One of the biggest Apple events of the year was concluded last week after week-long festivities, leaving behind many memorable quotes, excitement and heated debate.

It was an interesting week for geeks everywhere and the Twittersphere was alight with discussion around the numerous updates from WWDC.

With so many eyes on Apple to see whether it can revive its doubtful and dwindling fan base, we felt it was only appropriate that we dig in for social insights through Brandwatch app.

Using Brandwatch’s flexible query and Rule functionalities we were able to set up a custom-tailored search that looks for relevant mentions of WWDC in the United States.

The buzz around WWDC started to spike significantly about an hour before the start of the event and reached its peak at 10AM PDST when Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took the stage.

On the day of the keynote speech, there were total of 73905 WWDC mentions in U.S.

Taking place in San Francisco, WWDC unsurprisingly received the most buzz (25%) from those in California, which was followed by New York with 13%.

General reception to WWDC Keynote was very positive, with almost 3 times more positive reactions than negative ones.

Apple unveiled several interesting new developments at WWDC 2013, starting with the OS X Mavericks. Named after a famed surfing locale in California, it promised performances improvements, more power-user support and better battery life.

As depicted in the above topics cloud, battery life was a popular overarching theme for Apple’s presentation across different product lines.

However, what really garnered a lot of attention on Twitter was the Mac Pro.

Phil Schiller, SVP of marketing for Apple, took stage to boast something slightly unexpected: the famed aluminum Mac Pro chassis, which has not gone through a major cosmetic change since 2006, has been revamped with more computing and graphics power than any previous versions and packaged into 1/8^th the size of previous models.

Following the sneak peak of Mac Pro was the announcement about iOS 7, which had already been anticipated by many to be unveiled at this event.

The refreshed mobile operating system boasted several new features, as well as a complete overhaul in user interface. Further news of a renewed MacBook Air also featured among the most hotly-discussed topics.

Based on popular topics above, we categorized newly announced products and were able to calculate their share of voice.

iOS 7 was in the lead with Mac Pro announcement coming in close second.

Steve Jobs was one of the most idiosyncratic personas in the tech industry, and following his death in 2011 all the operations that Steve Jobs notoriously micromanaged were divided among Apple’s current leadership team.

Category function can be used to track visibilities of executives to specific audiences, such as in this case with Twitter. Accordingly, we thought it would be interesting to see which exec is getting talked about most.

Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple had a very obvious lead with 46% of exec chat, followed by Jon Ives, SVP of Designs, who had a huge influence in the UI changes that were announced during WWDC.

Phil Schiller’s presentation on the redesigned Mac Pro and a memorable quote (“can’t innovate any more? my ass”) had a huge traction on Twitter as well. It is also interesting to note how Steve Jobs still provides a source of chatter for many of those following WWDC. 

Brandwatch’s Twitter Insights functionality is a powerful tool that can allow users to take a step further from textual searches to more content-based searches. It can show you particular pieces of content that are resonating amongst Twitter audiences.

For example, here we see that the Verge’s report on Mac Pro is the most tweeted content regarding WWDC.

The Insights component is also a great tool to monitor trending hashtags and popular conversations on Twitter. It is interesting to see hashtags relating to E3 and Xbox were trending alongside WWDC on this day.

With most of the announced developments for iOS and Mac still in beta and not due until Fall, it will be interesting to see how Apple’s saga unfolds and whether these new products will deliver on high expectations people have for Apple.

To get closer to the data and uncover how Brandwatch reveals these types of insights, get in touch with us for a demo today.

The post Social Media Insights from Apple’s WWDC Event appeared first on Brandwatch.

In an ever-more competitive marketplace, customer engagement and loyalty can spell the difference between robust revenue and sagging sales.

Increasingly, businesses are turning to social media and other digital technology in hopes of attracting and keeping customers.

One of the most popular options is Foursquare, a free app that allows users to share location-based details about their activities, such as shopping or dining. Launched in 2009, Foursquare today has more than 30 million users worldwide, as well as in excess of 1 million businesses using its Merchant Platform.

