ImpactWatch Blog

ImpactWatch now displays a real-time feed of custom filtered tweets right on your dashboard.

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

The ImpactWatch team would like to welcome Rahul Dubey as our new Vice President of Business Development.

Rahul joins ImpactWatch after working in Brussels and Malta on a 6 month project for an international media company.  He has been in the media monitoring and measurement world since 2007 and has worked with Global 2000 companies, NGOs, Non-Profits, Members of Congress and Government Agencies to develop their monitoring and measurement capabilities.  He worked with C-level executives to implement industry best practices and strategic research.  Rahul’s experience also includes advertising where he spent 5 years at Fox and CBS Television.

Rahul has a BBA in International Business and BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan.  He has lived in DC for over 7 years, but his heart still bleeds for his hometown Detroit sports teams (yes, Lions included.)  Rahul enjoys cooking, playing tennis, books with lots of pictures, and traveling.

• Social Media ROI? Traditional Is Still More Accepted – Social Media Explorer

• Why Social Media ROI Is The Most Over Debated & Misunderstood Topic? – Social Media Marketing in India

• 5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 – Read Write Web

• Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts – The New York Times

• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet – ken Burbary

• Why Sentiment Analysis is About as Reliable as a Canary in a Coal Mine – Marketing Pilgrim

• Web 2.0 Rule #7: Social media programs are a choice, social media monitoring is NOT – CK’s Blog

• The Single PR Metric and Flying Pigs – Measurement Standard

• You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Tac Anderson

• Why Measure ROI of Social Media? – Regular Geek

• Are we too worried with finding the ROI of social media? – Mack Collier

• How To Measure Your Social Media ROI: Don’t – Social Media Today

Tools Lists

• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – Dan LaRusso

Presentations

• Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi – The Brand Builder

Photo courtesy of Lara604 on flickr / CC BY 2.0

• Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales – Left the Box

• Social Media Monitoring: Why You Must & Its Value – Techrigy

• Make Sure Social Media Metrics Are Meaningful – IT Business Edge

• The Truth About Measuring Social Media – Nation Ranch

• Scaling Social Media – Web Trends

• Can computers take the place of the personal touch in media evaluation - Corp Comms Magazine

• Social-Media ROI Elusive: MarketingProfs Poll – Marketing Profs

• Meeting the New Media Challenge with ROI – TalentZoo

• Why Your Small Business Needs to Measure Its Return on Social Media Investments – Content Marketing Today

• Best Practice Advice
  Social Media Monitoring – Listening is the new marketing! – eCircle

We’ve been saying this for a while. The customers are talking, are you listening?

• Wish List for Social Marketing Metrics – Half Rose Blog

Some good ideas for Social Media Metrics as they relate to marketing.

• Blogs and Social Media: Moving From Monitoring to Networking – yhteiskuntaetiikka.net

Great, you’re listening to the conversations about your brand or issue. What’s next? Join them.

• Social Media Metrics
• Social Media Metrics Tips from Experts
• Listening & Trust

Emerging Technologies Librarian knocked it out of the park this week with three great posts on Social Media Monitoring

• Answers to Social Media Questions You Should Know – Online Marketing Blog

Lee Odden answers questions on some Social Media basics including monitoring and third party data metrics.

Read last weeks top posts.

Photo courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt

On June 29th and 30th the ImpactWatch team and The Bivings Group had the pleasure of attending the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. One of the tools that we built for the conference was a Twitter aggregator called Twitterslurp so that everybody could keep track of the tweets about the conference on one web page.

Dave Witzel over at the Personal Democracy Forum has a great post up analyzing all of the data Twitterslurp collected to determine which people and topics got the most buzz on Twitter during the conference. These are the top five:

• danah boyd
• Micah Sifry
• Mark Pesce
• Andrew Rasiej
• Michael Wesch

Media monitoring and analysis is what we do over here at ImpactWatch, so we decided to see how online News and Blogs stacked up against the Twitter results. They tell somewhat of a different story.

Speakers

Looking at News and Blogs published between June 29th and July 8th the clear standouts were White House CIO Vivek Kundra and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Online News 6/29 – 7/9

Kundra’s announcement about usaspending.gov, an online “IT Dashboard” where citizens can go to look up how the government is spending their tax dollars on Information Technology was reported in over 54% of main stream news sites online. Bloomberg also announced five NYC government information technology initiatives including the NYC Big Apps contest asking developers to find creative ways to mash-up New York City’s data feeds so information could be better shared with the public. He garnered 17.3% of the media attention as a result.

Blogs 6/29-7/9

Comparatively, in blog posts, Kundra and Bloomberg again dominated the coverage with a combined 55% share from bloggers. The overall results, however, were closer to the trends that Dave Witzel found in Twitter. danah boyd and her presentation on class differences on Facebook and Myspace was the third most written about in 25 different blog posts. Anthropologist Michael Wesch’s session on the evolution of the phrase “whatever” managed to make a top five appearance with 19 blog posts, a tie with PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej.

Themes

The overall topics again reflected the “Gov 2.0” initiatives by Kundra and Bloomberg, earning 53.9% of the total coverage. Other top trending topics were health care, being driven by Obama’s health care initiatives and the call for an open data format for health care data. Iran was still on a lot of people’s minds as a result of the recent elections. Again, danah boyd’s discussion of classes in social networks received a lot of press. Rounding out the top five themes was the debate over whether or not Broadband is a civil right.

