ImpactWatch

With the Beijing games’ conclusion in August, the Olympics Demo we’ve been running has a lot to show for itself. Over the course of the summer, we picked up thousands of news stories ranging from athletic scandals to the cuisine of China, medals sweeps to Tibet supporters.

Overall, as noted in our previous posts, the Olympic games held a much higher favorability rating than that of host China. Nearly all articles reporting on sporting results were much more correlated with the Olympic Games or other countries, while China’s stories consisted largely of pollution, Tibet, and human rights.

As the games began, the “Phelps Fever” swept the press. With the flexibility of the ImpactWatch platform, I was able to add attributes to tag all articles related to Michael Phelps. Taking data from August, here is a graph I generated showing the topics breakdown:

It is incredible to see that out of the articles published about athletes, Phelps-related stories comprised of nearly 1/5 of the total news about athletes. I had expected it to be slightly higher, but this is still an incredible percentage.

Our demo worked out just as we had intended. Aggregating articles about the Olympics and arranging them in intelligent and meaningful ways yielded interesting results, as well as provided an outlet to showcase the features of the ImpactWatch platform. As this demo was my first IW experience, I am convinced that the platform is a valuable tool for monitoring media (our clients agree!).

We’re throwing some ideas around within the IW team for a smaller-scale demo in the future, and so far we’ve come up with UFOs, assorted B-list celebrities… have a suggestion? Drop it in the comments, we’d love to hear it.

As the Olympic games have kicked off over in Beijing, I thought it was time to update the topics and issues portion of the demo to reflect current events. We’ve removed some of the topics and issues that are no longer in the news (such as the torch run) and added some others that have come to light since the 8th. So far the new additions are medal race, journalistic freedom, and security. Have any ideas for other issues or topics we should be tracking for the report on the games’ duration? Let us know in the comments.

You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again. Monitoring the jumble of user-driven media is essential for the health of any brand. A few days ago, Jeremiah Owyang highlighted the importance of this on his blog entry about a recent brand-jacking involving Exxon Mobil. Apparently, a user account “ExxonMobilCorp” was created on Twitter, and a user known only as “Janet” posed as an Exxon Mobil spokesperson. This is not the first time that brand-jacking has been been identified as a problem within social media.

Analytics aside, it boils down to a matter of tipping points. Most organizations spend countless resources building their brands, and the reality is that these intellectual positions can fall at a moment’s notice. Trying to calculate ROI, tracing overall trends, semantic analysis — all of these take a back burner to public relations emergencies within the realm of new media.

Being aware of attacks on your image, misrepresentations of fact, and negative opinion from top influencers is simply necessary when positioning your brand.

With only three days left before things kick off in Beijing, our ImpactWatch demo has made itself clear: within the media, China is being portrayed at a far less favorable rate than that of the actual Olympic Games. Even with widespread buzz addressing athletic performance enhancers, coverage of China’s human rights record, air pollution, algae blooms, and authoritarian domestic policies have been pushed to the forefront of western media. While glittering articles about athletes’ preparations boost the favorability of the Olympics, China is struggling to find its own crutch topic under the strain of relentless criticism and unfavorable press.

The graph below illustrates what I’m talking about:

 Even from this raw graph of daily average favorability, the difference is quite noticeable. When I visualize by month to show overall trends, things get interesting:

These trend lines highlight the discrepancy between the two topics. While the Olympic Games’ average favorability has had its ups and downs, its average favorability has both remained positive and increased in positivity from May to August.

China has not fared as well in its coverage; while enjoying two relatively neutral months (May and June), its favorability rating began to falter in July (-.13) and August (-.29). Quite the opposite of the Games’ coverage, China’s trend line indicates both a negative rating and an increase in negativity from May to August.

As the Games’ opening ceremony nears, a new chapter in our ImpactWatch demo begins. With Beijing as a stage, the world — and our demo — is all eyes…anything could happen.

It seems that everyday I see a new catchphrase coined by a social media “expert” to describe social media, hoping the concept will set the blogosphere ablaze with link endorsements and fleeting exposure on Techmeme. Amid the clutter, converting metrics such as blog views, Facebook buzz, Tweets, and del.icio.us plugs to a usable, actual value of return-on-investment (ROI) in dollars seems nearly impossible — currently the holy grail of strategic internet marketing.

I’ve noticed something as analysts try to pinpoint an exact metric to measure social media and all this talk of ROI as both return on investment and return on influence. The derivative (change over time) has taken a backburner to comparitive measurement. I’m a proponent of using this measurement, and I think it’s currently underrated and arguably more, or at least equally important, as comparitive analysis in social media.

