Amy Collins on Data: Focus on AsiaPac

In my first data blog, I shared the major themes for 2017 in terms of data.

In this post, I wanted to talk about our major investment theme for Quarter 1 of 2017: Coverage for the Asia Pacific region. We already have good coverage, globally, of all geographies, but as we’ve expanded to acquire more global customers and as our existing customers are also specializing in their social data needs, the thirst for more regional data has grown.

There are three parts to the plan that I can share with you.

Locally targeted data sourcing

Brandwatch is almost unique in the industry in that we do our own crawling.

This gives us a competitive advantage that we can steer our own course and react to our customers needs. Most of the time, this will take the form of adding groups of sites for specific customers with niche needs around content, but in the case of the AsiaPac coverage push, we’re being much more ambitious.

We’ve begun an initiative to find vast amounts of new content by using in-market, local teams to find top forums, blogs and news sites across over 50 verticals. It’s not surprising that none of our competitors are doing this as managing a project of this complexity is a challenge.

We’ve piloted this in Indonesia and Korea and plan to increase this to additional countries over the coming months. So far the results look enormously positive and we’ve added 14,000 new site urls into our crawlers to be visited regularly.