A few months back Edelman Public Relations and the blog search engine Technorati announced a partnership. The gist of it seems to be that Edelman gave Techorati some funding to fast track the expansion of Technorati into other countries.

Due to Edelman’s recent troubles, some folks are raising questions about the propriety of the deal.

Me? I’d prefer that a search engine I use not take money from a PR firm in the business of molding public opinion (note that this comes from someone who does interactive PR). People love Google because they trust it and it works. They trust that the results don’t contain any human bias.

By cutting this deal, Technorati opens itself up to criticism that they are tweaking their results to help Edelman and its clients. It rasies questions I wouldn’t want raised if I was Technorati.

What do you think?

We've just published the second in a series of reports on media favorability in the Connecticut Senate race. The race isn't nearly as close as it was a couple of months ago, but come election day surprises are always plentiful! Even so, as a niche case study in media favorability on a major Senate race, we think it's probably one of only a handful out there. We used our ImpactWatch(TM) web platform to generate this report — those interested can obtain access to a demo showing the nuts and bolts of the system here.

Key findings in our second Connecticut Senate race report covering the period from October 1, 2006 to November 5, 2006:

• Campaign Tactics, a category we created for articles about overall strategies employed by the candidates, particularly advertising strategies, was the most written about subject with 18% of all articles.
• The subject most written about in the last reporting period, the war in Iraq, was written about in 16% of the articles in this reporting period.
• Overall, coverage for both Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman was predominantly negative at 47 and 48% respectively.
• Local Connecticut publications favored Ned Lamont in the Campaign Tactics and Iraq War subject categories much moreso than national publications which tended to slightly favor Joe Lieberman.
• Poll results seem to directly affect the overall positive or negative media coverage of a particular candidate in a very significant manner.

To view the full report click here. We blogged about our previous report here.

The following graphs illustrate some of the trends in coverage available within the full report.

Lieberman Favorability Breakdown: 

Lamont Favorability Breakdown:

Lamont vs. Liberman Average Favorability: 

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. 

With the recent news that the Iranian government has decided to limit ADSL bandwidth above 128 kbps for all ISPs (BoingBoing reported it before Reuters) without giving a reason, it makes sense that this is an opportune time to take stock of state-mandated Internet regulation (including content filtering and surveillance) schemes around the world.

We've done a post before on the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an organization created through the collective efforts of the various Internet research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. The main mission of this group is to examine the phenomenon of state control over the Internet (filtering and blocking content, etc.) in various countries. The center has published a number of research papers on their site that are devoted to studying the anatomy and pervasiveness of state-sponsored filtering and information-control initiatives around the world. Case studies concerning content filtering and surveillance are currently available for the following countries:

• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Tunisia
• Burma
• Singapore
• Iran
• China
• Bahrain
• United Arab Emirates
• Saudi Arabia

In addition to case studies and other interesting publications, ONI also provides an interactive map that not only illustrates the state of the Internet in various countries, but also briefs the user on the level of filtering in the country, the way filtering technology is used, the state of the media environment and examples of sites that have been either blocked or filtered. (more…)

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. 

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 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.

I'm a little late to this party, but last week Pronet Advertising put together a list of 10 Things You Should be Monitoring.  Jeremiah Owyang added numbers 11-17 and Joseph Jaffe added numbers 18-23.  Shel Holtz even set up a page of the New PR Wiki where people could collaboratively add to the list.  I figured I'd add to the list based on my experience monitoring through our ImpactWatch platform.  Note that my contributions are mostly specifics building on some of the concepts others discussed.

(24) Search Term Volume.  Track how many people are searching for keywords that impact your company and watch how it changes over time.  This can be done using tools like Google Trends or through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing accounts.

(25) Search Term Rank.  See how high your company appears for key search phrases.  Obviously related to #24.

(26) Relevant Wikipedia Entries.  See how relevant Wikipedia entries are evolving over time.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for entries so that the changes come to you.  If you decide to edit or complain, be transparent about it.

(27) Third Party Influencers.  For some, it is important to know everything certain individuals/institutions say about your industry as a whole.  For publicly traded companies, that might be financial analysts covering your industry.  For technology companies, this might be Walt Mossberg or Michael Arrington.  For others, this might include thinks tanks or trade associations.  Figure out who they are and read what they are saying.

