Around a year ago, I registered the username “bivings” on the micro-blogging platform Twitter on behalf of our firm, The Bivings Group. Our original intent in creating the account was to squat the username and protect our brand. We didn’t really intend to do anything with it.

This week, we decided to start actively using our account for a couple of reasons:

1. More and more, we’ve been counseling our clients to experiment with Twitter. It feels strange to give this advice when we aren’t using our own account effectively. “Doctor, heal thyself” as the saying goes.
2. Twitter doesn’t cost anything to use and the time investment required for us to update our account isn’t that great. So why not?
3. In the last few months, we’ve come across some great examples of companies using Twitter to further their brand. We were inspired by these success stories. Look for a blog post showing some examples later today.
4. Twitter isn’t mainstream yet, but it is on the cusp. It seemed like we should get in while the getting is good.
5. Lots of us here are already using Twitter and we like it. We thought thought it would be fun to launch a Bivings account we update collectively.

In terms of content, here is what you can expect from our Twitter account.

1. We’ll be automatically publishing all our blog posts to the account using Twitterfeed. If this is all we did on Twitter, it would be worthwhile. As I’ve started using Twitter more heavily the last few months, the time I spend reading RSS feeds has dropped dramatically. I discover stuff to read on Twitter instead. I think others are doing the same. Twitter is becoming an important distribution channel for content.
2. We’ll post links to sites we launch and updates on things we are working on.
3. We’ll post short, quick thoughts that we don’t want to try to stretch out into full blog posts.
4. We’ll enter into discussions with people we follow on Twitter.

Anyway, you can access our account here. Please follow us! We’ll do our best to be interesting.

And if you have any suggestions as to people we should be following, leave them in the comments.

I gave a presentation earlier today at the New Communications Forum conference in Santa Rosa, CA on how well traditional media (newspapers and magazines) are adapting their Internet programs based on the challenges presented by the web and social media.

During my talk, I reviewed the results of our newspaper and magazine studies that examined the Web 2.0 features these media properties include on their websites.  I also reviewed examples of some of the cooler things media organizations are doing on the web. 

When giving these presentations, you try to force yourself to reach some sort of coherent conclusion.  In the case of my presentation, I have to try to answer this question: “What will newspaper and magazine websites look like in five  years?”  The truth is that I don’t know and I don’t really think anyone does. 

Our studies tell the story of an industry in transition.   

Some bigger properties, like the Washington Post and New York Times, have the budgets and commitment from management to experiment.  They launch new web programs and cut the ones that don’t work and keep the ones that do.  Some smaller papers, presumably unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy, are also experimenting and doing great things.   Other publications are suffering from institutional inertia and not doing much of anything.  Web-based companies like Digg and Techmeme are breaking their own ground.

What newspapers websites look like in five years will be the story of these various experiments.

For those of you that are gluttons for punishment, my presentation is embedded below.  As you’ll see, in the future I should probably take help from our design team.  Notes regarding some of the slides are embedded beneath the slide deck.

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At the Politics Online conference yesterday, I participated in a panel entitled “Does Good Design Matter” (previous post here). In my opening discussion, I talked briefly about some common mistakes I see people make when building their websites. Here is a quick summary of what I said.

First, I think website design really consists of two things:

1. What the site looks like (the brand)
2. How well the site works (usability)

The instinct of most folks when building a website is to invest a great deal of energy into the overall look and very little into how usable the site is. In my opinion, this gets things backwards. I’m not advocating that people build ugly sites or not pay attentions to looks. Not at all. But, it is important to remember that, on the web, usability has just as much to do with your site’s brand as the overall look does.

Think about it. When you visit a site for the first time you definitely have an immediate reaction that is based entirely on how the site looks. The colors. The fonts. The pictures. Etc. Your brain processes this information quickly and then you go about the business of actually using the site. If the site doesn’t deliver in a usability sense (things are hard to find, forms don’t work, error messages aren’t in place, etc.), all the good will built up by that good first impression will be thrown out the window and the user will be left with a bad impression of your organization.

So my first piece of advice to folks building websites is to invest as much energy in usability as you do in agonizing over colors and font choices.

Second, always remember that content is the driving force behind any website. Design is there to serve the content. A blog that isn’t updated is going to fail no matter how pretty it is. The slickest tool for writing letters to the editor isn’t going to get used if you don’t provide a compelling reason for people to act.

Too many people think design is a panacea that can cover up content problems. “If we make our site really cool with lots of Flash animation and stuff, maybe people won’t notice that we only have two pages of content.” It doesn’t work. People know.