The geo-social site offers a variety of tools for businesses and marketers. With Foursquare Local Updates, companies can share information and photos about sales, fundraising events, loyalty programs, new merchandise lines and other promotions.

Customers receive the Local Updates via their smartphone or other mobile device when they are in the vicinity of the particular business.

For example, business can attract potential customers – and support a good cause – by hosting a silent auction, trivia tournament or similar event for charity and sharing it on Foursquare.

Rewarding Loyal Customers

With the Foursquare Specials feature, businesses can offer online discounts and deals that customers redeem when they visit the place of business, which, in Foursquare speak, is known as “check-in”.

For example, a Rhode Island bar offered $5 pitchers of beer for the first 10 customers each day and a fast-food chain gave away free drinks with a sandwich purchase.

When Foursquare users search for businesses or other locations to visit, the discounts and specials are highlighted as orange pins on the app’s map feature.

Foursquare and other geo-social networks are likely to become even more important for businesses as smartphone ownership increases. Currently, about half of all U.S. adults own a smartphone.

According to a Pew Internet report, 74% of U.S. smartphone owners were receiving real-time, location-based information on their phones as of February 2012. That was up from 55% in May 2011.

The Pew report also noted that a growing number of smartphone owners were using an app such as Foursquare to check in at specific locations or share their location with friends – 18% of smartphone owners in February 2012 compared with 12% in May 2011.

Women were more likely than men to use geo-social services (20% versus 17%) and rates of use were higher among smartphone owners ages 18 to 29 (23%) compared to other age groups.

Tracking Customer Engagement

The dawn of the digital age has not only given businesses many more options for marketing their goods and services, it also has given them the ability to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in minute detail.

Foursquare offers free analytics that allows businesses to track how many customers are checking in, the number of first-time versus repeat visitors, and whether customers are sharing their check-ins across other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook (Foursquare users can choose to publish their check-ins to their Facebook and/or Twitter accounts).

This information is likely to prove invaluable in helping business owners to tailor their marketing and promotional efforts to the habits and preferences of their target audience.

Diane Pierre-Louis is a writer for Bisk Education and covers a variety of topics related to higher education and the workplace, including internet marketing and social media training.

The post Using Foursquare to Corner Your Market appeared first on Brandwatch.

It’s always great when a new client joins the Brandwatch family, and we’re happy to welcome new members every single day. Sometimes however, one comes along that really impresses us with how they plan to use our platform.

One such company is the European car manufacturing giant, SEAT. A part of the Volkswagen group, the Spanish-based automobile brand has gained a significant following in recent years, thanks to the success of vehicles like the Ibiza and the Leon.

You can read the press release of this announcement here. 

The company is undergoing an enterprise-wide shift to embrace and integrate social within the business. In order to do so, it went through a list of 35 vendors in its pursuit of finding a social media monitoring and analytics platform that met its diverse needs.

SEAT wanted a solution that:

• Could be rolled out across a number of regions in Europe, with mentions being able to be automatically defined at the country, city and state level.
• Provided data coverage of a wide range of languages
• Allowed numerous departments to use the platform for their different needs – unlimited free users was desirable

After meeting these criteria, Brandwatch was selected. It will be used by multiple areas of business at SEAT to track social activity and inform decisions across internal operations as well as the customer lifecycle.

Purposes of the tool/departments that will be using the platform include:

• human resources
• public relations
• brand reputation
• online communications
• digital marketing
• customer service
• market research
• product development

Specific innovative uses of social analytics that SEAT is pioneering include plans to ensure its design-driven, dynamic and young-spirited messaging aligns with the consumer perception of the brand, as well as a strategy that complements traditional research methods during the development of new car models.

“Thanks to our extensive research, we’re confident that our close relationship with an accomplished vendor like Brandwatch means that instead of managing and investing in lots of solutions to gather social media intelligence, we can trust one platform to help us perform better holistically as a business” 

- Txema Garitano, Social Media, Search and Analytics Manager at SEAT.

It’s exciting for us to see corporations like SEAT adopt Brandwatch not just for one use, but across the entire organisation.

We’ll be talking more and more about which clients are using Brandwatch, and how they are using it over the coming months, so keep an eye out. You can already read about how some businesses have been using the platform over on our Case Studies page.

