One of the largest perils of social media is when it all goes wrong, as the capacity for customers to vent their frustrations globally has never been greater.

With this power of disruption at the fingertips of all users of social media, it’s very important that companies have systems in place to weather these potential storms.

Neil Glassman of WhizBangPowWow discussed the issue with Jardel Appelt, head of social media at Brandsclub, a Brazilian online fashion retailer with a history of disaster management.

When Jardel took over the new role, the company were almost immediately plunged into a troublesome situation whereby a warehouse change caused a logistical catastrophe.

Customers were left without orders for long periods, and Jardel had a problem on his hands in dealing with the myriad complaints online. His first step was to invest in a social media monitoring tool, one which allowed workflow assignment and analysis.

The couple of hundred daily complaints resulted in utter chaos for Brandsclub, and to deal with each was a laborious act originally, involving manual recovery of order numbers, phone calls and emails, a process that meant each customer took hours to deal with.

The existing customer service team were not au fait with Facebook, Twitter and the like, so part of Jardel’s job was to train staff to understand them properly before he could implement the new system.

Each social network has a different protocol, and learning the mode of address is just as important as getting to grips with the syntax and form.

With the SMM tool in place and the staff equipped with the knowledge to act, Brandsclub could then use work assignment features to allocate different aspects to each member of the customer service team.

One may be responsible for any enquiries about delays for example, another concerned with incorrect orders.

Using keywords and by crawling the social web, the SMM tool allows mentions about Brandsclub to be distributed into topics, which is how they were able to split the workflow amongst staff.

It wasn’t long before the damage was limited, and with a network of social profiles in place, Brandsclub could then isolate potential complaints on the social web before they reached the formal complaints level (email, phone).

On Brandsclub’s two year anniversary, they celebrated the event by offering wildly discounted goods on their site. The demand cause unprecedented amounts of traffic, causing the website to crash. Jardel hadn’t even noticed until the SMM tool displayed thousands of fresh complaints, all alluding to the site disruption.

With over 11,000 negative mentions for Jardel’s team to deal with, they were unable to respond to them all.

After liaising with the IT team, marketing issued a press release and distributed it amongst their social media channels, as well as attempting to target some of the most commonly reported problems, namely the site outage of course.

Once people were informed about the company’s issues and felt included in the responses, complaints went noticeably down.

Trolls still remained, something Jardel is quite adamant in ignoring. For people who criticise a company or thing without merit or reason, the best course of action is to not rise to the challenge and allow the mention to remain isolated.

To hear how Jardel helped Brandsclub handle their crisis management in full, click here to listen to the conversation at the PowWow.

2. Dr. Tim Owen – Head of Backend Development

Tim heads up our team of backend developers. We asked Tim several questions about how Brandwatch gathers data from the web, what makes that approach unique and why it benefits our clients:

Questions:

1. Where does the data in Brandwatch come from? (00:28)
2. How do Brandwatch’s crawlers know where to look? (01:07)
3. How much data does Brandwatch store? (01:52)
4. Where is all the data stored? (02:13)
5. How far back does Brandwatch have data from? (02:53)
6. How does Brandwatch crawl Facebook? (03:13)
7. What are the benefits of Brandwatch’s crawling flexibility? (04:03)

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when they engage in social media marketing is not responding to mentions, questions and even compliments published by other people there.

Not only is it common for users to shout out to brands and companies on channels like Facebook and Twitter, it is also an established best practice to respond to what people are saying – the good and especially the bad.

Engage in Social Media

If your brand is Lady Gaga, who presumably receives thousands of mentions a day, you might have an excuse to ignore a few hundred of them (or most of them.)

However, even brands like @CocaCola, who have hundreds of mentions a day, respond to each and every one. In fact, they staff full-time teams who do nothing but reply to Twitter mentions.

For companies like Coca-Cola, this method of customer service is as fundamental as answering telephones.

Coca-Cola use a suite of heavyweight SMM tools, but if you’re a very small company or are just testing the waters, basic SMM searches are not difficult to perform.

When you realize how easy it is to monitor what people are saying about you, your company or your products on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, it’s surprising many companies don’t do take the time to do it.

In a matter of minutes, you can make social monitoring a daily routine you won’t believe you never had. You can also make a huge difference in how you engage with your customers and how they feel about you.

Here are four free and simple-to-use tools that will help you monitor what people are saying about you on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

Four Tools For SMM Search Success

None of these services are ever going to compare to the paid-for tools, but are an excellent entry point to researching social media monitoring.

Topsy

Topsy is as simple to use as search engines like Bing and Google. By simply entering your search terms, let’s say “Lady Gaga” for example, we can be presented with thouands of results showing what users are saying about her on Twitter and now Google+.

You can optimize your results to see only what users are saying within the hour, all the way back to 30 days ago. Users can also filter results by tweets and G+ posts featuring photos, videos, links and more.