We actually struggled with this ourselves in developing our site, www.bivings.com. We got stuck trying to build something really design heavy and slick a few years back, because we weren’t focused enough on the conent. Below is what I wrote about our own struggles a few years back:

We’ve been contemplating a redesign of the main Bivings site for a couple of years, but the path forward only became clear the last few months. When thinking about a redesign previously we fell victim to our own ambition. We had grand plans and wanted to create something that was perfect. This sort of led to paralysis. We didn’t follow our own advice, which is to focus on usability and design that serves the content.

We finally started making progress when we shifted the focus to our blog. We decided to keep www.bivings.com really simple and not to overwhelm folks with lots of brochure content they don’t want to read anyway. We brought our blog content front and center. Our goal with the new site is to tell the story of our company a little bit every day by writing about the projects we are working on and the things we are passionate about. We think this will be much more effective than producing some sort of slick, heartless brochure site.

So my second piece of advice would be to figure out your content strategy in advance of even contemplating a redesign.

Without compelling content, your website is not going to work that well no matter how slick the design.

We have an opening for a programmer here at The Bivings Group.  Job description is below.  You can apply on Craigslist or by emailing jobsint@bivings.com.

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The Bivings Group was featured on an NPR segment that discussed Presidential candidates use of the Internet this cycle. Following is the teaser for the piece:

Through ring tones, viral videos and social networking sites, presidential candidates are relying more on the Internet than any of their predecessors. We explore the highlights and examine whether cyber-connectivity translates into votes.

In the interview, I talk about Barack Obama’s web program and Ron Paul’s fundraising ticker.

You can listen to the interview here.

The Bivings Group has an opening for a design/production associate. We’re looking for someone willing to come aboard for three months to help us fill some gaps, and then potentially full time after that period assuming both sides are happy with the way things are going. A complete job description is below.

Please email prodjob@bivings.com if you are interested in applying.

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Last night we launched a new marketing site for our media monitoring product, ImpactWatch™. The site features a slick new design and streamlined new copy. We also added the following new features to the site:

(1) Users can sign up for an online demo of ImpactWatch.

(2) The site now features a quick tour of the product. We are going to be adding video demonstrations to the site as well in the coming weeks.

(3) Most importantly, we’ve launched an ImpactWatch-focused blog. Check out the posts “Welcome to the ImpactWatch Blog” and “Tracking Twitter” to get a taste of what we’ll be talking about over there. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Anyway, check out the new site and let us know what you think in the comments.

The Bivings Group recently won an Award of Merit from the Society for New Communications Research for our company blog, The Bivings Report. Here is the write up on our blog that was published in the New Communications Review:

The Challenge
The Bivings Group lacked a medium for showcasing the company’s projects, publishing research and reports, and discussing issues in new media, technology and politics that are relevant to the company’s projects and clients. To resolve this problem and to provide the company with a flexible platform, The Bivings Group developed a corporate blog called The Bivings Report.

The Ingenious Proposal
The Bivings Group decided to create a blog that would serve as a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. They tailored their blogging efforts to several key audiences: members of the traditional media industries (newspaper and magazine publishers), representatives from politics interested in online developments, potential clients, and individuals interested in emerging Web 2.0 technology. The goals of The Bivings Group’s corporate blog were to find new business opportunities, garner attention for media research, showcase the company’s abilities and quality work in new technology, and solicit feedback and commentary from audience members.

The Call
The Bivings Group implemented a corporate blog as an extension of its main website called The Bivings Report. Tapping in-house design, programming, and communications professionals, The Bivings Group built the blog in WordPress, an open-source system, and customized the blog with various types of new technology to serve the company’s needs. Specifically, they used video, podcasts, sharing tools, and wikis on their corporate blog to demonstrate the company’s capabilities in Web 2.0. Finally, The Bivings Group used its corporate blog to develop a library of research materials and written reports relevant to new media and politics. By publishing these materials on a blog, they are easily accessible and available to the public.

The Success Story
The Bivings Report has been an extremely productive tool for The Bivings Group. Publishing articles consistently on a near daily basis, The Bivings Report has grown to become one of the top “public affairs” blogs in the USA. They have also received several new business opportunities and numerous press inquiries through the blog. Most recently, The Bivings Report was recognized by the Web Marketing Association for the high quality of technology and content employed on the blog and received a Blog Standard of Excellence award. The Bivings Report has given the Bivings Group an opportunity to expand upon and develop its corporate identity online through discussion, written expression, and graphic design.

Click here to check out the other winners.

