Earlier this month, Leah Messinger wrote an interesting piece on "quality swag" and its potential ROI.  For those who do not recognize the terms, "swag" is a gift or free service that a company offers to potential clients, typically at events such as trade shows.  Some award shows package all of the gifts together in ‘swag bags' for the guests.  ROI stands for "return on investment," the rate of return which is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment.  The ROI of swag is important because once the products are created, they are a sunk cost, and I am sure many companies find themselves tossing pens and highlighters that were never given out at any shows.

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<cross posted from our ImpactWatch blog>

Since its launch in 1999, our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform has been focused on serving the enterprise market.  The product has been aimed at organizations that receive a high volume of coverage from both traditional and online media, require a large number of employees to access the data ImpactWatch collects and need high-end  reporting and analysis of coverage.  Due to its robust feature set and flexibility, ImpactWatch remains a great solution for these types of enterprise clients.

But in showing ImpactWatch over the years, I’ve run into a lot of people who love ImpactWatch’s interface and base tool set, but who don’t need all of the advanced features we’ve built into ImpactWatch over the years. They were looking for an elegant and affordable way to manage and report out on their media coverage as opposed to an enterprise level media tracking platform.

In an effort to provide these folks with a product they can use, we are in the process of rolling out two new ImpactWatch product lines that will enable the IW to serve the needs of organizations of all sizes.  Specifically:

1. ImpactWatch Basic - Aimed at groups that get a limited amount of coverage (approximately 1-50 clips a day) and only need for a handful of people to access data.
2. ImpactWatch Professional - For organizations with a higher volume of coverage (50-100 clips a day) and who need a few dozen people to access the system.
3. ImpactWatch Enterprise - This is our current system, which is aimed at organizations with a high volume of daily coverage (100+ clips), a large number of users and that need access to some of ImpactWatch’s high end reporting features.

I know this is vague, but we are in the process of a big development push and aren’t ready to talk about all the details yet.  Check the ImpactWatch blog for updates on our progress and look for us to roll out the new product lines later in the summer.

We’re excited.

Once again, the Internet is abuzz with predictions and theories about who is going to win American Idol.  In the early days of the competition (back when Kelly Clarkson was still a nobody singing karaoke and we only hypothesized that we hated the British without actually knowing it through Simon Cowell), there was much less web traffic about the show.  This season and the previous one, however, it's all the Internet can talk about.

This leads people in finding numerous ways to predict who of the now-6 remaining contestants will be voted off each week.  After all, this is a show that purports that the American public gets to decide who is going to stay and who is going to go.  Polls, blogs, and fansites may all play an important role in deciding the overall victor, much like a modern day political campaign. 

TV Squad, a popular television site, uses polls from various sources as well as their own intuition to predict the next bootee.  Most of the polls incorrectly predicted Syesha Mercado's demise, while the real loser was Kristy Lee Cook.  Obviously, this is not an accurate way to predict the contestant with the lowest votes.  The polls are simply too specific in the sense that only those Internet snoopers that come across them will actually get a chance to vote in the poll.  This does not represent an accurate view of the American public.

DialIdol.com has found a more inventive way to predict the successful contestants.  Their software measures the busy signal of each phone line to determine who is getting the most votes.  They started the program during the previous season, but achieved only moderate success in the predictions.  The company also sells software to enable one person to vote many times for a contestant.  Many sites have reported that the software is now known by the American Idol producers and rarely works anymore.

Tivo also found a creative way to measure the votes.  The company claims that they can predict who is going to be voted off by which minutes of the recorded programs are re-watched.  The theory is that Idol favorites will have their performances re-watched by their adoring public, while soon-to-be eliminees will have fewer views.  Unfortunately, the system seems to not be altogether accurate, since Tivo has incorrectly predicted Mercado two weeks in a row.

Another social media company, BuzzLogic, uses their "influencer blog" ratings to follow the entire competition via their blog.  I was impressed by the fledgling company's efforts at first glance, but upon closer inspection realized that few, if any, of their predictions have been true.  In addition, BuzzLogic gives very little explanation when they are incorrect.  This does, however, bolster my recent opinion that Katie Paine's connection between online activity and offline activity is flawed.  Many ‘influential' bloggers may be writing about certain candidates for American Idol, but that does not necessarily mean that they are voting for them, or voting at all.

I decided to tackle the task of predicting American Idol, ImpactWatch style.  Instead of using news articles, I used Tweet Scan to analyze 90 tweets per remaining contestant, using two separate searches for each.  I searched for each contestant's full name as well as their first name and the phrase "American Idol".  I read and ranked each tweet post as positive, negative, or neutral.

