The Friday# 27 August 2010

Welcome to the Friday#

This week in The Sizzle: England’s cricketers have dressing room secrets to hide and the Smartphone App market reaches more than $2.2bn. In the Fri up we take a look at Lola the wheelie-bin cat’s terryfying ordeal through Brandwatch. In The Sauce, Apple sues David Copperfield and The Sun lets you bin Mary Bale.

The Sizzle

Smartphone App Market Reached More Than $2.2 Billion In The First Half Of 2010
Now mutually beneficial relationship between TV and social media to become increasingly competitive
Twitter ban for England’s cricketers: Divisive and could lead to dressing room secrets being revealed
When you close your eyes do you see the Google logo? Here’s why
Double hand transplant via twitter – too much information?
Reverse running mania: “It just came upon me when I was in the park running forwards and I thought I could simply turn around…” – yes you can!

The Fri-Up

Tech-team news:

We don’t have any specific releases but 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.

Here is a specific blog by CTO Fabrice on our monitoring tool’s usability upgrade

For tech updates as they happen, follow our tech team on Twitter: @brandwatchinfo

Fur enough

So the big news story of the week – The Camerons’ baby? Chilean miners? Migration to UK up 20%? Not even close.

On 23rd August, it came to the world’s attention that a tabby cat named Lola had been imprisoned, by a cruel and evil woman, in a Coventry wheelie bin. This prompted an outpouring of sympathy for Lola, followed by a witch-hunt for Mary Bale. Followed by The Sun appearing on Lola’s doorstep to shower her with gifts while simultaneously creating a game on their website where you can ‘bin Mary Bale’.

As @mrblackett summed it up so perfectly in his tweet: “Pakistan! Sick of no-one paying attention to your plight? Put a cat in a wheelie bin and everyone will go f***g mental.”

As a nation of animal lovers – this really did provoke genuine outrage. The story and the hatred for Mary Bale went global within a few hours. So, we thought we’d take a look at the Lolagate timeline through Brandwatch.

So we see the story unravel. The rumour starts with Stephanie Mann posting her CCTV footage on Facebook: a mystery woman casually picks up a small tabby cat and dumps her in a wheelie bin and rushes off. As the woman’s identity is revealed to be Mary Bale we see the chatter reaching it’s peak as the story goes global: US, Australia, Italy – and that’s just using Brandwatch English version. The story begins to plateau and then we see the final pitch on the evening of August 25 when Mary Bale is tracked down by the press and forced to explain herself.

Below, we look at the story by site type:

Before the mainstream news picks up the story, we can see Lolagate first comes to light on 23rd August via blogs, forums and of course the video. The news then picks it up and runs with it prompting an initial reaction mainly from forums and blogs – some of which are cat specific. As the story gathers pace, the social networks go crazy for the news with a significant slice of video added to the mix. As the story continues to simmer, the blogs and forums keep a constant buzz – even this morning at 9.00, people are already waking up for a chat about Lola.

Something for the weekend:

Hope you enjoyed the Friday#, have a great weekend.

If you haven’t already joined us on twitter – we’d love to see you there: @brandwatchtweet

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