Product Update: Author Groups, Historical Rules, Farsi & More

Somebody help us, we’re bleeding new features. It hurts because they’re just so cutting edge. The past weekend saw Brandwatch introduce FIVE new features to the social media monitoring platform, each significantly improving the performance of the tool.

Farsi

First up, we’ve tallied off another language to the already twenty-strong roster we offer. In the rapidly-developing Persian world, we’ve seen plenty of growth and demand for social media monitoring so we’ve implemented Farsi into the tool.

This will allow Brandwatch to track mentions from places like Iran and Afghanistan in the resident language, extending our coverage for the better.

Adding Tags to Topics

Our topic clouds were improved not too long ago, but we’ve now added a handy feature whereby you can add your own custom tags from the topic screen, nice and easy like.

It can help you clean up and customise topic clouds to your heart’s content, with minimal fuss. To demonstrate its usefulness, take a look at this topic cloud generated by Brandwatch about the European Championship final weekend:

Looks great, sure, but it’s missing a certain something; a bit of character. Not to worry, with the new tag creation feature there’s a perfect remedy right around the corner. Let’s make a new tag; we know just the thing to add a bit of spice to the proceedings.

So here’s one we made earlier. It turns out there are 8016 mentions about the famously naughty Italian striker Mario Balotelli. This should be enough to make it one of the most talked-about topics of the query.

Just like on Blue Peter (vintage British reference), you look away for a few seconds and voila!

The new tags appear in the newly-arranged cloud. An improvement, wouldn’t you agree? It’s easy to see how useful this can be for creating your own customised topic clouds.

Historical Rules

We’re a bit proud of our Rules here at Brandwatch. They let you set your own filters and systems for incoming data so that if mentions match the criteria you set, then the mentions will get acted upon in the way you see fit, be it a work priority assignment or a category classification.

We’ve boosted the power of Rules in the latest release so that now your Rules apply not just to the data streaming in, but also (if you like) the data you’re already sitting on. Think how this could be used to make your own clever automatic categorisation or even sentiment classifiers, for example.

By setting all mentions in your query that contain cheery and nice words to be classified as positive through a Rule, you could have a go and see if you’re better than our own built-in sentiment analysis. It’s a great way of taking control of your data set.

NEAR Operator Improvements

The NEAR operator is what brings us closer together. It’s a wonderful little Boolean that makes the tilde (~) look puny by comparison. It lets you determine not only which two (or more) words you want to search for, but also how close those words must be. Romeo must be within 5 words of Juliet, for example.

Now, we’ve added the means to state which order those words must be in too. Now, by stating NEAR/5f we can still say that Romeo must be within 5 words of Juliet, but also that Juliet must follow Romeo, or in the romantic tongue of Boolean-speak: near forward. Because really, who ever heard of Juliet and Romeo?

Author Groups

Maybe we’ve saved the best until last here. What with Brandwatch buddying up with the folks over at Kred, as well as Klout and PeerIndex info in the tool, our extensive in-app metrics and a forthcoming influence scale, we really believe there is no better place to track and measure influencers and Authors Groups add yet another layer to the onion.

The Author Groups feature builds upon the Authors component we added earlier this year, and now allows you to group individual authors together into groups, for safe keeping.

It presents a vast sea of opportunities for our users. You could group together all the UK media institutions that are included in your data for example, to successfully and simply analyse the impact of your brand’s publicity in that region.

Alternatively, you could bundle together a ‘wish-list’ of potential influencers. By selecting the most frequent bloggers about your product or collating the highest Kred-scoring tweeters into a single group, a potent range of options become available. Use your imagination! The sky’s the limit!

For a more detailed document of how to use this suite of new features, take a peek at this handy PDF. You can also pester your Account Manager with your questions, who won’t consider it pestering at all. They’re happy to help, as are our tech support team and community managers.