(28) Key Stakeholders.  Employees were mentioned in the original list.  For some companies it might also be useful to track coverage of partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

(29) Press Release and/or Blog Post Pickups.  Many large companies seemingly produce a press release a day.  The effectiveness of these releases at actually generating press should be tracked so you can see if they are worth the time/effort.  Same applies for blog posts, if your company has a blog.

Note that I don't think every company should track every item I've listed above (or every item on the full list).  Some of the items I've added are only really relevant for specific industries.  But I think the cumulative list that has been developed could serve as a great starter kit for those implementing a monitoring program.

Splogs are to blogs as spam is to emails.  It's a scam, a growing problem on the Internet, and splogs are threatening to pollute the blogosphere.  They seriously challenge efforts to monitor real conversations in the blogosphere.

There's a very good article in the September 2006 issue of Wired (in print, not yet online) by Charles Mann about the increasing menace posed by Splogs. Here are a few highlights for your enjoyment or disgust, depending on your perspective:

• Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to research by Tim Finin at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• He also found that splogs account for about 3/4(!) of the pings (or links telling the network that a blog has been updated) from English-laugage blogs
• David Sifry of Technorati.com acknowledes that spam is doubling every six months
• In Decemeber 2005, Blogger.com, the blog hosting site, was home to more than 100,000 sploggers (those who splog), according to Mitesh Vasa, a splog researcher
• Vasa also found 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger to be inactive, fertile ground for sploggers — and also good evidence of the overbound hype as to the size of the blogosphere
• Examples of splog sites include debts.com, lasvegasvacations.com and photography.com (worth a visit, but watch out, each time you click on a link, you're helping the sploggers to make money)
• 9 out of 10 comments on blogs are spam, according to investigations by the founders of WordPress, the software that powers this blog

Splogs are here to stay.  There's too much money to be made, especially since hyperlinks are now a form of currency.  Everyone, who should be, is alarmed and looking for solutions.  So far the solutions aren't that pretty; they inevitably take away the interactivity and openess of Web 2.0.  Quoting Mann from the artilce's final paragragh:

"Asked what impact he thinks splogging will have on the future of the Web, Some Title (a prominent splog) creator Goggins pauses.  'I'm just making my living,' he says. 'I guess I don't think about that kind of thing very much.'"

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!

I exchanged a few emails with Mark Glaser from Mediashift a while back when he put together a story on our campaign study. One of the questions he asked is how I advise candidates and campaigns who are thinking about blogging. It’s a question I’m asked pretty often and something I address in the pitches I put together. So here is my somewhat convoluted answer.

First off, I’m a big believer in political blogging. Frankly, most campaign websites are dreadfully boring and don’t give supporters a reason to visit more than once. They consist of brochure content and press releases and volunteer forms and bios and contribution pages. And that’s really it. They cover the basics and don’t really establish a real relationship between the candidate and his/her supporters. In my opinion that is the entire point of a campaign website. Blogs are a great way to forge this kind of relationship. I believe that if you truly engage supporters in your campaign, they will be more likely to give you money, perform actions on your behalf and volunteer for your campaign offline. Telling a supporter to give you money or write a letter without context doesn’t cut it - you’ve got to give them a compelling reason to do so. Blogs have a role to play here.

I also believe that most campaign blogs are horrible. They consist of recycled press releases and op eds that read like they’ve been reviewed by an army of lawyers. For a blog to really be successful, it needs some personality. It has to read like it’s been written by real, live, living, breathing human beings. This is harder to do than it sounds. It is against everything candidates and campaigns have been taught about staying on message. It is counter to the lessons they’ve been taught by direct mail and TV and radio advertising.

Ultimately, it’s better to have no blog than a really bad one. People see through this stuff.

So, after all that throat clearing, here are the questions I think campaigns should contemplate when they think about whether they should blog.

(more…)

According to a recent New York Times article, “Death by a Thousand Blogs“, there are now some four million blogs in China, representing about 4% of some 100 million Chinese Internet users.