Social Mention

Social Mention pulls results from across various social media profiles, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo News and more.

Social Mention also measures the sentiment of your search terms. For instance, a search for the British designer Vivienne Westwood reveals 138 mentions that are positive, 493 neutral and 18 negative.

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are applications you can use to monitor one or multiple social media profiles.

At the heart of these tools is a handy dashboard you log into everyday that displays all of the activity happening in your newsfeeds, as well as any activity that includes brand mentions, responses or direct messages.

You can manage multiple Twitter handles and even Facebook profiles from the convenience of one area.

Both of these applications allow you to monitor keywords. This is extremely helpful for companies who create content that revolves around specific topics or who are conducting market research for new product development.

Tweet Alarm or Twilert

If automation is more your style, These products will become your favorite tool. Simply enter your email address, Twitter name, and the keywords you want to monitor and Tweet Alarm will send you an email every time someone mentions you, your brand or product on Twitter.

The Tweet Alarm service is still in beta. Until its testing and optimization are complete, it might be best to mix Tweet Alarm in with some of the above services. On the bright side, Tweet Alarm could add new features that might be even more helpful in the future.

This article was written by Camella Mendez, a content strategist for Internet Exposure, who are a Minneapolis web design agency that specializes in web design, web development, content marketing and SEO.

Click here to listen to the conversation in full

Inbound marketing is yet another term that has enjoyed a great deal of hype in recent years with regard to social media.

One of the companies to emerge as a key player in this realm is HubSpot, and Neil Glassman of WhizBangPowWow has taken the opportunity to corner their Inbound Marketing Evangelist, Laura Fitton, to discuss the ins and outs of the concept.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Fitton describes inbound marketing as the art of marketing to make people actually want to consume your promotional material. It’s about slowly building a lasting relationship with potential customers to nurture them towards your sales funnel.

Content marketing is hugely important, she continues to say. Making sure the content is of a great quality is paramount to ensuring customers are coming to you for thought leadership.

When grilled on whether inbound is replacing outbound, Fitton is diplomatic in her response. She states that there will always be room for outbound sales opportunities, but techniques such as cold calling, trade shows, ad spending and billboards have seen dwindling returns in recent years have meant companies have enjoyed much more success after turning to inbound techniques.

ROI of Inbound Marketing

The HubSpot exec then uses two case studies to show how ROI can be boosted dramatically, an appliance store from Boston and a sports fishing site called Wired 2 Fish.

In 18 months the fishing magazine has taken an already successful business to the next level, which has seen a 292% growth after email marketing, 278% increase in leads and other amazing growth statistics through tactics such as frequent tweeting and regular blogging.

In her final comments, Fitton stresses the importance of having all your social media channels working in harmony, and how HubSpot allows the likes of Mailchimp and Google Analytics to ‘talk together’.

To listen to the conversation in its entirety, click through here to hear it at the PowWow now.

CAMBRIDGE, England & BOSTON, Mass., Feb 06, 2012

Source: Linguamatics

Linguamatics, Brandwatch and the University of Sussex are pleased to announce a joint project funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board to address challenges faced by automated language processing software in harnessing diverse data sources. The project forms part of a broader Technology Strategy Board initiative focusing on enabling technologies to harness “big data” for economic growth.

The development will improve automatic extraction of information from scientific papers, news or social media for applications in research and development, marketing, and competitive intelligence.

Dr David Milward, Linguamatics CTO, points out: “Good quality vocabularies are a key part of ‘intelligent’ text mining. This project will allow us to develop vocabularies much faster, and adapt them efficiently for new applications.”
The current generation of language processing has had considerable success in extracting useful information from unstructured text, whether this is research literature or social media. However, adapting to a new domain is often a laborious process, with respect both to the type of data (e.g. newswire vs. patent literature) and to the terminology used in a given domain (e.g. in medical practice vs. pharmaceutical research). Humans can perform these tasks on small data sets, but face a huge challenge in the face of massively increasing amounts of electronic text.

The EVOKES project, which stands for “Exploitation of Diverse Data via Automatic Adaptation of Knowledge Extraction Software” will exploit distributional similarity techniques developed by the University of Sussex. The project will run for 18 months.

About Linguamatics
Linguamatics is the leader in deploying natural language processing (NLP) based text mining for complex, high-value problem solving. Used by nine of the world’s Top-10 pharmaceutical companies, and other prestigious commercial, academic and government organizations, Linguamatics operates globally, with offices in the UK and USA. Further information: www.linguamatics.com .

About Brandwatch
Social networks and the rest of the Web have become massive indicators of consumer influence, market insight and brand reputation. Launched in 2007, Brandwatch provides one of the world’s leading tools for monitoring, capturing and analyzing social media. Further information: www.brandwatch.com .