Do get in touch if you already use Brandwatch and want to show off some of the innovative ways you’re employing it, or also if you like what you see and want to see how we can help your business do something similar.

The post SEAT Joins the Brandwatch Family as it Embraces Company-Wide ‘Social Business’ appeared first on Brandwatch.

As you may remember, last year we at Brandwatch produced a stunning data visualisation around the Academy Awards, in partnership with The Credits.

We used the social data we collected to predict 15 out of 18 award winners correctly and garnered much press and media coverage for the project.

In our latest case study, we explore the key benefits and results of such a project, and why the The Credits, managed by the MPAA, chose to partner with us.

Read the full case study here.

The project proved the power of social data; whilst one needs to be wary of making predictions based on one data set, careful and in-depth analysis of social data can give real insights into the thoughts and opinions of people across the globe.

Our Oscars analysis was done in partnership with The Credits – an innovative digital magazine about film and television, sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America, who wanted to create a campaign around awards season in order to reach new fans.

The challenge was to do something – amongst a background of lots of other Oscars content around on the web – to capture fans’ imaginations and drive new traffic to thecredits.org.

“We know we have something pretty special here when it comes to immersing fans into the stories behind the story telling,” says Khalid El Khatib, senior director at The Credits. “We had to get creative and produce something engaging that would help people make sense of the Oscars buzz on social media.”

So the MPAA, who had been using Brandwatch for some time, decided to team up with Brandwatch to create an interactive data visualisation that collected opinion about nominees from both critics and influencers in the industry, and from the general public.

The Credits saw some huge benefits from the project, with both Brandwatch and The Credits being immersed in press, radio and TV interviews about the analysis in the weeks preceding and following the Awards. The project resulted in a range of other measurable results for The Credits, including an increase in coverage and site visitors.

You can find out more how they benefited from the project in our case study, which outlines the objectives of the project and meausrable results The Credits achieved through partnering with Brandwatch.

Read the full case study here.

The post Case Study: How the MPAA tracked the Social Oscars appeared first on Brandwatch.

The idea of ‘content’ as the heart of a social media community is an idea that has really taken root in recent months.

But understanding how to use content – essentially articles, images, ideas and more – to raise awareness of your brand most effectively is of huge importance. 

It might seem hard to predict which content will work for your community, but here are a few ways to get a better understanding of this – and some tips that should work for any online group.

Understand your community

At the heart of understanding what makes content successful has to be an understanding of your community. You need to know what makes them tick; what they enjoy talking about among themselves; and what times they are most active.

This sort of background understanding ensures that you can properly sense the mood and balance the tone (and therefore lower the risk of an ‘epic fail’).

Some things, however, are rules that can work across communities – good tips to understand what makes content in general a success – and what can scupper its chances.

The user experience

The first of these is to remember the user experience.

For example, with Facebook it’s easy to think that people may access your page as a community manager does – but most engagement will happen with the content that makes it into a user’s feed. Increasingly, this will also be via a mobile device.

This is why visual content often works so well. A powerful image doesn’t require that someone click away to another site – one that may not even work well on a mobile device. It’s also easy to share and often self-contained.

Some content fails altogether on a phone – websites with elements of Flash, for example, won’t work on iPhones.

Find your fans

Understanding where your fans are based is also a great way to increase engagement. Think about scheduling a few posts for when you’re tucked up in bed, but your fans in Japan are eating their lunch.

What is success?

Ultimately however, you need to work out what constitutes success for your community. Chasing Likes and shares for their own sake is never a good idea.

Developing an understanding of what the sharing of great content will give back to your brand is the most important thing.

This is a guest post by social media agency Yomego.

The post How Can You Predict What Content Will be Successful? appeared first on Brandwatch.

In another move that further cements our reputation as the leading solution to power social analytics and intelligence across the enterprise, we’re proud to announce our inclusion in Twitter’s heralded Twitter Certified Products Program.

The program is a bid to help businesses intelligently select from the litany of Twitter-enabled services, so that companies in the search for a tool are able to see which are accredited from the platform itself; an official stamp of approval from Twitter, if you like.

