Blog > September 2008

We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work – and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.

We are, first and foremost, a data company. Brandwatch offers amazing, insightful buzz monitoring data that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Release 3.7 achieved mostly two things:

• giving users direct access to that data, with a bulk download tool, plus some download links for the various portlets of the application. Our users can now manipulate that data offline, using their favorite tools. The data can be downloaded in CVS and Excel format.
• extracting more useful information from the data – and letting users interact with it more. We have a new ‘Answers’ module – answering the most common questions you may have about your brands in one click, which we expect will help people with their reputation monitoring. We also do more site analysis – telling you what sites talk about your brands most, but also comparing a group of brands and showing their share of mentions on their top sites. Now you know which important site talks more (or less!) about your competitor than about you. Finally, users can edit and delete the Trends that we automatically identify in each brand’s mentions – on the fly.

Aside from these two main areas, we also included several smaller enhancements: users can edit their brand subscriptions online, and the graphs have nice popups with useful info and a normalise option. We’ve also made our brand matching logic smarter and added many new automatic classifiers for better accuracy.

Overall, I hope that the work we have done will help people in their quest to understand their customers, benchmark against their competitors and manage their online reputation.