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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.

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

We’ve put together what we think is a pretty interesting chart. It shows those brands with the liveliest presence on Twitter during the month of February. Rather than searching in a passive way through a given sample of tweets provided by the Twitter feed, we actively search Twitter in order to get close to full coverage of the real volume of tweets relevant to any particular brand. So, here are the runners for February:

The events took place in nice venues like the Design Museum and when you arrived, you were given a colour-coded sticker/badge which marked you out as being in one of the three categories.

There was a glamour associated with these events. Those were the days of cool Britannia and dot com madness like click mango raising £3m in 8 days. The events were buzzy and it was cool to be a VC (red badge I think it was) as all the sweaty entrepreneurs would make you feel like a God (or that’s how it looked). The suppliers (yellow badges) were roundly avoided if at all possible - as the last thing the entrepreneurs wanted was to be sold to and the VCs were too busy being schmoozed.

In the middle of it all were the pseudo rock-star First Tuesday organisers/founders Julie Meyer and I think Andrew Carruthers from New Media Spark. The events were the place to be.

It was at one of those events that I met a guy wearing an entrepreneurs badge (blue) who was flustered, rather anxious and more than a little sweaty. ‘Hi’ I said, ’so what do you do?’

‘carbonmonoxide kills. dot com’ he said. And that’s all he said.

‘right, ok’ said I, buying some thinking time. My thoughts were in no particular order: he really shouldn’t run to events like this, WTF?, that sounds rather niche, it’s all just some crazy dream, nutter.

Thoughts arranged, I said. ‘wow, so tell me about that’ (I’m the next John Humphrys)

‘Do you know how many people die each year from Carbon Monoxide poisoning in their homes?’ he asked

‘erm, no’

‘lots’ (actually he probably said some big number, but it was 10 years ago and I can’t remember)

‘right’

‘carbonmonoxidekills.com’

‘I’m not quite following’ I said, thinking, this guy is clearly bonkers

‘…..faulty appliances……killing people…….poisonous gas…..death…….can’t smell it…….dead children……smoke detectors’

‘ah, so you’re selling smoke detectors online’ I’m starting to see some light…

‘yes and [lots of other stuff I can't remember]‘

That’s all I remember from the conversation, but I remember him and I remember having the conversation and those are the only things I remember from those events other than the champagne atmosphere.

I have told that story to a couple of people over the last 10 years and as you can imagine, I usually end it with a fascinating insight about people taking the concept of niche too far or some other really smart observation.

So, imagine my surprise when in a moment of I don’t know what, I decided to see if he actually did launch carbonmonoxidekills.com

AND OMG, HE DID.

Check it out. Fantastic. Granted it’s not the nicest looking site in the world - actually it’s probably the ugliest site I have ever seen, but it’s just bloody brilliant that it exists at all. I urge you to buy your smoke detectors from it.

And who was or is that crazy guy - I didn’t get his card and I can’t remember his name, but a quick whois look up for the domain carbonmonoxidekills.com shows it’s owned by Rob Aiers from Envirotec (UK) Ltd. That’s him on the home page of CMK.com (hey, with a catchy shortname like that, this thing could really take off…..)

Kudos to you Rob - you are a legend and officially (to me) the King Of The Niches.

New Dashboard
We recently introduced a brand new Dashboard interface. It requires Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3+, so you may want to upgrade your browser to access it. With the new Dashboard, you can create any number of Workspaces (reports). Within each Workspace, you can create several tabs, and place various components on each tab. The components are like the ‘boxes’ of the old Dashboard, but more configurable. This makes the whole system much more flexible and powerful for data-mining and reporting purposes. The new Dashboard is still in Beta, so as always all comments are welcome!

Query Setup
As part of the new Dashboard, we revamped the Query Setup screen. The improved layout will better guide you through the Query setup process, particularly thanks to a quicker test feature. All newly created Queries are now automatically backfilled with one month’s worth of data; you will receive an email once the data is ready.

Hourly Updates
The Dashboard data is now updated every hour. Simply reload the components of your Workspaces (or refresh the whole Workspace), and you will get the latest data, including mentions, sentiment, etc. This way you can stay up to date with the latest developments around your Queries, and can respond to them more quickly.