As per the Twitter Certified Program charter, the primary benefits of the enhanced relationship are to:

• Make Twitter more valuable to businesses and solve a need that Twitter does not address
• Help bring Twitter to new or underserved markets
• Ensure integrations behave as consistently as possible with Twitter’s own products
• Encourage meaningful engagement with the Twitter network
• Use Twitter Platform products rather than creating similar, competing products

It will also grant us an intimacy with what is indisputably the most important data source for brands and agencies performing analysis of their online presence.

We’ll be able to work closely with Twitter to release new features and functionality more efficiently.

We were chosen by Twitter because of our renowned monitoring and analytics services. Our collaboration showcases support of what has now long been established as the leading platform in the sector, and will now serve to aid businesses in selecting from the competing vendors in the social media monitoring and analytics space.

You’ll be able to see the benefits of this relationship over the coming months, so keep an eye on this part of the internet to see what surprises we have in store for you.

The post Brandwatch Named Twitter Certified Product appeared first on Brandwatch.

In a previous post on Brandwatch I recommended 5 steps to integrate SEO and social media activities. In this follow-up I will look in more detail at some of the tools can be used.

1. Identifying themes for target keywords

There are many great tools for identifying customer search behaviour. You will be familiar with these if you work in SEO, but not necessarily social media marketing.

The best known known tool is the Google Keyword Tool. It’s an essential tool for getting inside customers’ minds, to see their concerns.

The latest version of the tool now defaults to grouping keywords to target using AdWords, but this also helps identify content themes for SEO and social media.

Google Insights for Search is no longer available, but Google Trends is still worthwhile for finding keywords that are important seasonally or the latest “Rising” trends.

Übersuggest is another keyword identification tool I’d recommend, particularly useful if you’re working to understand how search behaviour differs in different countries.

2. Define target keywords and review current effectiveness

As I mentioned in the first article, it’s important to group search behaviours which will give you ideas for topics to target across SEO and social media in your content calendar.

I recommend using this type of layout of grouped keywords which can be used for targeting across SEO and social media.

To review the effectiveness of your SEO or social media there are two key techniques using Google Analytics it’s worth applying:

1. Advanced Segments can be used to isolate different types of traffic in Google Analytics, such as natural search traffic or social media traffic. This makes it easier to report on this.For example, you should set up a segment of non-brand SEO visits to show where you are attracting new visitors to your site who weren’t familiar with you – they don’t include the brand name when they search. We explain how to set this up in our 7 Step Guide to Getting more from Google Analytics.We also cover how to use the new Social Reports in Google Analytics which group social media so that setting up an Advanced Segment for Google Analytics is less necessary.
2. The other technique, also relatively new, is Multi-Channel Funnels. This provides information on Assists delivered through any referring source like social media, so you can see where engagement with a site occurs initially through social media, but a lead or sale is later generated through another channel like a brand search or email.

3. Set targets for engagement and sales

To set targets, the starting point is to implement the right form of tracking in Analytics.

Although Google Analytics or the new Universal Analytics starts collecting data as soon as the site is tagged, more effort is needed to customise reports for each business.

I consult a lot on setting up customisations and dashboards and am still surprised that many companies don’t have good insight on engagement or conversion. Some of the techniques every site should be setup are:

• Define Goals – this is relatively easy for an ecommerce site where you will setup ecommerce tracking. For other site types you need to setup goals and value for lead sources like callbacks, downloads, etc.
• Define funnels – often setup for the bottom of the funnel like checkout, a full funnel should be setup which covers initial brand and service engagement also based on page types
• Advanced segments – to group visits from different traffic sources as explained above
• Dashboards – summarising trends in Volume, Quality, Value and Cost of visits from different channels

Once customisation has been setup, another tip is to compare the value generated through SEO and social media using the value measures like Per Visit Value and Per Visit Goal Value.

This is really powerful since it gives you insight on which search terms, social networks and content are really working to generate new business for you.

4. Develop content marketing approach to target keywords

At it’s simplest, a content strategy involves defining the right content to engage different audiences which leads ultimately to leads and sales.

Here’s a different type of tool to the others in this post, which we have developed to help select the right types of content.

