Brandwatch works pretty hard to not only find all those mentions of your brand that matter, but also to then scan these mentions for their sentiment – what thay are saying about you, what their problem is, what pleases them. To reflect this endeavour we’ve put a list together that represents those brands that have been in our system for most of the year, and that give us a solid and prevailing reading of each brand’s sentiment. We have also included a volume number for each brand. This is the number of mentions from which we analysed sentiment. You can Interact with the list to place the brands in terms of most positive, most negative. Also, the display gives you an idea of how emotive a brands is – the extent to which it elicits fevered and polarized opinion. We believe that it’s all about the numbers - the detailed breakdown of the sentiment a brand elicits in the people who talk about it.

It is worth saying that this list does not cover all the brands in our system. No where near. Just those that have reached a certain volume threshold of mentions over a significant portion of the last year, AND that our sentiment classifiers are more than happy with. So, for example, brands such as the IQ (very positive sentiment, so far) and the new Sega Sonic game (showing a fascinating mix of opinion around its impending launch) are not included here, simply because we don’t quite have enough data to confidently place them in this list. In the next few days, maybe. Each day means a new layer of data.

We are happy to place our list next to those made by other media analysers, to show-up the different angle of approach made by this particular list of ours:

• The BrandIndex Top 100 2007
• The Millward Brown Top Brands Page
• The Brandwatch top 200

It will hopefully become clear that the size of a brand – its fame – is not over-riding at Brandwatch. Our list is not necessarily so much about the size of the brand as much as it is about the sentiment the brand elicits. Consequently, a brand does not have to be a global or even a national heavy-weight to feature: we want to also find and take notice of those brands that people talk about in specailized fields. It is why companies like ‘Norton’ are in there, ADHD brands, too, and the film ‘Wall-E’, together with those monsters, Barclays and Jaguar. Enjoy!

P.S. Let me add one little thing. We are currently developing a feature which will dig even further into the data and then separate off and show those ’special’ mentions about a brand – those mentions out there which are the most revealing, pertinent, and most key, the most telling of the telling, the ones which reflect the heart of an issue around a brand. This will be coming very soon!

Bye

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 .

This chart shows you how brands (in the case of BB9 - people) rank, by volume of chat and by sentiment. Its a neat little widget and we have customers who are using it to rank global brands, politicians, banks and video games. It can be styled, and sized and show different indexes. But most importantly it gives you a lot -with no effort.

To quote Jon who coded the chart- ” it delivers rich and interesting data in a way thats quick and easy to understand”.

I know it does because I had to justify the build by testing how easy (or not) it was to do this using free onine tools. Try it, you’ll go mad. Pick 10 celebrities, take out all the spam, work out from all the relevant results you get back, who is liked most and who the least… if the sentiment towards them has changed in the previous week, what the volume of chat around each person is, what the topics concerning them are and… keep hold of clear metrics to support your analysis.

It’s not easy. It took ages and i never achieved a clear breakdown of sentiment towards each contestant with their change in ranking from the week before.

The new Brandwatch chart immediately shows you the sentiment and volume of chat around each contestant and how its changed. From the Brandwatch dashboard i get more BB9 metrics plus the detailed performance of each contestant over time -the dips and peaks of public sentiment towards them- and how they compare to each other. I can clearly see the topics and issues on peoples minds and track the conversations not only about them… but  also around CH4, Endemol, and Davina McCall.  I also know which sites I should start targerting for next years “big brother really is complete and utter trite” …campaign

Most satisfying, is that I can now do this kind of analysis, in about 4 minutes , my coffee stays hot, and I can use this company blog to show off about it.

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

Being a good citizen and signed-up member of the movement towards self-sustainability, I cycle to work and on Friday I went over to my bike to ride home and found that it had been tampered with.

The back brake had been adjusted. And suddenly it worked perfectly again.

I was, as you may imagine, rather surprised by this. And during my cycle home into the setting sun, I had a smile on my face and I secretly thanked my anonymous and selfless bike fixer.

Thank you whoever you are.

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!!

One other way to look at this is: given some data, how do you turn it into useful information. And this is really, really subjective. What I consider as noise, you may consider as insightful - and vice versa.

Even assuming we agree on what we try to measure, and on what would make an interesting measurement, the interpretation of the information is by definition subjective. A good example of this is … the housing market. My specialist subject again.

Let’s summarise what seems to be the common understanding of the UK housing market - according to the press, tv, estate agents and other ‘experts’:

• the UK housing market has seen strong growth in the last 10 years
• this growth is supported by ’sound fundamentals’ (high employment, housing shortage, low inflation and interest rates)
• if any slowdown had to happen, it should have been just that: a slowdown, a ’soft landing’
• the US housing market ran into problems, caused by (and only by) subprime lending
• the subprime issue has forced UK banks to restrict lending, which is stopping people from buying houses
• there is no subprime in the UK

Bottom line: as soon as banks go back to normal lending practices, the market will boom again.