Influence Metrics
Identifying the key influencers and the most important Mentions about your Queries is most probably one of your key needs. We’ve added new metrics to achieve that: each mention now comes with the MozRank score (similar to Google’s PageRank - find out more) and the number of inbound links to the Mention’s website. For all Twitter mentions, we also display the number of followers, followings and tweets of the Mention’s author. You can use all of these metrics to sort - hence prioritise - the lists of Mentions.

Video Tracking
For all Queries we now find and track relevant videos on YouTube and other video sites. These videos will show up as Mentions, and you can use the new Video Tracking component to analyse all Video Mentions, and see their history of Views, Ratings and Comments.

Search String Queries
As you may know, Queries can now be defined using a full search string, as you would use on any search engine. We’ve extended this to support ‘Search in domain’ and ‘Search in title’ capability. Use “site:” to only find Mentions on websites whose domain contain a particular word, and use “title:” to only find Mentions on pages whose title contain specific words.

What’s Next For 2010?

We already have many new exciting features in the pipeline.

As well as the ongoing architecture and backend changes, we will shortly release enhancements which will greatly simplify the ‘markup’ of Mentions. Marking Mentions as irrelevant, or correcting their Sentiment will be much easier and quicker.

New data will also soon come through every 10 minutes, rather than 1 hour. Combined with our ever faster Crawlers, this will offer you a much more realtime experience.

Next we will extend the Mention List component so that you can easily tag Mentions, workflow them to team-mates, and track their status as if you were using a ticketing system. All of this will enable you to easily, quickly and accurately Monitor and Respond to your Query’s social presence.

And this is for the next two months only… So 2010 promises to be a very exciting year.

Do contact us if you have any feedback or questions, at contact@brandwatch.com or on Twitter @brandwatchtweet. You can also join us on our new Facebook page

As developers, we may not be able to directly answer those questions because typically they’re subjective. But what we can do is provide meta-data that helps our users make that judgement. At the beginning of October, we added a new feature to Brandwatch: metrics about the source of each page. We’re using a couple of excellent services to bring in this meta-data: the mozRank API from SEOmoz and the Twitter API.

The mozRank API provides some very useful site metrics, including the number of backlinks to the site and the mozRank, which is a score from 0 to 10, giving a feel for how important the site is. I tend to think of the mozRank as being like Google’s PageRank - it tries to distill the number of inbound links (and how important those referring sites are, in turn) into a single score. For twitter pages, we now show the number of followers that tweeter has, how many tweets they’ve written, and the number of others they are following. You can sort the data using these metrics, to help sift out the most important pages from the passing chatter.

Choosing a username

was impossible. I wanted to link it up to my existing Google accounts, but guess what, they are all taken! So i had to settle for some random username which i will never remember and which pisses me off

Using Wave

Once through the username ordeal, the app loads nice and quickly and a bunch of stuff is staring me in the face. Here’s a picture

Dr Wave - aka - Greg the happy Aussie Wave product manager then gives me a 2.12 minute intro, care of an embedded YouToob video, which is cute and I’m off.

That’s where things get weird. I’m off, but I’m not sure where I’m off to. My contacts who also have Wave accounts show up, and I hook Wave into Twitter to get some content going, but other than that, it’s not at all clear to me what to do next. I start a conversation with Miles and see him typing on my screen as it were, which is nice, but not ground shaking.

And after 20 minutes or so I’m left with the following feelings about Wave

1. Nice UI, albeit quite similar in structure to an email client
2. Some nice Javascipt touches - like being able to select where in a thread you want to make your comment, just by hovering there and seeing a bubble show up and a great idea on scroll bars. This is a real issue for us at the moment with the new release of Brandwatch in testing - there are just too many scroll bars - Wave has a nice solution for this
3. What it really needs is ADOPTION and PLUGINS. I have a feeling that it has a chance to become something important, but it’s not clear what - at least not clear to me - at this stage. But when more people actually USE it and figure out it’s really good at this and that (and maybe not so good at other stuff), clarity will emerge. It’s an interesting tool, but what can be made with it is, I guess, up to us.
4. Final point is I send my congrats to the Wave team for coming up with something new and interesting and for Google to have the wherewithall to back them and get it out there. I’m sure it will spawn another round of web-based innovation and that’s good for us all

[random promotion] - Taking a tip from Felix Dennis to never miss a chance to promote yourself, here’s a shot of the new Brandwatch dashboard

[/random promotion]

Confusion reigns

Fast forward 3 years, and nowadays there seems to be a whole industry in our space and it’s a really messy, confusing, interesting, exciting place to be.

