ImpactWatch

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.

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…)