Last week I went to the i-com conference in Estoril

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It was an interesting event and a big thanks goes out to Andreas Cohen for organising it.

Of course, being CEO of a monitoring company, I decided to track the event using Brandwatch. Setting up i-com wasn’t that easy though as Brandwatch strips out punctuation as a default and i-com without the ‘-’ generates alot of irrelevant mentions of routers and stuff. So I had to use our new Raw operator which matches the raw text including capitals/non-capitals. So my query was

raw:i-com OR raw:#icom OR raw:I-com OR raw:#Icom OR raw:#ICOM.

But there were still some issues: there’s a SEO agency in Mancester called I-com and there were mentions of I-com meaning intercom on sites like www.aviationclassifieds.com. So the query ended up as

raw:i-com OR raw:#icom OR raw:I-com OR raw:#Icom OR raw:#ICOM -manchester -site:www.aviationclassifieds.com -site:www.goldwingowners.com.

[NB total time to create query, 4:27 minutes]

The results: one word TWITTER-TOWN

Over the last month, the mentions break down looks like this:

So >90% of all the volume is from Twitter - holy micro-blog Batman!

Although it’s interesting to see Google Buzz in there as the number 2. Facebook shows that it’s not really a business thing nor that public.

And these Tweets basically happened over the 3 days of the conference

Although Twitter is only 140 characters, Brandwatch managed to mine the 1000 odd Tweets for common phrases. Here’s a cloud of them. These have been generated automatically although I edited the Metric(s) one.

Microsoft and Unilever were presenting, and their presentations were good which is why there was more chat about them than any other company. Geoff Ramsey too was an excellent speaker although he did kick the conference off so there might have been an initial Twitter keenness going on in the audience which tailed off over the 3 days (I know that’s how I felt).

In fact a closer look at the most tonal topics shows this

Finally, here’s a really interesting visualisation that our labs team put together which shows the Twitterers on the right and the recurring phrases or topics on the left and the relationship between them. Click on one of the names to see.

So my take away from all this is that Twitter is ideally suited to conference commentary and some fantastic data processing and visualisations can reveal some interesting insights.

Filed under: Brand Matching, Sentiment analysis, Social Media, twitter by Giles Palmer

We’re twice as likely to say something positive as negative on the public internet. I find that rather life-affirming!

I’ll do an analysis of how this varies from country to country. I have a feeling we Brits are a little more cynical!

Filed under: Sentiment analysis by Giles Palmer

An erstwhile colleague (update your blog Miles!) who now works at Google sent me a Wave invite, so i dutifully logged in and had a play around. Here’s what i found (more…)

Filed under: Technology by Giles Palmer

It has been a few weeks since the last release announcement, but we have been quietly adding to and improving Brandwatch behind the scenes. Some new features are being released tonight, and some major upgrades will happen over the next few weeks.
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Filed under: Software development, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky

This summer The Metro Newspaper asked us to track the online sentiment towards this years big brother contestants. So, we put them into the system and  I spent the next ten weeks monitoring daily, what Brandwatch brought back. Every morning, armed with a steaming cup of coffee i logged in and patiently scanned the content Brandwatch picked up; lots of mindful insight like the biggest topic of “ugly bitch”  and inspiring comment,  “did yah see nicole doin the thriller dance she fort shu was pua amazinn”

I said a silent thank you on the last eviction night …and here I reflect on what we got out of it.  Well…apart from a lucrative flutter with the bookies (brandwatch correctly predicted the evictee for 8 out of 10 weeks), we built a new chart . (more…)

Filed under: Brands, Public Relations, Sentiment analysis, Technology by Katja Garrood

We are a data company. That’s to say, what we sell is data which is used for reputation management and social media analysis. But it’s the technology that mines and creates the data that we pour most of our blood, sweat and tears into. That’s to say we are a bunch of geeky guys (apart from Katja!) who build software.
One of the difficult choices we face - one that I face from customer requests, our investors and my inner Magnus Magnusson, is where to best direct and deploy our fabulous, but finite development team? Do we put more emphasis on developing a user-friendly, fast, beautiful, full of wow-factor, no-training-required front end or a robust, scalable, fast, redundant, far-reaching backend?
The answer in the past has been, 8 out of 10 times, the backend. We are after all, a data company and it’s the backend that finds, organises and analyses the data.
But that has meant that our front end has been rather restrictive which can be a pain for our users as well as we ourselves using the system. No longer! We have pushed the weights along the scale a bit towards the frontend.

Not quite balanced as this cute little diagram suggests, but on the way.
So by the End of November - oh my - what UI delights will we have in store for the unknowing world? Some maybe!

signed: your rebalanced buddy

Filed under: Technology by Giles Palmer

I have mixed feelings about Google. They have made billions of people’s lives easier with their search engine and they truly are an innovative company which is just so impressive for such a big organisation. On the downside, their business model works as a network effect (many searchers=more ad potential = more advertisers) so now they have critical mass, and an amazing brand to go with it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for others, both big and small to get a foot into the online information business, which in the long run is a bad thing.

On the whole though for me the name Google is bathed in an overall sense of awe. When they launch a new product, they just do such a damn good job. And this is a company that is just over 10 years old. It’s not as if we are talking about decades of corporate learning here, unlike other super performing organisation like say Toyota or Apple.

So to Chrome - their new browser. Another amazing entrance from Google. Lovely and clean. It barely takes up any screen real estate, and there are some other nice design touches like the animations on file downloading and the incognito guy. BUT the best part about it for me and in particular for Brandwatch is it’s so goddamn fast. We did some side by side tests with IE7 and Firefox3 and Chrome is 50% faster at loading our app than either of the others. And 50 is a lot of %s.

The reason, it appears, is how Chrome deals with Javascript. We use a lot of Javascript in our UI to make it as nice to use as possible and firefox in particular is not that fast at rendering it. Chrome is. It’s my new browser of choice. Google has done it again - horray! boo! horray!!

Filed under: Browsers, Search, Software development by Giles Palmer

We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work - and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.
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Filed under: Brand Matching, Quality, Research, Software development, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky

I don’t know about you – but growing up in the UK through the 80’s and 90’s (I wish it was later), I have an in-built love for Marks and Spencer. Yes, it’s true.

Not the Marks and Spencer that is constantly talked about in the financial pages and business sections – but the Marks and Spencer that brought us Chicken Kiev (with real chicken), sandwiches with exotic fillings (like avocado and walnuts!) and stuffing with real fruit (amazing).

Anyone who has watched “The Royle Family” will know what I am talking about.  Marks’ (pronounced “Markses”) is revered alongside the Church, “Who wants to be a Millionaire” and the Queen. (more…)

Filed under: Brands, Customer Engagement, Reputation Management, Technology by Dominic Frost

Much has been written about methods of developing software - books and books and blogs and blogs. I love the writing and thinking of Steve McConnell, although some of his observations can be a bit gloomy (top 2 mistakes almost always or often stated are 1 Overly optimistic schedules 77% and, 2 Unrealistic expectations 73%)

And I subscribe to several blogs including Jason Yip’s which has some nuggety insights.

I was at Reboot this year where Eelco Rustenburg gave a great talk on Agile, Software, Management, India collaboration in which he spoke about the benefits of a more agile approach. During his talk something crystallised in my mind.

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Filed under: Software development, Technology by Giles Palmer