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Each year around the holidays, staffers from TBG head to Washington DC’s Bread for the City, an amazing organization providing food, medical care, clothing, social services and legal services to the city’s residents.

To all of our readers, clients, colleagues and friends, we wish you the best this holiday season and a happy 2010.

In our newspaper study, released earlier today, we developed a formula we call the Twitter Interactivity Quotient (or Twitter IQ for short) as a way of measuring how newspapers were using their accounts.   If tweeting, which consists of original tweets, responses to tweets, and retweeting others’ tweets, is viewed as a conversation, then the tweeting is effectively “talking”, while responses and retweets are evidence of “listening”. And, while not every conversation is equally balanced for a variety of good reasons, it seems reasonable to propose that the best conversationalists are those who cultivate balance over time.

Working off that premise, we combined the percentage of replies and retweets (listening) and subtracted it from 50 percent (a perfect balance). We then subtracted that number from 100% and translated it into a real number between .5 and 1.5, establishing “1” as the ideal balance. Accounts registering a .5 only tweet, accounts registering a 1.5 only reply and retweet, but they are equally out of balance in different directions. The Twitter IQ is the difference between an account’s “balance” and “1”. As such, in an ironic flourish, the lower one’s Twitter IQ, the better. The combined Twitter IQ employed in ranking the newspapers’ is simply the sum of the three applicable accounts. Below is a list of the newspapers who had the best aggregate Twitter IQ scores, meaning the three accounts we examined had the best overall balance between listening and talking. Please note that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, as we didn’t look at every single Twitter account for each newspaper.

Newspaper	Circulation	Twitter IQ
1. The Sun	210,098	0.0921
2. Austin American-Statesman	152,691	0.2834
3. St. Paul Pioneer Press	192,342	0.4807
4. The Florida Times-Union	122,655	0.4909
5. The Detroit News	169,748	0.5213
6. Chicago Tribune	501,202	0.5997
7. Democrat and Chronicle	135,776	0.6075
8, The Buffalo News	173,925	0.6159
9. Orlando Sentinel	206,205	0.6617
10. The Commercial Appeal	192,631	0.6620

Here is the list of the specific accounts we looked at that have the best Twitter IQ scores.

Twitter IQ Rank	Twitter Accounts	Twitter URL	Followers	Twitter IQ
1	Alesha Williams Boyd	http://twitter.com/AleshaBoydAPP	145	0.00000
2	Omar Gallaga, Digital Savant	http://twitter.com/omarg	3,652	0.00060
3	Sophia Ahmad	http://twitter.com/SophiaAhmad	2,243	0.00720
4	Julio Ojeda-Zapata	http://twitter.com/Jojeda	7,689	0.01300
5	Bethany Clough, Business Blog	http://twitter.com/BethanyClough	320	0.01380
6	Walt Mossberg	http://twitter.com/waltmossberg	24,773	0.01700
7	Michelle Deal-Zimmerman	http://twitter.com/suntravelblog	1,349	0.01730
8	Gus Sentementes	http://twitter.com/gussent	1,601	0.02360
9	MichMoms	http://twitter.com/MichMoms	1,004	0.03020
10	Los Angeles Times	http://twitter.com/latimes	38,845	0.03500

See our full rankings of the newspapers in aggregate, and the individual accounts themselves, at the link below.

• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

Update: We decided to remove the list of the lowest ranking accounts, since it wasn’t our intention to bring negative attention to those with low scores.

Twitter was seemingly everywhere in 2009, with sports stars, celebrities, politicians and journalists using the micro blogging platform to promote everything from themselves to their employers to the issues they advocate for.    After several years of assessing the general online presence of the top 100 U.S. newspapers, this year we decided to produce a study specifically about how newspapers and journalists are utilizing Twitter as a way of promoting their content and interacting with readers. Frankly, this was a daunting task.  There are thousands of newspaper-related Twitter profiles, from official accounts of the paper overall to more personal profiles maintained by individual journalists.  Given the pure volume of accounts, we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter.  Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often, and in what manner, the accounts are updated, and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion.  Following are some key findings and a link to the full study. Top Line Stats

• We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.
• 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.
• Of the 300 Twitter profiles we looked at in depth, the average account had 17,717 followers and followed back 1,470 other users. However, if you remove the four accounts we looked at that had over 100,000 followers, the average number of followers drops to a much more modest 3,447 users.
• The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe's Big Picture, The Denver Post's Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald).
• 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The next most popular method with 28% was Twitterfeed, which is a service that automatically posts updates to Twitter accounts via RSS feeds. The remaining 21% of accounts were updated via a variety of other Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. This indicates that the vast majority of Twitter accounts (around 70%) are updated by staff members as opposed to a simply being an automated feed.

