Earlier this year, The Bivings Group went looking for a better internal management tool. Spreadsheets, email and a tired and clunky intranet weren’t working. Weekly staff meetings were basically recitals of what got done the prior week and what was on the plate for the coming week. We wanted a way to focus instead on bigger things, to talk about what was new, and how we could have more fun.

We found one. It’s called a wiki, and is the same piece of software that drives the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wiki is short for the Hawaiian “wiki-wiki” meaning “quick.” We downloaded the free software, installed it one of servers, and a small group got it up and running. You do have to learn a bit of wiki-ese, and get used to a few idiosyncrasies, but it’s a pretty powerful and easy-to-use way to add and edit content collectively.

We now use it to set priorities, keep track of every project, and even do some software bug tracking. Now everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and what the firm as a whole is up to.

Staff meeting are still too long, but not half as boring, at least most of the time. We even use it to manage our large client relationships and have promoted the use of wikis with partners.

Here is the first result if you query Microsoft’s new image search engine for “bill gates“:

Here is the first result if you search Google Images for “bill gates“:

Searches were done at 5:00 pm EST on Saturday, March 18.

The products behind Microsoft’s Origami project were unveiled just over a week ago today after one of the most exceptionally intense and successful viral marketing campaigns in recent memory. Blogs were buzzing like crazy over what the mysterious project might be about. Even the mainstream media picked up on the success of the grassroots initiative.

Who would’ve thought? Microsoft was for once getting (gasp) positive buzz! However, unfortunately for Microsoft the product that they unveiled, the Ultra Mobile PC or UMPC, was somewhat disappointing and the reaction generally tepid. They look like tablet PCs, but slightly smaller and with a touch screen. People have expressed muted disappointment with the hardware that was presented.

The funny thing is that Microsoft, unlike Apple, doesn’t make the hardware - others do. Microsoft’s only real contribution to the project was something they call a “Touch Pack”. This is essentially a driver for the UMPCs’ touch screens and other input devices. So Microsoft provides a driver, Intel provides a low-power chip, and several other PC manufacturers like Samsung, Asus and others try to build something useful around this. Sure, Microsoft stands to gain from sales of the platform’s operating system, but right now this is really just a Microsoft marketing project on behalf of these hardware vendors and Microsoft took the negative publicity hit for all of them.

On the project’s homepage, Microsoft is now using language to tout UMPCs that reminds me more of how beta open-source projects are presented than anything else. Surely UMPCs will be useful someday, but instead of capitalizing on the hype they successfully generated and presenting a cool new product that is ready to market, by unveiling a very raw product they’ve managed to turn that positive hype into another platform for criticism. And to make matters worse, they’ve given out valuable competitive intelligence. Note to Microsoft: only hype it if it’s ready to be hyped.

The National Cherry Blossom Festival in D.C. is fast approaching. I’ll spare you the history, but let you know that The Bivings Group, as a public service, built and hosts this site. Site traffic has soared over the past few years. It’s on target to reach some 1 million visitors and 7 million page visits this season.

What’s more interesting is the blogging going on around the Festival. Not surprising, but something that’s only been seen in the last year or so. There are now hundreds of bloggers talking about the festival – speculating when the blossoms will peak, announcing they’re going, looking for others to come along, and offering up travel ideas around the event. All this activity is driving traffic to the site.

With Flickr, YouTube, etc. expect to see lots of pictures of the festival online. Should all help to keep pushing site traffic up, and give the Capital a boost.

As a moody consumer and cynic, I’m beginning to find that there are way too many websites that claim to be “a one stop shop” or the “complete” or “ultimate” resource for their field. In many cases, these sites are so unappealing and loaded with so much content, that users like myself are forced to seek help from other sources or forget the whole matter entirely and continue watching television, wondering why we even bothered in the first place.

Recently, I discovered http://reallybig.com/, tag lined as “The Complete Resource for All Web Builders”.

When I hear the words “complete resource”, I am assuming that I am going to be provided with some substance - something that I can actually LEARN from.

Upon entering, I was immediately met by enormous banner ads forcing me to switch to T-Mobile and use Peapod.com for my grocery needs and get a Capital One card. I’m just looking for new coding developments or tricks!

But I am assured by the site’s welcome message, “If you’re building a Web site, you’ve come to the right place.”

Okay then…

I finally located what I assumed was the site’s navigation (in the middle of the page) and clicked on “HTML Tutorials”. Seemed like as good a place as any to start. Right away I was taken to another poorly designed page that again, assured me (in a green box at the top of the page this time) that I will be provided with everything I need to create a webpage.

Fifteen minutes of scouring more options than I would ever need and many that I didn’t understand, I am finally taken to a page that simply links me to an external site (that did not even open in a new browser window - HTML Coding 101?).

At best, I would describe this site as a large web-tree or links page but certainly not a “complete resource”.

I think there are two possibilities for why sites like this exist. 1.) It profits from and is designed to lure people into reading and clicking on a series of paid advertisements or 2.) The creators of this site actually believe that they are helping people and simply lack the presense of a good project manager - someone to challenge them to think critically about what they have to offer - real content or a series of links?

