Buzz Radar Creates Social Command Centers for Brands [Tech Profile]

Patrick Charlton is the director and co-founder of Buzz Radar.

Tell us a little about yourself. Describe your job, how long you’ve been doing it, and how you got into this field.

My ambition growing up was to be a professional car driver, and I raced seriously from the age of 14-20. I left Lotus' Sports Car Programme in 2000 after a few too many crashes and went to university. There, I developed a passion for radio, producing radio shows and managing the university station. Eventually landing a role at the BBC, I worked in radio production for some of the most established shows at the organization.

During this time, I saw the emerging power of new mediums like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter in our programming, especially around music. So, I got into social marketing, becoming a digital specialist. During the past 9 years, I've been lucky enough to lead groundbreaking projects on multiple award-winning global social engagement campaigns.

Working at the cutting edge of all social, I began to see a hole in data management and understanding. I realized technology could solve this and used my entrepreneurial background to pull together a group of talented individuals to solve this.

What is Buzz Radar?

Buzz Radar captures and visualises real-time data, making it collaborative, easy to understand, and shareable for everyone. We’ve seen what happens when data is tied to one department. Data becomes siloed, and great insights can be lost with every moment it sits inside a report, waiting to be read. We want to get the right info to the right people quicker and in more engaging, fun, and painless methods. When this happens, more people are empowered to make changes. So, we are helping create a new way of working — one where data is simplified to the most interesting and relevant portions, happens in real time, and is easily shared so anyone can collaborate to form actionable insights.

Buzz Radar was born out of the realisation data can be useful, collaborative, beautiful and easy to understand. There are great stories in data — if you know how to read them. We pump live data through our screens and broadcast it beyond just the analysts and social teams. This surfaces actionable and useful information — at all levels and for everyone. This takes brands and companies to a whole new level.

How can the marketing industry use your Buzz Radar to create better results for its agency or clients?

We process visual information 60,000 times faster than it takes our brain to decode text. Because of this, we strongly believe data visualisation is the next generation of listening and reporting, replacing static reports with insights that are great to look at, engaging, real-time, and most importantly, useful. Rather than analysts constantly creating reports, insights are animated live so the whole organization can see and understand them collaboratively. It’s a new way of working and interacting with data and then adjusting your approaches and campaigns based off the information.

Buzz Radar has fully integrated the worlds of advertising and technology to show vital information through interactive touchscreen displays, Leap Motion, and beautiful digital and projected billboards. We understand that the world of marketing is evolving into a marketing-in-the-moment format, and our platform enables brand managers and agencies to monitor and participate in real time. They to keep up with their brand reputation at the speed of culture.

What changes in your industry made you realize BuzzRadar would fill a void?

Our philosophy is that data should be engaging and easy to understand. Reports are often outdated the moment they are created, and it's hard for teams to have all the same information to act on. So, we wanted to create a platform that anyone can use showcasing the data that is most important to brands when they need it.

In addition to our big event partnerships, like the Consumer Electronics Symposium and SXSW, many prominent brands use our analytics tools to display our platform in common areas in their headquarters to encourage a culture of listening and understanding. They've been very pleased to rely on Buzz Radar to give them an up-to-the second display of vital social data. We’ve proven the concept with some of the biggest brands in the world now using Buzz Radar Social Command Center and Insight Platform.

Describe 1-3 core features of the platform.

Our platform allows you to create a Social Command Centre for your brand or live event visualisations. We have more than nine animated real-time visualisation options and provide deep-dive analytics that can be accessed on any device. This includes Facebook monitoring, share of voice, most talked about, heat maps, key stats and analytics, conversation spikes, most influential, user-generated photos and videos, and animated word clouds. You can dive deep into what is happening online with our analytics dashboard. See who is sharing what, what posts are resonating most, and what topics are most important. All the data in your hands gives you more control. Finally, we incorporate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, Google Analytics, and Vine to give you the most comprehensive overall picture.

How do you see your industry evolving in the next few years?

We believe data will continue to become easier to understand and act on. We also believe real-time marketing and messaging will become more central to how brands, agencies, and events operate. Marketing isn't going to be as siloed, with everyone from those creating products to those providing services needing to understand and act on feedback quicker. We also want to help all companies customize data and get the data they deem most important when they want it.