ImpactWatch Blog

Thank goodness the media monitoring industry isn’t regulated by the FDA. They would probably make companies actually back up the claims they make in their advertising.

I’ve always found it interesting, for example, that every single media monitoring service monitors the most publications in the industry. You would think by definition that only one company could hold that honor, but not so!

Who really has the most sources?

ImpactWatch. I was going to make you wait for it, but I knew you just couldn’t. Really, any platform like IW that doesn’t limit the integration of content ultimately offers the most monitored publications.

Source availability is complicated in this industry. Some companies limit source number based on your monthly plan, some on whether the publication is public, some use secret algorithms to determine which sources to search for your news.

Another issue is the timeliness of new source integration by media monitoring companies that create their own data feeds. New blogs, forums, online news sources and social media platforms can be created at any moment. How long do you have to wait to start searching them for your coverage?

We avoid most of these issues by partnering with pretty much any content provider there is. If they make the coverage digital, we can put it in your ImpactWatch. And since they are professional, dedicated feed providers, they focus on offering the widest and most up-to-date source lists available.

Leaving us to focus on what we know – making cool web-based software.

What sources do I care about?

I really should have added this to the last Media Monitoring 101 installment. But I forgot, so I’m looping back.

In addition to figuring out what publication types (print, broadcast, online, SM) you want to monitor, you should also identify your top publications.

This is usually fairly easy. You want to take a list of important outlets that are talking about you now and add to that the list that you want to have talking about you in the future. These are the sources that you will verify as being offered by your media monitoring service.

Tangent: a neat thing we do for clients with this list is divide your coverage into tiers of importance.

As an example, we have a client who gets mentioned  – just between print and online news publications  – 30,000 times per month. It would be extraordinarily costly to have humans read and analyze every single one of these mentions. But the client still wants subjective analysis on their most important coverage.

So, the ImpactWatch system divides their coverage by importance. All mentions from their top publications are routed to human analysts, while the remainder is processed and tagged using computer automation.

How do I make sure my sources are covered?

Take the list you just made. Email it to your current/potential media monitoring service. Tell them you want to know which are covered. The company should be happy to provide you with availability.

What if my sources aren’t covered?

Find out if the source offers a digital version.

No – Some niche trade publications are literally only available on paper. Not a single media monitoring company can get these for you automatically. However, some offer the option of receiving your paper copy, analyzing and digitizing it for you. If you are a highly specialized or industrial company, this might be an issue for you.

Yes – Ask the monitoring services that you are using/considering if they can add your missing publications. Often, that’s all it takes.

If you are missing many of your top publications and your monitoring firm can’t make them available, email your list out to other firms to compare offerings. This should tell you if you have a tough list or if your service just isn’t up to par.

How many sources does ImpactWatch offer?

Millions. Certainly tens of millions. Possibly hundreds of millions.

But it’s unlikely that your company will be mentioned in more than a few thousand of these, so make sure we cover the ones that you need!

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Rossen

In the process of leafing through my RSS reader seeking inspiration for a blog post, I came across some outstanding links relating to things we do here at ImpactWatch. If you haven’t checked out these articles, they are definitely worth a look.

Some URL’s relevant to your interests:

• Social media expert Mark Evans details his thoughts on the long-term effects of social media.
• A TechCrunch report on internet advertising and how its growth is outpacing television.
• Snippet on determining browser market share.
• Tips for spotting users with fake Twitter followings.

Just a quick look at Monday’s web offerings.

The mostest of the bestest…

Your Social Media Goals Drive Your ROI Analysis – Inner Architect. Gosh, this sounds so familiar…

Measure or Die: Why Communications Executives Need to Become Fluent in Web Analytics – PRNews

The ROI Metrics That Will Help Make PR Agencies Relevant Again – The Science of Listening

Measure what matters – Rethink success in a new-media world – MAD

How Do You Measure Social Media Marketing? -SinoTech Blog

A Call for Creativity in New Metrics for Liquid Media – Journal of Interactive Advertising. OK, the fatty IPR paper last week was just a warm up for this bad boy.

Making More Than a Good Impression: Moves to value-engagement metrics challenge traditional measurement criteria – AdWeek

Fire your ad agency – What They’re Saying

Social Media Marketing Industry Report – White Paper Source

PR Measurement Conference, Washington, DC June 3 – PR News.