There are two reasons why I believe this method to be more valid than the other ways that were described above.  First, tweets represent impulses and first impressions, which I assume mirrors the mindset of actual voters.  Secondly, this is the only method that ascribes a positive or negative take on the information.  Polls just rank the favorite, while the Tivo system lacks any real information about why certain parts of the show are re-watched.  BuzzLogic's system has merit, but suffers from the need of personal input by its bloggers to explain anomalies in the amounts of influencer blogs.

Using my ImpactWatch inspired protocol, I found that David Cook and Jason Castro have the highest amount of positive tweets.  Sure enough, after doing some extended research, I found that the two received much praise for their performances last week.  All three females had an identical number of negative tweets (45), but Mercado has the lowest amount of positive tweets at a scant 30.  This is preliminary, but on Wednesday morning, I will post an updated tweet analysis (since Tuesday is when the contestants will perform their new songs).  Voters will most likely be tweeting away while they are waiting to vote.  Let's see if I can accurately predict which Idol will fall.

My current results are summarized below, using a graph created using ImpactWatch.

[This post is cross-posted at the ImpactWatch Blog] 

To follow up on a recent post concerning Comcast’s effort to answer consumer complaints via Twitter, I used Tweet Scan to search specifically for Comcast posts and research exactly with what we are dealing. A basic one-word search found well over 1000 tweets about Comcast within just the last couple of hours, so I narrowed my focus down to the most recent 300. I read each of them, and categorized them in three different ways.

The first specification was whether the tweet was positive, negative, or neutral, overall. The results are as follows: 26 of the tweets were positive, 86 were neutral, and a majority of 188 were negative. It is a pretty negative environment for Comcast on Twitter right now.

The second category dealt with what category of complaint or praise under which the tweet fell. There were four distinctions: Not Working, Slow, Prices, and Company. “Not Working” and “Slow” deal with complaints about the Internet and cable service. “Prices” concern any complaints or praise about cost or billing issues. “Company” refers to any mention of the company that does not fall into one of those categories, or short tweets with little information (i.e. “grrr…Comcast”). 178 were about the company itself, 66 were problems with the Internet or cable completely not working, 33 were about slowdown, and 22 were about pricing concerns. It is interesting that on Twitter there is a lot of general venting about Comcast (bad for the brand), and less specific complaints.

The final category is whether or not the tweet contains cursing of any sort. From a quick skim of the 300 tweets, it seems like this is a good indicator of the level of frustration by the writer of the tweet. 35 contained curse words, and 265 did not.

Found below are some examples of Comcast-related tweets, as well as a document containing all the graphs above. This post is similar to the kind of analysis we perform through out service ImpactWatch. Interesting to note is that several of the tweets among the 300 were by the same user, who claims to be a representative from Comcast. Also, many of the tweets contained links to articles referencing the recent customer service use of Twitter by Comcast. Unfortunately, the representative could only handle one consumer problem at a time, so the use of tweets was just as effective as phone consumer services. The links below represent the tweet-by-tweet written data, some examples of Comcast-related tweets, and analytics.

All Data Collected

Example Tweets

Graphs Made in IW

Over the weekend, two of the users I follow on Twitter, David All and Techcrunch (Michael Arrington), had separate problems with Comcast and vented about them via their Twitter accounts. Comcast apparently monitors Twitter and proactively reached out to both of them.

Here is the relevant tweet from Techrunch:

And here is the tweet from David:

An article in the Consumerist confirms that other users have received responses after complaining via Twitter. In a follow up article about his problems, Michael Arrington offers advice to folks with a Comcast service problem: “Skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead. You may find your problem fixed in a hurry.”

Three thoughts on this:

(1) I think it is great that Comcast is listening to people on Twitter and reacting proactively to fix problems. Based on a quick search, there appear to be plenty of problems to that need addressing. More companies should monitor and participate in Twitter in a meaningful way (we are working on doing Twitter tracking through our ImpactWatch service).

(2) As a consumer, I’m bothered by the precedent of the squeaky wheels on Twitter getting preferential treatment over people who go through normal channels.

(3) Not speaking specifically about Comcast, I think the focus some companies place on social media is more about PR/crisis management than a true commitment to customer service and dialogue. Performing triage on complaints that come in through Twitter may keep the customer revolt at bay for a short time, but when that levee eventually breaks, it isn’t going to be pretty.

ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold blogged last week about how Reuters is trying to help organize all on the Internet — including its own content — by launching its API — Open Calais.

