ImpactWatch

Dell, who was once an example of how not to embrace social media, has done a tremendous job at stemming the tide of the negative conversations about them on the Internet. Other than knowing that Dell was listening and participating in the conversations with success, I had not heard the story of what they had specifically done to achieve all that success. That was until a couple weeks ago at the SNCR New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa California, where Richard Binhammer of Dell joined John Cass of the SNCR for a Keynote Conversation.

Through Dell’s blog searches and participation in numerous other social media outlets, Dell discovers about 4000 posts a day in all languages. They handle that load by doing triage on the posts, deciding which ones urgently require a reply, which need to be watched, and the ones that don’t need a reply. Out of the 4000, about 200 are addressed by the tech support team that communicates with new media and about 100 have to do with corporate brand and image.

At times it can seem overwhelming for companies to consider tracking new media and social networking. In the past I’ve suggesting to start by at least listening. This is exactly what Dell did. Also, if you consider that a huge company like Dell can narrow 4000 posts a day to only 300 that they really need to focus on should give hope to anybody trying to raise their awareness of social media conversations.

The results are certainly impressive. Dell has been able to lower the number of negative posts about them from 49% to 21%. Richard suggested that may be the best they can do, however. In the past 8 months that number has not gotten any lower. It just seems that no matter what they do, 20% of the people out there just aren’t going to like Dell. An audience member suggested that this might be a great research topic for the SNCR. Does 20% equal success or are there ways that the needle can be moved even further?

One thing that Richard noted as important to the success of this initiative was that they had corporate buy-in. Michael Dell basically directed that he wanted this to happen. Sometimes in a smaller or less technical environment it can be hard to get this kind of managerial support, but it seems to be a battle worth fighting. They also rarely involve the legal department, and as such, it was critical to get people with good judgment involved.

Two other comments were particularly interesting to me. First, they pay no particular regard to influence of who they pay attention to. The program is truly about communicating with their consumers. Dell has learned first hand how a few blog posts can snowball. Second, from their interaction with social networks, Dell is aware of emerging issues and concerns two to three weeks in advance of getting a call about it from a main stream media outlet. I have no doubt that kind of awareness helps their overall PR efforts.

Jeremiah Owyang of the always informative “Web Strategies by Jeremiah” blog had a great post recently titled “The 3 “Impossible” Conversations for Corporations.” Involvement with customers via social networking is quickly evolving from a possibility to a necessity (just ask Dell.) The part that stood out the most to me was his first point about corporations asking for feedback.

“#1: Asking for Feedback
It’s so hard for companies to ask for feedback. Take a look around, how many ‘corporate’ blogs ask for raw, unfiltered product feedback. It’s scary for a few reasons: 1) Most companies want to talk about how great they are, not expose themselves to weaknesses. 2) Most companies don’t have the appetite to listen to the feedback, then do anything with it. 3) Most companies don’t know how to respond to the feedback, they don’t want to promise it will happen, nor acknowledge a weakness.”

It may seem like a daunting task with no clear place to start, but there is a very simple way to start, the way that most good conversations begin. Start by listening.

Before jumping headfirst into a grand social networking strategy, the easiest thing to do is listen to what is already being said about you. Most likely you don’t have to ask for feedback, there’s already going to be some out there whether you like it or not. All of our ImpactWatch clients are currently monitoring Print and Online news for mentions about themselves and competitors. Those that are ahead of the curve are using ImpactWatch to do the same with Blogs.

Measurement needs metrics right? How do you determine what bloggers, blogs, and posts are more influential? Which is more important, a post with a hundred comments that started a heated conversation or a post that was read by 10,000 people who never made a comment? These are a few of the good questions, and the debates rage on, however I think the most important part of getting involved doesn’t require a magic metric, if there even is such a thing. Listen to what’s going on now, let that be the benchmark, and expand your strategy from there.

Corporate communications and PR professionals often find it useful to track what specific authors and publications are writing. Since ImpactWatch is a permanent archive of your business’ article information, it becomes the perfect tool to research these metrics.

From the main ImpactWatch dashboard, if you click on the Ranking menu you’ll be presented with a breakdown of “Leaders” and “Movers” for Publications. The Filters section allows you to change the date range you’d like to analyze, the default is the Last 7 days. ImpactWatch will use this date range and determine the Leaders. Leaders are publications which have published the most stories about you during that time frame. The little arrows indicate whether they are rising or falling in rank. ImpactWatch will also determine the Movers. Movers are publications which have published more articles about you during the specified date range compared the the same length of time just previous to it. The percentage shows how much more, or less, a publication is writing about you.

