As mentioned previously, we are currently running a demonstration of our ImpactWatch™ media monitoring platform that tracks mainstream media coverage of the Connecticut Senate Race.  As part of the demonstration, we have used ImpactWatch™ to create a report on media coverage of the race during the month of September.  This is the first in a series of reports we will release in the days leading up to the election.

Following are some of the reports key findings:

• Iraq was the subject of 20% of all stories written about this race, making it the most popular frequently mentioned topic.
• Overall, coverage of Ned Lamont was slightly more favorable than the coverage of Senator Joe Lieberman. 
• However, Senator Lieberman's coverage became more favorable as September went on due to the release of positive poll numbers at the end of the month.  During this same period, Mr. Lamont's coverage became more negative.
• Connecticut media had a larger proportion of positive articles written about Mr. Lamont and negative articles written about Sen. Lieberman than the national media.

The following graphs demonstrate some of the trends in coverage.

Subject Breakdown

Lamont vs. Lieberman Avg Favorability

You can view the full report here. 

If you are interested in learning more about ImpactWatch™, please sign up now for our free access to our demo on the CT Senate Race. 

As a small company, we've always struggled with how best to market our media monitoring platform, Impactwatch™.  We don't have a dedicated sales force or the budget to sponsor every conference or present at every trade show.  We also aren't much for intrusive cold calling (unlike a lot of folks in this space).  Plus, it's difficult to explain Impactwatch™ on a marketing site with text and screenshots - it's the kind of product that doesn't really click until you see an in person demo and/or play with it yourself. 

We may be delusional, but we think we have a great product here.   We just need more folks to give it a try.

So we're trying a different approach.  Today, we are launching a new version of our Impactwatch™ marketing site that includes an invitation to sign up for a 5 day pass to a demo of the product.  The topic of the demo is the Connecticut Senate race between Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman.  We'll run this demo until November 15th, and then launch a new one on some other timely, non-political topic soon thereafter.  This initial demo will track only Mainstream Media (MSM) - in future demos we will show how Impactwatch™ can be used to help track the blogosphere in addition to MSM.

I would encourage anyone who is interested to sign up for our demo now.  You can also check our our FAQ about the demo to learn more.  We'll begin issuing usernames and passwords for the demo tomorrow.

If you have questions or comments about the demo, please feel free to send me an email or give me a call at 202-741-1500. 

This morning our client and philanthropic partner, Washington Area Women's Foundation, launched a redesigned version of their website, thewomensfoundation.org.  The Women's Foundation works in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to better the lives of women and girls through community outreach, education, and grants.  The Women's Foundation is a fantastic organization that contributes an immense amount to communities of struggling women in the Washingon, DC area. 

We worked hard to get the site ready in advance of the Women's Foundation's annual Leadership Luncheon, which was held today.  We are hopeful that the new website helps the Women's Foundation connect with kindrid spirits out there on the web and in the blogosphere. 

Some notables about the new Washington Area Women's Foundation site:

• The Women's Foundation is blogging!  We think this is extremely exciting.  Several members of the Foundation will be writing blog entries on a regular basis, discussing the news, philanthropy, and women's issues.  We encourage everyone to check out the blog and comment on some of their recent entries.  We are hoping a real conversation takes place on this blog.  Here's their first entry.
• We built the entire site in Wordpress.  This enables members of the Women's Foundation to update all text content easily and quickly when they need to, in addition to having all the latest blogging bells and whistles are their disposable.
• The site includes a searchable database of the Foundation's grantee partners, which allows volunteers and contributors to search through the various organizations that have received Women's Foundation help in the past for volunteer and internship opportunities, as well as for opportunities for funding and contributions.
• The site successfully brings to the forefront the highly personal and emotional stories of those that The Women's Foundation has helped, and also those people on the Foundation's staff who enable the organization to operate on a daily basis.

Best of luck to the Women's Foundation with their new Web program!  And be sure to check our their blog, as they really want to participate in the discussion online.

You can make yourself a free, categorized and searchable archive of news on any topic for reference and monitoring using free web-based RSS reader Bloglines in tandem with major news aggregators. This is not something that is immediately apparent, but it's still relatively simple. Here's how to do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose.  (more…)

We launched a couple of new features yesterday sort of on the sly.