Through my work on ImpactWatch, I spend a lot of time analyzing data. I’m also a pretty big sports fan. Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that the Mitchell Report on steroids and baseball was released yesterday. Given that, I thought it would be interesting to use ToCloud.com to create a tag cloud showing the words mentioned most often in the report. Here is a quick screen capture of the cloud showing which keywords were mentioned most often.

Here are links to the full tag clouds I created that look at the 300 top keywords:

• Tag cloud ordered by most mentions
• Tag Cloud in alphabetical order

Upon looking at this initially, the thing that jumped out is that the Players Association and the Commissioner’s Office are mentioned in the report roughly the same number of times. I think this demonstrates how careful Mitchell one in not trying to place too much blame on either party.

Anything jump out at you?

The Fred Thompson campaign, for whom we are one of the web vendors, recently launched a new consumer generated video program called Be a Star. The program encourages users to submit their own Fred videos to the campaign. Site visitors can then go to a page on the site to view all the videos that were submitted and vote on the ones they like best, much like Digg. Anyway, check it out.

Disclosure: we did work on this project.

Yesterday The Bivings Group launched our latest client site Living Conversations, a community-based website for breast cancer survivors. The site encourages survivors to submit their stories via video and the written word as a way of providing strength and support to anyone coping with the disease. We’re happy of the way the site turned out, and to be associated with such a cool organization.

Working on the site also gave us the chance to try out a few things we hadn’t attempted before. Given that, I figured I’d give a little look under the hood and explain how the site was constructed.

The site is built using using the open source Content Management System Drupal. As mentioned previously, we pretty much build all our website these days in Drupal or Wordpress. We chose to use Drupal for this site due to the community features that were required and the varied content types on the site. We also wanted to leave the Living Conversations folks with the ability to quickly expand the functionality on the site should they choose to.

Working from Drupal, we added a great deal of additional functionality to the site through a combination of custom coding and the use of Drupal modules and plugins. Here is the breakdown of the ones we used:

(1) Video Uploading. A central aim of Living Conversations is to get breast cancer survivors to tell their stories via video. This required us to develop a way for users to upload videos to the site and then to display dynamically in various spots on Living Conversations. We did this using a combo of the Video module and a plugin that allows for the uploading of videos to a Blip.tv account. So basically users can upload a video on Living Conversations and it will FTP directly into their Blip account and show up on the site. Cool stuff.

Note that the Video module in Drupal is very easy to use. If you want to use the Blip.tv upload plugin, you are going to need to have some developers around as it is a bit tricky.

(2) Content Rating. The site allows registered users to rate content using a five point start system. This was implemented using Voting API as the backend and Voting to control the methodology used for the rating on the frontend. They work together.

(3) User Profiles. Out of the box, Drupal has a powerful Profile module built in. This allows registered users to create profiles on the site. Administrators to add just about any fields they want to capture to this profile field. We supplemented this with Buddy List, which allows users to add other users as contacts and track their activities on the site.

Those are the big ones. We also used Flag Content and Syndication to add some minor functionality to the site.

Anyway, check out www.livingconversations.com if you get a chance. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Back on Oct. 3rd through the 5th Alex and I attended the Institue for Public Relations’ 5th annual Summit on Measurement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Overall the event was fantastic. I spend all day working on ImpactWatch, the media measurement platform created by The Bivings Group, so it was great to meet with a group of 100+ media measurement, media research, and social network gurus.

The session I was most interested in attending was “How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media.” This was a panel discussion including Shel Israel , Kami Huyse , Todd Parsons, Donald McLagan from Compete Inc, and moderated by KD Paine . Unfortunately I set my expectations too high. Not that the session was bad, it just wasn’t what I expected. I think Shel summed it up best when he said that we haven’t been doing this long enough to have best practices “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.” As such, it seemed like the discussion took a turn towards the merits of doing social media measurement at all. Todd and Donald (and I) think there is absolutely value in it, that’s why we provide products and services doing exactly that. Some thought that it was a waste of time. It was also suggested that the whole point of social media is the conversations it creates which are hard to measure at all. I agree that it’s ideal to have blogs and social networks facilitate conversations and generate engagement, and it is something that is hard to measure. I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. This was confirmed when the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had a personal or corporate blog. Almost everybody raised their hands. When asked if they comment on other blogs, the hands dropped to about a third of the audience.

Most readers are still going to blogs to learn more about subjects they are interested in. They aren’t necessarily interested in joining the conversation. Therefore, many traditional web metrics still apply.

