Seth Godin wrote a moving post yesterday about worthiness. He writes almost as a stream of consciousness and makes some great points. I like the last one best

“The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”

Which leads to the question how good is good enough. How quickly should you release. In particular, this applies nicely to software. How many bugs are acceptable before making a release? Or what level of bug is acceptable to let through? (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 19 2008 under: Quality

As I mentioned in the last post, the accuracy of the entire result set is critical to us at Brandwatch, but so too is making sure that we have as big a sample as possible.

We are increasing our crawl all the time (circa 100k new sites per month right now), but a comparison with Google’s index is something that we do on a regular basis to cross check our total result count with theirs.

Whilst doing this I stumbled upon a rather surprising little secret (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 18 2008 under: Search

This is a classic tug-of-war issue with search. There is a good definition on Wikipedia and I really like Tim Bray’s description on the Ongoing site.

Recall is important. Google likes to boast about its recall capacity by saying that you are looking at results 1-10 of x million where x is usually unfeasibly large (more on this rather bogus figure in later posts). Aside from recall what is important to Google is the relevance of the top results (this is the precision bit). Page Rank which forms a big part of the answer to how far up Google your results appear is their secret sauce, although Larry and Sergey’s original thesis is public knowledge. (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 17 2008 under: Brand Matching

Sifting through the list of web pages in Brandwatch that have been reported as spam, you get a feel for the ever-changing ways that spam merchants manage to infect the web with junk.

They used to just redirect browsers to their own hosted spam sites - but we could blacklist the entire site and filter out all the pages. Next, legitimate sites were hacked and hijacked to store the spam content, exploiting weaknesses in certain webservers. Many of these we filter out using tell-tale patterns in the hijacked page address. The latest trend seems to be hijacking a range of sites, embedding the spam content from one server inside pages served by another. (more…)

Posted by Tim Owen on June 16 2008 under: Brand Matching

So I decided to compare data between the iphone and Nokia 95, two phones which I suspected shared common air in the blogosphere. The N95,…ah!

Something that Brandwatch brings to light is the hold a particular brand name has over a brand tracking system. There were 2284 mentions for ‘iphone’ last week, and 180 for ‘Nokia 95′. Really? So few for the new Nokia? To what extent are these volume results manipulated by the brand tracking friendliness of these respective brand names? (more…)

Posted by Phil Newman on June 12 2008 under: Brand Matching

Remember the promises of flawless matching of supply and demand and limitless consumer power when the web burst onto the scene a dozen years ago?

The last couple of years have not disappointed (Consumers are already enjoying near full transparency of prices and in categories like travel and music, and of opinions as well.). 2008 could be the year when this kind of transparency really starts scaring non-performing brands, forcing them to shift focus from exerting their pricey influence via parts of the media to taking more stock of priceless consumer opinions. (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 11 2008 under: Customer Engagement, Research

If you could put ‘Brandness’ itself under the microscope, this is what you would see: a crossroads with a pussy playing a banjo, hovering just off the ground.

There would be a signpost which says ‘Capitalism That Way’ and ‘Faith That way’. The signpost would be spinning round, too fast to read though.

It’s probably fair to say that, though we can all name a brand or fifty, we cannot point at one, pin point where it happens, where it has taken place, or what it is made out of. We may be trying with brand analysis tools to understand better and better how to pick up signs of how a brand works on the web – how the internet makes and breaks a brand - but you ain’t gonna pick up the brand itself: it’s not made of any material.

The product is different: we know where and what the product is, the Lexus and the Stella Artois that surfs on the reputation of the brand – we can point at and hold and drink it, and we can count the number of times it is mentioned, and who is talking about it. But to track the brand itself? Trickier. (more…)

Posted by Phil Newman on June 10 2008 under: Brand Matching

One of the double-edged side-effects of the process of ‘locking on’ to a new brand is a certain engagement with low-grade spam-generation-pornography.

New brands are being requested and added to the tracking system all the time, some demanding initial work in order to set the classifier on the right tracking path.

For example, there is a stationary producer named ‘Avery Dennison’. The thing is, in order to pick up its ‘everyday’ mentions in the informal areas of the web – blogs, etc., - we need to track it in its short-hand: ‘Avery’. And so here come the exclusion terms: bird-related content must not get a look in - and then there is ‘Tex Avery’ – creator of Daffy duck, ‘Roger Avery’ – co-writer of Pulp fiction, and Cardinal Avery Dulles, an outspoken fire-brand.

Now this type of ‘dirty’ pick-up is dealt with by adding an exclusion term or two, but what happens when the tracking of ‘Avery’ means we start picking up the whitest of noises – a common typo, and when this, in turn, means an over-abundance of porn? (more…)

Posted by Phil Newman on June 9 2008 under: Brand Matching

New research from Millward Brown shows that online communities, blogs and message boards are the most likely sources of negative opinions about brands.

According to the brand consultancy’s survey of over 1,000 UK consumers fully one third of people who had used online communities, contacts and blogs said they’d received negative brand opinion from those resources.

We couldn’t agree more with Tim Wragg, Head of Client Service at Millward Brown UK, who has this advice for marketers: “There is no doubt that marketing campaigns using online communities are a key part of the marketing mix, but marketers need to truly understand how their online activities will impact their brand and be prepared to monitor positive and negative conversations in these communities”.

(more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on June 4 2008 under: Research

Let’s face it, increasingly blogs are yielding the power to either build or break a brand.  So for PR professionals – those ultimately responsible for their client’s reputation - it’s more important than ever to listen up, pay attention and be able to influence what’s being said online about your clients’ brands.

According to Don Bartholomew, author of ‘Proving the Value of Public Relations’, first generation attempts at measuring the extent of online coverage of your brand have predominantly relied on traditional media metrics like numbers of impressions. But Don believes that 2008 will see a stronger push toward specialised metrics to understand online engagement and dialogue, rather than just exposure.  He rates online analytics as the top measurement trend for PR in 2008. (more…)

Posted by Giles Palmer on May 26 2008 under: Consumer Generated Media, Public Relations