We developed a content marketing matrix structured to help you think through the dimensions of different content based on how your audience might think and what you’re trying to achieve as a business.

What will work where your audience are more or less impulsive or rational? What does that mean for content creation and marketing goals?

Depending on the quadrant(s) that you feel drawn to for your audience, it offers a starting point for your ideas generation.

I hope you find that helpful.

5. Implement a communications strategy to use SEO and social media

Of all the techniques we have reviewed in this post, this is the most familiar to marketers. It’s essential to create an effective content calendar.

Developing a sound content calendar requires:

• Major content themes: perhaps 4 to 12 a year, depending on scale based on promoting business propositions.
• Responsibilities for content creation and workflow review
• Integration with campaigns
• Associated outreach and online and offline advertising to support this.

A nice current example of this is in the UK is the creation of the BUPA knee clinic site, which has been supported by integration with print and web advertorial on The Guardian and other sites.

The post Tools and Techniques to Improve SEO and SM Results appeared first on Brandwatch.

It’s no surprise that technology has been a driving factor in how we communicate. 140 character limits, the need to be succinct and other prevailing memes have transformed the ways we talk to each other online.

It’s not rare to hear celebrated literary experts lament the demise of the second-most widely spoken language in the world, but seldom to we ever witness any evidence of such change beyond the anecdotal.

Accordingly, we have taken it upon ourselves to conduct our own research into how social media is helping drive evolution in the English language.

Deviating from official English

Twitter users are the least literate of the internet users we looked at, with 0.56% of words on the network being either misspelled or otherwise unofficial, perhaps due to its stricter character limit.

Twitter                 0.56% or 1 in 179

Google+              0.42% or 1 in 238

Facebook            0.31% or 1 in 323

Forums                0.18% or 1 in 556

Americans tend to deviate slightly more than those based in the UK, with the Brits at 0.53% and the USA at the global average of 0.56%.

Interestingly, tweeters have been getting increasingly literate over the past few years, getting 0.01% more literate each year since 2011 – is this a result of increased adoption of auto-correcting devices perchance?

Females are more likely to deviate too, using unofficial language every 169 words, whereas males do it once every 192. The fairer gender are also responsible for elongating words like arghhh, awwww, soooo and ahhh much more than males, who instead prefer to shorten them to things like gonna, wanna and kinda.

The most common form of ‘error’ is the exclusion of apostrophes, resulting in words like im, wont, cant, theres, hes, womens and parents.

The second most frequent deviation was the usage of acronyms, the widest used of which was LOL, followed by WTF, LMAO, YOLO, OMG and FFS.

In terms of the actual words that are misspelled, here are the favourites:

• definitely
• separate
• embarrass
• achieve
• surprise
• weird
• government
• argument

We found out plenty of other interesting things, which we’ll write about more soon, and you can discover others in this infographic, put together by our friends at mycleveragency.

The post Research Shows Twitter is Driving English Language Evolution appeared first on Brandwatch.

With the shift of the digital marketing industry from SEO to inbound marketing, crafting an effective earned media campaign is more important than ever. But there’s much more to earned media than planting articles all over the Internet – it takes time, research and finesse.

For brands who want to realize effective ROI, earned media can be the most efficient and cost-savvy way to reach their target audiences.

I’ve been working on this guide from Digital Relevance, which covers earned media from an inbound marketing perspective, and gives marketers the tools and resources they need to craft an effective campaign especially for their target audiences, no matter where they hang out on the Internet.

From paid to earned

Earned media is a new term, but it’s certainly not a new concept. The three digital media types—owned, paid and earned—reach target audiences in different ways.

Owned media lives on a brand’s own digital property and is controlled by the brand; this includes social presence on networks like Facebook and Twitter, blogs and mobile apps.

Paid media is advertising created and controlled by an organization outside of a brand, like paid search ads, affiliate advertising and YouTube commercials.

These two digital media types can be effective, but they also require an investment in time and resources, both internally and externally. But with earned media, a brand can cover an amazing amount of ground without such a deep investment of resources, while strengthening its image and building trust with its target audiences.

