Brandwatch Hires for New San Francisco Office

Brighton, UK-based social media monitoring and analytics provider Brandwatch is setting up an office in central San Francisco, where it has appointed former Topsy execs Even Walser as VP, Enterprise Sales and Aaron Hayes-Roth as VP, Strategic Alliances.

Brandwatch, which was launched in 2007, also has US offices in New York and Chicago, as well as in Berlin and Stuttgart, Germany. The firm crawls the Internet, archiving social media data from more than 70 million sources in 27 languages, and provides clients with the tools to analyze the resulting data.

San Francisco-based social media analysis and tracking firm Topsy was acquired in December by Apple, in a $200m deal. Walser worked for Topsy for a year, prior to which he was VP of Business Development at marketing automation firm Genius.com; while Hayes-Roth also worked for Topsy for a year, and previously, served as a Principal at social media monitoring specialist Meltwater Group.

Giles Palmer, Brandwatch CEO, says the firm is planning to 'aggressively hire' on the West Coast in a move to secure its presence in what he describes as the most important place for social media data, joining companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter in Silicon Valley.

Commenting on the expansion and appointments, Palmer added: 'Apple has presented us with a huge opportunity here, and we're certainly going to make the most of it. Ensuring we're close to the epicenter of the social media ecosystem will help us to provide our clients with the most relevant, accurate data available.'

Web site: www.brandwatch.com .