Welcome to our first Friday #

Each week we will be bringing you our mix of the biggest social media stories, top tips on campaigns and updates on using the Brandwatch tool, topped off with a bit of Friday fun. The Sizzle will keep you up to date with the week’s hottest social media news – we spend the week trawling the papers, websites and blogs so you don’t have to. The Fri-up is our Friday mix of tips, cases studies and interesting campaigns – who we’ve been watching this week. Think of The Sauce as the condiment to your weekend including Friday polls and tall tales.

The Sizzle

• Foursquare: a stalker’s dream?
• BBC charts  the rise and fall of social networks
• Facebook reaches 500 million users
• Social Spice: ‘Old man’ fragrance brand revamps image, smashing social media records
• 9 in 10 Brits now use social media
• Facebook as Popular as Filing Taxes – What?
• Twit Chegwin steals jokes and posts them on Twitter

The Fri-Up

Tech-team news:

• Improvements have been made to the Chart component,  making it possible to plot weeks and months, rather than just days. We’ve added a new option to chart categories to easily graph most mentions over the last few weeks.
• The dashboard now has improved usability (see blog)
• Our technical team now has a Twitter account @brandwatchinfo. Follow us to be kept up-to-date with system updates, developments and fixes.

Old man’s aftershave brand Old Spice almost brought down the internet last week,  smashing social media records with their incredible campaign featuring the rippling former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa invitingly introducing him as ‘the man your man could smell like’.  We love their videos – and we weren’t the only ones. A raft of celebrities joined to create video responses to the ads.

If you haven’t seen them all, check this one out

This week in the Brandwatch office, we’ve been tracking the rise and fall of the Mercury nominees since the shortlist was announced at London’s Hospital Club on Wednesday. You can see here in our Widget that since we started charting them Dizzee and the XX have been neck and neck with The XX regaining poll position only this morning, with Corinne Bailey Rae hot on their heels.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets now…..

The Sauce

Friday Poll: Has the Old spice campaign made you want to make your man an Isaiah Mustafa smellalike – would you give the brand a chance to shake its old man image?  Click here to vote

Something for the weekend:

• Newport vs Brooklyn : Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind) – Alicia and Jay-who?
• Councillor faces suspension for calling scientology ‘stupid’ via Twitter
• I-dosing -  Daily Mail: Finger on the pulse of the MySpace generation or another cruel misunderstanding by a junior reporter?
• Humans, slow off the mark – Aliens have been ‘tweeting for decades’

First, we’ve improved the new Chart component by making it possible to plot weeks and months, rather than just days. We’ve also added a new option to chart categories (that is: mention Assignment, Priority and Status), so one can easily graph who has been assigned most mentions over the last few weeks, or how many mentions are left to act on for a group of queries, etc. In a few week’s time we will let users create their own categories (such as Business Area, Mention Type, and so on), to tag mentions, sort them and filter them, and create more beautiful charts and visualisations.

Second, we’ve improved the usability of the new Dashboard by adding a small widget to hide the left-hand column of the screen, leaving more screen space for the workspace itself. We’ve also improved the mentions component – it now has a More widget which you can use to only keep the columns you’re interested in, and your column selections are saved along with the rest of the workspace.

Dashboard with left-hand column widget and More widget highlighted

Third, we’re trained 18 new sentiment classifiers, mostly in English, French and Italian.

Fourth, we’ve improved our Crawler’s coverage of Twitter, and Twitter retweets in particular. We’re preparing major improvements to our Twitter coverage over the next few weeks, so watch this space.

Finally, our technical team now has a Twitter account @brandwatchinfo. Follow it to be kept up-to-date with system updates, issues and fixes.

Brandwatch ist einer der führenden Anbieter von Social Media Monitoring-, Webmonitoring- und Analyse-Software am internationalen Markt. Unser Hauptsitz ist in Brighton, England. Wir eröffnen jetzt eine Zweigstelle in Stuttgart.

Diese Vollzeitstelle stellt eine grossartige Chance dar, in einem schnell wachsenden, erfolgreichen Unternehmen mit state-of-the-art Web-Technologien zu arbeiten.

Hauptaufgabe wird es sein, das Web-Interface unseres Social Media Monitoring Tools mitzuentwickeln.

