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.

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.

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 experts in both social media and data analysis, we find infographics a fascinating part of the modern social media landscape.

Scroll down to see the collection of infographic infographics

From cave paintings to the iconic London underground map, infographics have long been part of our language for communicating data.

At their best, infographics provide plenty of otherwise complex information in a digestible, interesting and visually appealing series of images. Good.is hosts a plethora of amazing examples of good infographics.

Some of the best things about them are:

• Attention – in the ADD world of the internet, snapshots of info are more appealing than spreadsheets of data
• Data – Lots of information at a glance, with more room for emotive representation than raw data affords
• Text – a picture is worth a thousand words. With annotations, it’s worth a million
• Colour – there are semantics to colour, and different styles can be used to effectively convey meaning
• Interactivity – always a draw for users, interactive infographics are very popular

At their worst, they are a useless poster that reveals little information and can actually be more annoying to look at than a simple number can be.

Potential shortcomings:

• Don’t always add anything to a simple text version. All to often infographics are little more than an obscure way of showing a few numbers
• Poor for SEO, as the text is embedded within the image
• Not great for visually-impaired users
• Mobiles can struggle to display them, especially ones which necessitate lots of scrolling
• Statistics don’t show working, and are regularly unverifiable. Plucking numbers from nowhere, the data can be incredibly misleading, badly re-appropriated  or irrelevant.

Here are two examples of a good and bad infographic on exactly the same topic!

We’ve found a few neat little infographics that are all about infographics, just to meta things up a bit. Thanks to Ivan Cash, Zabisco, Laughing Squid and The Society Pages for providing these images.

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1. Dr. Xinglong Wang – NLP Research & Development

Xinglong heads up our Analysis team. Here we ask him a series of questions about how Brandwatch approaches sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) and what challenges there are to getting it right:

Questions:

1. What is sentiment analysis? (00:38)
2. How can a computer understand human language? (01:06)
3. What makes it difficult? (02:11)
4. How does Brandwatch do sentiment analysis? (03:34)
5. What are the strengths of Brandwatch’s approach to sentiment analysis? (04:13)

Although it only seems to be community managers that actually care about this day, let me tell you that they are probably the most amazing, good-looking and talented people in every company you care to name.

This is where I should mention I am a community manager for Brandwatch, which in no way makes my opinion biased in this matter.

To mark the special day, the guys over at Social Fresh compiled a report into the role of community managers. You can read the full 15-page report here.

Some of the most interesting outcomes of the report are listed below:

• Two-thirds of all community managers are female
• Unbelievably, male CMs earn more than female CMs
• Content creation is the primary task for most community managers, especially in terms of time spent
• Almost 20% of all community managers are based in New York
• Community managers earn, on average, over $50k a year
• The average age of a community manager is about 30
• Unsurprisingly, software companies are more likely to employ a CM

Rather wonderfully, Social Fresh also produced a great infographic to accompany the report, so feast your eyes on this:

Thanks to Social Fresh for compiling and sharing their research!

Click here to hear the conversation.

The unimaginatively named but aspirationally-acronymed ‘Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) this week began accepting applications for its customised top-level domains.

The gTLD programme, allowing for generic top-level domains, permits anyone to apply for custom domain extensions.

There have been a number of these extensions already assigned, such as .aero for the aviation industry, .museum for museums and .xxx for the places we’re not supposed to talk about at work.

With the opening up of these domains to the private sector, it’s surely not going to be long before the likes of coca.cola,  apple.ipad and hsbc.bank start splashing their branding all over our browser address bars.

While many of these multi-billion dollar businesses may be scrambling for the best and most desirable names, Neil Glassman at WhizBangPowWow has been asking Jeffrey Braverman of Nuts.com whether SMEs should also be considering registering these types of addresses.

In the aftermath of a rebrand from Nuts Online to Nuts.com, Jeffrey reveals the thought processes behind his decision against applying for a .nuts domain.

Aside from the giant stumbling block of the whopping $185,000 required just to apply for one of these gTLDs, Braverman also discusses the inherent problem of what to include before the .extension: eat.nuts? love.nuts?

Everyone is familiar with the current extensions, most familiarly and desirably so with .com. Therefore, justifying spending extra cash on an unknown quantity is terribly hard to do.

One of the main lines of thought is defensive strategy. This is the notion that companies should buy these domains to stop competitors from capitalising upon them, or even to sell them on or to host other sites under that gTLD.

Jeffrey Braverman discusses all these considerations in the conversation, and why he concluded that SMEs probably shouldn’t invest in gTLDs over at WhizBangPowWow.

We’ve also decided to provide a summary of each conversation here on our blog, as well as linking to each audio conversation.

Note that the conversations are merely saved as a video, and don’t actually feature moving images; they are audio files.

Is ROI a ridiculous concept? (link)
A discussion with Dennis Yu of Blitzmetrics about the difficulties of measuring ROI in social media.

Is It Worth Customizing Your Domain Extension? (link)
Jeffrey Braverman of nuts.com explains why he is not interested in the new ICANN custom domain names.

What Does Engagement Actually Mean? (link)
Neil Lieberman of Sword Ciboodle reveals his understanding of the different meanings of engagement, as well as offering advice on the subject.

Orbit’s Social Media Campaigns (link)
Jennifer Jackson Luth of Wrigley’s gives an account of Orbit’s social media campaigns, in particular their ‘spotlight series’ Facebook contest

Watch this space – More to come very soon!

Click here to hear the conversation

One of the stickiest ingredients in the social media cake is the notoriously difficult task of measuring how well it is baked. Understanding the quality of your return on investment on social media spending is absolutely essential to building an effective business strategy: but what is the best way to do it?

The guys at Whiz Bang Pow Wow are running a 24-part series on conversations about social media, in partnership with Brandwatch. Host of the series is Neil Glassman, and the opening discussion features the CEO of Blitzmetrics, Dennis Yu.

This fascinating dialogue discusses whether there is any point in even seeking to quantify ROI with regard to social media, and addresses many of the problems that companies encounter when trying to do so.

Dennis describes how a Google search for ‘Rosetta Stone’ immediately prior to a purchase may well have been the final driver in making a sale, though it shouldn’t take all the credit for this sale.

Other factors, such as word-of-mouth, Twitter, advertising and all manner of things may influenced that particular customer’s decision to Google that term in the first place.

Drawing on an analogy with basketball statistics being skewed towards forward players unless assists and other data is also accounted for, Yu describes the importance of tracking all the contributing factors that lead into a sale.

Companies should not be measuring conversion rates based solely on the last thing that happens before a sale.

Yu continues to say that there will never be a universal figure for all businesses to use for measuring ROI, and that there are two parts to the sales funnel that increase purchases. Further up this article is the picture that accompanies Yu’s description during the conversation.

To find out exactly what Yu said, and what advice he had for Glassman at WhizBang in measuring ROI you can listen to the conversation here.