At the New Communications Forum conference last week, Chris O’Brien from the San Jose Mercury News mentioned during a presentation that 2/3rds of the traffic to the paper’s website comes from news aggregators (like Google News) and search engines.  This figure was higher than I expected, so I mentally filed away the tidbit to write about at some point.

Then today I came across a site called Newsknife, which breaks down which newspaper websites have the most articles appear in Google News.  I found this fascinating, so I quickly compared the twenty five newspapers that appeared most often in Google News with a list of the twenty five largest newspapers in terms of print circulation.  A couple of quick things jumped out at me:

• The Mercury News, Washington Times and Akron Beacon Journal were the papers that performed the best in Google News as compared to their print circulation.  For the Mercury News and Washington Times, I’d guess they do well because both papers have a lot of content niche news topics (silicon valley and politics) that are very popular on time.  So it makes sense that Google News might have a lot of their stories.  I have no idea why the Akron Beacon Journal is in Google News so much.
• The Wall Street Journal and Rocky Mountain News were the largest newspapers that did not appear on the list of top newspapers sites in Google News.  I suspect the Journal will start showing up soon given their recent deal with Google.  I don’t know what is going on with the Rocky Mountain News.

However, I was mostly left slightly baffled as to what to make of the data and why certain sites performed better than others.  How important is optimizing for Google News?  What is the impact of registration walls?  How important is the topics that are covered?  I think these questions are important to answers, as, based on the figures from the Mercury News, performance in search engines and news aggregators plays a huge role in the success or failure of a newspapers online program.  I’ll try to write more on this later after the data has a chance to sink in.

Anyway, below is the raw data.  Please share any thoughts you have in the comments.

[This post is cross posted at our ImpactWatch site] 

Continuing the study (see the preceding part of the analysis here), I analyzed if there had been recent activity by users regarding the addition of new applications.  Facebook applications can be added or deleted from profiles at any time, and there is a specific tab on the left-hand side of user profiles designated to the addition or removal of applications.

I used the mini-feeds (which show recent user input) to analyze if there had been recent application-related activity.  35 users had made recent additions, while not a single user had recently deleted an application.  An overwhelming majority of users had done neither in the last week.  Below is a graph showing this data, made using ImpactWatch features.

The final area of study concerned the ‘Top Ten' applications as elected by Adonomics.com.  These are Super Wall, Top Friends, Hug Me, Super Poke, Bumper Sticker, iLike, Graffiti, Zombies, Scrabulous, and Quizzes.  These were the top ten applications at the time of the research.  With the addition and removal of applications, the top ten applications could change periodically.  More information on these applications can be found in the background post about the study.

Of the 300 users, 146 had at least one of the Top Ten applications, while 154 did not.  Below is the graphical representation of this data, made using ImpactWatch features.

The final part of the study will be posted soon.  It will include an Excel spreadsheet of all the data, as well as some conclusions drawn from the data.

If you have not read the background to this study, please read this post before going any further.

The first aspect that I wanted to analyze was the sheer amount of applications contained within profiles.  To make the count simpler, I narrowed the selections down to five categories: 0, 1-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9+.  Only 3^rd-party (i.e. not official) applications were counted.  Of the 300 profiles researched, 64 contained 0 applications, 84 contained 1 or 2 applications, and 84 contained 3, 4, or 5 applications.  On the higher side, 41 profiles contained 6, 7, or 8 applications, and 27 contained 9 or more.  Below is a pie chart with a summary of the collected information.

The application interfaces appear within the profile itself, based on where the user would like them to appear, and also as a small icon directly under the profile picture.  Below is an example of what could be found under profile picture, if the user had many many many applications.

The second usage category that I analyzed concerned the type of applications that each user employed.  Of the applications used, which type was most prevalent in their profile?  I divided the types of applications into four categories, based on my own observations.  The categories under which the applications could fall were Extended Use, Online Games, Hug Applications, and Outside Applications.  Applications under Extended Use expand the usability of the standard applications, like the Super Wall.  Online Games, such as Scrabulous, give users the ability to play turn-based games with other users.  Hug Applications grant the user the ability to send more personal messages and ‘gifts' to other users.  Finally, Outside Applications promote an outside media, such as a charity, television show, or computer program like Skype. 