About University of Sussex
The University was first in the new wave of UK universities founded in the 1960s and is now a leading teaching and research institution. Sussex research has been formally recognized as world leading, confirming the University among the leading research universities in the UK. Further information: www.sussex.ac.uk .

About the Technology Strategy Board
The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led government body which works to create economic growth by ensuring that the UK is a global leader in innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more information: www.innovateuk.org .

SOURCE: Linguamatics

The Sizzle: Facebook IPO. The Fri-Up: Super Bowl. The Sauce: Fox News Muppets

The Sizzle

• Facebook IPO – your data just became a lot more valuable
• Sony slashes forecast
• Tawainese Steve Jobs lookalike touts Android tablet
• Hackers outwit online banking security
• Survey shows Android users more likely to put out…. 

The Fri-Up

Dataviz: Super Bowl XLVI – Which brand is running with the social media ball? 

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

• The Muppets Attack Fox News
• Facebook IPO fails – nobody can find ‘Buy’ button
• And then….?

If you haven’t already joined us on twitter – we’d love to see you there: @brandwatch
If you want demos on how to use our latest improvements to optimise your reports and social media monitoring it’s all on our blog.
If you’d like any support with using Brandwatch’s social media monitoring tool contact contact@brandwatch.com

To commemorate the event, some of the geniuses we have working here at Brandwatch have developed this great little data-viz, which feeds off Twitter to represent the popularity of each advertiser in a wormery.

To view the data-viz, click here!

Much better than a lousy old infographic – there’s been a bit of infographic fatigue in recent weeks – the app is a real-time representation of all the tweets about each brand’s adverts during the Superbowl.

Using our social media monitoring tool with full access to Twitter’s firehose of tweets, we’ve been able to pull in all the tweets that mention each company and the superbowl, using bespoke queries afforded by the app.

Each worm represents a one of the brands, with kit colours to match. The more mentions a brand receives, the closer that worm will get to the middle. The most popular brand will be the proud holder of the ball too.

We’ve also included all sorts of data goodies, such as a topic cloud for each brand, a simple buzz chart that illustrates when peaks in volume occurred and the total ad spend for each company.

Another sweet little feature is the sentiment breakdown for each ad, which is broken down further into days.

The app also shows US and UK news sources about the Superbowl adverts, which have understandably so far shown that American news outlets are a bit more eager to discuss it than their British counterparts.

The brands are also ranked by volume in the column on the right; almost two million mentions have been found at the time of writing.

Who will emerge victorious as the adverts are aired is up for debate, but Volkswagen are leading the pack on the 2nd of February, thanks to their recent preview of the Star Wars-themed commercial.

Another cool way of engaging with the app, aside from getting on Twitter now and discussing your favourite brand’s Superbowl ad, is to tweet a chant and include the #BWcheerleader hashtag.

Now you’ll be able to see your chant appear in the top right, right where our sexy cheerleading worm is!

Each worm lets you scroll through a selection of their latest tweets, so you can see the type of comment people are saying about each brand.

Get involved! Tweet to your heart’s content about your brand’s Superbowl advert and get your favourite company’s wormy hands on that elusive ball. Watch this space to see how things develop over the weekend.

If you’d like to know more about Brandwatch, or to request a demo, click through here to get in touch.

Horizontal Graphs

One of the most useful features we’ve added is the new chart type. Under the ‘change view’ menu, users are now able to select two types of horizontal chart views.

The first is akin to our existing stacked bar charts, but presented from a flipped perspective. The second is a bit more novel, now granting users the option to view data using percentages, rather than total volume.

This means that whereas before you can get a decent impression of how trends occur, you can now observe percentage shares side-by-side. In this chart below, the monthly volume of mentions is plotted, as well as being split into positive, neutral and negative sentiment.

Although you are able to see the difference in percentage share, the initial impression would be that August was a ‘good’ month for the brand in question. Further inspection, through the use of the new percentage graph shows otherwise.

This graph reveals that August was in fact a poor month in terms of sentiment, as although the volume of mentions increased, the percentage of those mentions that were positive actually decreased. The graph also highlights the significance of the drop in positive mentions for October and November.

The charts can also easily show the comparison of other criteria, such as share of voice or page types. Previously, when using visuals such as pie charts, it is not immediately obvious how to compare the data, as they are not shown side-by-side.

With the horizontal percentage graph however, it’s much easier to see that Twitter has dominated discussion of the cheesecake flavour, but has almost evaded the other two categories.

It allows analysts to play with the new percentages to reveal previously hidden insight, and there are dozens of ways our power users could think of to use this new chart format.

Review Site Coverage

We’ve improved out coverage of review sites, which means for various websites instead of tracking a page of reviews and listing it as a single mention, the Brandwatch tool now picks apart these pages and tracks each comment review as a separate mention.

This update completes this process across a number of review sites, including Amazon, Yelp and Ciao.

