ImpactWatch

One of the benefits of the ImpactWatch service is that it archives all of the tagged information about your corporate news articles. We previously talked about how to create a clip sheet of your search, but let’s take a step back and look at how to actually do the search in the ImpactWatch News Center.

On the right hand menu of ImpactWatch you’ll see an option labeled “News.” When you click this option you will be presented with a page that has multiple search filters depending on how your news is being analyzed.

When we first set up an ImpactWatch for a client we help them determine the best way to tag and categorize all of the news we will be monitoring. This is an important step in both the setup process and in ongoing adjustments to the monitoring, but is easily customizable in ImpactWatch. You can imagine when you are not only monitoring your own news but that of your closest five competitors that the volume can get overwhelming without proper analysis and attribute tagging.

The search filters available in the News Center are the same as these attributes and tone ratings assigned by the analysts. You can choose the date range you want to search and, as with most search engines, one of the most powerful features is the “keyword” field. Any of the filters can be combined with the keyword field to further narrow down the topic, or help you find a specific article you are looking for.

One thing to consider is that if there is a large number of matches to the keyword field, ImpactWatch may consider that a common word and not use it in the search. This is used to filter out common words such as “the” or “and” in a search. It often happens, however, that because your ImpactWatch is set up to collect news on specific topics to begin with, that it may seem like a common word even though it’s not.

A perfect example of this was the ImpactWatch we set up to monitor news on the Mitchell Report back when it was released in December. If I do a search on the word mitchell, ImpactWatch considers it a common word because of the sheer number of articles that match.

The solution is to put the word in quotation marks. A search for “mitchell” brings up the correct number of articles.

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 other 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.

Here at The Bivings Group we are in upgrading our workstations to MS Office 2007 including Outlook 2007. There are quite a few differences from the previous version of Outlook I was using, but one big difference that ImpactWatch users should be aware of is the way it handles images in emails and the default “Junk E-Mail” settings.

By default, Outlook 2007 will block images in HTML emails. So if you are receiving your Daily Email Alert from ImpactWatch and are used to seeing the nice formatting with links and logos, these images will probably not be displayed when you upgrade, you’ll just see blank boxes where they used to be. Fortunately, if you find this happening to your Daily Email Alert there is quick fix.

Select one of the Daily Email Alerts you’ve received in Outlook 2007, then choose the “Actions Menu,” go to the “Junk E-mail” menu and then choose “Add Sender to Safe Senders List.”

Once this is done the ImpactWatch Daily Email Alert will be considered safe and will show all of its images and arrive in to your Inbox normally.

For as long as I can remember, USA Today has compiled a list of the best Super Bowl ads based on a focus group testing process they call the Ad Meter.  This year is no different and you can check out this year’s breakdown here. 

This year the Viral Video Chart website provides us with a way to judge which ads and Super Bowl moments are creating the most online buzz the day after.  The site analyzed the most popular Super Bowl videos on the various video sharing sites (YouTube, Daily Motion, etc.) and has produced a list of the twenty most popular.  The list mostly consists of commercials, although Jordin Sparks singing the national anthem and Tom Petty’s halftime performance also made the cut. 

So cutting to the chase, what was the most popular moment?  A Pepsi commercial starring Justin Timberlake.