Brandfeed was a startup that I worked on between 2011 and 2013. The company was dissolved in 2013, and the site was taken offline at the end of 2014.
The concept of Brandfeed was to enable journalists and bloggers to discover new stories, whilst providing brands with newsrooms to publish and distribute press releases and other media assets.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a start-up with my business partner Dan Leach.
Our goal with Brandfeed is to connect brands and the media more effectively. There are similar efforts on both sides of this fence, but our approach is to provide a centralised database of pressrooms with a journalists’ dashboard all under one roof. The idea as that our pressroom format will become familiar to journalists, so they always know where to go when the they need a media contact, logo asset, or hi-res photo of a CEO. Additionally we offer discovery and notification features so journalists can ‘follow’ the brands they’re interested in, receive content and suggestions in a low-noise environment that they control.
With Dan’s experience in brand communication strategy and my background in tech and creative, we think this is going to be pretty special.
We’re not ready to launch yet, but yesterday we went public. It’s great to be out; I no longer have to say “I’m working on this thing I can’t tell you about yet“. I’m a great believer in transparency and not keeping ideas to yourself, but that’s another blog post
We’ll be giving private previews of Brandfeed to industry friends very soon. After we iterate from that round of feedback we’ll be running a more public beta programme. If you’re a journalist, brand representative or PR you can register for the beta now.
Update – 06 Aug
We are now in a public beta phase.
I’ve been thinking a lot about sentiment analysis recently; for a number of reasons:
Datasift (a new product by Tweetmeme, currently in rather exclusive alpha) offers sentiment analysis as part of their streaming filters for Twitter.
Valley-based Fflick are developing their own sentiment engine via machine learning algorithms. The current manifestation of this is a movie review site, but they will be pursuing other verticals – no doubt once the tech has improved and they’ve got some $$s.
Qwiki, which I wrote about yesterday, appears to be on the artificial intelligence trail too. The task of establishing whether content is relevant/important/canonical is an incredibly daunting task to automate.
Finally [prompting this post] this morning I see a product launched by Lewis PR: Chatterscope monitors brand mentions and performs sentiment analysis – A free alternative to Radian6 and Alterian, perhaps? Monitoring and alert functionality is obviously useful, but sentiment analysis – that’s the marketing holy grail, and I’ve always been
What’s the shortest lifespan of a spoof Twitter account, ever?
If you’re impersonating the police [‘s logo], apparently the answer is 47 minutes. Well, at least until you have to change your logo.
The @gmp24_7 account (parodying the official Manchester Police accounts @gmp24_1 -through- @gmp24_6) was created at 9:55 this morning and less than 40 tweets later at 10:42 was ordered (by the police, via Twitter) to stop using their copyright
What amuses me about this the most is that copyright infringement is what they got called on. (Apparently falsely according to lawyer @davidallengreen – unless he’s a spoof too). Personally, if I was told I may be impersonating a police officer I’d be a little more petrified.
For the record, this spoof account made no attempt to indicate it was a parody. That was a bit of an error, but they’re still tweeting apparently. I’m curious to see whether Manchester Police take any further action to shut this account up. Most famously @BPGlobalPR remained operational throughout BP’s recent PR crisis.
I look forward to the social media/PR pundits tearing this campaign to pieces. It seems rather brave to enter the public domain with something like this and not expect a backlash.
In my view, this campaign basically says “See, we’re working hard. Don’t cut our budgets“. Does anyone doubt that the police work hard? I don’t. The campaign in no way highlights the actual impact of budget cuts – other than more PR will be done on Twitter, because it’s cheap.
After a brief exchange of tweets with @jsmag I discover this web development ‘podcast’ : webdevgeekly.com, which appears to be run by the same people as jsmag.com. About 9 minutes into the following podcast there is a 2 minute discussion about JASPA. Conveniently just 24 hours after I rescued my site from a hardware crash.
> http://www.webdevgeekly.com/r/www.webdevgeekly.com/mp3/geekly6.mp3
Not being a marketeer or PR guru I’ve been struggling to get JASPA‘s raison d’être across succinctly enough. The elevator pitch is easy; give me a 100 words and your attention and I’ll get the message across. Give me 10 words and I’m useless. Continue reading…