124 users had applications for Extended Use, a clear majority over the other categories separately.  21 users had applications mostly for Online Games, with these mostly being very popular ones like Scrabulous and Jet Man.  59 users mostly have Hug Applications; 32 mostly have Outside Applications; and 64 have no applications whatsoever.  It's worth noting that eight of the ‘Top Ten' applications fall under the category of either Extended Use or Hug Applications.  Not a single one of the Top Ten is an Outside Application.  Below is a graphical interpretation of this data.

Part 3 of the study to come shortly.  Check back soon.

[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

<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog> 

Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.

As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.

(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.

But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.

(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.

If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.

The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.

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.

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.

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?

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. 

I wrote a pretty complementary post a few weeks back about a conference call the McCain campaign had with conservative bloggers. 

Two weeks later it is clear that the McCain campaign is failing at the most important part of blogger relations: listening.

Mike Turk signed up for an account on McCain's social networking tool, McCainSpace, a while back.  Due to the top-down nature of the campaign's online effort, accounts must be approved by a human administrator before they are made active.  So far no joy for Turk.  He writes:

It has been 14 days since I created my page, and it still has not been approved.  I have received no rejection, no e-mail indicating there is a problem, and no request to change the content.  There is simply stony silence.

Ok, so they are slow or maybe someone missed something.  It happens.  But Turk has written about not getting his account approved not once but twice on his blog.  William Beutler is also waiting.  Silence. 

A sort of small time, political version of Dell Hell.

And mind you these guys aren't just some random bloggers.  Turk ran the Bush-Cheney e-campaign in 2004 and Beutler is a former National Journal reporter.   If you aren't listening to these guys who are you listening to?

Contrast this with the Obama campaigns' response to a site bug pointed out by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.  The bug was fixed within two hours of posting (although admittedly that bug was a little more explosive than the McCainSpace problems). 

Contrast this with the Edwards' campaign, where Elizabeth Edwards herself is engaging in blog discussions (including one on our blog). 

Contrast this with Microsoft, which helped Gaping Void's Hugh Maclead fix a problem he was having with his tablet PC within a few hours of him posting.

Having conference calls with bloggers is great.  Truly listening to what they are saying is better.

Update: Mike Turk has now written his third blog entry about his troubles.  We'll see if this ever gets resolved.

Update 2: After eighteen days of waiting, Turk's account was finally approved.  He has a full review of the McCainSpace tool up on TechPresident .

The buzz about Yahoo! Pipes is through the roof – as of writing number 6 on Technorati’s top searches list. This confirms what a lot of us here have been saying all along: people want to look at web content in a completely customized way and on the platform of their choice be it Netvibes (we're big fans), Windows Live, Newsgator or whatever. Yahoo! Pipes provides an assortment of interesting tools that allow people to manipulate of web content feeds to their liking, something I think is an increasingly clear a sign of things to come.

I’ve played around with Yahoo! Pipes a little over the last few days. One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.

For those interested in receiving a single RSS feed with, say, news about a specific political candidate from multiple websites, Yahoo! Pipes makes this fairly easy to do. The alternative would be having to scour several RSS feeds looking for the nuggets you are interested in. I talked about an alternative method of doing this a few months ago, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this process a lot easier to manage.

Yahoo! Pipes has a lot of work to do in making the tool more user friendly and less buggy, but it’s a great start. In its current form it’s going to turn most users off of using it as you need to be pretty comfortable with basic programming logic to get started. It also lacks any sort of tutorial that makes things harder still, although it does provide a few usage examples.

Here’s an example of a feed I created using Yahoo! Pipes that pulls in news containing the keywords "Obama", "McCain", "Clinton", and "Giuliani" from Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Reuters and Associated Press.

You can explore the actual Pipe I created to make that feed. If you've got some other interesting ideas on content filtering/customization or applications of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to customize web content feeds let us know in a comment!

Back in November, a number of us here at The Bivings Group were captivated by the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 launch – so much so, that we set up our ImpactWatch demo to follow the news about the two game systems. Now that both the launch and the Holiday Season have past, we decided to put together a report based on the ImpactWatch analysis and our own research.  The following is a brief summary of our findings.