In conclusion, it was certainly valuable to learn that blog measurement is something everybody is still trying to get a handle on right now. In fact, the direction we’re headed with ImpactWatch looks pretty advanced compared to what other folks are doing.

Today we launched a new public demo of our media management platform, ImpactWatch™. To quote our marketing materials, ImpactWatch “is a web-based media management platform used by public relations and corporate communications professionals to continuously observe, track, gather and analyze high-volume media coverage of any brand, product, issue, event, or industry.”

Put more simply, we track mentions of your company/product/issue in newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. and provide you with tools that help identify trends in coverage.

Our new demo looks at coverage of the real estate market.

If you want to give ImpactWatch a quick test drive, sign up now.

At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in Wordpress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use Wordpress and Drupal.

Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds. As a web development shop, using Drupal and/or Wordpress allows us to focus our energies on design and strategy as opposed to reinventing the content management wheel.

After implementing a variety sites using both Wordpress and Drupal over the years, we’ve sort of developed our own unwritten rules as to when to use each platform.

Single Person / Group Blog (Use Wordpress)

If you are building a straight on single person or group blog, I think Wordpress is the way to go. It has all the base functionality you need built in and a robust set of plug-ins if you need to add on. The admin interface is dead simple - anyone with basic computer knowledge can master it in a few minutes. The install of the software is also simple and the templating system is not difficult to master.

Anything you want to do in Wordpress, you can also do in Drupal. But Drupal is more complicated from a design/install perspective, and has tons of features you’d end up turning off/not using for something simple like this.

A good example of a blog like built using Wordpress is our modest blog, The Bivings Report.

Blog Community (Use Drupal)

At a certain point your simple blog sort of crosses a line and becomes a blog community. Here are the things I look for:

• In some cases you are going to want people to navigate directly to an authors blog instead of the main page of the overall blog.
• Your blog has 10+ authors.
• There is the possibility that your commenters may themselves become contributors.

You can accomplish these goals by extending Wordpress. You can also use Wordpress Mu, which a community-version of Wordpress that we don’t think is quite ready for prime time. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available right away upon setup with little tinkering required.

A good example of a blog community is TechPresident, which we had nothing to do with building.

Blog Driven Website (Use Wordpress)

With its pages section and various plugins, Wordpress can be used as a full on Content Management System for blog-based websites. Lots of companies (including us) long ago abandoned the old fashioned press release and use blogs as their primary content delivery mechanism. Assuming your overall templating system on the site is pretty straight forward and you don’t have hundreds of pages, Wordpress works perfectly well for these types of sites.

Once again, Drupal can accomplish the same thing but it is a little more complicated to deal with and the admin interface is a little more complicated. It is sort of like driving a Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic - you will get from point A to point B but you’d ultimately be better off weaving through traffic on a motorcycle.

The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is a good example of a Wordpress-based site that we built. In addition to having all the content editable through Wordpress, we also built a few databases as custom plug-ins.

Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)

At certain points, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using Wordpress. If you find yourself bumping against any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:

• If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with Wordpress you are hacking things together.
• If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
• If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal’s block system is great at this kind of stuff.
• If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.

We built a site for Monsanto Spain that uses Drupal as a full on Content Management System. This is a good example of this kind of website.

As a follow up to our most recent newspaper study and last year's examination of magazines, our team has finished some research evaluating America's top 50 commercial magazines (according to circulation) based on the presence or lack of certain web features.  The purpose of this research was to determine how American magazines are using the Web, and how the online programs of magazines have changed over the past year.

Here are some key findings from the report:

• More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006.   Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now offer reporter blogs on their sites, compared to just 40 percent in 2006.  Ninety three percent of these blogs allow reader comments, while just 31 percent use blogrolls, or links to external blogs.

• Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007.  The only exception is the use of tags; four percent of magazines use tags compared to just one percent of newspapers.
• The usage of required registration increased since last year from 38 percent to 42 percent.
• Video usage nearly doubled in 2007, with 60 percent of the magazine websites we researched now offering video content.  In 2006, just 34 percent of the websites offered this feature.

The following chart summarizes the report's results.  Many more charts are included in the actual study.

In general, we have found that magazines are slower at adopting Web 2.0 trends than newspapers.  We can hypothesize that this is due to the differing cultures surrounding the two types of print media: newspapers and the content they present are essential to most people's daily lives.  In contrast most magazines are something "extra", and are often focused on entertainment.  Perhaps for this reason, magazine websites tend to be geared more toward the casual browser rather than a serious reader or application user. 

You can read our full report here and check out our data here.