(1) We put up a Wiki (what's a Wiki?) that will serve as a companion to The Bivings Report.  At it's most basic level, the Wiki will provide a place where readers can collaborate and expand on some of the ideas we discuss on The Bivings Report.  Down the road, we'll be attempting to conduct some collaborative research on our Wiki. 

Currently, you can contribute to our listing of PR Firms that Blog or add your ideas to our piece on Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites. 

Stay tuned.

(2) We added a link on our sidebar that you can use to email us ideas for posts or products/services you think we should look at.  Or if you just want to talk.  Either way. 

Both ot these features appear in the Collaborate area of our sidebar.

We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with Moreover Technologies to begin to use their online news content in ImpactWatch, our flagship media monitoring service. For those not in the know, ImpactWatch is a web-based media management platform used by a large number of public relations and corporate communications professionals. We are proud to announce that Moreover now joins other high-volume media content providers such as Factiva and VMS in helping to provide our ImpactWatch clients with a truly global combination of news sources, tools and information that give our clients a simple way to visually track, gather and analyze global news content.

After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.

Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.

Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.

We’re looking for programmers to help with the development of ImpactWatch, Graphhopper and our other internal products.  Job description is below.  If you are interested send an email with your resume to jobs@bivings.com. 

Don’t usually post jobs to our blog, but we figured why not.

————————————

PHP Programmer

Washington, DC-based Internet communications firm seeking experienced and skilled PHP/MySQL programmers for development of company’s suite of web-based products.

Minimum 3 years of PHP web development experience. Strong knowledge of relational databases and database design required. Knowledge of PERL, JavaScript, AJAX, and/or SQL a plus. Undergraduate degree required, preferably in computer science.

No overseas inquiries. Compensation commensurate with skills and experience.

www.bivings.com

Mark Glaser from MediaShift has written a great article about the spontaneous sister studies bloggers from around the world put together in response to our look at the use of the Internet by U.S. newspapers.  Below are some snippets.

Story Intro:

On August 1, The Bivings Group released a research report of how the Top 100 U.S. newspaper websites were implementing features such as blogs, podcasts and social bookmarking. (I summarized the findings here.) By August 10, three bloggers located outside the U.S. took it upon themselves to do a similar study of their own country’s top newspaper sites to see how they stacked up to their American counterparts. And one German blogger set up a wiki  to track results for German newspaper sites.

On why it took off:

So why was this such as successful foray into ad hoc open source reporting? I think it was easy for anyone to gauge the features on a newspaper site by just poking around and tallying their offerings. It didn’t require calling up people to survey them or other more time-intensive or expensive research techniques. You just list the results, create a graph, and presto! — you’re an online media research expert.

On the benefits limitations of a collective approach:

Of course you might miss something, and with no centralized controls, mistakes might happen. But with centralized control, mistakes happen, too. Plus, you can count on others — especially online newspaper publishers themselves — to correct the record where possible.

The full story is worth a read.

As a complement to our study on the use of Web 2.0 tactics by the top 100 U.S. newspaper, we took a look at how the twenty largest Japanese newspapers are using the Internet.  Overall, we found that Japanese papers are not taking aggressive Web strategies (except when it comes to cell phones), and are behind their American counterparts in terms of Web offerings.  The study speculates that the lack of adoption of these tools by Japanese newspapers is a result of the structure of the Japanese newspaper industry itself and the unique newspaper culture in Japan.

Here are some of our key findings:

• Only four of Japan’s top 21 papers are using RSS feeds. In comparison, 17 of the top 25 American papers offered this technology. In both the United States and Japan, none of these RSS feeds included advertisements.
• Almost all of the Japanese sites had pages dedicated to cell phone access.  From looking at the results it could be argued that the widespread distribution of content via cell phone has made it less neccessary for Japanese papers to use RSS.
• Just five of Japan’s top 21 papers offer reporter blogs. In contrast, 23 of the top 25 American papers have blogs on their websites.
• The most widely used Web feature on the Japanese websites was video. Eleven of the 21 websites offer this technology.
• Just one Japanese newspaper, the Shizuoka Shimbun, required registration to read online content. In contrast, nine of 21 American papers required registration, with some charging a registration fee. The Shizuoka Shimbun’s registration was free of charge.

Here is a graph showing the results of our study, comparing the top 21 American and Japanese newspapers.

You can download our full study here.

You can find links to sister studies performed in the UK, Italy and New Zealand here.