This is remarkable, given the high degree of Web censoring that occurs in China today. Although China claims that its web regulation is no more restrictive than that of the US or Great Britain, the reality is much different. According to BBC News, the websites of news providers such as the New York Times or BBC, as well as human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are inaccessible from computers in China. Major Internet service providers (ISPs) throughout China required by law to monitor their websites and to control and erase “dangerous” or “subversive” content. However, judging from the blocking of a variety of websites that have nothing to do with “dangerous” content, it is clear that a much wider policy of censorship is occurring. According to the New York Times, it seems that blogs may be a way for Chinese citizens to escape such censorship.

Author Nicholas Kristof wrote that the “Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of ‘nei jin wai song’ -cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open”.

Kristof notes one Chinese journalist in particular that has had success in the blogosphere- Li Xinde, who writes about official wrongdoing on his personal website.

This is not to say that bloggers in China are free from punishment. Prison still remains a major threat to free-speakers in China, forcing bloggers like Li Xinde to flee from authorities in order to avoid serving jail time.

Despite the high risks of punishment, Chinese citizens are aware of the massive size of the Internet, and appear confident that there just are not enough police to control all website content in China.

Perhaps blogs may be the key to breaking down the “Great Firewall of China”.

“Blogger Jeff Jarvis single handedly brought down Dell! He hurt their stock price! He hurt their reputation! Thus, buy our services! Blog monitoring, blogger relations, blog, blog, blog! Do it now or it will happen to you!”

The pitches are probably more refined than that. But in reading PR blogs, it’s clear that the Dell Hell situation has become a go to case study for PR firms pitching blogger relations programs. I’ll bet it works, too. It’s an easy argument to make.

Backing up, in July of 2005 Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine bought a lemon from Dell. He paid a premium for a four year in-home service plan and Dell refused to live up to their pomise. They refused to come to his house and fix his computer, which is what he paid for them to do. Jarvis got angry and started complaining about it. Other bloggers came forward with similar problems and the blogosphere engaged in open warfare against Dell. You can read Jarvis’ R-rated original posts here and a great case study on the situation here.

You know what though, the “blogs brought down Dell” argument rings false to me. The fact is, Jarvis only resorted to blog complaints after being told to buzz off by Dell customer service personnel over the phone. I can guarantee you he wasn’t the first customer this happenned to. I would also guarantee that Dell was well aware that customers weren’t happy about the in home service plan (and problems with their computers) long before Jarvis started his blogging crusade. Customer service folks record phone complaints religiously. Dell knew what they were doing. They knew they were cutting costs at the expense of customer satisfaction.

(more…)

I was catching up on my feed reading and noticed posts on Techcrunch and Micropersuasion about Google’s new buzz tracking product, Google Trends. According to Google:

“Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph.”

Basically, Google Trends is a souped up version of the trending tools that have been in place for awhile on blog search engines like IceRocket and Blogpulse. The advantage Google Trends has over those products is that it gets to use Google’s own, much more robust data set (much greater search volume, ability to tie to news articles, etc.) and piggy back on the fantastic graphs that were developed for Google Finance. Google Trends is an interesting product, but I would offer a few notes of caution as folks begin hyping the tool:

(more…)

The latest Beta version of Internet 7 was released a few days ago and the reaction of the blogosphere has been mixed. Based on what I’ve read, my guess would be that the the reviews are probably 20% positive, 60% middling and 30% negative. You know what though, it doesn’t matter all that much.

The blogosphere isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t representative of typical consumers. Bloggers tend to own Macs and use alternative browsers like Firefox at much higher percentages than typical Internet users. And I’d speculate that the people who have downloaded IE 7 and written reviews at this early date are mostly Internet professionals who use Firefox and other alternative browsers more heavily than even bloggers. IE 7 is playing to an extremely tough crowd at this point. The browser is being judged by some of IE’s harshest critics.

So how do you track the reaction of the blogosphere to the release? I’d avoid the kind of good/bad approach I took in the opening paragraph. As mentioned, it just doesn’t matter that much. In this case, the conclusion a reviewer reaches is far less important than the details of what they have to say (what specifically do the like and not like). It’s sort of like playing for a coach like Bobby Knight. The fact that he calls you stupid and lazy doesn’t matter - he’s always going to call you are stupid and lazy. What’s important is what you did in this particular instance to make him reach that conclusion.