Another day, another dollar. Sorry, another day, another update. Updates are as good as dollars, right? They are when they’re Brandwatch-flavoured.

Anyway, so this weekend we added a couple of new features to the Brandwatch app. The main upgrade we’ve been working on is threshold alerts, a smart system for alerting users to changes in data.

This means that we can now let you know whenever mentions of your brand start going off the chain. For example, we keep a track of how much people are talking about us in Brandwatch.

In March, everyone and their dog were talking about us online. We knew why this would be, as we had recently announced our $6m investment, but what if we hadn’t? How long would it have been until we noticed the surge in mentions?

It was with this mind-set that threshold alerts was designed, so users could be notified of unusual or unexpected peaks in data volume.

You can set up your threshold alert in the same way you’d set up a regular email alert. The next menu will prompt you with a number of options.

Here you are able to add any email address you’d like to receive the alerts, and they don’t even need to be Brandwatch users (even though we give all clients unlimited users for free).

That way, you can send your mum automatic messages when people suddenly start talking about her. You’d be best advised to keep it about business though.

You can define what percentage increase the data will need to undergo for Brandwatch to notify you about and also play with the specific filters that you want to isolate the alert to. This is so that you can state that if the amount of people discussing your brand increases by say, 250%, you will be alerted to it.

Define the Type, Author, Twitter, Site and Site Visitor filters (or leave them as they are if you like) to refine your data, name the alert and then save that beauty.

You can then sit back and wait for Brandwatch to warn you when your criteria have been met.

When creating a new query, you’ll now also get the chance to setup an auto threshold alert for a value of 200%, which you can then modify in the ‘manage alerts’ menu later on if you’d like to change it.

Once the incoming data hits the threshold you’ve set, you’ll receive an email.

The email shows a description of what triggered the email as well as an accompanying topic word cloud.

It also lists the most recent 5 mentions and a link to the app, an option to download the data or delete the alert.

One other upgrade we’ve made to Brandwatch is our new-look mentions pop-up. You now search within the window to find the portion of the mentions that you’re looking for at a quick glance.

There are now new ‘sort-by’ options too, so that you can rank the mentions in order of mozRank, blog comments, site visitors, forum comments or Twitter followers.

You can still export data and change the views as you could before, so don’t panic. If you have anything to add or ask about these features, let us know in the comments.