Blog > September 2011

This week’s update takes another step towards automating the various tasks carried out in Brandwatch.

The data management features we offer in Brandwatch are already known for being amongst the best in the market. The flexibility offered by Topics, Tags and Categories (see blog post) means data can be organised and labeled in a number of ways to suit user-preferences, with certain elements automated to make the process faster.

New Bulk Actions

All the below types of categorisation and classification were available previous, but we have now added them to the list of functions you can perform on whole batches of mentions.

The only bulk-action previously offered was tagging. Now in the the Mentions component, once you select one or more mentions by ticking the box next to them (or the select-all box), you will see a “More Actions” button become active – clicking this brings up a list of options:

The list will be fairly self-explanatory, but here’s a bit more detail about what’s possible with some of the options:

Change Sentiment

Our automatic sentiment analysis systems have come on a long way in the last year or so, but due to the difficulties still presented by contextual and subject-specific language (see blog post) there may be times when our classifiers don’t return the results you’d expect.

For these cases we have introduced the option to bulk change the sentiment of a whole batch of mentions that match a specific set of filters or a search term. For example, our system might be classifying mentions that include the word “cheap” as positive, but you might consider this a negative if you are a very luxury brand – now you have the ability to override all mis-classified mentions with just a couple of clicks.

Add or Remove Categories

Due to the two-tiered nature of Categories in Brandwatch (there are Categories and Sub-Categories) they are already a very powerful data management tool which many users prefer to Tags.

With this week’s update you will now be able to assign Categories to multiple mentions at once – again with the option to select all the mentions returned by your filters or search.

(NB: As before, Categories must first be created separately through the button at the top right of the Brandwatch screen.)

Add or Remove Assignments/Priority/Status/”Checked” Status

These are what we refer to as Workflow Categories. You can again assign these to a batch of mentions, either by manually selecting several, filtering by a search or by other filters. Here are a couple of examples:

• You could filter all your mentions by a search for “customer service/support/care” and then assign all the returned mentions to the email address of the person in charge of online customer service.
• You might consider mentions of your brand in blog posts with a certain number of comments on to be particularly high-priority, so you could set your filters to return only those results and then bulk-categorise them all accordingly.

For more detailed information on how to use these new features, here’s the full guide from our Training team.