Looking Back & Looking Forward: Brandwatch 2014 in Review

Well. What a year that was!

It’s safe to say that in 2014, we got stuff done. As we sit back at our desks after a couple of weeks of indulgence, recharging and eating 800 roast potatoes (no? Just me?) it’s now time to screw our heads back on.

I always love the beginning of a new year. It’s like when you’re younger and you get to pick out a new pencil case at the beginning of the school year.

Everything seems a little fresher, a bit more exciting. There are possibilities for new starts, new projects. But before plunging into January, it’s always good to have a little look back on what happened the previous year, before closing the door and getting started.

So what did we achieve last year? Loads. Alongside a successful round of VC funding, hosting New York and London Masterclasses, dressing up a lot, attending amazing events all over the world and eating many, many cakes, we’ve been very, very busy.

We acquired a really cool, exciting company

Yup. Probably the most splendid way to close the year was sealing the deal to acquire our friends at PeerIndex.

You can read what our CEO Giles wrote about it here – perhaps unsurprisingly this post shot up the ranks to be one of the most viewed articles posted here on the blog in the whole year.

The talented people over at PeerIndex have built an index of over 300m Twitter profiles – technology designed to track audiences, turning big data into human insights and helping clients identify the influencers and content that really matter to them.

We’re going to be working with them to integrate this technology into our own products. Very exciting.

We moved into new offices…

Both our UK and Berlin teams outgrew their offices and upgraded to larger, more growth-friendly spaces before the year was out. New York is next.

With 120 new faces joining the Brandwatch teams across the globe in 2014, we quickly needed to find new space for them all.

The UK office re-fit is underway at the moment, and no doubt we’ll all be instagramming and tweeting the new digs and giving you a sneak peek as soon as we’re in, using the #insidebrandwatch hashtag.

…and new cities

In January of last year, we opened our first office in San Francisco – taking our total city tally to five. We hired some top commercial talent from Apple-acquired Topsy to help build our presence in the area, and we’ve since added over a dozen new faces to join them.

Brandwatchers have moved from the UK, to NYC, to San Francisco, to Germany. With offices dotted all over (and more to come in 2015), we’ve been spreading the Brandwatch vibe across the world.

We launched new products

Our engineering and product teams nailed it last year, releasing a whole host of new features and products for you to get stuck into.

These included Demographics, a whole bunch of useful data and features that mean you can understand who’s talking about your brand in much more detail, and Minute-by-minute Charting, allowing you to understand the exact moments causing peaks in conversation, topic and sentiment changes, and surfacing new audiences to engage with.

We launched Hindsight in July, offering access to the full eight years of public Tweets since Twitter’s inception. You might remember the video? Cats and lasers? Give it a watch here.

Not only that, but we also relaunched Vizia with a slew of new UI and admin updates. Add to this our work on creating more sophisticated and secure methods of signing into the platform, a restructured pricing and product plan specifically for agencies and redeveloping our API, making it easier to release new features. We’ll publish a fill list of the product updates we did in 2014 tomorrow.

See, when I said we’d been busy, I wasn’t joking.

And a bucketload of great new content

We released a different insightful customer story every month, sharing the experience of brands such as IKEA, Moneygram and LateRooms. We even published our first customer video too, which shows how Monster use their Vizia set up.

Alongside case studies, we also published a number of sector reports, looking at Financial Services, Travel & Hospitality, Household & Personal Care, and Consumer Technology.

We didn’t stop there, though. We decided that there wasn’t enough info about Pinterest analytics tools around, so we wrote a guide on that, too.

Closing the year, we launched a new series – Social Listening In Practice – which looks in detail at different use cases for social listening. You can now download the already released Command Centers and Influencer Marketing guides, and we’ll be releasing a new one every month, because we like to give ourselves too much to do and we run most efficiently on fear.

I could go on and on and on, but I won’t, because you’re probably very busy. And my fingers hurt.

So what does 2015 hold for us? To play us out, here’s what CEO Giles Palmer said when I asked him.

“2014 was a crazy year for us – we opened up in San Francisco, added 120 staff and made our first acquisition.

At times it felt like we were riding a bucking dragon – pulling hard on the reins of a wild beast. At other times the whole company seemed to be in flow and inspiring stuff just happened. One of our values at Brandwatch is that we believe in goodness. We believe that people want to do good. We all want to feel like we are leading wholesome and productive lives.

At Brandwatch, we try to minimise decisions and activities that diminish this. We obey the golden rule. I hope that we can continue to keep sight of this and now and again sit up, take a deep breath and survey the magnificence of the scenery.

I hope 2015 is a good and happy year to all my fellow Brandwatchers and to you, kind reader.”

Happy new year. Let’s make 2015 even better.

Now you know™