ImpactWatch

It seems that everyday I see a new catchphrase coined by a social media “expert” to describe social media, hoping the concept will set the blogosphere ablaze with link endorsements and fleeting exposure on Techmeme. Amid the clutter, converting metrics such as blog views, Facebook buzz, Tweets, and del.icio.us plugs to a usable, actual value of return-on-investment (ROI) in dollars seems nearly impossible — currently the holy grail of strategic internet marketing.

I’ve noticed something as analysts try to pinpoint an exact metric to measure social media and all this talk of ROI as both return on investment and return on influence. The derivative (change over time) has taken a backburner to comparitive measurement. I’m a proponent of using this measurement, and I think it’s currently underrated and arguably more, or at least equally important, as comparitive analysis in social media.

Here’s my short list of ways to use the power of the derivative in social media campaigns (a friendly reminder, in case you’ve been distracted):

1. Focus on change over time for your brand. Sure, it’s nice to know how your competitors are doing with their online presences and how you stack up comparitively. However, unlike traditional print media, there are both logical and logistical fallacies that don’t always make this an easy task. As Maggie Fox from the Social Media Group points out, good metric aggregation for social media is a time-consuming and manual process (read: expensive). As my boss recently pointed out in an e-mail, in terms of actionable PR work in social media it is much more important to know where you stand and how to improve than where your competitors are: in social media, there are no press release standards, and there is no official staging ground for retorts. I don’t want to sound like a self-help book, but focus on you.
2. Keep in mind, “buzz”, by nature, is merely a rate. Internet buzz itself is a phrase coined to describe lots of conversations in a small amount of time. By identifying time spans that had the highest rate of change, you can reflect upon successes (or disasters) and find what works best for your specific brand. Comparing the rate of change for different campaigns can give you a metric as to what worked better — for your brand. Not all methods work similarly.
3. The double derivative can affect timing. Think real hard back to high school physics… the double derivative represents acceleration. When applied to aggregated data about social media, it is easy to tell whether the cycle of buzz is coming or going. Keeping up the momentum on a social media campaign is difficult, and one of the most common downfalls of an otherwise great campaign can be timing. The double derivative (acceleration) can help with increasing, or at least maintaining, positive headway for your social media campaign. Knowing when to play your cards is key to success. The gadget/computer manufacturers have their “product-leaks” to blogs down to a science.
4. The derivative of self boils down to constant self-comparison. It’s a tangent from point #1, but I cannot stress how much I believe that in social media, self-contained metrics are vital to a strong social media strategy. Allocate resources to where it really matters, and I think pushing said resources into creating change for your brand is the top priority. Self-comparison through time gives real results with actionable intelligence.

Since its launch in 1999, our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform has been focused on serving the enterprise market.  The product has been aimed at organizations that receive a high volume of coverage from both traditional and online media, require a large number of employees to access the data ImpactWatch collects and need high-end  reporting and analysis of coverage.  Due to its robust feature set and flexibility, ImpactWatch remains a great solution for these types of enterprise clients.

But in showing ImpactWatch over the years, I’ve run into a lot of people who love ImpactWatch’s interface and base tool set, but who don’t need all of the advanced features we’ve built into ImpactWatch over the years. They were looking for an elegant and affordable way to manage and report out on their media coverage as opposed to an enterprise level media tracking platform.

In an effort to provide these folks with a product they can use, we are in the process of rolling out two new ImpactWatch product lines that will enable the IW to serve the needs of organizations of all sizes.  Specifically:

1. ImpactWatch Basic - Aimed at groups that get a limited amount of coverage (approximately 1-50 clips a day) and only need for a handful of people to access data.
2. ImpactWatch Professional - For organizations with a higher volume of coverage (50-100 clips a day) and who need a few dozen people to access the system.
3. ImpactWatch Enterprise - This is our current system, which is aimed at organizations with a high volume of daily coverage (100+ clips), a large number of users and that need access to some of ImpactWatch’s high end reporting features.

I know this is vague, but we are in the process of a big development push and aren’t ready to talk about all the details yet.  Check the ImpactWatch blog for updates on our progress and look for us to roll out the new product lines later in the summer.

We’re excited.

An eye-opening post by Jeremiah Owyang details the five questions that he uses to summarize business’ questions about new social media.  He claims that these questions not only help his team to be able to help the business, but also helps them to determine the level of sophistication present at the company.While his answers are detailed and thorough, I believe that they lack the straightforwardness of which I am a fan.  Below are his five questions with my own style of answers:

What is Social Media?

Social Media encompasses many different types of communication that were once thought of as silly and amateurish.  Blogging, online video, and discussion forums are three examples of this now-powerful public relations world.

Why does it matter?

More companies are adopting these various tools in order to help their businesses.  At first, it was only the savviest of the communications gurus that were using them, but now, most major companies have started implementation.  To be without social media knowledge, is to be without power.

What does it mean to my business?

Measurement is important because companies like to have a plan and loathe making mistakes.  Incorporating social media and measurement into the overall package of the company means that the company is willing to take the steps to grow.  In more practical terms, it means the need for new jobs within a company as well as new forms of education on social media.  Currently, more classes and even related majors are being offered at many educational institutions.

How do I do it right?

In my opinion, there are two ways to effectively accomplish this goal.  While there is something to be said for educating current employees, there are enough already-educated individuals in the field of social media to hire new blood.  Consultants on the topic are becoming in increasingly high demand.

How do I integrate across the Enterprise?

There are many internal ways of using social media, including blogs to be read only by persons within the company.  Other ways include videoconferences, video clips of announcements, as well as more complicated procedures.

Many of the comments concerning Owyang’s blog post say that people are asking how social media procedures “make money.”  The social media procedures themselves don’t make money, but the overall appeal and professionalism of a company that integrates them is much higher.  Political candidates have already realized how social media can greatly affect their campaigns, and now other people are learning the same lesson.

Only sixteen days after my last post about our ImpactWatch demo, the media has begun drifting away from Sichuan’s earthquake in light of high-tech espionage, Paul Hamm’s broken hand, and a record-breaking year for track and field. With the Olympic trials season in full swing, positive coverage on athletes and the games itself is steadily rising. I created an issues breakdown visualization using ImpactWatch, which reveals that just as quickly as the media surrounding the earthquake sprang up, most of it seems to be over:

While the stories surrounding the earthquake have subsided quicker than I had anticipated, it certainly set the stage for interesting coverage of the 2008 Olympic season. Stay alert, more updates to come.

In the last post, I did a micro-study of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads and the way they are being portrayed in the realm of YouTube. In addition to analyzing the “views” count on the website, I adjusted the quantity by minutes to give a better representation of the exposure YouTube is actually giving the Kinoki brand.

This time around, I will examine the user feedback to the videos that were part of the study. If I had been the one who had actually posted these videos, I would be able to utilize YouTube Insight, a powerful built-in tool that turns an ordinary YouTube video into something that resembles an online focus group (there will be more on this tool in the future). Seeing as how I am not interested in posting my own videos about Kinoki Detox Foot Pads, I will have to rely on the inexact method of comment analysis and “feel it out”.

First, a red flag. On the positive videos, there were only a couple of comments that were all positive and framed as customer testimonials reiterating their “refreshing feelings” and how using them had changed the users’ lifestyles for the better. After three or four comments, the commenting feature had been disabled, thereby locking in a few positive comments and keeping naysayers from commenting on the wall. That, and the videos themselves were infomercials in the guise of “health update” news reports. Rather suspect if you ask me.
On the videos that allowed commenting, the tone was overwhelmingly negative. A couple of comments would be users who have actually used the product and would claim that the Kinoki Detox Foot Pads actually made them feel better, to which users would instantly become outraged and prove them wrong with their elite high school chemistry knowledge.

In review, the coverage of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads on YouTube is quite negative, both in videos and commentary. If an undecided consumer were to consult YouTube to make a more informed decision, they would more than likely decide not to purchase these foot pads — maybe changing your diet is the way to go after all. I still swear by my twice-daily regiments of snake oil.

According to Alexa’s listing of most visited websites (sorted by country), YouTube is ranked as #4 in the United States, #6 in the United Kingdom, #4 in Japan, #5 in South Korea and #2 in Germany. It has the power to launch overnight public-relations Cinderella stories such as the Blendtec miracle (yes already, it will blend) as well as broadcast to millions a reputation-killing moment even more swiftly. These occurrences, once posted to YouTube, are available indefinitely.

How does one quantify the amount of successful or damaging exposure YouTube is causing them? Here are some measurements of a micro-case study crafted specifically for this blog post: an analysis of YouTube exposure of the television infomercial product, Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. Note: The Bivings Group and the ImpactWatch service are in no way affiliated with Kinoki™ Detox Food Pads.

I manually aggregated data by watching YouTube videos related to the “miraculous detox system”. You can see the raw data that I collected here in an excel spreadsheet. Using the resulting data, I created some visualizations within ImpactWatch:

The first graph shows a raw view of the types of videos people watch related to the Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. This is strictly measured in views, which is valid because YouTube only counts views once from each unique IP address, and only if an overwhelmingly large portion of the video was viewed. However, this unit of measurement is often misleading and does not give an accurate representation of the actual exposure Kinoki foot pads have received. That’s where a little spreadsheet manipulation and the second graph comes into play.

In the second graph, a new unit was analyzed. Taking the number of views for each video and multiplying them by their length in minutes, an adjusted unit that more accurately represents total “exposure” was created. This graph provides a much better metric for gauging the float-or-sink status of the product. Although in both graphs negative exposure was dominating (I wonder why?), the adjusted quantity of “YouTube minutes” shows that it wasn’t as bad as just a raw views count might have initially demonstrated.

In the next part of this two-part case study, comments for the videos and other forms of responses will be analyzed.

As I have suggested in a previous post, the metrics for measuring websites are greatly out-of-date.  Click-thru rates and unique visitor counts are so primitive that they are almost quaint.  Avinash Kaushik not only agrees with my position, but he also aggressively accuses the ‘hippos’ of the business world as the ones at fault for still using these outdated metrics.  ‘Hippo’ represents the “highest paid person’s opinions,” and he believes that these six-figure gurus are disconnected with what is actually important in the evaluation of a website.

Kaushik is the newly crowned “analytics evangelist” at Google (seriously, that’s his actual job title…if only we could all sound so grand), and he is taking steps to teach the members of the Google team how they should be measuring website success.  Kaushik employs the word “sucks” frequently when he talks about the traditional metrics used for measuring online marketing.  He’s even went so far as to say that online marketing sucks as well, and likened it to a “faith-based initiative.”

Kaushik wants website owners to stop looking at the ‘what’ of numbers, and to start looking at the ‘why’ of the users.  He implores that website creators use free online surveys such as ones offered by Iperceptions.com to measure exactly why the users are visiting the site.  The company touts that it can help answer the following questions:

• How satisfied are my visitors?
• What are my visitors at my website to do?
• Are they completing what they set out to do?
• If not, why not?
• If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

Surveys like this can aid website designers in perfecting their creations to better suit the masses.  Let’s face it; the [online] world would be a lot better place with fewer poorly designed sites.

Kaushik also takes the time to remember which company signs his paychecks and praises Google Analytics.  He states, “Google is giving the same tools that, only prior to Google, you had to get at a big advertising agency or digital firm for free.”

I agree that Google Analytics is a decent program, but this article from Six Revisions highlights some other excellent (and free) analytics tools for websites.

Hopefully, as metrics used for analysis and evaluation change, so will the quality of corporate websites.

[The author thanks you for being a ‘unique visitor’ to this blog post]

Popular website About.com recently ranked Epinions.com 4^th place in the Top Ten Most Useful Websites of 2008.  At the site, visitors can read reviews about a variety of items to help them decide on a purchase or they can join for free and begin writing reviews that may earn them money and recognition, according to the site’s FAQs.

Epinions has been around since 1999 (which nearly seems like the dawn of the Internet), and was recently acquired by Ebay in 2005.  Improvements to the site over the course of time have included message boards that act as forums for users to discuss general product topics and giveaways/sweepstakes for active users.

Admittedly, I had never used this “useful” new media outlet before researching for this blog post.  Some extensive delving into the site led to some interesting conclusions about why it is considered so valuable.

• It lists products by every conceivable category.  Movies can be listed as anything from “Dinosaur Movie” to “Punk Rock Movie”, so you know what you are getting.
• Written opinions conclude with a “pro” and “con” section as well as The Bottom Line, which makes surfing through numerous reviews much quicker.
• Reviews are rated by their ‘helpfulness’.
• There is a sense of maturity among the raters; this is not a kid’s website.
• Slight competitiveness between users is encouraged as reviews by Top Reviewers and Category Leads are given preferential placement at or near the top of each review list.
• The site is easy on the eyes for prolonged reading periods, and the smiley faces are…dare I say it…cute.

Though there is some worry that advertorials will pop up from time to time, the creators of the site insist that isn’t a worry. With this lack of pesky company intervention and an organized and pretty site, it’s no wonder that Epinions has risen among the ranks.  It can almost be said that all review sites have, in one way or another, copied the successful design of this review site.

Companies would be smart to frequently check Epinions for reviews on their latest products.  See who are the Top Reviewers in the category, and if people are tracking your merchandise.  It’s a great indicator of how the consumer base as a whole is viewing your company.