ImpactWatch Blog

(Cross-posted from the Bivings Report)

We love talking about Best Practices here at the Bivings Report, and today we’re offering up a very meta look at best practices in company blogs. Every business has a point of view or way of delivering their products and services – and what better way to share that with the world than on their sites? At last night’s June Social Media Club DC event, the panel discussed the strategies and challenges of their respective companies’ blogs.The speakers ranged from AARP, to Jess3 to the Nature Conservancy and their wise words (along with our perspective) could be distilled in the following list:

DO

• Leverage your company’s unique point of view to create great content. There’s a reason your company does what it does: so share it with the world
• Be Authentic. Chances are – if a reader is checking out your company’s blog – it’s because they care about your products, services, or brand. Or maybe they just think the colors are pretty. Regardless, your blog isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a way to share your organization’s perspective about relevant topics.
• Blogging takes a sustained and concerted effort. This means posting content on a regular basis, and not expecting your first 300 word post to get picked up by Mashable. Your blog WILL find its voice and niche audience,but getting there will take work and dedication.
• Great content leads to great SEO (not the other way around). Don’t spend so much time worrying about keywords, and more about what you’re actually writing. Sure, its nice when google picks up your content, but the content itself is what will drive traffic (as well as fame, fortune, and new business leads) to your site.
• Get lots of people in the mix. Allow all types of employees to have a voice. The programmers probably have good advice, as do the upper management. Involving many different authors also allows for more even workload distribution.
• Measure. Web analytics can help you see the full picture when it comes to traffic. Tracking the data over time can show valuable trends. Are old posts still getting lots of pageviews? Maybe that’s a good opportunity to revamp them.

DON’T

• Stop posting if the blog isn’t an overnight success.
• Forget to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets.
• Aim to sound like your competitors.
• Forget to make sure any guest posts/cross-posted content is OK with your lawyers

Last week, we created a SLURP140 to track #askobama and @townhall for the twitter townhall hosted by @Jack Dorsey at the White House. We tracked the data and then created a downloadble CSV file that anyone can download for further analysis.  In fact, over the course of four days, we collected 153,136 tweets from 59,000+ users.  Download the file here!

We also noticed that most of these users were tweeting from the web using standard browsers – which very different than the trends we often see with SURLP140-tracked events. The tweets themselves were longer than average; and chock-full of questions about jobs, the economy, and the debt ceiling.

SLURP140 – TBG’s twitter monitoring tool has been redesigned and re-tooled to be better, faster, stronger…and more accurate. We’ve mentioned the product time and time again on the IW blog, but this new re-design is serious business. The biggest changes have been the re-tooling of the twitter-stream as well as the addition of the Klout Score. Now you can log into your twitter account and participate in the SURP140-tracked conversation right from the page itself. Likewise, you can now see just how popular or influential members of the leader board really are.

All of these functionality changes are all in addition to making the site much more visually appealing. The new streamlined design (with added customization functionality) is aimed toward conferences and events who have SLURP140 up on their screens continuously. It also follows TBG’s mantra of practicing what you preach with good design and best practices in social media marketing.

Our signature tracking charts are still in full effect and can be relied upon for accurate monitoring of events that in progress as well as those that have already passed.  And now every user who pops up on the leaderboard can now check out their own Klout score as well as see how well they rank when it comes to tweets and @mentions.  For new instances of SLURP140 in action, you can take a look at:

• Earth Day 2011
• The release of Obama’s birth certificate
• the April Georgetown Day holiday
• And, of course, tracking ImpactWatch

This is the full screen-shot of the product of our hard work. And don’t forget – it’s still completely free to use for conferences, events, and organizations. All you have to do is fill out the contact form on the left-hand side of http://www.slurp140.com/

What do YOU think of the new SLURP140?

This weekend, several members of the Bivings Group client services team attended the Social Leaning Summit held at American University by the AU Social Media Club.  But we didn’t just moderate panels and network with attendees – we also create a SLURP140 for this particular conference. This new and improve tracking tool helped over 300 attendees keep track (and compete with one another) when it came to twitter use during the conference.

Many American University students were tweeting up a storm using the ipad (1 and 2) while others were glued to the TweetDecks on their laptop screens. Overall, tweetdeck won as the most popular twitter service by a long shot. The #SLS11 hashtag was officially trending in Washington, DC by mid-afternoon on Saturday – thus bestowing the official social media stamp of approval on the student-run conference.

Big props go out to the AU Social Media Club (@AU_SMCEDU), specifically Alex Priest- the founder and president of the AU club.

Here at ImpactWatch, we’re always looking to the future; whether that be information aggregation, social media tracking, sentiment analysis, or mobile communication. So imagine our bewilderment when we saw the following video and realized that the augmented reality that it depicts may not be all that far off. And furthermore – users may not be able to opt-out of facial recognition/social media hybridization.

Read Write Web may have said it best:There’s very little gray area on this one: You’re either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.

Watch the video about video and face tagging (and how it can be synchronized with augmented reality mobile software) and let us know what you thought in the comments:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

(Re-posted from the Bivings Report)

In comparing the Facebook pages of the top 86 magazines by circulation, while those with the highest circulations generally had the highest number of Facebook fans, much like our newspaper study this presents a problem when trying to quantify engagement. In short, how do you avoid biasing your results towards magazines with a small, but engaged numbers of Facebook fans.

For a magazine like Playboy with 2.3 million fans, what is the best approach  to compare engagement on their Facebook page to engagement on Time’s which has over 2 million fewer members? While there are some  statistical methods can compensate, at the end of the day we believe  it’s going to come down to a qualitative, rather than quantitative judgment. In this respect, we present our own views as to the top ten magazines on Facebook. If you agree / disagree or have a better method please let us know in the comments!

Please feel free to share or embed this image on your blog w/ attribution: Download at http://bivin.gs/i93iiJ.

See the speadsheet of our raw data after the jump -
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These are a couple of those statistics pages that we pulled from other SLURP140 sites.

Here at the IW blog, we’re all about data aggregation and analysis. This naturally led us to be really interested in hyper-local blogs. They aggregate information and do research about issues that large local newspapers couldn’t devote resources to. These sites are also an interesting microcosm of concerned citizenry trying to make their communities a better place. And thus, we decided to create an IW list of our favorite Washington, DC blogs. Enjoy:

Greater Greater Washington - This blog has over 40 editors who contribute at least 4 lengthy articles to the site every weekday. GGW often features graphs, charts, and research conducted by the authors themselves (as opposed to aggregated data from other news outlets). Likewise, many of the pictures of the site are ones that the authors take using their own cell phones or cameras. GGW also provides handy links to useful (smaller) community pages that even allowed members of the TBG staff to sign up for a Glover Park email listserv.

Prince of Petworth – This hyper-local blog, run by Dan Silverman, focuses on the news, real estate, and events happening in Petworth, Columbia Heights, Park View, Adams Morgan, Pleasant Plains, U Street,  Logan Circle, and Mt. Pleasant neighborhoods. Unlike the DCist, PoP talks quite a bit about area real estate and development issues – while letting their commenter run wild with other topics and open questions.

TBD (for it’s aggregation capabilities) – We know that TBD is affiliated in a local news service (ABC 7), but their focus on the social media information aggregation in the DC community is pretty commendable. The make google maps of cool bars, link to community news, and allow you to create a user account and customize your TBD news experience. We’re also HUGE fans of the @TBDCommute twitter account – which you can follow to get up-to-the-minute tweets about escalator outages, traffic accidents, and other WMATA issues.

DCIst - We may not be breaking any ground here by mentioning a blog in the city-ist sphere. However, DCist can always be relied upon to not only provide relevant news, events, and links that keep us entertained throughout the week.

Also honorable mentions: FamousDC and FishBowlDC which both feature great content.

Curious about other things that are popular in DC nowadays? Check out the Washington Post’s DC Tweeps 2011 list – which recently held a vote to determine the most popular twitter users in a number of categories.

Did we forget to mention your favorite DC blog? Let us know in the comments below

We are passionate abo0ut social media monitoring here at ImpactWatch. Therefore, we wanted to share some of the social media statistics for two recent blog posts on the The Bivings Report about our 2010 newspaper facebook fan study.

Infographic entry (published on 12/14)

• 132 likes on facebook
• 52 tweets
• 1,485 page views since 12/14 (making it the #5 most popular TBR post in the last month)
• 7 total disqus comments
• Picked up by Facebook News, feedburner, twitter, sites on tumblr, and poynter.org

Top 10 List (published on 12/17)

• 167 likes on facebook
• Average time on site for the post – 1:50
• 109 tweets
• 2,820 page views (making it the #3 most popular TBR post)
• Picked up by feedburner, twitter, sicrono.com and facebook.

Are you curious about what other developments the Bivings Group is monitoring? Check out our two new new SLURP140s – one about the CES 2011 conference, and one about the launch of Drupal 7.  With SLURP140, we are able to track multiple hastages and usernames via the global twitter stream – and track the most influential users and keywords pertaining to a certain event.

• http://www.slurp140.com/ces/
• http://www.slurp140.com/drupal7/

(Cross posted from the Bivings Report)

The Bivings Group has just completed a newspaper online interactivity report looking at Facebook fan engagement amongst the nation’s top 100 newspapers (as determined by circulation). Our main focus was to compare large and small newspapers across the nation by looking at the number of fans that interacted with the newspaper and amongst themselves via posted content via Facebook Fan pages. Over 1,000 individual wall posts were used to determine the averages seen in the above picture.

In addition to ranking each paper by the number of Facebook fans, we also looked at number of comments per post, and the variety of post on each page. The overarching intent was to create a ranking that allowed large regional newspapers to compete on an even digital playing field with large national papers.

1. The Washington Post – The Post ranks 3rd in number of Facebook fans within the top 100 US newspapers, but it’s particularly effective form of audience engagement is what ranks it at the top of our list. It averages 41 likes and 55 comments for every post on it’s fan page wall, and maintains a very high fan-to-circulation ratio. The Post also features two custom tabs and its editors periodically use HootSuite to schedule posts and ensure a consistent stream of information to its readers.
2. The Chicago Tribune – It may be ranked 9th in the US in terms of circulation, but the Chicago Tribune has its Facebook engagement down to a science. It boasts a custom Welcome landing page, a number of newspaper-specific sub pages,as well as a discussion tab. This is in addition to it’s high average number of likes and comments on every post, and its continuous reader questions.
3. The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com web portal) – Due in part to its collaboration with AZcentral.com, the Arizona republic is ranked 3rd on this list despite having a 40% lower circulation than the first-ranked Washington Post. Its average number of likes and comments on posts (as a function of its total number of Facebook fans) shows that Arizona Republic routinely engaged a larger number of its fan base.
4. The Denver Post – This regional powerhouse newspaper has a greater number of Facebook fans than the nationally-distributed Los Angeles Times. The average number of likes and comments on newspaper’s posts are similar to newspapers with much larger circulations. Likewise, the Denver Post utilizes custom tabs to post Contests and Classifieds on its fan page.
5. San Jose Mercury News – This newspaper ranks 8th in circulation within the United States, but we’ve ranked it 5th on this list due to its consistently active Facebook fans. Often, the fan page will feature simple status updates (sans links) and will ask the readers questions or just wish them a good morning. It is this variety in fan communication that earns the Mercury News a spot in the top 5 of this list.
6. The New York Times – This is the nation’s third largest newspaper in terms of circulation, but is by far the most popular news source on Facebook with over one million fans. In fact, their number of Facebook fans actually exceeds their daily circulation – which is something no other top 100 US newspaper has accomplished. However, the number of comments and likes that their posts attain do not show proportional engagement of their one million fans.
7. The Los Angeles Times – This west coast paper’s fan base is surpassed in number by much smaller regional papers such as the Denver Post. However, its fans state engaged and its numbers of average likes and comments remain fairly high.  Distinctive feature: their posts are often published using HootSuite – as opposed to manually sent on Facebook.com.
8. The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland.com web portal) – By partnering up with the Cleveland.com web portal, the Plain Dealer’s Facebook an page become a hub of all things Cleveland-related.  The page also encourages fans to post pictures and otherwise interact with the Plain Dealer news, sports, and entertainment stories that they post.
9. USA Today -   The page boasts an impressive number of Facebook fans and often asks their fans questions relating to the links that they are posting. However, with a circulation of over 1.8 million (and being one of the best recognized national newspapers)– one would think that USA Today can attain a higher number of fans than 38,000.
10. The Wall Street Journal – This may be the largest US newspaper in terms of circulation (and one of the only ones with a profitable content paywall on the website) , but it’s follower and fan engagement numbers are still only a fraction of those on the NY Times Facebook page. Nonetheless, the page is frequently updates and fans are able to have lively discussions about each post.