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See Last Week’s Top Posts

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo Credit: snap®

I thought that my love for Wikipedia couldn’t get any stronger, but my romance with it has taken a drastic new turn with the introduction of WikiRank.  This new app allows users to search for Wikipedia articles and then view a 30, 60, or 90 day line graph of their popularity.  The line represents the number of views for a particular article in a day’s time.

On the front page of WikiRank, the creators have chosen what they believe is a particularly interesting comparison.  From that page, users can do their own comparisons easily.  Once the topics are selected, users can view a sample from the Wikipedia article on the topic as well as see links to various outlets such as Google, The New York Times, and Twitter.  This is a great way to figure out why articles have peaks in viewership on certain days.

The creators want users to be well aware that the numbers are for “entertainment and enlightenment” purposes only.  The log program counts all single page loads, including those from Web spiders.  The creators claim that the overall shape of the increasing and decreasing line graph is more important than the exact calculations.

The user-created charts can be embedded into anything that accepts widgets, and the charts themselves are bright and colorful.  For something that only took the creators six weeks to make, I’m happy that the first version of this seems very complete.

There are two glaring issues with the application: there’s no API (yet) and the auto-completing search functionality sometimes caused me to choose the wrong article, ending in inaccurate comparisons.  The API issue is being worked on, and maybe I’m the only one having the problem with my searches.  Check it out and let me know if you have any tips or tricks for it.

We spend a lot of time telling clients what to do with their media management programs. But just as important are the things you shouldn’t be doing.

Please DON’T:

1.    Jump Right In

Please, please don’t. Whether you’re doing reporter outreach or engaging customers, you can do a lot of damage in a little time. Start by listening and figure out how your objectives fit with the medium and the individual you are targeting.

2.    Go at it willy-nilly

Media management is ineffective when analyzed piecemeal. You need a comprehensive plan, a system to organize your results and someone/team to oversee the efforts. This is still true if you want to start with a small program and scale it over time. It is still true if you break up tasks to different departments. In order to get big picture insights, someone has to draw the big picture.

3.    Expect overnight results

Media outreach – through any channel – requires a big commitment of time and energy. You get back what you put in, so unless you spend the weeks, months and years to build real relationships*, don’t expect journalists, bloggers or customers to line up at your door.

4.    Refuse to ask for help

If you knew everything there is to know about media management, you probably wouldn’t be reading this post. Don’t wait until you’ve made a muck of things to ask for guidance. Consult your PR/Marketing resources. Ask your media monitoring firm. Hire a consultant. Do a Google search. Get some answers.

5.    Look for standardized metrics

I may have mentioned this (in every post I’ve ever written) but it’s absolutely essential for your media management program to be customized to your needs. Just because a number is important to Starbucks doesn’t mean it’s important to you.

6.    Measure, then sit back and relax

Hello? Why did you just do all of that work? Put that data into action. Don’t just measure to see what you’ve done. Measure to see what you should be doing.

7.    Try to control every mention

You can’t. Don’t try. Use negative brand mentions as an opportunity to show the stakeholder (and everyone else watching) that your brand is honest, transparent and attentive. That doesn’t mean you need to let go of the reins. You should strive to be the most relevant and comprehensive source of information about your company and products.

8.    Wait until you have a reputation crisis

You don’t want to start media management on the defensive – it makes you break a bunch of my other rules. If people are talking about you in any type of media, start now. Get some benchmarks, build a reputation, be ready to respond from a position of strength if things go awry.

Any other potential pitfalls I forgot to mention?

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*Or you could make a really sensational product, that works too.

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For more marching orders, follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo credit: flattop341

PLANNING

The most important component of using the media to further your business goals is to have a (good) plan. If you’re a bigger company with PR and Marketing peeps, ask them to do this or steal ideas from the plans they already wrote. Then skip to “How are you doing it?”. If it’s just you and a dream, read on.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

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Mission Statement

You should write a mission statement. I know it’s old school and all, but we need to get organized. Want to double the size of your business? Build a reputation as the warmest & fuzziest company in the world? Write down what your media program should be working towards.

Once you have a mission for your program, you have to figure out what objectives will fulfill your mission. Ask yourself – What do I want the end results of my media program to be? What business results are worth the work? Then think about ways to achieve each of those results.

Objectives, Strategies and Initiatives

I have made an example list below. These are just a few things that came to mind. Each Objective will have nearly unlimited Strategies to achieve them. Likewise there are infinite Initiatives you can include when building your Strategy. Your version of this table is going to look more like a bunch of webs.

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By now, you have a lot of pieces of paper lying around and are wondering why I’m having you make a marketing plan when all you want is to track your media coverage. I promise that there is a reason for this.