I’m not a financial advisor, nor am I an economics expert, but the above sometimes sounds like wishful thinking to me. It is an interpretation of some information, and it does sound plausible in some respect. But it is possible to come up with a contradictory interpretation which will sound just as plausible, if not more:

• the UK housing market has formed a bubble, with exponential growth, over the last 10 years
• sound fundamentals (assuming they are sound) can only go one way - they become unsound. It’s difficult, for example, to slash already-low interest rates. Some other fundamentals are just myths: how many empty houses can you have in a housing shortage?
• bubbles are not followed by soft landings
• lending practices were lax for all types of loans in the US, not just subprime
• UK banks now ‘restrict’ loans by requiring 10% deposits and only lending 4x salary. THIS is normal practice. If we have seen a fall of 70% in lending over the last year, it just means that 70% of all loans made a year ago were not viable. Here is the ‘UK subprime’
• people don’t want to buy houses anymore. Who would buy when the market is crashing by more than 10% annually?

Bottom line: the UK market is in for a serious crash, from which it won’t recover soon. The higher you go, the bigger the fall.

Endless blog posts could be written about the merits of either interpretation (and this is already quite long). But my point is: how do you get Brandwatch to build a sound, logical (irrefutable?) narrative from the data? That is one of the challenge we currently face.

• giving users direct access to that data, with a bulk download tool, plus some download links for the various portlets of the application. Our users can now manipulate that data offline, using their favorite tools. The data can be downloaded in CVS and Excel format.
• extracting more useful information from the data - and letting users interact with it more. We have a new ‘Answers’ module - answering the most common questions you may have about your brands in one click, which we expect will help people with their reputation monitoring. We also do more site analysis - telling you what sites talk about your brands most, but also comparing a group of brands and showing their share of mentions on their top sites. Now you know which important site talks more (or less!) about your competitor than about you. Finally, users can edit and delete the Trends that we automatically identify in each brand’s mentions - on the fly.

Aside from these two main areas, we also included several smaller enhancements: users can edit their brand subscriptions online, and the graphs have nice popups with useful info and a normalise option. We’ve also made our brand matching logic smarter and added many new automatic classifiers for better accuracy.

Overall, I hope that the work we have done will help people in their quest to understand their customers, benchmark against their competitors and manage their online reputation.

Search is not about getting a list of web pages. The structure of online information is much more complex. If you’re looking for some help on a particular Java library, you wouldn’t expect Google to return you a link to every single page of a 50-page online manual: the whole manual is the information unit you’re looking for. If you’re looking for opinions on a new Wii game, you should expect a list of forums, with for each forum, some insight into how many posts refer to the game, what the overall sentiment is, etc. The posts may be on one same web page, or they may not, and this does not matter.

The concept of relevancy is changing. Google’s strengths was to give you the best results quickly. But if you want to know what is being said about a particular brand, product or person - who’s to say which mention is more relevant than the others? Shouldn’t the relevancy of a mention be a subjective mixture of the credibility, reach, and popularity of the mention’s author? It seems impossible to reduce such a mixture into a single number - and wrong to assign such a number to each and every web page.

The Google index proudly boasts of returning you millions of results, but only ever shows you a thousand (quick tests on the News and Blog searches show you that these numbers are misleading). But the key assumption is that only the top results are interesting. Aren’t they all? Don’t most users want to get a complete picture of the information out there, including information from smaller, less ‘relevant’ sources?

Social content evolves, too quickly for a fat search index like Google’s. Google did create separate products for News and Blog searches, and that is revealing about the limitations of their main search index. Besides, Google Blog search is packed with non-blog content, and full of spam.

The future really seems about extracting ‘keyword mentions’ from web pages, as often as possible, then identifying the mentions’ authors and sentiment, aggregating them in various ways, and so on.

You could argue that Google Search answers a different need: it gives a rather static picture of the knowledge accumulated on the web. This may be why, for half of my searches, the first result is from Wikipedia - in which case, do we really need Google in the first place?

After a few of these, I’m beginning to get frustrated and bored. The other issue of course is spam - it’s everywhere. For a typical search, when I look beyond the first 20 results or so, it feels like almost half the rest are spam - auto-generated sites that infect the search indices. Blog search is particularly bad. Some of this spam is so well disguised, again it takes time to sift and filter.

What I do find though are pockets of goodness. Places you’ll find people in the know. They visit them directly or subscribe to their RSS feeds. I’m researching a company called Nobel Biocare and I find this site osseonews.com with the best site tag I’ve ever seen “The World of Implant Dentistry onlnine”. Fantastic. It reminded me of a guy I met years ago who just said when I asked him what his business did “carbonmonoxidekills dot com”. OK, it was a short conversation after that, but he hit the information thirst like a bacon sandwich hits hangover-hunger.

Back to dental implants - my point is that if you want to know about dentistry you go to osseonews.com. If you want to find something out about mortgages, you go to moneysavingexpert.com, not Google although if you check this out you can see that Google is making it easy to search MSE for you. (and try to get you to click somewhere else before you go so they can get some PPC revenues)

What does this mean long term? It means that Page Rank (and the other associated ways Google determines relevance) needs to be improved if search is Google isn’t going to start losing traffic share. How? By understanding more about what the user is trying to find so it can serve up more relevant information. That’s why Google encourages you to log in so it can track what you have been searching for in the past, get to know you better and give you more relevant results in the future. Can this rather subtle, behind-the-scenes approach deliver? Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to be working so far. It may be that a different approach would be better. Could a combination of some social search approaches (recommendations and crowd-ranking for instance) coupled with better data linking based on topics as well as hyperlinks deliver higher quality search results? Is this an opportunity for a Google killer?