Added ‘je ne sais quoi’ to Our Sentiment Analysis

The Brandwatch analysis team have used the help of some skilled linguists to create a new bespoke French rules-based classifier. This will help improve our sentiment analysis of all mentions in French, as we can now use our Hybrid technique for the language.

You can read more about how our sentiment analysis works soon, which will be discussed in an upcoming paper we’re producing.

Other Goodies

We’ve updated some small features to try and improve the user experience of our app. The search box within queries has been moved to the top of the controls column and pops out to show an expanded text box for better cohesion when creating longer search strings.

Tags are also now generated on the fly when Rules are being created, without the need for users to make them before setting a new Rule.

Other Brandwatch users that are sharing projects with you are now listed in alphabetical order for simpler navigation than before.

The pop-out mentions section features a new maximise button, allowing users to view the component in full screen.

The Mentions Map component introduced last week has an improved scaling algorithm that means the colouring of countries is now more visually relevant.

We listened to some of your comments and took them on board. Let us know what you think of all the updates and work we do here at Brandwatch, and fill us in if you have any thoughts, ideas or comments!

Job Description

Brandwatch requires a Community Manager to be based in our US (New York) office. You will represent the company online and engage with customers and relevant parties in social media spaces in order to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to the US website.

You will also manage the content in company marketing channels including the website, blog and email marketing campaigns, ensuring all brand content is leveraged and adapted to the US market.

You will be an avid user of social media who is constantly on the pulse with recent developments, trends and tools. You will understand how to use social networks, social bookmarking, syndication sites, RSS feeds, blog directories and more to:

• Stay on top of what’s happening online
• Grow the local community and promote the brand
• Promote and seed Brandwatch content
• Build relationships with authority networks

As you will become the lead writer of the US company blog, you will also be an excellent writer with attention to detail and strong creativity.

As part of a global team, you will work closely with the head office team in the UK to ensure consistency and collaboration across all activities.

The ideal candidate’s background will entail either:

• Direct experience in Community Management and social media for business or;
• Experience in a similar marketing role and heavy engagement with social media (especially Twitter and blogging)

Core responsibilities:

• Develop and manage social media channels key to the US (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc)
• Maintain the US company blog (in liason with the central UK based marketing team)
• Manage content on the US company site to ensure relevance to US market
• Develop and manage content for US specific email marketing activity
• Daily writing for company blog – focusing on social media for business and how social media is affecting marketing/consumer research
• Representing Brandwatch in relevant discussions on Linkedin/Quora and industry blogs
• Reciprocal guest-posting/networking with individual and industry blogs
• Represent Brandwatch US on Twitter (using company profile) to engage with current customers and reach out to new communities; to be done in collaboration with UK community manager
• Identifying indirect leads and passing to the Sales team, tracking of all leads
• Setting up and managing blog syndication with external US websites
• Provide ongoing reports on key performance metrics to the UK central marketing team
• Establishing relationships with bloggers and social media influencers in the US
• Work as part of the Brandwatch global marketing team to ensure brand consistency is delivered in the US and all opportunities are leveraged for maximum efficiency.

Key skills:

• Exceptional creativity and writing skills – ability to write and communicate in an engaging way which reflects Brandwatch’s branding whilst adhering to social media etiquette
• Experience with WordPress CMS and fast to pick up new software (you will need to use Brandwatch for blogging)
• Understanding of cutting edge social and digital strategy
• Interest in and awareness of marketing/PR concepts at a broader level (consumer research, campaign-tracking, social media marketing, reputation management etc)

Suggested salary: $40-50k based on skills and experience

If you would like to apply for this position then please send your CV to seb@brandwatch.com

We have built a team of the brightest developers and built our own web crawler, text analysis engine and web-based user interface. Continuing our rapid expansion we are looking for an NLP developer to join our Analysis team. Working closely with the rest of the team and other software developers, you will play an active role throughout the whole development process.

Your duties will include:

1. Design and implement accurate and efficient software applications for sentiment analysis and topic extraction
2. Analyse clients’ requirements and provide innovative solutions to extract and organise information from textual data
3. Maintain and enhance the performance of our existing NLP systems

You should have:

1. PhD (or equivalent R&D experience) in Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing
2. Good understanding of statistical approaches and machine learning
3. Good Java programming skills
4. Familiarity with Linux
5. Excellent communication skills in English

The following would be advantageous:

1. Experience with processing Web-scale data sets
2. Knowledge of other languages

Salary between 30k and 40k depending on skills and experience.

Perks

* Private health insurance
* Monthly and yearly bonuses
* Work on small projects of your choice every other Friday
* Great offices in central Brighton, with free drinks and snacks

Start date: ASAP.

Interested candidates should send their CV and a cover letter, including salary expectations, to xinglong@brandwatch.com

STRICTLY NO AGENCIES