Monitoring your media coverage is utterly useless if you’re not going to do anything with that information. Additionally, we won’t know what to monitor until we know what you’re looking to accomplish.

HOW ARE YOU DOING IT?

Organizing Your Data

So, the next step is to look at all those little webs you just made and pick out data points. Make a list of all of the data you will need to inform your strategies and initiatives. You’ll break this up into two lists: Tags and Metrics.

Tags

You should think of this as topics and keywords – attributes that you will use to “tag” a media mention. So, “Products” is a tag, then you list all of your products. I think it’s helpful to imagine that you already have a monitoring system in place and are now creating reports and action items. What tags will help you sort and search your coverage data?

Other ideas:
-Business units/op cos
-Competitors
-Competitor product names
-Industry issues (subjects)
-Geographical distinction (country, state)
-PR campaign (if you have organized campaigns)
-Company executives
-Competitor executives
-Industry analysts
-Other actors (regulators, activists, any group affecting your biz)
-Promotions
-Product Initiatives
-Corporate Initiatives
-Marketing Messages
-Customer segment
-Customer comments
-Action to be taken on mention

Metrics

These are the measurements that you want calculated using your tags. Like the tags you choose, your measurement options are nearly unlimited. You can measure anything from traditional metrics such as volume, circulation and share of voice to a wide variety of social media metrics (note that many measurements will apply to all types of coverage).

If you decide to use professional media tracking software, the tags and metrics you use will be largely automated, so each media mention will have lots of tags and you will be able to quickly sort and search your data. If you are doing this by hand, you will probably want to pick only the most critical distinctions for categorizing your coverage.

For super bonus points, prioritize your lists!

Data Format

The next question is how do you want to see your coverage and measurements? Think about your current workflow and determine how your media coverage data will fit in. Also consider how you expect to be acting on your media mentions.

-    Will you pride yourself on immediate response to customer contact? You’ll want to receive email alerts of your coverage at short intervals (on the hour, 3x per day, depending on volume).

-    Do you have several product managers or business units managing their coverage? Get your alerts and reports divided by those tags and sent to the appropriate party.

-    Want to track trends in your media coverage? Monthly, quarterly and annual reports will do the trick.

-    Planning discrete PR or marketing campaigns? Short-term initiative reports can measure the success of your efforts.

Also think about what on-the-fly searches you will want to do and what other ways you will need your data presented. If you plan to do your monitoring and measurement work in-house, go ahead and use your tags and metrics lists to create report mockups. Creating templates ahead of time will help you organize your coverage as it comes in and help you get it out to interested parties more efficiently.

Your wishlists will also be useful if you plan to outsource any part of this to a 3rd party. Many software providers have one-size-fits-all systems. They offer the same data and options to all customers. Which is fine…if what they are offering coincides with what you want in a platform. This is why you made your list BEFORE looking at vendors. I want you to match their services to your needs, not the other way around.

Data Flexibility

How often will you need to change what you are tracking? Will you add new products, competitors, messages or other attributes often? This is an important point to consider when shopping around for an outside service. Are the number of tags or keywords limited? How often can you change them? What kind of access do you have to administrative tools? What is the process for adding a new metric or report template? Do they offer retro-tagging in case you want to apply a new tag to historical data?

Make sure you think through how you will use the data collected so you can find a service, or create a process, that meets your needs.

Next, we’ll focus on organizing your internal resources.

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo credits:
Tea bag – JanetMCK
Measuring tape – Aussiegall
Filing cabinets – Specialkrb
Flexibility – Nicolasnova

After this post, I pledge not to speak of Facebook at least until May.

With that out of the way, Facebook conducted a poll over the last week or so in an attempt to gauge user feedback to the new design changes.

Predictably so, the response has been overwhelmingly negative. 94% of about 800,000 respondents disliked the changes, leaving fans of the revisions (such as myself) outnumbered.

It leaves me wondering whether or not they should have even conducted a poll to begin with. They are well aware of historic negative feedback following redesign deployments; would it be easier to just let things settle? Or am I in the wrong, and is the new Facebook actually worse than it was before?

Facebook Poll, Screen capture courtesy of TechCrunch

Every Friday I bring you the top SMMM (Social Media Monitoring and Measurement) articles of the week.

So, here are the goodies.

10 ways to measure social media success – eConsultancy Blog

300+ Online Reputation Management Resources -
Todd And

Social Media ROI – Zygote
Little heavy on the graphics, but his point needs to be made every day until we’re all wearing the t-shirt – Media programs and metrics must be specific to YOUR organization.

