UK-based Brandwatch is “laser-focused on being an enterprise social intelligence company.”
That’s what PR manager Dinah Alobeid told me in a recent telephone conversation. And it helps clarify what Brandwatch can and can’t do for brands. Brands–indeed, it’s all in the name. Brandwatch is dedicated to learning what the global social conversation is saying about a brand of interest–and its competitors–and running metrics against that data to extract commercially valuable insights.
It isn’t a general social media management and engagement tool; it’s not about managing and publishing content; it’s not about creating social campaigns or targeting personalized messages. This is one of a number of specialist products which doesn’t pretend to cover business social media needs soup to nuts.
Launched in the UK by accountant Giles Palmer in 2007, Brandwatch is a veteran product by marketing tech standards and boasts an impressive roster of clients: ESPN, Whole Foods, Sky, Pepsico, Heinken, Dell, and many more. It’s an international operation, headquartered in the south coast resort town Brighton, and with offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Berlin, and Stuttgart. Alobeid told me it’s currently looking to establish an Asian foothold in Singapore.
The Toolkit
Simply put, Brandwatch offers two related products. The main tool is Brandwatch Analytics which mines social media data to evaluate and optimize marketing strategies. It wouldn’t be quite right to call this a social listening tool, because it tracks brand-relevant activity from over 80 million online sources (and includes metadata like time, location and author). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram–the usual suspects–are part of the package, of course, but Brandwatch also trawls blogs, forums, news sources, and reviews, and grabs images and video as well as text. Alobeid told me it currently accommodates some 27 languages.
Brands can surface relevant conversations by using an extensive battery of Boolean search operators, and automatically identifies related trends and themes. It provides data to identify important influencers and advocates, and the Demographic Insights feature profiles individuals engaged in the conversation (currently for Twitter only). The use cases for Brandwatch Analytics include determining the value of marketing efforts, benchmarking them against competitors, and monitoring brand reputation.
The associated product is Brandwatch Vizia which creates vizualizations of this data. Vizia provides a customizable display which can be hosted on individual screens, or screens shared by teams working at social media hubs and audiences at events. Vizualizations make it easy to share social data and successes across business teams and helps collaborative management of positive or negative brand-related events. Along with MutualMind, Brandwatch makes visual display opportunities a central part of its proffer. Of course, if you prefer, you can extract the data to spreadsheets.
Look Elsewhere or Look Within?
Brandwatch is an enterprise scale tool for large businesses with global reputations to manage. It may hold less appeal for brands, especially smaller brands, seeking a one-stop social media management product–although Brandwatch offers to fill the gap through its “social suite” integrations with partners who bring parts needed to complete the jigsaw puzzle.
In 2013, Brandwatch announced a partnership with Hootsuite to add engagement capabilities to social intelligence. Additional partners include Spredfast (social media management), Percolate (marketing management) and Converseon (social strategy and analytics). The suggestion is that brands build a suite of social tools based in the Brandwatch eco-system as an alternative to going out and acquiring one–a proposition entertainingly challenged on the Brandwatch blog.
It’s also worth noting that there’s currently no mobile app for Analytics or Vizia, although Alobeid assured me that both tools are functional in any browser.
Brandwatch is highly favored by G2 Crowd, the user review source, which places it as a clear leader and high performer among social media monitoring products.
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Company Name: Brandwatch Headquarters: Brighton, UK Categories: Analytics, Monitoring, Enterprise Social Intelligence Describe Yourself: Brandwatch Analytics is Brandwatch’s social listening and analytics tech platform, providing deep listening and a multitude of analysis capabilities and features to slice, dice, and view data in a number of different visualizations for easy reporting and to extract insights to inform business, marketing, product, and communications decisions. Brandwatch Vizia is Brandwatch’s social command center platform, which aggregates the social data from Brandwatch Analytics, translating it all into easy-to-read, beautiful visualizations on dynamic displays to show competitive analysis, brand share of voice, and to make real-time decisions and engage with customers and more. Housed outside C-suite offices, in corporate lobbies, or in social media command centers and marketing departments, Brandwatch Vizia brings social data to life. Main Competitors: Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, Sprinklr, Tracx, Netbase Website: www.brandwatch.com
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