Similarly you can use the Choose menu to see the same metrics for Authors. (more…)

One of the benefits of the ImpactWatch service is that it archives all of the tagged information about your corporate news articles. We previously talked about how to create a clip sheet of your search, but let’s take a step back and look at how to actually do the search in the ImpactWatch News Center.

On the right hand menu of ImpactWatch you’ll see an option labeled “News.” When you click this option you will be presented with a page that has multiple search filters depending on how your news is being analyzed.

When we first set up an ImpactWatch for a client we help them determine the best way to tag and categorize all of the news we will be monitoring. This is an important step in both the setup process and in ongoing adjustments to the monitoring, but is easily customizable in ImpactWatch. You can imagine when you are not only monitoring your own news but that of your closest five competitors that the volume can get overwhelming without proper analysis and attribute tagging.

The search filters available in the News Center are the same as these attributes and tone ratings assigned by the analysts. You can choose the date range you want to search and, as with most search engines, one of the most powerful features is the “keyword” field. Any of the filters can be combined with the keyword field to further narrow down the topic, or help you find a specific article you are looking for.

One thing to consider is that if there is a large number of matches to the keyword field, ImpactWatch may consider that a common word and not use it in the search. This is used to filter out common words such as “the” or “and” in a search. It often happens, however, that because your ImpactWatch is set up to collect news on specific topics to begin with, that it may seem like a common word even though it’s not.

A perfect example of this was the ImpactWatch we set up to monitor news on the Mitchell Report back when it was released in December. If I do a search on the word mitchell, ImpactWatch considers it a common word because of the sheer number of articles that match.

The solution is to put the word in quotation marks. A search for “mitchell” brings up the correct number of articles.

Here at The Bivings Group we are in upgrading our workstations to MS Office 2007 including Outlook 2007. There are quite a few differences from the previous version of Outlook I was using, but one big difference that ImpactWatch users should be aware of is the way it handles images in emails and the default “Junk E-Mail” settings.

By default, Outlook 2007 will block images in HTML emails. So if you are receiving your Daily Email Alert from ImpactWatch and are used to seeing the nice formatting with links and logos, these images will probably not be displayed when you upgrade, you’ll just see blank boxes where they used to be. Fortunately, if you find this happening to your Daily Email Alert there is quick fix.

Select one of the Daily Email Alerts you’ve received in Outlook 2007, then choose the “Actions Menu,” go to the “Junk E-mail” menu and then choose “Add Sender to Safe Senders List.”

Once this is done the ImpactWatch Daily Email Alert will be considered safe and will show all of its images and arrive in to your Inbox normally.

Recently one of our power user customers asked us how to create a custom list of articles for printing and was amazed at how easy it was and how much time it saved. We call that a Clip Sheet and here’s how you make one in ImpactWatch.

Once you’ve logged in to ImpactWatch, go to the News section. You’re probably aware that in the News section you can search for specific news articles you’re interested in. Once you’ve completed a search you’ll see all the resulting articles. From there you want to click on the “Choose” menu and select “Create Clip Sheet.”

You’ll then be taken to a page with a list of the articles that resulted from your search. You can either choose to select all of them or refine your list even more and check off individual articles you’d like to include in your Clip Sheet.

Choose whether you want the Clip Sheet created in Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word format and then just click the Create Clip Sheet button. Your final Clip Sheet will have a summary table of contents listing all of your articles at the top, which is followed by the full copy of each article.

If you don’t already use ImpactWatch and would like to give it a try you can always sign up for a free five day account on our live demo site.

A while back we had a post on the Bivings Report, now cross posted here, about the RSS features built in to ImpactWatch. ImpactWatch already has filtered, categorized, and rated news and blogs about the information your company is concerned about. That’s an extremely valuable feed of information right there. But what if you’re only concerned about your department or even a specific product or issue. All you have to do is use ImpactWatch to do a search and it will build you a link to a custom RSS feed of that search.

In addition to this being one of the most powerful features of ImpactWatch it still seems to be one of the least used. I bet a lot of the reason for that ImpactWatch is password protected and most of the mainstream news readers don’t support password protected feeds. The reason I bring this up is that as of yesterday, NewsGator, one of the leaders is RSS news readers has updated and released their client products for free.

I now have FeedDemon, the standalone windows client installed and I am trying NewsGator Online, the web based newsreader. Here’s a screenshot from FeedDemon of an ImpactWatch news feed from our demo site.