Shift to Real-Time information

The following two graphs represent the volume from June 25th and the days leading up to the conference, to July 9th, nine days after the conference ended. If we take a look at the total volume of Tweets, News, and Blogs, the spikes look pretty similar, but there are two big differences that stand out.

The most obvious difference is the volume. 19324 total tweets versus 91 News articles and 194 blog posts during the same time frame. Twitter has clearly become the communication method of choice, at least at technically oriented conferences like PDF.

The other noticeable difference is when the spikes in volume occurred. The peak day for News with 41 articles and Blogs with 61 posts was the second day of the conference reflecting the coverage of the previous day’s events. Twitter however peaks on the first day of the conference with 9615 tweets and is almost as high on the second day with 7959. The audience’s value of the real-time nature of Twitter conversations is clearly evident.

Twitter Volume

Cross posted from The Bivings Report

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

Well not me, but Save Chuck! That’s the call to action that fans of the NBC television show Chuck are promoting on the Internet. With Jay Leno taking up five hours of prime time this fall there isn’t much room for shows that are on the ratings bubble. NBC announced their lineup of new fall shows on Monday but didn’t say which shows were going to be canceled.

Enter the Internet.

There’s a SaveChuck Twitter account. There are at least nine Facebook groups trying to save the show from being canceled, with the largest group boasting a membership of 18,014 currently and an online petition with 11992 signatures. Interestingly, the online campaigning is working in concert with offline campaigns as well. One effort encouraged Chuck fans to go to Subway, one of the shows biggest sponsors, and buy a footlong and put in a comment card asking for the show to be saved. Folks from TheWB.com drove around L.A. in Nerd Herd cars, if you spotted one and sent a tweet to @thewbdocom with the #savechuck and #chuck hashtags you had a chance to win prizes. The candy maker WONKA even sent Nerds candy to NBC execs as well.

Another idea that is just plain awesome was to donate to the American Heart Association in the name of Chuck Bartowski, the star character of the show, and acknowledge Ben Silverman, an NBC executive in the donation. In just three days there are almost $4,000 in donations. Have a Heart – Renew Chuck!

There seems to be a lot of momentum, show actors Zach Levi and Josh Gomez were even on CNN yesterday to talk about the shows renewal possibilities. Hopefully that momentum will carry over into increased viewership in the fall as well.

Save Chuck campaigns on CNN

Earlier this week Facebook announced the general availability of an Open Stream API allowing developers to incorporate user’s activity stream into their applications. For instance, I use Tweedeck to keep track of all the people I’m following on Twitter, and now one of the columns I can display shows the activity stream of my friends and I on Facebook. I can see it all in the same interface. Another example is the third-party Facebook application Newsfeed RSS. Once I added that application and gave it access to my activity stream, it output a RSS feed link that I can use to pull that information into any feed reader I want. Not only could I keep track in my reader now, but it would be archiving that feed so I can go back and find status updates in the past.

This is a big step forward in convenience, and it seems that a lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how great it is for you to be able to access your activity stream, and all the activity streams of the people who trust you as friends on Facebook.

But that brings up a big question. What about that trust?

I’ve always though it was kind of weird that if a friend of yours is tagged in a photo, not only can you see that photo, but you can see the whole album, even if the person who posted it isn’t a friend of yours. Newsfeed RSS pretty much makes that possible with your entire activity stream.

RSS output allows you to not only read it in your RSS feed reader, but theoretically you could publish that feed anywhere. I could set up a public website showing all of my and my friends updates, viewable by anyone without them ever having to log in to Facebook or have any of my friends approve of it.

In the past Facebook has always been considered a “walled garden” of information in which they could control the walls. While it would be socially unacceptable to broadcast all of my friends updates, and surely against the Faceook Terms of Service, they sure have made it a lot easier to technically do it.

Last week was an interesting week to be monitoring social media. There were several examples of consumers’ feedback running rampant on the social web and companies scrambling to keep up. Here are the big ones.

• Amazon.com delisted thousands of books from general search results, including many gay and lesbian themed books, prompting accusations of sudden policy change against such topics.
• Employees of Domino’s Pizza posted a video on YouTube of them defiling food while making it.
• Time Warner Cable revealed the details of its metered internet usage plans being tested in four major cities.
• Ashton Kutcher and CNN were involved in a challenge to be the first to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Only it turns out CNN didn’t even operate the CNNBrk Twitter account that was in the race.

All of these events created a massive amount of social media buzz, and the companies involved varied in their responses.

Amazon apologized and basically said the problem was “a glitch” but since then seems to be hoping that the buzz will go away leaving all of those who were outraged without much satisfaction.

Domino’s created a YouTube video response and set up a Twitter account of their own to answer any questions people might have showing that while they might not have been ready for something like this, they can certainly roll with the punches and respond appropriately.

Time Warner Cable backed off and has delayed plans to implement metered billing, presumably to polish up their PR and marketing machine before giving it another go. We’ll have to wait and see what the final outcome is.

CNN embraced the idea of the race to 1,000,000 followers while behind the scenes they hired James Cox, the owner of the CNNBrk account, as a consultant to run it for them. This well-played maneuver was a great way to make the best of the situation and let the hype about the race overshadow the possible branding nightmare.

The speed at which these story lines unfolded illustrates just how important it is to be monitoring your brand. But that’s only going to give you a fighting chance. The way you address the concerns of your consumers is going to mean the success or demise of your reputation in the long run.