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

Click here to listen to the conversation in full

Some of the world’s brands have taken an age to adapt to the advent of social media, whilst others have thrived with the new opportunities it has afforded.

The variance in outlook and approach regarding social media can be the different that makes a company sink or swim online. One success story in this realm is the case of baseball-famous chewing gum giants, Wrigley.

Neil Glassman of WhizBangPowWow sat down with Jennifer Jackson Luth, who is Senior Manager of North American Corporate Affairs at Wrigley, to discuss the Wrigley-owned Orbit social media campaigns.

Luth talks about a number of things in the conversation, stressing the importance of taking a holistic approach to social media and of making brand advocates online.

Their most recent campaign is a unique Facebook-centered competition. The contest invites users to like the Orbit Facebook page in order to apply, a classic incentive to drive brand fans. Individuals are then entered into the competition as the app generates some Orbit packaging based on the user’s Facebook timeline.

Entrants are then free to modify the artistic packaging to create their own personal masterpiece. Next, a series of voting will take place in order to determine sixty winners, which will then see a full release on retail packets of Orbit in shops.

Luth describes how she recruited design students for a spotlight series, which helped her create high quality packaging for an initial promotion run, allowing future entrants to see how the final product might look and to spread the word about the competition.

Campaigns such as this, as well as previous other successes have helped establish Orbit as a major brand, one which has transcended simply gum. Luth details how fans mimicked their ‘Dirty to Clean’ commercials by replacing expletives with crazy terms, like in their advert, and suggests that people like engaging with the brand as it has now become a pop culture icon.

Towards the end of the conversation, Glassman presses her on how Wrigley plans to measure the success of this campaign, as well as how they monitor ROI in general. Listing Facebook page visits, likes, time on page, shares through third-party networking sites, sales spikes and other metrics, Luth finally concludes that most ROI measurement takes place post-campaign.

To listen to the conversation in its entirety, please click here to be taken to the WhizBangPowWow site, where it is hosted.

The Sizzle: FBI social plans. The Fri-Up: Google vs Facebook. The Sauce: ’Find another idiot’

The Sizzle

• New EU laws promote ‘right to be forgotten online’
• MegaUpload execs granted bail
• Google privacy update – more impact on Android users
• FBI plots social network scraping app
• Newscorp backed Beyond Oblivion’s spectacular crash

The Fri-Up

Here we look at them side by side hour by over the last couple of days: 

We can see the rumblings on the Facebook timeline appear first – as their announcement did. Google’s privacy policy quickly picks up the chat, overtaking concerns as we head into Friday. After which, people resume worrying about their Facebook timelines and their murky pasts circa 2006.

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

• ‘Find another idiot’
• Welcome to Cat Facts… 
• Ross Kemp. Folded

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

Click here to listen to the conversation.

Engagement is a word that’s tossed around in social media spheres so often that it can be difficult to get a proper grasp on its true meaning anymore.

Its overuse has prompted lots of discussion over its practical usage, and Neil Glassman of WhizBangPowWow has taken the opportunity to talk it over with Sword Ciboodle market strategist, Mitch Lieberman.

In an attempt to nail down a working definition, the two discuss different meanings of the word, specifically by breaking the term into two distinct types: sale/marketing and customer.

The sales engagement techniques are by no means new, but have simply transferred into the online space. This pre-sale engagement has been commonplace for decades, through the use of competitions, surveys and other established engagement practices.

The more novel aspects of sales CRM come after the sale has been made. The customer service opportunities made available by social media are incredible, and Lieberman details how businesses can use this post-sale method of CRM for good effect.

He also describes how customers are engaging with brands. Mitch suggests that fans are not actually engaging with the brand itself, but rather each other; they are interacting with other members of that brand’s community.

Next he goes on to pose the difficulties in remaining both impersonal and engaging, a saddle that many companies struggle to straddle. In order to remain professional, some degree of engagement must be sacrificed, which is why we have witnessed the rise of employee interactions on behalf of companies.

This is an invitation to then discuss ‘employee engagement’, a term that is defined by good old Wikipedia as the following:

“Employee Engagement is the extent to which employee commitment, both emotional and intellectual, exists relative to accomplishing the work, mission, and vision of the organization.

Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers, and for the success of the organization as a whole.”

Lieberman and Glassman cover a whole range of topics in this conversation, which spans over 20 minutes in length.

To find out what else they talked about, including whether increased employee engagement leads to better customer engagement, click here to listen to the audio recording of their dialogue.

One of the biggest industries impacted by the prevalence of social media is the hotels industry.

Ultimately, it’s a question of who do you trust more? The hotel website telling you how clean and comfortable they are, or the third party review site that details the grim details of their dirty laundry?

Marketing vs User Reviews

In 2010, Accorhotels - the owners of Motel 6, Sofitel and more – made a daring move; they decided to skip their own review selection entirely.

Instead, they integrated TripAdvisor’s reviews directly on their website. It was a bold step, and a shining acknowledgement that most people don’t even notice the hotel marketing information at all.

They effectively cut out the middleman and provided the information, good and bad, right there on their page.

In the digital age it’s the equivalent of letting their hotel speak for itself.

Harnessing The Power of Social Media

Another novel approach a few companies are taking is to use social media itself to guide the reviews.

For example, Carnival, of Carnival Cruises, uses their Facebook page to ask leading questions like “What is your favorite port we visit and why?”

This is an opportunity for pleased customers to speak about their favorite Carnival memories, while avoiding the negative comments. Carnival gains a lot of positive press, and drowns out the few complaints that might crop up.

Carnival uses other social media outlets, such as Youtube and Twitter, but they direct traffic back to their Facebook page. They keep it all contained and guide people there for information, as a central hub for their social media activity.

Interactive Tourism

Global brands, like Four Seasons hotels, have a bit more work to do. Some of their more far-flung destinations lack the social media infrastructure to really influence anything.

Therefore Four Seasons have taken it upon themselves to establish these social media presences. Not only do they offer local people in those locations a social media presence to contact, but they also offer potential travelers an “armchair tourism” experience.

People don’t have to wonder what a hotel or city looks like: they can view the series of pictures online and make their decisions from there.

Even though it involves training people to use Facebook or Twitter, Four Seasons believes it’s worth the effort.

Word of Mouth

Many companies are hesitant to use social media as deeply as some of the above companies. One negative review can have far more impact than a dozen negative ones. Positive reviews could be seeds written by the company, and it can be impossible to tell sometimes.

Negative reviews rarely lie, though they may exaggerate or simply have a second side of the story left untold. Who wants to risk booking a hotel with bad reviews and potentially ruin a one of a kind vacation?

Social media has had a huge effect on travel companies and hotels, and it’s not likely to change.

Travelers these days will have to do some careful research and a little guesswork to pick the right hotel. Then again, that’s no different than it used to be, only now the discussion takes place online, rather than in the real world.

Travelers will just have to disregard the most extreme reviews and check the ones in the middle of the road, for the most reasonable expectations.

Joe Hall is the originator of Myrtle Beach Hotels. When he isn’t writing or hanging out on Facebook, you can see him lounging on the shore, with cocktail in hand!

As we continue our rapid expansion we are seeking to hire a Junior IT Support Technician for our operations team.

Your main duties will be:

1. Support of users on a mixed Ubuntu Linux, Windows and Mac environments
2. Build and fixing of our internal systems hardware

You should have:

1. A computer-related degree or commercial experience of user support
2. Experience managing a system from a command-line
3. The ability to go from a non-technical request to a viable solution, and to present that solution clearly
4. A sharp mind and the ability to learn quickly

Knowledge of the following is required:

1. Installation, configuration and troubleshooting of Linux, Windows 7 and preferably MacOS X
2. PC Hardware maintenance and upgrades
3. Basic network administration
4. Mail server administration
5. Trouble-shooting of office software (MS Office, Open Office, Google Docs)
6. At least one of the following: TCP/IP, Ethernet, Shell scripting, VOIP, teleconferencing

This will be a perfect opportunity to learn new technologies with the option to advance to a Junior Systems Administrator position within 2 years.

Salary between 18k and 25k based on skills and experience.

Perks:

• Private health insurance
• Monthly and yearly bonuses
• 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 steve@brandwatch.com

STRICTLY NO AGENCIES