Blog > July 2010

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’