Bottlenose Updates Its Trend-Finding Tools With Automation, Emotion Detection, And An API

Bottlenose co-founder and CEO Nova Spivack told me that with the latest version of its Nerve Center (Bottlenose’s trend detection product for large enterprises), the company is “giving brands and marketers a virtual analyst in the cloud.”

Data, particularly real-time data, has become a buzzword in the marketing industry (heck, I got roped into moderating a panel on that topic a few weeks ago), but Spivack said that many brand marketing teams don’t have anyone focused on data science and trend analysis.

“You sort of say, ‘Whose job is it?’ and nobody will raise their hand,” he said. “Everybody just reads the news.”

Bottlenose is trying to fill that gap. To a certain extent, that’s the whole idea behind the Nerve Center, which helps brands spot emerging trends — initially on social media, and now on radio and TV, too. (Other companies offering trend detection tools include Dataminr, which announced a product called Dataminr For News, created in partnership with Twitter and CNN, earlier this year.)

However, in Nerve Center 2.0, Spivack said the system for automatically detecting trends has become much more sophisticated — it’s not just looking at sentiment and volume (for example, finding topics that are drawing a lot of angry tweets), but 150 different metrics.

In addition, Bottlenose now creates a newsfeed for users to catch up on trends and allows them to set up alerts to get notified about trends as they happen. That’s the flip-side of Spivack’s earlier argument about relatively few brands putting someone in charge of data science for the marketing team — he also said that even when the team has analysts, they feel compelled to sit at their computers at all time, in case something important happens while they’re away.

“We’re allowing them to get up and go to the bathroom, because if anything important happens, [the Nerve Center] is going to alert them,” he said. (If nothing else, that’s a pretty, uh, vivid example.)

Other new features include emotion detection, which Spivack characterized as distinct from the kind of sentiment analysis that Bottlenose and other companies already do. In this case, it’s not just telling you whether the general sentiment is positive or negative, but getting more specific about the emotions, like pride or optimism.

Spivack noted that Bottlenose StreamSense platform is now processing 3 billion messages each hour. Customers and other application developers can start tapping into that data on their own, as the company launches new APIs. Bottlenose refers to its API as “META”, which stands for the types of data available — Metrics, Entities, Trends, and Actions. Spivack said the APIs can be used to improve ad targeting tools, customer databases, their own enterprise dashboards, and more.

Nerve Center 2.0 is rolling out to customers starting today, the company said, and should be live for everyone by Monday. (Customers announced in the past include Pepsi and Razorfish.)