ImpactWatch

Recently one of our power user customers asked us how to create a custom list of articles for printing and was amazed at how easy it was and how much time it saved. We call that a Clip Sheet and here’s how you make one in ImpactWatch.

Once you’ve logged in to ImpactWatch, go to the News section. You’re probably aware that in the News section you can search for specific news articles you’re interested in. Once you’ve completed a search you’ll see all the resulting articles. From there you want to click on the “Choose” menu and select “Create Clip Sheet.”

You’ll then be taken to a page with a list of the articles that resulted from your search. You can either choose to select all of them or refine your list even more and check off individual articles you’d like to include in your Clip Sheet.

Choose whether you want the Clip Sheet created in Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word format and then just click the Create Clip Sheet button. Your final Clip Sheet will have a summary table of contents listing all of your articles at the top, which is followed by the full copy of each article.

If you don’t already use ImpactWatch and would like to give it a try you can always sign up for a free five day account on our live demo site.

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.

A while back we had a post on the Bivings Report, now cross posted here, about the RSS features built in to ImpactWatch. ImpactWatch already has filtered, categorized, and rated news and blogs about the information your company is concerned about. That’s an extremely valuable feed of information right there. But what if you’re only concerned about your department or even a specific product or issue. All you have to do is use ImpactWatch to do a search and it will build you a link to a custom RSS feed of that search.

In addition to this being one of the most powerful features of ImpactWatch it still seems to be one of the least used. I bet a lot of the reason for that ImpactWatch is password protected and most of the mainstream news readers don’t support password protected feeds. The reason I bring this up is that as of yesterday, NewsGator, one of the leaders is RSS news readers has updated and released their client products for free.

I now have FeedDemon, the standalone windows client installed and I am trying NewsGator Online, the web based newsreader. Here’s a screenshot from FeedDemon of an ImpactWatch news feed from our demo site.

Adding the ImpactWatch password protected feed was a snap. It has a username and password box ready for you to enter when you create the feed. Plus one of the best features is that the FeedDemon on my computer and the NewsGator Online are synchronized with each other. When I go home tonight and install FeedDemon on my home computer I will see all of my subscriptions the same way as I do on my work computer or the web.

On December 13^th 2007 Senator George Mitchell released the now infamous Mitchell Report detailing his investigation into performance-enhancing substances in Major League Baseball. We decided it might be interesting to use ImpactWatch, our media-monitoring dashboard, to track the ensuing coverage from mainstream media and blogs.

Since we began tracking, ImpactWatch has collected 23,652 news stories and 1,706 blog posts relating to the Mitchell Report. That’s a significant amount of news. In comparison, during the same time frame one of our biggest corporate ImpactWatch customer had 15,554 news stories and that is a technical firm with all of the product reviews and stories during the Christmas shopping season and leading up to this weeks Consumer Electronic Show.

The big story has turned out to be the accusation and fallout regarding Roger Clemens’ use of illegal substances.

It stands to reason that a seven time Cy Young award winner is getting most of the attention. 15,730 of the stories mention his name, which is right at two thirds. One of the reasons for this has been Clemens’ activities following the release of the Report.

• He immediately issued a denial of the accusations via his lawyers resulting in 2571 stories.
• On December 23^rd Clemens posted a video denial on his website and YouTube which was picked up in the media 524 times.
• Last night Clemens was on 60 Minutes, again denying the accusations (3050 articles mentioning Mike Wallace) and all but calling former Yankee trainer Brian McNamee a liar.
• The fact that former Yankees manager Joe Torre won’t take sides between Clemens and McNamee (1043 stories) could be telling to some, but Clemens says he is willing to take a lie detector test to help clear his name (904 articles) and today announced he is suing McNamee for defamation as well (444 articles so far.)

This kind of information is just he tip of the iceberg of how your organization might use ImpactWatch to track corporate coverage, media events, or any issue you may be concerned with. Plus adding on our rating team, offering expert human-reviewed bias rating, and you can truly dive down into the meaning of your media coverage.