Consider this: 90% of web traffic comes from unpaid earned media. Here’s how campaigns that drive earned media can stack to provide combined value thanks to their evergreen nature.

Generating buzz

One of the most successful and popular examples of how earned media can work for a brand is Buzzfeed, a site that’s as known for its crack political team as it is for endless kitty pics and listicles.

However, Buzzfeed is also fertile ground for brands who want to kickstart earned media gains with curated or specially created content.

Take auto insurance brand GEICO, whose TV and digital commercials tend toward the quirky and critter-centric. The brand created a series of list articles and videos especially for Buzzfeed, including “29 Animals Who Are Delighted To See You,” what the brand offers as an approximation of the delight a customer might get from GEICO’s customer service.

By crafting content that’s clickable, shareable and instantly recognizable, GEICO creates a winning partnership with one of the web’s busiest sites – which is sure to result in earned media gains.

Creating a successful ‘earned media’ campaign doesn’t happen overnight—it takes research, creative and promotion before a brand realizes conversion.

Though, with the right strategy, a brand can tap into its target audiences and generate website traffic and conversions, social media buzz, build an online community and boost brand awareness.

The post How Earned Media Helps With Inbound Marketing appeared first on Brandwatch.

Last weekend, thousands of dressed up, euro-pop crazy people descended on Malmo, Sweden, to soak up the atmosphere and see this year’s Eurovision song contest.

Here at Brandwatch, we saw this as a fantastic opportunity to flex our data muscles and get analysing. We collected all tweets about the contest on the night of the final and have displayed that data in an interesting, visual way that also tells us a bit more about the Eurovision buzz.

As the data streamed in, we used Brandwatch’s Rules feature to categorise tweets according to the topic of conversation related to elements of the performance: song, voice, sex factor, outfit, appearance, dance routine, performance, political and stagecraft.

We also categorised them according to emotion, to further understand how people felt about each country’s entry.

On the night, during the show we collected nearly 1.8 million tweets – that’s a whole lot of Eurovision love (and some hate!) We’ve put together a dataviz that shows all the data by country and there are some interesting insights into how their performances were received.

Take a look at the viz here and have a play with the data - there’s some interesting insights to be found. For example, Belgium’s interesting ‘many arms’ dance routine provoked a lot of chat, whilst Spain’s use of lots of fog, lanterns and wind clearly made an impact on the audience.

There’s plenty more to see – take a look – but we’ve also pulled all of the data from the night together to provide some further insights.

Topics

When we look at all the data together and compare countries, we can see that Romania’s slightly odd Dracula-esque performance got the most buzz, followed by Ireland. Surprisingly, winners Denmark didn’t experience a significantly higher amount of buzz than other countries. We can see,however, that during the voting portion of the night, the discussion of political topics increases – no doubt the yearly complaints that voting has little to do with the actual songs.

Emotion

When we look at the data divided by emotion, we can see that there was quite a lot of love and joy throughout the night, which is nice; Eurovision always provides lots of fun.

As one Brandwatch fan, who attended the final, said: “The atmosphere both in and around the arena was electric, with thousands of fans milling around in all manner of outfits. Everyone was talking and taking photographs with fans from other countries and the overwhelming feeling was one of friendliness and goodwill.”

However, hate and anger increases during the end of the show – the voting section – which is no doubt viewers disagreeing with the voting choices of other countries.

Romania and Greece experienced the most emotional chatter, with Romania provoking quite a lot of fear and hatred, and Greece provoking more love, joy and excitement.

What amazed us this year was the sheer number of tweets about the Eurovision. At Brandwatch, we always strive to do something innovative and our matra is ‘Be bold, be brilliant’. This was the first time we’d tried to do a live dataviz, and we learnt a lot in the process.

We had tested our viz with last year’s data, and although we expected a rise in the volume of data, 1.7 million was more than we had anticipated. This led to the technical difficulties we experienced on the night, which meant that we couldn’t let users play with the dataviz live during the contest as we had hoped. We apologise to any fans who were disappointed, but hope that you enjoy playing with the viz now and looking back at the data.

The post What Social Media Revealed About the Eurovision Song Contest appeared first on Brandwatch.