Sites should not pretend to be more than they are in hopes of luring lots of people to their pages, who ultimately, will never return.

There is a good article on Wired News about the different approaches being taken by Web 2.0 news sites like Digg and Tailrank to solve the information overload problem. With the explosion of blogs, its gotten harder to wade through the hay to find the needle. These sites attempt to find the most popular stories on the Internet at any given time, delivering readers a sort of cliff notes version of what’s hot on the web. Sites like Digg rely on a community of people to identify the hot stories while sites like Tailrank use technology to find the the most talked about nuggets. The article provides a good overview of this growing field.

For those who want to explore, here’s a list of the sites either mentioned in the article or that I’ve bookmarked. I’ve made quick notes by the ones I’d endorse.

• Annotated New York Times
• Blogniscient
• Chuquet
• Digg (Most popular voting based system)
  
• Google News
• Megite
• Memeorandum (Industry leader in the computer based aggregation field)
• Newsvine (Best designed and most accessible of the bunch)
• Reddit
• Tailrank (My favorite due to growing feature list, comparatively attractive design)
  
• Topix

Adrants has a breakdown of the Web Marketing Association’s (WMA) Internet Standards Assessment Report, which examines which industries have the most/least effective websites. The study found that gaming, music, sports and automotive sites are the best while public relations, directory/search engine and radio sites are the worst. You can download a copy of the report from the WMA website.

A close look at the report reveals that the definitions of the various industries covered are a bit fuzzy. As an example, the PR category doesn’t consist exclusively of PR firm websites (which was my initial assumption), but instead broadly of any website that has a PR focus. In addition, search engines are defined pretty liberally - Tower Records and www.cancer.com were included. It makes it difficult to make some sort of big statement about the report’s results.

However, web developers should explore the report for the listings of exceptional websites in each industry. You’ll find some gems. The winner for best search engine website in 2004 and 2005 was www.scirus.com, a scientific information search engine that allows visitors to save and export search results and guides users deftly towards more refined keyword combinations. Volkswagen was ranked the best automotive website in 2005 and its got everything you can imagine. The website had better be great if its going to help VW overcome those baffling television commercials they are currently running.

First saw this on Micro Persuasion.

I have been meaning to write a post on Stowe Boyd’s Conversation Index for awhile, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to it. Then late last week I read that a media monitoring firm had started using it as a metric to track the amount of conversation a blog entry generates, and now I feel compelled to comment. As background, here’s Stowe Boyd’s description of the Conversation Index that started it all:

“While working at Corante, I had the opportunity to peer at the stats for all sorts of blogs that we had going. And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index, just to put a handle on it.”

I think its fantastic if you want to use the Conversation Index as an internal metric of your own success at generating conversation on your blog. Watch how it changes over time. Compare the ratio of different posts to each other. Go for it.

However, the Conservation Index is not valuable as a universal measure for comparing blogs (and blog posts) to each other. Why? Generally speaking, because measuring the conversation generated by a blog post is a lot more complicated than that. Specifically, because there isn’t a univeral method for dealing with trackbacks and comments. You end up comparing apples to watermelons:

(1) Not all blogs accept comments. And some don’t take trackbacks. Technorati’s most popular blog, Boing Boing, doesn’t allow comments or trackbacks in the traditional sense. Other prominent blogs that don’t take comments include Instapundit (#16), the official Google blog (#11), Andrew Sullivan (#72) and Michelle Malkin (#12). And those are just from memory. How do you accurately show the conversation generated by these influential sites using the Conversation Index?

(2) Some blogs moderate comments and others require registration to comment. I know Micro Persuasion (#69) moderates. I’m sure other popular (and influential) blogs do as well. I’ve also abandoned the idea of leaving comments many times when I was asked to register (Personal Democracy and Doc Searls jump to mind). These tactics employed by bloggers to prevent spam/bad language/thread hijacking lead to less conversation. These kinds of sites will have artificially low ratings.

(3) Different categories of blogs attract different levels of participation. Some blogs ask open ended questions that invite a lot of discussion. Others don’t. Personal blogs often attract more comments than more professionally oriented sites, as Rohit Bhargova of Ogilvy has pointed out. In these cases, the level of conversation (particularly the number of comments) says more about the kind of blog it is than its influence.

There is more I could write. Are comments and trackbacks really of the same value (I place more value on trackbacks)? Aren’t links to an article more important than trackbacks (lots of bloggers don’t use trackbacks)? How do you account for comment and trackback spam? How do you deal with sites that have massive open threads that attract comments about what people had for breakfast?

There are too many holes for this to be used as a universal metric in blog monitoring. At its best, it provides an antecdotal measurement of the amount of conversation generated. At its worst, it could lead a client to a false conclusion about the true impact of a post or blog.

Utlimately, I think measuring the conversation generated by a blog is more complicated than adding a few numbers together. I think Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher got it right in a recent post:

“Finding the right metrics to measure a blog’s value as an influencer will never be as simple as measuring numbers of links, comments, trackbacks, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, etc. Because you have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And you can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline.”

Disclosure: The Bivings Group has its own media monitoring product, ImpactWatch. We don’t use the Conversation Index.