Sie werden

1. Teil der User Interface Gruppe innerhalb des Produktentwicklungsteams sein
2. Am gesamten Ablauf der Interface-Entwicklung beteiligt sein: von der Gestaltung über die Implementierung bis hin zum Testen und Debugging
3. Dem User Interface Team, als auch dem Technical Director zugeordnet sein

Aufgaben und Profil

Sie sollten einen Informatik/IT-bezogenen Studiengang absolviert haben und idealerweise auch schon einige Jahre relevante Berufserfahrung mitbringen.

Ihre Kernkompetenz sollte die Javascript Programmierung sein (inklusive Ajax-basierte Entwicklung mit jQuery). Oder die Java-Entwicklung, gepaart mit dem starken Willen sich in Zukunft intensiv der Javascript Programmierung zu widmen!

Der ideale Kandidat hat folgende Eigenschaften

1. Gute Kenntnis des DOM, XHTML, CSS und Webprogrammierung im allgemeinen
2. Objektorientes Entwickeln, Vertrautheit mit dem MVC-Pattern
3. Vertrautheit mit Mootools
4. Kenntnisse des Spring Frameworks
5. Gutes analytisches Denken, mit der Fähigkeit, Vorgaben und Anforderungen in ein klares Design zu verwandeln und dieses dann umzusetzen.
6. Gute Organisations- und Kommunikationsfreudigkeit
7. Gute Englischkenntnisse (unser Hauptsitz ist im schönen Brighton, UK)

Das Gehalt wird von Erfahrung und Fähigkeiten abhängen und wird jährlich neu bewertet. Sie werden ausserdem an unserem Mitarbeitererfolgsbeteiligungsprogramm teilnehmen. Ihr Einsatz wird belohnt!

Haben wir Ihr Interesse geweckt?

Senden Sie uns Anschreiben, Lebenslauf (idealerweise auf Englisch) und Ihre Gehaltsvorstellung an julius at brandwatch punkt com.

One of our clients is monitoring the buzz around a brand, in particular the impact of campaigns they run on Twitter. To visualise this, one can simply add a new Graph component to a Workspace, select the Query and date range in the Controls, then ask to graph the volume for each day, broken down by page type. Click on Load data, and here is what you get:

Daily buzz per type

The graph shows clearly how buzz fluctuates over time, mostly from Blog and Forums – but the impact of the Twitter campaigns is very clear, with 3 spikes corresponding to 3 campaigns.

The Graph component is flexible and has several options of which two metrics to display: a group of Queries, a set of Tags, page types, and days. It can also represent the data using pie charts:

Comparison of queries by buzz type

Over the next few weeks we will expand this component to cater for more metrics (sentiment, country, language, etc), additional graph styles, and more. This very flexible component will really enable users to generate all types of graphs in only a few clicks.

As part of the same upgrade we have also added some new sentiment classifiers (in Spanish and English), and better coverage of German social media and review sites.

First, within the Mentions Component, users can now add comments to mentions, and assign these mentions to team-mates. This is a great way to share a monitoring and engagement effort across a whole team. Team-mates are alerted each time they have been assigned a mention, and can use Brandwatch to check the mentions currently assigned to them – they can then deal with the mentions, comment back, and re-assign the mentions to somebody else, or simply mark the mentions as ‘closed’.

Assigning a mention in the Mentions Component

Second, we have trained new and improved automated sentiment classifiers for several industries in multiple languages (English, French, German, Turkish, French and Italian). This will improve the reliability of sentiment statistics.

Third, we have increased the width of our crawler archive, so that newly-created queries pick up more historical data from the get-go. Twitter coverage has also been improved, particularly for ’smaller’ queries.

Finally, several changes have sped up the Mentions Component, and our search index is now updated every 10 minutes, giving users the latest results even more quickly.

You will:

1. Join our operations team which supports and improves the Brandwatch web application
2. Deal with user requests and issues, investigating problems when necessary, and coming up with fixes
3. Design and implement code enhancements and new functionality
4. Liaise with the Sales and Sysadmin teams

Skills and Experience:

You should have a good software-related degree and great analytical and communications skills.

The following technical skills are required:

1. Java programming
2. Databases (Postgres, Mysql)
3. Working with XML, HTML and other Web standards
4. Linux
5. Knowledge of MVC frameworks (eg Spring) a bonus

Salary will be based on skills and experience, and will be reviewed yearly based on performance. You will also join our bonus scheme.

Interested candidates should send their CV and a cover letter detailing relevant experience and salary expectations to jobs at brandwatch dot com.

Absolutely no recruitment agencies – you would be wasting your time.