As complex as programming and APIs can get, the idea behind Open Calais is rather simple.  Reuters simply wants to find a better way to easily identify important bits of information in an article or on a web page.  For instance, a news article has the who, where, when, where, why, and how in it; thus, finding a way to pull out the people, organizations, location, etc. in an article would help file the article in vast sea of information.

Hopefully, this will make it a lot easier for people to find articles about events that occurred at a specific time, involved an individual or organization, took place in a certain city, was caused by a specific issue, etc.  Needless to say, anyone who deals with information — which should include virtually all of us — will benefit from more enhanced technology to sort through the large amounts of information that we literally have at our finger tips through the Internet.

This is cross posted from our ImpactWatch blog.

In trying to measure blogs, a lot of people put a great deal of stock in inbound links.  It might not be going too far to say that inbound links have become the standard by which the influence of a blog is measured.  Theoretically, the more links you attract from other sites the more influential the blog must be.  Right?  It sort of makes sense.

But I really think inbound links became the standard out of the lack of a better way to measure.  Specifically:

1. Legit traffic figures for blogs are impossible to obtain.  Sites like Alexa and Compete are notoriously inaccurate and don’t have data at all on smaller sites. We simply don’t know how many people go to the various sites out there and don’t have a defensible way to make comparisons.
2. Inbound link information is really easy to get on Technorati and Google.  This became the standard because it is readily available and easy.

But I really think inbound link information is entirely anecdotal and not a defensible way to truly measure influence or even popularity.

Let me explain based on personal experience.  We launched the current iteration of our main corporate blog, The Bivings Report, around two years ago.  In the beginning, I had an unhealthy interest in our Technorati ranking, a measurement based on inbound links.  The result was an unhealthy number of linkbaiting types of posts, participation in blog carnivals etc.  Basically, I was focused too much on attracting links and not enough on building an audience.   Frankly, it worked - we rocketed up into the top 5,000 blogs on Technorati.  But in the process we learned that attracting links doesn’t really mean more readers (as measured by site statistics and RSS subscribers).  Most links you attract only lead to a few referrers.

Anyway, at some point we all grew bored with trying to attract links and just focused on writing about what interests us.  The funny thing is that as our Technorati ranking has dropped our readership has continued to grow.  We have far more readers (and hopefully influence) now than we did when we had a higher Technorati ranking.

This isn’t to say that looking at inbound links is a useless exercise.  It is a great way to identify an initial list of big players from which to work from.  Just keep in mind that inbound links are not the sole way we should measure the influence of blogs.  Instead, it should be part of a bigger methodology.

More on this later.

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.

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?

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.

Last week I wrote a post mentioning that I thought coverage of the 2008 Presidential election would lead news organization to push the envelop in terms of innovation in online coverage. Cyberjournalist has the scoop on just such an innovation from the Washington Post and Daylife - Issue Tracker.

Issues Tracker allows you to select Presidential candidates to get an idea of the amount of press coverage they attract around issues such as abortion, immigration and education. Visitors can also select an issue to view how the candidates compare in terms of the volume of press coverage. I find this tool particular interesting since as it is similar to tools we have on our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform.

A couple of things that I think are significant about Issues Tracker:

• The tool aggregates stories from all across the web. Newspapers have traditionally been reluctant to link to competitors, i.e. other news outlets. It is nice to see the Post recognizes that this is an archaic way of thinking.
• The piece functions as a widget that you can insert in your website (see below). Very cool, although they might want to offer a less full featured version - that is a huge chunk of code to include on your site in any sort of permanent way.

Beyond measuring Dell Hells, it is helpful for those who track blogs to measure relationships between them.

When dealing with a small set of blogs, it is easy to determine if and then how they're related.  However, with millions of blogs no person or organization has the resources to accurately track all of them.  Thus, having a automated system to establish relationship is very helpful.  That's a gap that search engines fill for the Internet in general. 

Relationships could form around a myriad of factors like: topic, geography, style, stance, etc.  For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to focus on topic for this post.

There are many ways that blogs can align themselves with others around a topic. 

Semantic analysis can determine if blog posts have a large set of common specialized words that tie them together.  Data mining isn't perfect though.

How about links?  Bloggers can link to other sites that address the same issues that they do.  However, linking is not standardized throughout the blogosphere.  In many cases links will lead to sites which cover a wide variety of topics.  At times bloggers don't hyperlink to other sites, even if it is helpful.  Many people simply posts a list of links that interest them while others will include links in their text.  Then we have to ask: What's a more meaningful link — one in the blogroll, in-text, or part of a list of several other links to sites discussion different topics?

If a blogger is generous with links, then tracking the sites linked to is useful.  It makes sense to connect two blogs to each other if one links to the other in at least half of its posts.  But as I discussed above, measuring this way is hard since linking habits differ greatly.