Here’s my short list of ways to use the power of the derivative in social media campaigns (a friendly reminder, in case you’ve been distracted):

1. Focus on change over time for your brand. Sure, it’s nice to know how your competitors are doing with their online presences and how you stack up comparitively. However, unlike traditional print media, there are both logical and logistical fallacies that don’t always make this an easy task. As Maggie Fox from the Social Media Group points out, good metric aggregation for social media is a time-consuming and manual process (read: expensive). As my boss recently pointed out in an e-mail, in terms of actionable PR work in social media it is much more important to know where you stand and how to improve than where your competitors are: in social media, there are no press release standards, and there is no official staging ground for retorts. I don’t want to sound like a self-help book, but focus on you.
2. Keep in mind, “buzz”, by nature, is merely a rate. Internet buzz itself is a phrase coined to describe lots of conversations in a small amount of time. By identifying time spans that had the highest rate of change, you can reflect upon successes (or disasters) and find what works best for your specific brand. Comparing the rate of change for different campaigns can give you a metric as to what worked better — for your brand. Not all methods work similarly.
3. The double derivative can affect timing. Think real hard back to high school physics… the double derivative represents acceleration. When applied to aggregated data about social media, it is easy to tell whether the cycle of buzz is coming or going. Keeping up the momentum on a social media campaign is difficult, and one of the most common downfalls of an otherwise great campaign can be timing. The double derivative (acceleration) can help with increasing, or at least maintaining, positive headway for your social media campaign. Knowing when to play your cards is key to success. The gadget/computer manufacturers have their “product-leaks” to blogs down to a science.
4. The derivative of self boils down to constant self-comparison. It’s a tangent from point #1, but I cannot stress how much I believe that in social media, self-contained metrics are vital to a strong social media strategy. Allocate resources to where it really matters, and I think pushing said resources into creating change for your brand is the top priority. Self-comparison through time gives real results with actionable intelligence.

Only sixteen days after my last post about our ImpactWatch demo, the media has begun drifting away from Sichuan’s earthquake in light of high-tech espionage, Paul Hamm’s broken hand, and a record-breaking year for track and field. With the Olympic trials season in full swing, positive coverage on athletes and the games itself is steadily rising. I created an issues breakdown visualization using ImpactWatch, which reveals that just as quickly as the media surrounding the earthquake sprang up, most of it seems to be over:

While the stories surrounding the earthquake have subsided quicker than I had anticipated, it certainly set the stage for interesting coverage of the 2008 Olympic season. Stay alert, more updates to come.

In the last post, I did a micro-study of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads and the way they are being portrayed in the realm of YouTube. In addition to analyzing the “views” count on the website, I adjusted the quantity by minutes to give a better representation of the exposure YouTube is actually giving the Kinoki brand.

This time around, I will examine the user feedback to the videos that were part of the study. If I had been the one who had actually posted these videos, I would be able to utilize YouTube Insight, a powerful built-in tool that turns an ordinary YouTube video into something that resembles an online focus group (there will be more on this tool in the future). Seeing as how I am not interested in posting my own videos about Kinoki Detox Foot Pads, I will have to rely on the inexact method of comment analysis and “feel it out”.

First, a red flag. On the positive videos, there were only a couple of comments that were all positive and framed as customer testimonials reiterating their “refreshing feelings” and how using them had changed the users’ lifestyles for the better. After three or four comments, the commenting feature had been disabled, thereby locking in a few positive comments and keeping naysayers from commenting on the wall. That, and the videos themselves were infomercials in the guise of “health update” news reports. Rather suspect if you ask me.
On the videos that allowed commenting, the tone was overwhelmingly negative. A couple of comments would be users who have actually used the product and would claim that the Kinoki Detox Foot Pads actually made them feel better, to which users would instantly become outraged and prove them wrong with their elite high school chemistry knowledge.

In review, the coverage of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads on YouTube is quite negative, both in videos and commentary. If an undecided consumer were to consult YouTube to make a more informed decision, they would more than likely decide not to purchase these foot pads — maybe changing your diet is the way to go after all. I still swear by my twice-daily regiments of snake oil.

According to Alexa’s listing of most visited websites (sorted by country), YouTube is ranked as #4 in the United States, #6 in the United Kingdom, #4 in Japan, #5 in South Korea and #2 in Germany. It has the power to launch overnight public-relations Cinderella stories such as the Blendtec miracle (yes already, it will blend) as well as broadcast to millions a reputation-killing moment even more swiftly. These occurrences, once posted to YouTube, are available indefinitely.

How does one quantify the amount of successful or damaging exposure YouTube is causing them? Here are some measurements of a micro-case study crafted specifically for this blog post: an analysis of YouTube exposure of the television infomercial product, Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. Note: The Bivings Group and the ImpactWatch service are in no way affiliated with Kinoki™ Detox Food Pads.

I manually aggregated data by watching YouTube videos related to the “miraculous detox system”. You can see the raw data that I collected here in an excel spreadsheet. Using the resulting data, I created some visualizations within ImpactWatch:

The first graph shows a raw view of the types of videos people watch related to the Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. This is strictly measured in views, which is valid because YouTube only counts views once from each unique IP address, and only if an overwhelmingly large portion of the video was viewed. However, this unit of measurement is often misleading and does not give an accurate representation of the actual exposure Kinoki foot pads have received. That’s where a little spreadsheet manipulation and the second graph comes into play.

