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.

Last night we launched a redesigned version of Monsanto's Spanish site made using Drupal's CMS. The site style mimics the existing style on Monsanto.com to a great extent.

The entire site is run on Drupal with some custom PHP mods. This essentially allows Monsanto or ourselves to add a new page, news article, press release or hi-res image to the image library really quickly and easily.

A significant chunk of the Spanish content was created or edited in-house here at The Bivings Group.

If you have a moment or are interested in biotech take a look around and let us know what you think!

Regular readers of this blog know that we are part of the web development team working on the Fred Thompson website, www.imwithfred.com. On Monday afternoon, the team launched a new version of the site. Frankly, I’m too tired to write up a good entry summarizing all the new features so I’m going to cheat and just link out:

(1) The Fred File blog has a good breakdown of what has been added.

(2) Patrick Bell over at TechRepublican makes note of my favorite part of the new site, the Volunteer HQ section that features a log of all activities a volunteer completes. He calls this section “much more advanced than anything I think I’ve seen by the announced candidates.” I’ll take it.

(3) Micah Sifry over at TechPresident sums up the site’s new features pretty well:

I’m With Fred.com” Version 2.0 is up, and the 2.0 is justified. Not only is the redesigned site a hub for news of Fred Thompson’s potential presidential bid and his positions on the issues, the site offers new tools for organizing events in local communities, for creating and exporting contribution and communications widgets to other sites, for registering to vote, and for allowing members to track through their profile pages how well they are doing in recruiting supporters. It’s nicely done–a tribute no doubt to Michael Turk, who techPresident readers know has been agitating for this kind of GOP site for quite some time. One interesting wrinkle–you can’t view comments on the site’s blog without first becoming a “Friend of Fred.

Let me know what you think about the new site in the comments.

We have recently completed the 2007 study of America's top 100 newspaper websites, entitled "American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?". As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper's reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. This study explores these concepts, as well as the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers. Our research examined the websites of the top 100 newspapers in the United States, as determined by circulation (via the Audit Bureau of Circulations). We evaluated all of the websites on the presence of lack of various web features. Here are some of our key findings:

• The use of RSS increased in 2007 by 21 percent since 2006. Now 96 of the papers we researched are using this technology. Within this group, 93 papers offer partial text feeds, while three offer full text RSS feeds. No papers have begun embedding advertisements in their RSS feeds.

• Ninety-two percent of America’s top 100 papers now offer video on their websites. This represents a significant jump from 2006, where just 61 percent offered video. In this group, there is a mixture of local, Associated Press, and original content available on newspaper websites. Thirty-nine papers offer original content, 26 use AP video streams, 13 offer video content from local news outlets, four papers use all three technologies, and 10 papers use a mixture of two different types of video.

• The number and quality of reporter blogs also improved in 2007. Now, 95 percent of papers offer at least one reporter blog. Ninety-three percent (88 papers) of these blogs allow comments. In 2006, 80 percent of the papers offered blogs, with 83 percent (67 papers) allowing comments.

• One-third of newspapers now allow comments on articles. This represents a 14% improvement on 2006 statistics, when only 19 percent of papers allowed comments on articles.

• The number of papers requiring registration increased by six percent from last year’s results. Twenty-nine percent of the nation’s top 100 papers now require users to register before gaining full access to their website. Of this group, three papers required a paid subscription, while 26 papers required free registration.

Overall, use of online features by newspapers improved across nearly all the categories when compared to last year's research, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers."

Read the study in its entirety here and let us know what you think! Our research data is available in Excel format here.

We currently have two positions available in our Washington, DC office.

1. Production Manager
2. Part-time Accountant

A full description for each position is available after the jump.

(more…)

You know you’re busy when you are a week late breaking your own news. The Bivings Group is part of the team working on the Fred Thompson website.

Last night, the team rolled out a new version of the I’m With Fred website. This release includes a blog and tools that allow supporters to draft letters to the editor and call talk radio. Profiles have also been launched on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Stay tuned and share your thoughts in the comments.

The Bivings Group was recently interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered for a piece about the online success of Republican/Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Micah Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum was also interviewed.

You can listen to the piece here.

In the interview, Robert Smith asked me if I thought all of the Paul-related activity would have a real impact on the election. Can Paul become the next Howard Dean?

I said no. Paul isn’t going to become a viable candidate and I don’t think the online movement being built around Paul’s candidacy will come close to reaching the scale the Dean movement achieved.

Regardless, I think all the noise being created has had the desired effect. It is exposing more people to Ron Paul, which is all his supporters can really hope for. As I told Robert, one of the reasons Paul supporters are turning to Digg and online polls is that they feel they aren’t getting enough attention from the mainstream media. So the fact that NPR and other media outlets are doing stories on Ron Paul’s online success is the ultimate validation of what they are doing online.

A number of us will be headed up to NYC later today to attend the Personal Democracy Forum conference tomorrow. I will be participating in the conference’s Idea Market, where I will be discussing “Best Practices in Blogger Relations.” We’ll also be co-sponsoring a post-conference happy hour from 8:00-10:00 tomorrow night with the David All Group, Heritage Foundation and Townhall. If you are interested in attending, details are here.

We hope to see everyone in New York.

We just added a new function to our sidebar that lists current employees of The Bivings Group that have contributed entries to the blog. Clicking on the name will take you to a page listing all that author’s posts. Next week we’ll expand this to include some bio and contact info for each person.

Start browsing our archives below:

• Gary Bivings
• Alex Clover
• Bobby Dodd
• Tom Mccormick
• Yukako Nishihara
• Steve Petersen
• Erin Teeling
• Ajit Verghese
• Todd Zeigler

Working with our partners at iWeb Strategies and episode49, we launched a new website for Bobby Jindal (R-LA) for Governor yesterday (blog here). Along with the website, the Jindal campaign also launched profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Brian Lyle has the details over on the iWeb Strategies blog.

Update:

• Blaise Hazelwood posts her thoughts over on iWeb Strategies blog
• Brad Levinson from The Beta Stage has some nice things to say about the site and Bobby Jindal’s blog efforts

My Stuff is a new ImpactWatch™ feature that enables individual users to save stories in the system that are pertinent to them.  To do this each story is listed with an icon that saves the item in a place where they collect articles.  Further, it uses AJAX so that saving items is a smooth process that doesn't involve multiple web pages.

Visit the ImpactWatch™ site to learn more about the program.  We also offer a free demo that features analysis of media coverage about the launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 and provide case studies about how ImpactWatch can help any organization manage its public relations.

Click on the picture for a video demo of My Stuff.