Bookmarking and tagging sites like del.icio.us are helpful when establishing blog relationships as web surfers classify blogs and posts by using keywords and writing their own headlines.  As David Weinberger explained in a commentary piece "The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet" during NPR's All Things Considered on June 11, 2007, people can categorize web content in a variety of ways.  For instance, tags like "Africa," "animal," "pachyderm," and "mammal" are all applicable to a blog post about elephants.  Further, one can tease out blog relationships by looking at how people have tagged or bookmarked a blog and posts.  Granted, such categorization is rarely standardized, but Weinberger argues that's not necessarily bad either.

These are just some ways I can think of measuring and defining relationships between blogs.  What are some other methods?   

ImpactWatch is one of our main products. It is a PR measurement tool that our clients use for mainstream media coverage, but blogosphere measurement is harder to assess since readership and authority aren’t easily quantifiable.

Companies simply lack the resources to closely monitor all that is said about them, and blogs have expanded their radar screen. I don’t know if the blogosphere has increased the number of people who chit chat about a company with others, but it has created a forum in which many more voices are measurable.

However, not all voices are equal in their importance to a company. Concerning this fact, one of issues I’ve grappled with is how to weigh general influence and influence within a specific topic.

For instance, using Dell as an example, most of the A-list bloggers very rarely discuss the company and its products directly. Granted, top blogs like Engadget and Techcrunch should interest Dell since they focus on technology, but what about other blogs like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post?

I use Dell as an example since the company has had to deal with a top blog that doesn’t focus on its arena. Remember Dell Hell?

Although Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog are prominent, they focus on media, not technology. Thus, they typically shouldn’t worry Dell, but when Jarvis blogged about his “Dell Hell,” the rules changed. In fact, sometimes when bloggers (especially an A-lister) complain about a company and its products, word can spread fast. Sometimes even the mainstream media picks up on such rants.

Measurement is tough in situations like Dell Hell. Does Dell need to devote resources to scrupulously follow BuzzMachine? No, since Jarvis mainly blogs about media and not computer hardware and software. However, Jarvis was worth Dell’s attention for a while.

How can a company determine which bloggers who don’t focus on the company and its field require their attention? Then, when should they start and stop monitoring such blogs?

After last week’s debacle with Barack Obama’s MySpace page, lots of bloggers have been discussing whether or not political campaigns should take control over MySpace profiles and other voter-created websites and online groups. It’s no surprise that bloggers have been covering this issue, but I wondered to what degree the story had reached mainstream media (MSM) outlets.

I did a quick Google search for articles about Barack Obama from May 2 to May 4. I limited my search to print media outlets (newspapers and magazines) and major online news sources (such as CNN.com or MSNBC.com). I did not include blogs, international sources, or TV/radio outlets in my search. To further narrow my search, I only considered articles that were directly about Barack Obama–his name was either in the headline, or he was a substantial part of the story. I did not include political overviews or articles where he was mentioned in brief.

I found 51 articles over the three days, 10 of which were about Barack’s MySpace page. I marked particularly negative articles with an asterisk.

Political blogging growing like a vine*
Barack Obama Could Lose Some ‘Friends’ In MySpace Debacle*
This Should Make Bloggers Happy *
Learn from Obama: Hire a Professional *
Campaign takes control of ‘official’ MySpace site
Between Barack and MySpace
I’m Sorry, Barack, We’re Through*
Obama Campaign Asks: Is it MySpace or Yours?
Obama Takes MySpace Page from Backer
Obama to MySpace: That’s MyPage

These 10 articles were spread over 8 different publications and make up 20% of Barack-specific coverage during May 2-4. I was pretty surprised that such a variety of MSM outlets, some of them very significant publications, picked up on this story. I was also surprised that MSM outlets were so critical of Barack’s efforts at regaining control over his MySpace page. I expected that since most newspapers and magazines maintain top-down strategies in most of their media coverage, they would be supportive of the transition to the “official”, rather than voter-controlled strategy.

To see the articles I included in my survey, please take a look at my datasheet.

Our media monitoring platform, ImpactWatch, would be perfect for tracking an issue such as this one. In order to complete this analysis, I had to manually search through Google results. If I had used ImpactWatch, this search would have been automated, allowing me to pre-determine which news sources I would be tracking. In addition, ImpactWatch would have given me a mechanism for sorting, graphing, and ranking the results according to subject, source, author, and bias (positive, negative, neutral).

For more information about ImpactWatch , check out the website and our current free demo, which tracks coverage of the PS3 and Nintendo Wii.