Sony PlayStation 3

Prior to launch, it sounded like Sony’s PlayStation 3 had captivated the imaginations of the gaming world. While the Nintendo Wii was quietly building buzz, the media was all over the PlayStation 3 like a pack of wolves on a fresh kill.  The hype surrounding the PlayStation 3 launch was staggering, and going into the Game Console Wars, a betting man probably would have put his money on Sony.  With the success of the original PlayStation and the even greater success of the PlayStation 2, it seemed like it would be a slam-dunk for Sony.  That turned out not to be the case. Three things that stood out about the media coverage of the PlayStation 3 were:

• PlayStation 3 Launch Sees Rampant Crime. Buying a video game system was never so dangerous.  Due to massive hype-driven demand, combined with severe supply constraints, the launch of the PlayStation 3 was tainted by theft and violent crime that spanned the globe.

• Sony PR and Management Blunders Abound. From Sony's decision to include the Blu-Ray high-definition DVD drive, thus delaying the launch by almost a year, to Sony Australia's General Manager, Nic Foster saying “Wii is a core gaming device. It's a more fun, intuitive sort of product to pick up,” to Sony’s press release falsely claiming that they had won a Technology and Entertainment Emmy for the SIXAXIS controller, they managed to fumble the PR ball on every play.
• Developers Jump Ship, Express Angst. Reports show Sony failed to cater sufficiently to non-Sony game developers. They lost the platform exclusivity of the best selling game of all time (Grand Theft Auto) and alienated their third party developers to such an extent that the launch line-up consisted of only a handful of titles. Gabe Newell of Valve Software said that, “The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think it's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted.”

Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii can be described as the underdog going into the Game Console Wars.  Initially, both Sony and Microsoft felt that it was not a direct competitor.  Their machines targeted hard-core gamers, who are interested in the most realistic gaming experience, the best sound, and greatest speed.  The Wii was considered more of toy targeted towards younger gamers. It turned out that the Wii was a more direct competitor than anticipated.

Three thing that helped to shape the brand perceptions consumers have about the Wii were:

• Media Stardom. The Nintendo Wii rapidly ascended to become a pop-cultural icon.  From the beginning, the Wii was a media darling, earning free coverage in editorials, radio station contests, and television shows - including being prominently featured in episodes of South Park and The Colbert Report, as well as being given away to every audience member on an episode of Dr. Phil.

• Strapgate. In a public relations coup d’etat, Nintendo managed to turn a potentially damaging quality issue into a resounding brand victory. Within a week of the Wii’s launch, reports began to surface about Wiimotes slipping out of gamers’ hands and the security straps breaking. Nintendo responded promptly and decisively, announcing an investigation and voluntary recall of the straps. What could have turned into a significant issue managed to help solidify the Nintendo brand in the eyes of consumers.
• Broad Demographic Appeal. Nintendo's NES gaming console was an 80's icon and many people that were kids playing their NES console in the 80's are now in their 30's and want to relive the fun of their youth. In a piece on 1up.com, Nintendo's Senior VP of Marketing, George Harrison, cites a 2006 survey by the Entertainment Software Association revealed that 25 percent of all gamers are 50 or older. Of the three next-generation game consoles, only the Wii has been positioned to really target such emerging market segments.

If you are interested in reading the full report, click here to download it as a PDF.

If you would like access to the ImpactWatch demo set up to track this issue, click here to request a username and password.

In the most recent volume of Communique Magazine , TBG’s Gary Bivings authored a featured article. “Watching the Web” is a great piece about how PR and marketing techniques are changing to incorporate the monitoring of various new forms of media, primarily the Web. The article cites several examples of how the Web has affected PR and customer involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, and discusses how content tracking platforms can be an effective addition to any PR firms strategy (this includes our very own ImpactWatch !).

Among other issues, Gary listed the Top Seven Online Media Monitoring Practices in his article:

1. Get involved sooner rather than later
2. Implement a platform that will track online media for you
3. Categorize online activities of target markets/information seekers–blogging, message board posting, etc.
4. Make a list of the top sites to monitor per public/target audience
5. Track site statistics (eg, how often the site is visited)
6. Track bias of various sites with regard to your product
7. Decide how you will respond to the circulation of negative information about your product

You can read the article in its entirety here.