Ranking Brands By Their Online Sentiment

This summer The Metro Newspaper asked us to track the online sentiment towards this years big brother contestants. So, we put them into the system and  I spent the next ten weeks monitoring daily, what Brandwatch brought back. Every morning, armed with a steaming cup of coffee i logged in and patiently scanned the content Brandwatch picked up; lots of mindful insight like the biggest topic of “ugly bitch”  and inspiring comment,  “did yah see nicole doin the thriller dance she fort shu was pua amazinn”.

I said a silent thank you on the last eviction night …and here I reflect on what we got out of it.  Well…apart from a lucrative flutter with the bookies (brandwatch correctly predicted the evictee for 8 out of 10 weeks), we built a new chart.

This chart shows you how brands (in the case of BB9 – people) rank, by volume of chat and by sentiment. Its a neat little widget and we have customers who are using it to rank global brands, politicians, banks and video games. It can be styled, and sized and show different indexes. But most importantly it gives you a lot -with no effort.

To quote Jon who coded the chart – ” it delivers rich and interesting data in a way thats quick and easy to understand”.

I know it does because I had to justify the build by testing how easy (or not) it was to do this using free onine tools. Try it, you’ll go mad. Pick 10 celebrities, take out all the spam, work out from all the relevant results you get back, who is liked most and who the least… if the sentiment towards them has changed in the previous week, what the volume of chat around each person is, what the topics concerning them are and… keep hold of clear metrics to support your analysis.

It’s not easy. It took ages and i never achieved a clear breakdown of sentiment towards each contestant with their change in ranking from the week before.

The new Brandwatch chart immediately shows you the sentiment and volume of chat around each contestant and how its changed. From the Brandwatch dashboard i get more BB9 metrics plus the detailed performance of each contestant over time -the dips and peaks of public sentiment towards them- and how they compare to each other. I can clearly see the topics and issues on peoples minds and track the conversations not only about them… but  also around CH4, Endemol, and Davina McCall.  I also know which sites I should start targerting for next years “big brother really is complete and utter trite” … campaign.

Most satisfying, is that I can now do this kind of analysis, in about 4 minutes , my coffee stays hot, and I can use this company blog to show off about it.