ImpactWatch Blog

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.