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 do best direct and deploy our fablous, 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, scaleable, 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

I have some data. Not much. Just two rows and a few colums and I want to make a beautiful graph, turn it into a web-friendly image and put it on this blog.

How hard can that be? It turns out, way harder than it should be. One word aarrrgghh (more…)

Filed under: Technology by Giles Palmer

Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.

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Filed under: Quality, Search, Social Media, Spam, Technology by Giles Palmer

Defining brand image as a multi-dimensional entity and working with individual dimensions explicitly has several important benefits, in both practical and conceptual terms.

If by watching a brand we mean the measurement and tracking of its image online, then we need a clear and operational definition of what a brand image is. We propose that a brand’s image is best construed as an aggregate of how that brand is perceived along multiple related topical dimensions. (more…)

Filed under: Brands, Research, Technology by Berkan Eskikaya

I hear this question quite often: how is the housing market doing? Let’s try to answer that.

First, define what precise information you want to know: whether the cost of buying (or renting) a property is going up, or down, and by how much, in a particular area (say Brighton). (more…)

Filed under: Brand Matching, Quality, Spam, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky