ImpactWatch Blog

I have a whole media monitoring routine that I go through every day. Media analysis is what we do and I even use our product, ImpactWatch, to do it. I see who has mentioned us on Twitter, who is talking media tracking on blogs, what new articles have been published about our competitors or industry. I try to track and read every single relevant post, tweet or update.

I read all this stuff to learn about advances in technology, to steal ideas (kidding… sort of) and because we have to. We are an internet company and our entire universe is online. Our product is online. Our media coverage is online. Our customers are online.

Media monitoring companies also look pretty incompetent when they miss their own mentions.

But not every company needs this level of media tracking. Some don’t need any at all.

This morning, while reading through industry blogs, I came across a post about a tweet by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. He stopped by The Burger Grill but they didn’t have Swiss cheese for his burger. Understandably peeved, he tweeted it.

Now, the point of the blog post I was reading is that The Burger Grill is in big trouble if they don’t get a handle on this negative online publicity. Who would even go to a burger place that doesn’t have Swiss cheese?*

Well, probably the 99.9% of Americans that don’t use Twitter. The fact is that for a small, offline business the potential damage from a few negative online comments is minimal. The vast majority of their customers are local, many of them not active in social media and none of them likely to happen upon a few random comments about this brand. If The Burger Grill had an issue severe enough to affect business – hideous décor, atrocious food or filthy bathrooms – customers would likely start mentioning it in person.

Do I think The Burger Grill could benefit from an online presence? Certainly they could:

-promote their business, increasing brand awareness.
-engage customers, bringing online contacts into their real-world restaurant.
-research their industry, reading comments about what people want/expect from a restaurant experience.
-develop an online mailing list of customers for promotions.
-provide online info, menu, specials (I personally love an online menu).

I encourage every company to take advantage of the web and social media to expand their business. And part of that is brand monitoring. But I’m also tired of the alarmist social media proponents insisting that this is critical for every company, and that if you’re going to do it, you have to do it all.

Media monitoring, measurement and engagement takes time and that means it costs money. Many small and/or offline businesses would find that the time involved to read coverage, to find someone who understands how to set up monitoring, to buy a computer (?) wouldn’t be worth it to address customer concerns that are few and far between. For them, focusing on a quality product and solid customer service is not only a more critical use of their time, it also serves to reduce or eliminate the very concerns they would be trying to monitor.

And, my dear Chicken Littles, when these companies do perceive a need to join the internet age, they will start with a program that fits their business – presence where their customers are, metrics that track what matters to their business, according to their needs and resources.

Zappos.com vs The Burger Grill perfectly highlights the two ends of the brand monitoring spectrum. Most other companies will fall somewhere between the two and must determine the right media tracking program for their business. I’ll be posting some tutorials that will hopefully help them out with that.

*The general availability of Swiss cheese at The Burger Grill remains unconfirmed. This may have been a temporary shortage.

For more cheesy goodness, follow hannah on twitter.

TweetLater is a twitter developer that offers keyword email alerts, tweet scheduling, auto-follow and auto-DM features. I’ve been using FutureTweet to schedule tweets and Splitweet to manage multiple accounts, so I was interested to hear that TL had integrated these functions into their TweetLater Professional version.

They have created a customizable dashboard called TweetCockpit, which displays timelines, replies, DMs and keywords for multiple twitter accounts. This was actually my least favorite part of the TLP trial.

The TweetCockpit display consists of 2 vertical panes – Pane A includes @replies and keyword search results, while Pane B includes your timeline(s), DMs and favorites, grouped vertically. I would much rather have a separate pane for each type of feed, and probably for each keyword, á la TweetDeck.

I did like the ability to color code each Twitter profile, but I found the design to be lacking in general. I would imagine this is going to be a big point of improvement for TLP 2.0, which is already in the works.

Features of TweetLater Pro:

MANAGE MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS

* Add unlimited accounts.
* Select which parts (DMs, @replies, timeline) of which accounts you want to view.
* Separately limit feeds for each part of each account (10 DMs from @acct1, 5 tweets from @acct2)
* Color code each account (fun!)

MANAGE TWEETS

* One-click retweeting to multiple accounts.
* Forward tweets as DMs.
* One-click reply-to-all on tweet.
* 90 day online archive of tweets made.

MANAGE KEYWORDS

* Checks all of twitter, not just who you follow
* Displays in timeline pane on dashboard

SCHEDULE TWEETS

I’ve heard people claim this is pointless but it actually has several uses. First, you can publish round-the-clock, so viewers in other time zones are exposed to your tweets. You can also space your tweets out so you’re not that guy who’s on twitter for an hour a day, but manages to cram in 40 messages (oh, you know who you are).

A unique feature of TLP is that you can set a single tweet to be sent at designated intervals. Top tweeters like @guykawasaki do this to ensure that a greater number of followers see each message. This is a useful function for power users, but certainly one that should be used sparingly by the rest of us.

SCHEDULE @REPLIES AND DMs

I don’t really see the potential in scheduling these unless you are using twitter for pitching. Please feel free to leave a comment explaining it to me.

BROADCAST DMs

This can only be used for evil.

BLOG FEED/PING.FM INTEGRATION

* Send RSS content to selected profiles, or multiple feeds to a single profile.
* Unlimited twitter bots to customize/filter posts to Twitter.
* Schedule Ping.fm entries and push to other social media sites.
* Publish RSS feeds to Ping.fm.

Why I love this :)

* Free Trial
* No Auto-renewing sneakiness
* Multi-account management
* Allows action right from dashboard

Why I don’t love this :(

* Broadcast DMs
* Not-so-pretty interface
* Want more data segregation
* Think the real goodies will be in next version

TLP is free for 3 days, then $19.95 per month if you join before 3/21. The monthly price will apply as long as you keep an active account. If you join after that date (or let your subscription lapse), it will be $29.95 per month. If you’re big on the tweeting, give the free trial a shot and see if it saves you some time.

Will keep an eye out for TPL 2.0.

Follow Hannah on Twitter (please)

Jennifer Leggio of ZDNET has published the results of a survey to gauge client satisfaction with their PR firms – generally and with respect to social media programs. The majority of the respondents were in-house PR/Marketing Directors from companies with over 1k employees.

• 63% are satisfied that agency communications are “informative and timely”.
• 60% are satisfied with the quality of coverage achieved by their agency.
• Only 38% feel that pitch promises made are being kept (33% were neutral and 29% unsatisfied).
• Respondents are evenly split over whether they have had an overall positive experience with their agency.

The biggest complaint of PR clients (51% unsatisfied) is with agencies’ failure to tie PR initiatives to general business objectives, focusing instead on simply producing coverage. Jennifer points out that part of the issue may be the involvement of junior account managers who lack an understanding of basic business. A bigger issue may be the ease with which traditional media coverage can be measured and thus used to prove ROI. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Let’s look at the social media responses:

• 79% (!!!) say it is “extremely” important for an agency to understand social media strategy.
• 70% say they themselves have an adequate grasp of how social media relates to business.
• 84% would attend a social media workshop offered by their agency – but over half wouldn’t pay for it.
• Only 22% say their agency has recommended a social media program beyond specific tools (twitter, linkedin).

The survey comments also suggest that agencies might be more successful rolling social media elements into current offerings, instead of adding a social media add-on or upgrade package.

What struck me about these survey results is that clients want two things 1) a comprehensive program that goes beyond traditional PR targets and 2) a clear accounting of the success achieved by their agency.

Understandable. The complication is that often, the more successful you are at 1, the more difficult 2 becomes. Social media initiatives are a perfect example of this.

Many companies are anxious to get involved in social media, both to build a presence and to engage their customers. They want to see how their PR campaigns are translating into social media buzz, respond to customer concerns from a corporate twitter account and figure out how many sales leads resulted from a blog post. But how do you measure message penetration on Facebook? How do you track lead generation from a blog? How do you calculate the value of a retweet?*

Expanding PR programs (out of coverage-chasing and into social media) requires a new level of engagement for PR firms. To avoid the type of dissatisfaction expressed in the survey results, agencies must:

1. Be the expert. Only 37% of clients said they fully understand social media for business.
2. Be the guide. Work with clients to develop a strategic plan – who and why? Not just how.
3. Be the evaluator. What metrics will you use to measure success?

See the full survey results.

*The answer is: one client at a time.

You may have noticed something new.  Today we’re launching the redesign of the ImpactWatch website. 

Over the past several months, we have brainstormed, designed and written content for what we hope will be a milestone in IW’s life.

The idea for the site redesign came from the need for a new logo.  Last year, we attended the PDF conference in NY and used a temporary logo for all the swag that was handed out to potential clients.  We weren’t particularly happy with the temporary logo; it was hurriedly done, and it didn’t symbolize IW in our eyes.  Upon returning to the office, Eric and I set to work on a memo detailing all of our ideas for a new logo.  Our initial idea was to have an animal mascot, an owl to be specific, and you can see that vision in some of the rejected logos at the bottom of the post.

Eventually, the owl died (flew the coop?) and after some weeks of redesign, marketing meetings and discussion, we finally came to a consensus.

 The process of selecting a new symbol helped the team see that it was time for a complete marketing website remix.  The original site had been created years ago and we wanted to match our fancy new logo with a fancy new site.  And so began a whole new process of meetings, marketing strategy sessions and designer debates.

The old site was mostly narrative, with long paragraphs describing the features and benefits of IW.  People in the blogging age simply don’t read that way anymore, so the first order of business was to streamline the paragraphs into new bulleted lists and tabbed sections.  The end result is a complete overhaul of the information presented to you on every page.  It’s easier to read, easier to edit and just plain better.

Another tweak to the site was the addition of the Twitter feed on the homepage and secondary pages.  We started tweeting for our brand a couple of months ago, and love the response we’ve been getting.  I saw a great feed app on a favorite webcomic’s page , so I pitched the idea and we made it our own.  Look for that to evolve and grow over time, with the addition of some more Web 2.0 goodies.

With phase one of the site re-launch complete, we are already hard at work thinking of great ideas for phase two.  Feel free to post any comments or suggestions, but try to keep them free of owls…it’s still too soon for me.

As a bonus, browse some of the logos from the decision-making process that didn’t make the cut.  During the decision-making period, these were designed by graphics guru Teddy Taylor.  As you can see, we went through a LOT of different ideas before finally deciding on the one you see above. 

As Twitter use explodes, tracking your brand and/or issues on the platform is becoming increasingly important to companies and organizations.  Through a variety of free tools that are out there, it is possible to easily find out what people are saying.  However, no tool that I’ve seen has the metrics and collaboration layer that I’d really like to see on a tracking platform.
Here is my own personal wish list as to what I’d like to see in a Twitter tracker:

• At the most basic level, display tweets relevant to the client along with meta information about the tweet author (number of followers, frequency of updates, etc.).  I think it would also be cool to show related tweets as discussion threads to provide some context, and provide a way to sort tweets based on the authority of the author.
• I would want a way to graph trends over time as a way of seeing how my brand is doing.  Are the tweets positive or negative?  What are recurring topics that come up about my company or issue?  How is the volume of tweets changing over time?
• I’d want to be able to quickly look up which Twitter users are talking about my brand the most, and which of those users have the most authority.
• Integrated within the platform, I’d like a way to track the success/failure of my own Twitter account.  What is my follower trend?  How often am I being retweeted?

These are just my initial ideas.  What would you like to see in a Twitter tracking tool?

I’m proud to say that ImpactWatch was recently recognized for its work with Hewlett-Packard and Porter Novelli.  We have been awarded a 2009 PRSA Totem award!  We are honored that our continuing work to provide excellence in multi-media monitoring has garnered us another award, and I’m sure that it’s far from our last one.  Look for an update to this post with more details, including a link to the website as soon as the information for 2009 is added.

Reading this article by Seth Godin made me think about the role of marketing for a product or service before it’s actually created.  As he states in the final line of his entry, “If someone comes to you with a ‘great’ product that just needs some marketing, the game is probably already over.”

A recent film comes to mind when I think about this concept.  Movies in general do a lot of marketing beforehand, including toys, games, and soundtracks released well before the actual film.  Cloverfield did an especially good job of this by creating many social media outlets for the film, including memes, YouTube ads, and separate websites for fake products placed in the film (one of the fake ads is shown below). 

By the time the actual movie premiered, I felt like I was watching something that was already part of my daily life.  And this is the goal of marketing.  It made me want the product to such a high degree that I couldn’t imagine not having it.

Some would argue that you can’t market something that doesn’t exist.  That’s hogwash.  I could market something that doesn’t exist almost as easily as I could market something that does.  Using the example of Cloverfield once again, they rarely showed any actual clips from the movie.  The social media outlets contained items whose appearance in the film was under complete speculation.

I would even argue that long-term marketing might lead the product creators to fantastic ideas for things that could improve the product.  This is especially true if they listen to feedback from their Internet audience.  Comments such as “This would be great if it also washed dishes!” could lead to new ideas for the finalized product.

My advice?  Immediately start thinking about how to market your new idea as soon as you think of the new idea.  In the long haul, it’ll save you a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.  Hopefully, it’ll even make you some money!

This is a little off-topic, but I simply can’t believe that Microsoft is planning SIX versions of their upcoming operating system.  As clever as the Mojave commercials may have been, they don’t make up for the onslaught of criticism that followed the release of Vista.  Even ‘non-techie’ people knew about the horrors that consumers who purchased Vista faced; so why not focus on one or two versions of the new operating system instead?

When you look at the specs outlined for the different versions, it’s easy to imagine your local Best Buy employee telling everyday consumer after everyday consumer that they need “Home Premium” and not much else.  After all, only a fraction of computer users opt to upgrade their operating system using the ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.

I would personally prefer if Windows followed Google’s lead by focusing their attention on one or two things, improving upon what is already working correctly instead of bombarding us with new things.  Perhaps Windows 7 will be a good OS, but I only want to have to choose between Home and Business versions.

Update: Clearly, Windows read this blog post and fixed the problem, now offering only three versions.  I’m taking full credit for this.