Slice like a pro: Top 6 tips to switching media monitoring providers – Slice Media (Yes, I realize I’m linking to a competitor’s site, but good advice is good advice).

Measure Your Social Media Campaigns Using Block-and-Tackle Attribution – Forrester Research

Managing Your Reputation Online: A Primer for CIOs Who Don’t Get It – CIO

An Analysis of the Increasing Impact of Social and Other New Media on Public Relations Practice – Institute for PR. If you mean serious business, this is the 22-page PDF for you.

Calculating a Return on Investment (ROI) – PRSA

When Brands Get Punk’d: Social Media Remediation – Jeremiah Owyang – Web Strategist

Social Media Maturity Index: Finding Social Media Engagement Leaders – PR Communications

Jack in the Box feeds the social media beast – Los Angeles Times

Hey Marketers, Stop Being Control Freaks – Silicon Alley Insider

For more fascinating tidbits, follow Hannah on Twitter. Well, really @impactwatch has the killer news feed, but follow me anyway.

Photo by CogDogBlog.

New applications and iterations of Twitter arrive daily, but I think I’ve finally found one that I want to champion:  Present.ly.  Despite my hatred of Web 2.0-y names for products, I feel like there are a lot of positive things to be said about it.

In the company’s own words: “Present.ly gives your employees the ability to instantly communicate their current status, ask and answer questions, share media, and more with the revolutionary communications method pioneered by Twitter.”

Pros

• Text attachments give users the ability to forgo the 140 character limit and attach longer accessible text
• The company offers an Enterprise Edition that provides more behind-the-firewall security than their open cloud-hosted version
• Plenty of interfaces are compatible, including smart phones like iPhones
• The website offers user feedback options as well as video tours
• Users can send video, images, audio, and more through attachments within the tweets
• Group creation helps users to only see the messages that are relevant to them

Present.ly had been around for less than a year, but in that time they’ve made some great progress.  I’m interested to see what else they have in store.

My only query concerns the types of businesses that need this sort of communication.  Assuming most of today’s companies use email for their interoffice communication, I can’t see there being a huge market for Present.ly.  For giant companies it seems like a lot of ‘noise’ would be present on such a platform, and small boutiques could just as easily email or chat with their five-person team.  Twitter is becoming more widespread, however, and this application is an example of just how big the idea has grown.

Can Twitter apps like this one help businesses flourish?  We’ll have to wait and see.

A new service called TweepMe is being released today. The website says the service is an opt-in service where member agree to follow each other.

All you have to do is put in your Twitter username and password and, sometime tonight, everyone who has signed up will start mutually following each other. As new members join, they will follow all other members and in turn be followed by all.

Twitter for the lazy set.

Tweepme is offering the first 5000 to join a free lifetime membership. Everyone else will have to pay $8.95.

The problem with this is that the Twitter community looks down on any illegitimate follower gains. You have your purists who think you should connect with every follow and distain the quid pro quo followback. You have the armageddonists who think that sky-high follow rates will render the site spam-filled and unusable. Then you have the people that worked hard for their Twitter base and think it’s just plain cheating.

There’s plenty of discussion web-side about the security of the accounts that have signed up, whether Twitter will even allow such a thing and what will happen if they do.

The tool’s own Twitter account is currently suspended – probably not a good sign.

I personally signed up with a secondary account…just to see what happens. I’ll let you know.

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Follow me on Twitter the old fashioned way.

Sheep photo by cappellmeister

UPDATE 3/18: I signed up with two test accounts. I then cancelled one of them to see if the request would be honored. Neither account has added any TweepMe followers, despite the site currently having 4,472 registered members. The company has also created a new Twitter account – the original remains suspended.

UPDATE 3/20: I have 15 followers and am following 8. Not sure if it’s supposed to go this slowly, but it’s not a bad plan if it is.

UPDATE 4/1: Things began happening yesterday. I now follow 82 and am following 64. Given that my test profile has a photo, no bio and 1 update, it’s understandable that TweepMe members are unfollowing me after I’m auto-added to their account.

UPDATE 4/14: We really picked up speed over the weekend – or people really love my profile photo. I am following 428, followed by 491 and 1 update. TweepMe seems to have delivered on its promises.

UPDATE 5/6: Remembered to check and now am following 2001, with 1783 following back. I’m surprised at how few un-follows given that it’s not a real account. It’s possible that people tried to organize their follows at first, then gave up when the count got too high. That’s what I would have done :)