ImpactWatch Blog

On Sunday I watched the Dallas Mavericks versus the Phoenix Suns game on ABC. Those two teams were fighting each other for the eighth and final playoff spot in the NBA Western Conference so it was a big game. (The Mavs have since clinched that last spot and the Suns are out.)

One thing I found interesting about the broadcast was that sideline reporter Lisa Salters was twittering during the game.  The timing was perfect, the game was a blowout and the announcers were struggling to find anything to talk about except for what was happening on the court. In comes Salters and her tweets with some behind the scenes gems.

i have carlisle at the end of the 3rd — what do you want me to ask him?? since they’re up by 20+, does it really matter 5:14 PM Apr 5th

check this out — i was just told by nba official that there is no ‘end of 3rd quarter intv’ if its a 30 point game 5:18 PM Apr 5th

grant hill told me before the game that the suns WOULD show up today — he just looked over at me from the huddle and mouthed ‘i was wrong’ 5:33 PM Apr 5th

As a basketball fan I think this is just awesome. She’s giving the opportunity for people to interact with her and possibly even contribute to the questions she asks in her interview with the coach. And what are the chances that her interactions with the players and refs would ever see the light of day unless it happens to occur on the rare occassions when the camera is on her?

Ask Twitter fans why the love it and you’ll probably get 10 different answers from 10 different people. But the way that it facilitates quick, off-the-cuff status updates, together with a somebody like Salters who has a unique level of access to share, makes for a pretty interesting combination.

The other day Hannah sent me a blog post titled 10 Things to Do Immediately After a Networking Event. There’s a lot of good information in there, and while I agree with most of it I’m going to have to take issue with number 2.

2) Connect on Facebook. My favorite strategy. I look the people up on Facebook using their business cards and add them to my network. Now, I know their birthdays, their occupation, and their day to day status (literally!). Best Rolodex in the world.

I know people use different networking sites in different ways. And I’ve been in a handful of arguments about the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook. But I can say that 99% of those friends are people I have actually hung out with casually outside of a networking event, conference, or business club. I wouldn’t consider somebody I wanted to form a potential new business relationship with as a Facebook friend candidate. It just seems a little too personal.

Then there’s LinkedIn. They don’t even call them friends, they’re “connections.” I consider that more of a professional network than Facebook and that’s pretty much what it’s intended to be. My LinkedIn connections are all people I’ve worked with in some capacity at one point or another, save for a few close friends that going to be connected to me on any networking site that I’m part of.

Last but not least, there’s the Wild West of social networking, Twitter. If I follow somebody it’s because I’m interested in what they have to tweet about. I’m not going to get my feelings hurt if they don’t follow me back. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can be part of the conversation without having to know somebody at all.

Am I alone here? Do you have boundaries for different social network “friends” or is it just a free for all now?

#followfriday is a phenomenon in the Twitter community. Essentially, people are tweeting about interesting people that they follow on Twitter to promote and share them with their own followers. In doing this they’re helping to promote and grow their own network.

So you’re following all these new and interesting people, and many of them are probably following you back to find out what you’re all about which leads to an email from Twitter telling you about it.

The email is pretty basic. Here’s an example:

Hi, Chuck Fitzpatrick (chuckfitz).

RedCross (American Red Cross) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out RedCross’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/RedCross

The first thing you’re probably going to do is click on the profile link to learn more about who that is. That’s where Twimailer comes in. It’s a middle-man replacement for the basic email that you normally get from Twitter directly. Check out this screen shot of the email I get now.

The Twimailer email has all of the info you were going to go look up anyway right there in front of you.

• Profile picture
• Full name
• Last 10 tweets
• Number of people they are following
• Number of followers
• Their bio information

Plus it still has the link to their page so you can follow them back. Of course, that’s if they don’t have crazy following and follower counts and their last 10 tweets were about the get-rich-quick plan they want to sell you.

Check out Twimailer and let me know what you think in the comments. And if you want to celebrate #followfriday you can always follow ImpactWatch or me!

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.