Adding the ImpactWatch password protected feed was a snap. It has a username and password box ready for you to enter when you create the feed. Plus one of the best features is that the FeedDemon on my computer and the NewsGator Online are synchronized with each other. When I go home tonight and install FeedDemon on my home computer I will see all of my subscriptions the same way as I do on my work computer or the web.

On December 13^th 2007 Senator George Mitchell released the now infamous Mitchell Report detailing his investigation into performance-enhancing substances in Major League Baseball. We decided it might be interesting to use ImpactWatch, our media-monitoring dashboard, to track the ensuing coverage from mainstream media and blogs.

Since we began tracking, ImpactWatch has collected 23,652 news stories and 1,706 blog posts relating to the Mitchell Report. That’s a significant amount of news. In comparison, during the same time frame one of our biggest corporate ImpactWatch customer had 15,554 news stories and that is a technical firm with all of the product reviews and stories during the Christmas shopping season and leading up to this weeks Consumer Electronic Show.

The big story has turned out to be the accusation and fallout regarding Roger Clemens’ use of illegal substances.

It stands to reason that a seven time Cy Young award winner is getting most of the attention. 15,730 of the stories mention his name, which is right at two thirds. One of the reasons for this has been Clemens’ activities following the release of the Report.

• He immediately issued a denial of the accusations via his lawyers resulting in 2571 stories.
• On December 23^rd Clemens posted a video denial on his website and YouTube which was picked up in the media 524 times.
• Last night Clemens was on 60 Minutes, again denying the accusations (3050 articles mentioning Mike Wallace) and all but calling former Yankee trainer Brian McNamee a liar.
• The fact that former Yankees manager Joe Torre won’t take sides between Clemens and McNamee (1043 stories) could be telling to some, but Clemens says he is willing to take a lie detector test to help clear his name (904 articles) and today announced he is suing McNamee for defamation as well (444 articles so far.)

This kind of information is just he tip of the iceberg of how your organization might use ImpactWatch to track corporate coverage, media events, or any issue you may be concerned with. Plus adding on our rating team, offering expert human-reviewed bias rating, and you can truly dive down into the meaning of your media coverage.

Through my work on ImpactWatch, I spend a lot of time analyzing data. I’m also a pretty big sports fan. Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that the Mitchell Report on steroids and baseball was released yesterday. Given that, I thought it would be interesting to use ToCloud.com to create a tag cloud showing the words mentioned most often in the report. Here is a quick screen capture of the cloud showing which keywords were mentioned most often.

Here are links to the full tag clouds I created that look at the 300 top keywords:

• Tag cloud ordered by most mentions
• Tag Cloud in alphabetical order

Upon looking at this initially, the thing that jumped out is that the Players Association and the Commissioner’s Office are mentioned in the report roughly the same number of times. I think this demonstrates how careful Mitchell one in not trying to place too much blame on either party. Anything jump out at you?

Back on Oct. 3rd through the 5th Alex and I attended the Institue for Public Relations’ 5th annual Summit on Measurement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Overall the event was fantastic. I spend all day working on ImpactWatch, the media measurement platform created by The Bivings Group, so it was great to meet with a group of 100+ media measurement, media research, and social network gurus.

The session I was most interested in attending was “How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media.” This was a panel discussion including Shel Israel , Kami Huyse , Todd Parsons, Donald McLagan from Compete Inc, and moderated by KD Paine . Unfortunately I set my expectations too high. Not that the session was bad, it just wasn’t what I expected. I think Shel summed it up best when he said that we haven’t been doing this long enough to have best practices “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.” As such, it seemed like the discussion took a turn towards the merits of doing social media measurement at all. Todd and Donald (and I) think there is absolutely value in it, that’s why we provide products and services doing exactly that. Some thought that it was a waste of time. It was also suggested that the whole point of social media is the conversations it creates which are hard to measure at all. I agree that it’s ideal to have blogs and social networks facilitate conversations and generate engagement, and it is something that is hard to measure. I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. This was confirmed when the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had a personal or corporate blog. Almost everybody raised their hands. When asked if they comment on other blogs, the hands dropped to about a third of the audience.

Most readers are still going to blogs to learn more about subjects they are interested in. They aren’t necessarily interested in joining the conversation. Therefore, many traditional web metrics still apply.

In conclusion, it was certainly valuable to learn that blog measurement is something everybody is still trying to get a handle on right now. In fact, the direction we’re headed with ImpactWatch looks pretty advanced compared to what other folks are doing.