Our media monitoring product, ImpactWatch, has always been able to accept and display non-English news articles.  But we recently had a client that wanted to take things a step further and create a version of ImpactWatch entirely in Japanese (navigation, drop downs, everything).  We just finished the work (see sample screenshot below) and the infrastructure improvements we made mean that we can now rapidly deploy ImpactWatch in just about any language a client requires.

The other cool thing here is that for global companies we can create versions in a variety of different languages (say Spanish, English and Japanese).  Each individual user within a company has the ability to to choose which language they want ImpactWatch to render in. 

Anyway, good stuff.

Hello dear reader and welcome! Last week we launched the marketing site of Graphhopper - a new and cool offering from The Bivings Group that is based on our ImpactWatch graphing engine.

We are in the pre-launch stages of Graphhopper, but we are continuing to develop and test graphhopper before we release it into the wild.

We hope to offer you a simple way to create great looking Flash-based graphs in a few easy steps. We will host your graphs for you for free, making it easy to post graphs to your website or blog. No more redrawing graphs by hand, battling Excel or paying for expensive graphing programs.

I will try and post regularly and talk about the experience of launching this new product. Feel free to email me with questions and check back ocassionally for updates.  Oh, and make sure you Sign Up for Beta!

For those of you interested in the whole "Did Lieberman's Website Get Hacked" mystery, TPMuckraker.com has a pretty geeky article about the hosting setup of Lieberman's host provider and another where they interview Lieberman's techies about the situation.  TBG was interviewed in the one about Lieberman's technical setup  (thanks to our developers for helping me pull together answers). 

I hope they find whoever did this (assuming they got hacked) and punish them appropriately.  No place for this sort of nonsense.

Mark Glaser of the PBS blog MediaShift gave our newspaper study a nice shoutout today.  Here's an excerpt from the article he wrote about us:

"Though newspaper websites have been around for a decade, they’ve often been slow to innovate, and have been mainly used for “shovelware” — repurposing the same print stories online. But now, times are changing, and newspapers are perking up and realizing they’re going to have to do more online if they want to compete with the TV network and cable news sites, international newspaper sites, and aggregators such as Yahoo and Google."

I really like Mark's "shovelware" terminology.  Despite newspapers' use of Web 2.0 and their innovations, much of the online content is similar to that of the print content.  Thereis even one newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, whose website is based on an electronic copy of the print newspaper. 

So thanks again to Mark for the great article!

Update: We've issued a call for help in conducting research in additional countries.  Learn how you can help.

After the success of our recent study, The Internet's Role in Political Campaigns, we decided to perform a study on America's newspapers. It is widely known that America's newspapers are suffering from declining readership and circulation. In many cases, this is occurring due to the availability of alternative forms of news and the changing habits of Americans. The Internet and the prevalence of free news sites, including newspaper sites and larger network sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and Yahoo, are often credited with playing a major role in the problems experienced by the newspaper industry. In our most recent study, The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers, we researched the websites of America's top 100 newspapers by circulation, and evaluated them based on their use of 14 different Web 2.0 features. These criteria were comprehensive, and included a wide variety of Web tools, such as reporter blogs, video and podcasts, message boards, and RSS feeds. We pursued this study in order to determine whether newspapers are trying to compete with the Internet or use it to expand readership over a different medium. The results of our research clearly showed that America's newspapers, unlike political candidates, are generally embracing the Internet and are using new and improving Web tools to their advantage. Here are some of our results:

• 80 of the nation's top 100 newspapers offered reporter blogs. On 63 of these blogs, readers could comment on posts written by reporters.
• 76 of the nation's top 100 newspapers offer RSS feeds on their websites. All of these feeds are partial feeds, and none included ads.
• Major Web tools, such as blogs and RSS penetrated both the most and least circulated newspapers.
• Video was the most common form of multimedia found on the websites, and was offered by 61 of the newspapers.

Based on these findings and others, it seems that today's newspapers are making a significant effort to reach Web-focused audiences with mediums that are relevant to today's virtual society. Take a look at our study and let us know what you think!

For the tens of people that are interested, we put together a podcast about the findings of our recent campaign study. In the podcast, Ajit Verghese interviews myself and Erin Teeling (who actually wrote the thing) about how 2006 Senate campaigns are using the Internet. We talk about which sites are good/bad, how candidates are using blogs and podcasts and what we expect to see from political campaigns in the future, among other things. Give it a listen if you’re interested or just a glutton for punishment.

 

 Campaign Study [27:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download