Since ImpactWatch is a product we develop, it must come as no surprise that many of us here at The Bivings Group are quite fixated with analyzing and predicting media trends. For those of you that think along the same lines, here’s an interesting website I came across today.

Alexadex allows anyone to participate in guessing which websites are likely to increase or decrease their “reach per million” in Alexa. It “rewards” people that anticipate these trends successfully by allowing people, using fake money, to buy and sell symbolic shares in these websites in a similar way to stock trading. The Alexa index going up would be similar to the price of a share going up. One Alexa “reach per million” point is akin to one fake dollar.

This kind of site basically begs the question “is there a pattern that can help predict website traffic increase or decrease?” The answer, at least on the surface, appears to be yes. There are many members of Alexadex that consistently predict large increases or decreases in website traffic. These people may be on to something. If we were to isolate the data offered by people that are successful in consistently anticipating these trends, we are essentially highlighting websites whose traffic is likely to increase or decrease.

Is this a potential boon for PR and marketing professionals, allowing them to focus their efforts on lesser-known sites that are likely to become much better known, or abandon efforts on other sites before they wither out?

Technorati Tags: Site Traffic Media Trends PR Journalism Web

I hate contemporary wall outlets, something that designers have overlooked forever. Adapters are too big, receptacles are too close to architectural elements and bulky plugs — can only use one of the two outlets. Waste no more. Check out the spinning outlets at 360 Electrical.

I think the Association of International Glaucoma Societies’ site is in the running. It makes just about every design mistake you can imagine - use of frames, background music, elements that spin, etc. And then takes the comedy factor to the next level by letting you switch the site’s background music to Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds”. Found on Web Pages That Suck, a site that documents bad web design.

When I first read about Wal-Mart’s blogger relations campaign in the NYT, I immediately assumed that the goal of the campaign was to improve Wal-Mart’s overall corporate image. Change the perception of Wal-Mart in the blogosphere and ultimately win the general public’s hearts and minds. That assumption led me to think the whole campaign just seemed off. Wal-Mart should have their own blog (or blogs), and perhaps launch an internal evangelist program. Engage in a conversation with their customers. A Wal-Mart version of Microsoft’s Channel 9. That would be an interesting program and I believe it is something worth pursuing.

But that’s not what Wal-Mart was up to. In terms of the online component, this is a public affairs campaign, not a PR effort. There’s a difference. The goal was to mobilize allies around issues Wal-Mart cares about, not to generally improve public perception.

• Visit the site they have built around this effort, Wal-Mart Facts. This site is issue oriented and not aimed at the general public. It is for journalists, policy makers, investors and, well, anyone really engaged in Wal-Mart and its issues.
• The blogger relations effort is being run out of Edelman’s DC office and is headed by conservative bloggers with political backgrounds. Its leader, Mike Krempasky, was the man behind RatherGate and is one of the folks behind RedState. These are political/public affairs pros, not PR folks.
• The blogger outreach focused on political bloggers. And if you read the correspondence between an Edelman executive and one of the bloggers, it is an ideological pitch that is being made. The language being spoken is one that people who have only done PR work may not be used to or comfortable with. This effort has more in common with a political campaign than an effort to pitch bloggers on products.

I’ve personally done more online public affairs work than PR work, and I judged the campaign based on the wrong criteria. I think others are making the same mistake - judging a public affairs campaign as if it were a PR effort. It may seem obvious, but I think its an important distinction to make.

Technorati Tags: Wal-Mart Edelman PR Krempasky Journalism

NBC has gotten all lawyered up against YouTube and similar sites that have posted video clips from shows the network airs. The basis for legal action is copyright infringement, which NBC began pursuing shortly after it released the Saturday Night Live digital short film Lazy Sunday (first as a free “gift” from the network on iTunes, but now costs $1.99). According to WOM expert Jackie Huba from The Church of the Customer blog , the digital short film was viewed over 5 million times on YouTube, before the network asked the popular video sharing site to remove it. Saturday Night Live’s recent airing of a Gangsta Rap featuring actress Natalie Portman immediately hit the the video sharing sites, but was forced off of YouTube by the C&D-ers at NBC. Furthermore, Huba notes that while the video is available on NBC’s site (I couldn’t find it on iTunes), it doesn’t play on Macs.

Obviously NBC believes that playing hard to get is the same as good marketing. With the variety of choices consumers now have with regard to entertainment, most of us realize that weaning ourselves from NBC content isn’t all that difficult. Jackie Huba points out that we can just film our own digital shorts. Ultimately, NBC didn’t have the vision to fully embrace the best free publicity SNL has gotten in years.

One of the bloggers Wal-Mart was wooing as part of their blogger outreach program has posted a PDF of his email correspendence with Wal-Mart’s public relations firm, Edelman. Its an interesting read and gives you an unfiltered picture of what Wal-Mart was up to.

The Hotline has a story about using the telephone to replace town hall meeting and focus groups. The system rings up voters, and asks if they’d like to participate in the politician’s “Tele-Town” hall. The politician talks, listeners ask questions, and the politician can even poll the listeners on whatever issue he or she may want. So far only being used by Republicans.