Amy Collins on Data: AsiaPac News Coverage and Data Partnerships Roadmap

As you know, this blog series is to increase transparency about the ongoing work we’re doing in the Data team within Brandwatch.

It’s not meant to act as big, glossy marketing, more to be the word on the ground as we gear up for the main marketing reveal. We’re going to be sharing the news as it happens here to show you the momentum that we’re building towards our main launch for Asia Pac data.

AsiaPac News Coverage

 

Our Data Partnerships Team is working through the Asia Pac data feeds that I shared with you in my blog from a couple of weeks ago.

We brought the new News stream online in the last release, just last week. There has been a really significant upsurge in News data volumes for the whole region.

I can share with you some very early analysis on the new data ingested. It’s probably not a representative sample as we really want to be looking at a full month’s difference to really measure, but this is interesting as an early headline.

The above is a Brandwatch Analytics chart taken from a 1% sample Query for the volumes for Asia Pacific news before and after the feed was activated. I have false coloured the weekends to make it easier to see what’s going on.

You can see that (1) the feed went live on the 9th of March. You can see that we are seeing a substantial increase over both the weekends (2) and the weekdays (3). Overall, based on this early data, we’re probably looking at a 60% increase in volumes for News coverage for the region.

Overall, based on this early data, we’re probably looking at a 60% increase in volumes for News coverage for the region.

As above, this is only a very early view and the final numbers may settle down to be higher or lower than this, but the difference is significant. I will report more in a future blog when I have more data.

My counterpart in Product Marketing, Phill Agnew, says:

“If you’re a current customer and want more information about how this increase in data may affect your account, please take a look at this help center article. It walks you through the updates we’ve made and the improvements we still plan to make, while highlighting tips to make the most out of this new data.

It’s worth noting that if you report on volumes to colleagues within your organization, you may wish to annotate this months report to factor in the benefit provided by this background volume increase. But this is just one piece of the puzzle. Keep your eyes on Brandwatch this April 5th, when we’ll be announcing all the major improvements to our Asia Pacific coverage.”

“Keep your eyes on Brandwatch this April 5th, when we’ll be revealing all the major improvements to our Asia Pacific coverage”

Imminently…Blogs

The next feed to come online is Blogs.

The great news is that we’ve bought in a global feed of Blog data, so it will benefit all of our customers even the ones without a specific need for Asia Pac coverage.

This will contain all the usual suspects such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc. Again, like news, we expect this to augment our existing in house crawled Blog coverage significantly.

The team are doing final testing and bug fixing and hope have this onstream towards the end of next week or early the following week (W/C 27th March). We’ll be sharing some highlights of the volumes and impact on our launch on the 5th.

Then Forums followed by Discuz!

As I previewed a few weeks ago, very quickly after Blogs, we’ll be rolling out a huge feed of Forums for Asia Pacific countries. And almost immediately after that, the Chinese Forum community, Tencent Discuz! will be coming online in the product.

And…yes the “!” is part of the name – it’s not just my excitement…though I am excited.

It’s worth noting that these four new data sources are all investments that we’re bringing in included within your Brandwatch Analytics Subscription.

The key thing I want you to take away from this is we made a commitment to world class data coverage in Asia Pacific and we are on schedule to deliver it for our launch.

Once we’ve delivered that, we’ll be continuing to bolt in new data partnerships. There are three areas I’m hoping to be able to announce partnerships in:

• Chinese Social Networks (We’re currently in talks)
• Premium News feeds for those customers that have specific needs around licensed content
• New geographies (We’re currently evaluating different options both in terms of crawling and suppliers)

Again – keep an eye on Brandwatch this coming April the 5th. We’ll be revealing something very exciting.