You will:

1. Be part of the User Interface group within our Product Development team
2. Work on the whole lifecycle of new interface functionality: from design to implementation to testing and debugging
3. Report to the rest of the team and to the Technical Director

Skills and Experience:

You need to have an IT-related degree, and 2 years of relevant commercial experience.

Your core competency should be in Javascript programming (including AJAX development with jQuery) or in Java development with a willingness to get involved in Javascript programming.

The ideal candidate would also have the following skills:

1. Good knowledge of DOM, XHTML, CSS and Web programming in general
2. Object-oriented development, familiarity with the MVC pattern
3. Familiarity with Mootools
4. Knowledge of the Spring framework
5. Good analytical thinking, with ability to turn requirements into a clear design and then into a working implementation
6. Organisation and communication skills

Salary will be based on skills and experience, and will be reviewed yearly based on performance. You will also join our bonus scheme. Your hard work will be rewarded.

Interested candidates should send their CV and a cover letter detailing relevant experience and salary expectations to jobs at brandwatch dot com.

Absolutely no recruitment agencies – you would be wasting your time.

• Identify those people who support Brandwatch, thank them and build an online relationship
• Tell the rest of the Brandwatch team what are the current important topics within social media reporting, how well we rate and what kind of questions are being asked
• Contact people interested in trialling social media monitoring and suggest using Brandwatch and pass these opportunities onto the sales team

In addtition, this person will be expected to learn about the existing and planned functionality of Brandwatch and pass general feedback to the team about what is being said and by whom about Social Media Monitoring. We would also like them to manage our membership of online communities like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Skills and attributes required

We are looking for someone with a 2:1 degree or better (or equivalent), preferably in one of the Arts or Humanities, who is an active user of social media (whether on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) and, preferably, who has some experience of either journalism or customer support. Being able to speak and write in another European language (especially German) would be an advantage.

As communications are central to this role, we are looking for someone with outstanding written and verbal communication. We would also need them to have practical experience of social media, e.g., through their own blog or active Twitter, Facebook, etc. account.

Salary and benefits

This will be a perfect opportunity to join a cutting-edge technology company, working with a world-class application to contribute positively to all aspects of the business.

The full time equivalent salary will be in the range £18,000-£22,000 p.a., pro rata for the amount of hours worked. The range depends on the prior experience of the candidate.

How to apply

Please send an up to date cv with cover note to jobs at brandwatch.com with the subject ‘Application for Community Manager.’ The cover note should include specifics on why the candidate is interested in social media (including what social media they currently use) and a few paragraphs (maximum of 200 works) on how they see companies use social media for their brands in the next few years.

Please note: absolutely no recruitment agencies should contact us about this role – you would be wasting your time.

The idea behind that component is that you can see right away, in a single place, several key pieces of information about the buzz surrounding a particular query, including:

• its overall volume
• the sentiment of the conversations
• the breakdown by page type
• the sites which talk about the query most
• a historical graph of overall volume and sentiment

This is therefore a great way to quickly check how a query is doing, or to find a few initial insights into a query’s buzz, before digging deeper into the data.

The Summary Component

To see the Summary component in action, just open a new Workspace within your Workbench, and you will see the Summary component on the first tab. You can also add the Summary component to your existing Workspaces.

You may remember that we used to have a simpler Summary component – this has now been renamed Volume component, as its purpose is to show the breakdown of volume by page type, sentiment or language.

You will:

1. Be part of the Data Analysis group within our Product Development team
2. Periodically train new sentiment classifiers using our existing classification framework
3. Improve our data analysis processes and technology on an ongoing basis
4. Implement new analysis functionality using the latest NLP research
5. Report to the rest of the team and to the Technical Director

Skills and Experience:

You should have a degree in Computational Linguistics, or Computer Science with experience in NLP.

Knowledge of the following is required:

1. Experience with Machine Learning, especially applied to unstructured text analysis and text classification
2. Object-oriented software development
3. Hands-on experience with an NLP or Machine Learning framework, such as GATE, Rapidminer, Weka, Lingpipe

Knowledge of the following would be a bonus:

1. Familiarity with working with web content
2. Practical knowledge in information extraction, fact finding and opinion mining
3. Familiarity with statistics and probabilistic methods
4. Advanced Java programming

This will be a perfect opportunity to learn new, cutting-edge technologies and to work with real, dynamic data while developing a world-class application. You will want to contribute positively to all aspects of the business. Your hard work will be rewarded.

If interested, send a CV with a short cover later, and include your salary expectations, to jobs at brandwatch dot com.

Absolutely no recruitment agencies – you would be wasting your time.