Replies and Retweets While these core statistics are interesting, we wanted to take things further and see how exactly the Twitter accounts were being used. Were the accounts simply linkbots highlighting newspaper content, or were they being used to by the paper to hold a conversation with its readers? Were newspapers simply talking, or were they listening, too? Some key findings on this front:

• Many of the accounts we looked at rarely if ever interacted with other users by replying to tweets. Indeed, 33% of the accounts we looked at replied to users in less than 1% of their tweets. 15% of the accounts we looked at had never replied to another users tweets. This suggests that these papers are rarely reading or reacting to the updates of people they follow.
• On the positive side, 37% of newspaper accounts we looked at replied to users in more than 10% of their tweets. 5% of accounts replied to other Twitter users in over 50% of their tweets.
• Similarly, many of the accounts we looked at rarely retweeted other users. 43% of the accounts we looked at retweeted others in less than 1% of their tweets. 23% of the accounts we looked at never retweeted another user during the time period we considered.
• 16% of the Twitter accounts we looked at retweeted other users in more than 10% of their tweets.

Please also check out this post, which goes into detail about Twitter IQ, our ranking of the level of interactivity of the Twitter accounts. The Full Study The full study is available for download here and is also embedded below for your convenience.  You can also view the back up data for the study at the URLs below:

• Raw data
• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

We would love for readers to use the data as a jumping off point for additional analysis, and just ask that you reference The Bivings Group in whatever you produce. The Use of Twitter by America's Newspapers

The Bivings Group is proud to announce, after much difficult deliberation, that Critical Exposure has won the TBGives $10,000 web consulting prize.

Critical Exposure uses the art of photography to teach DC youth imperative lessons about art and community leadership. The organization empowers students through documentary photography and encourages them to become advocates for change in their communities.

Congratulations to Critical Exposure, and thank you to all of our other fantastic applicant organizations.

Two panels here at The Bivings Group have pored over more than 50 submissions from fantastic non-profit organizations all over the Washington, D.C. area and narrowed our search down to six finalists.

Due to the heavy competition between all of the applicants and the excellent qualifications of our six finalists, we’ll need one more day of deliberations.

The final winner of the TBGives $10,000 web consulting prize will be notified and announced by close of business on Wednesday. Please check back!

 

Yesterday on Twitter I started seeing links pop up to what looked to be a URL shortening service run by the Republican National Committee – www.gop.am.  The site has “gop” in the URL and has branding consistent with the main RNC site – www.gop.com.  So it seemed reasonable to assume it was put out by the RNC. 

But if you look closely, it seems more likely that it is an independent effort meant to look like something put out by the RNC. As you’ll see from the screenshot below, the site doesn’t include an RNC copyright or the financial disclosure information (“Paid for by the Republican National Committee…”) that you’ll find on any official political website. 

Instead, the site is attributed to a firm called Political Media, which doesn’t list the RNC on its client list.  I also couldn’t find any mention of the service on the RNC Twitter account or website.  So I think it is safe to assume that this is an unofficial effort. 

As a side note, I do think it is a pretty good idea to launch branded URL shortening services.  It is easy to do, and with the ubiquity of Twitter I think it is a pretty good way to subconsciously brand your content.  However, the implementation on GOP.am is heavy handed.  Here is a sample link to give you an idea what it looks like, with a screenshot below. 

I see two fairly major problems from a usability standpoint:

1. There is no easy way to close the frame that is around the content.  So once someone clicks on a gop.am URL, they are pretty much stuck with the frame until they go in the URL bar and manually type in another URL. 
2. Many URL shorteners don’t put framing around the content at all, and the ones that do use subtle colors that don’t clash with the end website and make sure not to take up much space.  The red here is simply overpowering.  Worse, on gop.am we’ve got significant framing on both the top and bottom of the page.  It is just way too much.

So in summary, I would never use www.gop.am out of respect to the people I share links with.  It has too many usability problems.

What do you think?  And please let me know if I’m wrong about the ownership of the service.

Update: And five minutes after I completed this post, GOP.am was taken down with a note saying it will be back soon.  I bet the RNC got in touch.

Update 2: Looks like I was wrong.  It is back up. 

Update 3: Via Ali Akbar on Twitter, the new version of www.gop.am includes slightly different branding.  The logo has been changed to look less like the official RNC logo.  I’ll be the RNC gave them a call requesting this change as a condition for allowing the site to stay up.

Old Logo

Redone Logo

Update 4: The site is officially not run by the RNC.  It now contains this disclaimer: “GOP.am is a property of Political Media, Inc. The Republican National Committee is not responsible for any content generated by GOP.am.”

Update 5: Wired has a story on the tool, which says the site was taken down for a few hours today as a result of GOP opponents overriding the site with porn links.

During  the UN Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen this week, Google unveiled an advanced Google Earth prototype that allows  satellite imagery to show and measure the progression of deforestation in regions around the world.  Google teamed up with software experts Greg Asner, from Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza, from  Imazon (both institutions with forest data programs used in Latin America)  and created a “cloud-based computing” technology  that gathers all satellite imagery data for a region and displays them in a user-friendly format.

Google offers before and after stills of the technology on their blog:

This technology will enable organizations and researchers monitoring deforestation to gather data in a matter of seconds, as opposed to the days of weeks it would originally take.

As stated on the Google blog:

“On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.”

Google hopes to release this technology to the public during the coming year.

If you’d like to learn more about how current Google Earth technologies can promote environmental awareness, please take a look at the video Bivings produced for Wild Australia.  Using Google Earth video and b-roll footage, we created a short video showcasing the ecology of the Southwest Marine region of Australia.