In the second graph, a new unit was analyzed. Taking the number of views for each video and multiplying them by their length in minutes, an adjusted unit that more accurately represents total “exposure” was created. This graph provides a much better metric for gauging the float-or-sink status of the product. Although in both graphs negative exposure was dominating (I wonder why?), the adjusted quantity of “YouTube minutes” shows that it wasn’t as bad as just a raw views count might have initially demonstrated.

In the next part of this two-part case study, comments for the videos and other forms of responses will be analyzed.

With the month of May coming to a close, the new ImpactWatch demo about China and the 2008 Olympics has been fully operational for a couple of weeks now. The data collected already demonstrates the capabilities of ImpactWatch in real-world scenarios. Since May 6th, articles containing keywords relevant to China and the Olympic games have been aggregated and analyzed on a daily basis. Using the built-in tools of the ImpactWatch platform, I created this graph showing the average favorability (using a circulation metric) of both China and the 2008 Olympic games from 5/6 through 5/28 (today):

It’s no secret that China has had a rough time managing public-relations coming into the summer games because of media exposure related to questionable human rights practices, pollution, and the notorious Tibet fiasco. On May 12, about a week into our demo, the tragic earthquake in China’s Sichuan province shook the lives of thousands — as well as the focus of the American press, as the above graph illustrates. The average favorability of China skyrocketed on May 13, as media exposure shifted from criticizing the summer games host to covering the events surrounding one of the largest natural disasters of the year. As Economist.com has pointed out, amid enormous loss, China has largely gained positive press from this terrible tragedy. The results from ImpactWatch show that China’s favorability is holding relatively steady, at a higher level than just three weeks ago.

Here’s a breakdown of the articles that we’ve collected so far by issue:

As you can see, the earthquake and its effects is the most prevalent issue at the moment — expectedly so — and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

Over the coming months, the data contained within the demo will become better and better, which is the nature of aggregation and media analysis. Trends will become more long term and the quantities applied to the data will become more meaningful. In addition, I don’t have to go searching for these news clippings; one of the great things about ImpactWatch is that it automatically pulls articles based on keywords from various sources and feeds, but leaves the analytics to real, breathing humans — we’ve talked about why in previous blog posts. ImpactWatch tracks and streamlines the work/analysis without misstepping about the most important part, the actual reputation.

More China/Olympics updates to come — the summer is just getting started.

Since 2004 – the year web 2.0 truly took the limelight – I have stood witness to the rapid evolution of the internet. An ever increasing portion of web content has come from end-users and consumers in various forms of text and digital media. This information is nothing that you, a user that navigated their way to this blog (blogs being of the first trends in user generated content), didn’t already know.

It is likely that you have probably been aware of this trend for a while – and heard about it repeatedly on blogs, in articles, and at conferences. It has taken shape into a vast, universally accessible archive of raw consumer feedback and profiling information, so it comes as no surprise that lots and lots of people are highly interested in finding ways to use this repository of dialogue in effective ways.

Competent analysis of a widely anonymous medium is not an easy agenda; there are many complications that arise when trying to arrange the clutter of user-generated web 2.0 content into coherent information that has real-world application. As Bill Tancer wrote in an article for TIME magazine last April about the demographics of web 2.0, it takes a little more than some tricky guesswork to put the content into a meaningful perspective.

In summary of his article, Tancer writes about how certain classical business principles are exhibited, and even highly exaggerated, in user-generated web content. The Pareto principle illustrates how 80 percent of results can be attributed to 20 percent of the causation. As a result, this trend adds to the distortion when trying to interpret web 2.0 data and attribute it to specific groups of consumers. He goes on to talk about other disproportionate and not-so-apparent trends in user generated sites such as YouTube and Flickr. In my research, other analytic sources support Tancer’s conclusions.

Tools like Tweet Scan are quick, inexpensive (can you say ad-supported?) and effective; lots of people are using them to find specific, raw feedback that was not possible before this wave of web technologies. It is thus important to be mindful of the limitations of said resources, and to frame their results within what is known. That’s when I think these tools become truly powerful.

Here at ImpactWatch, we have recently been conducting some closer examinations of social media. Through specific case studies, we have been conducting market research and developing new ways to aggregate and interpret social media. It was obvious to our team that social media – a medium based on actual human relationships (read: consumers) – would be invaluable to our clients who already rely on us to track their reputation in more traditional mediums.

There are countless variables and trends that I could speculate about that I’m sure, in time, some scholar of new media will base his or her dissertation and life teachings upon. Edward Bernays started a whole field of public relations and the scientific study of mass media psychology and consumer profiling, paving the way for audience identification and strategic policies. Since his time, these fields have come very far. Just as I’m sure that the current digital toolsets and comprehension therein are just a taste of things to come.