There are free services like John Markwell’s How Sociable, Google alerts, that one with the logo that looks like vacuum cleaner that I can’t remember and now Seth Godin’s SEO-jacking ‘brands in public’ service

There are paid services like ours, Radian6, Scoutlabs and plenty of others, but even doing a price comparison between them is hard.

And Microsoft has announced its arrival with Looking Glass.

So it goes - things get more complex before they get simpler.

A big question

So, is there a big play in all this somewhere (yeah, i know ‘big play’ sounds w**ky, but you know what i mean). The big answer is, no-one knows right now, but there is static in the air. People in and around the sector expect something pretty big to happen. It feels like lots of rivers coming together and there is turbulence, but it looks like something with real momentum and power could emerge. As evidence for that, we’re getting inbound VC enquiries every month at the moment. No kidding. INBOUND. It’s flattering, but I’m glad to say that we are making profit now, so it’s not something that’s on the near-term horizon.

What happens next and who wins?

Finally, the real point of this post is my take on who or what will come out well from the rather chaotic scene we have right now. It’s going to be about 3 things

1. utility - how useful are these applications/sites/systems - will we hit a vein as it were

2. execution - how well have they been implemented (ref youtube and spotify for superb executions on an idea which lead to mass adoption quickly)

3. price - the pull of the free is strong with this one - it’s like a new Darth Vader line. With consumer apps, free wins on the web (google, facebook, twitter, wikipedia, youtube……). Although paid works for b2b (salesforce). So is there a freemium model here? Whatever the model, it needs to be simple and affordable to get big adoption

So assuming 1 to be true and 3 to be something that will be solved across the market at some point, 2 is the key differentiator. As it should be.

1. Join the user interface team within our product development team
2. Design, implement and refine new interface functionality
3. Find innovative solutions to all issues encountered by users
4. Periodically report to the rest of the team, and to the Technical Director

Skills and Experience

You will need great analytical and interpersonal skills, and should be willing to learn on an ongoing basis. You should have an IT-related degree, and will have strong experience in:

1. Advanced Javascript programming
2. Developing AJAX applications
3. Working with DOM, XHTML, CSS, and Web standards
4. Developing with jQuery

Experience of the following would be a bonus:

1. Mootools
2. The MVC and ActiveRecord patterns and ORM
3. HTML5 and Gears
4. Agile development methodologies
5. Greasemonkey and Firefox extension development
6. Rhino
7. DWR

Salary will be in the 25-35k range, based on skills and experience, plus bonus.

Interested candidates should send their CV and a cover letter to jobs@brandwatch.net.

Absolutely no recruitment agencies.

About Brandwatch:

Brandwatch is a cutting-edge software company. We have a vision that all businesses need to understand what is being said about them and their competition, by consumers and the media, on the web, every day. We are building systems that precisely do that.

Free Text Keyword Definition
When creating new Keywords, or setting up new Topics, you now have the option to use a free text definition. This gives you the same fine grained control as the structured definition you should be used to, but with the extra flexibility you would find on search engines like Google. You can combine any number of terms using AND, OR, NOT operators, exact phrases and proximity searches.

Proximity searches are particularly useful for tricky keywords. If for example you want to track stories related to Apple computers, you could use the following keyword definition:

“apple computer”~10 OR “apple laptop”~10

which will match pages where the words “apple” and “computer” or “laptop” appear no more than 10 words apart.

Crawl coverage
Many changes have been made to the architecture of our Crawlers, and Brandwatch has expanded into many foreign languages. As a result we have now seen an 8-fold increase in our coverage in the last 5 months, making our Crawlers a first-class system.

For further information email customerservices@brandwatch.net