ImpactWatch Blog

[This is cross-posted at The Bivings Report.]

J.W.’s American Idol Twitter prediction about which contestant would end their run last night was wrong.  Brooke White did not go home despite having a disastrous restart during her song while Carly Smithson performed well this week — even garnering praise from Simon Cowell.

I think that J.W. had a novel idea, but why was his prediction wrong?

There’s an excellent chance that those who use Twitter aren’t representative of the ardent American Idol voter.  While I don’t know the demographics of the voting population, Twitter is new and geeky enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case.

Here’s an anecdote about why I know Twitter isn’t that widespread yet. Twitter inputs my tweets into Facebook and lists them in my status updates.  My friends see: “Steve Petersen is twitter: …”  Although my friends do show social media tendencies by using the site, some of them have no idea of what Twitter is.  One asked me, “What’s with all this twittering?”  While another wondered if I was constantly nervous.

Now, I’m not saying that my friends accurately represent the American Idol voter, but they probably are more like the voter than a group of people who use a geeky (I use that with pride) site.  If some of my friends understand and enjoy social media enough to use a social network but are not aware of Twitter, then tweeters are in a smaller subset of the population than my friends who use social networks. Needless to say, I have many friends who either don’t want a Facebook account or lack the desire to social media (let alone Twitter) on-line.

Further, I doubt that everyone who positively tweets about a contestant votes for that person.  Also, I know people who vote multiple times for the same person each week, and even if a Twitter user voted for the contestant whom they wrote about, how are we sure that they voted once, twice, or nine times?

Beyond measuring Dell Hells, it is helpful for those who track blogs to measure relationships between them.

When dealing with a small set of blogs, it is easy to determine if and then how they’re related. However, with millions of blogs no person or organization has the resources to accurately track all of them. Thus, having a automated system to establish relationship is very helpful. That’s a gap that search engines fill for the Internet in general.

Relationships could form around a myriad of factors like: topic, geography, style, stance, etc. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to focus on topic for this post.

There are many ways that blogs can align themselves with others around a topic.

Semantic analysis can determine if blog posts have a large set of common specialized words that tie them together. Data mining isn’t perfect though.

How about links? Bloggers can link to other sites that address the same issues that they do. However, linking is not standardized throughout the blogosphere. In many cases links will lead to sites which cover a wide variety of topics. At times bloggers don’t hyperlink to other sites, even if it is helpful. Many people simply posts a list of links that interest them while others will include links in their text. Then we have to ask: What’s a more meaningful link — one in the blogroll, in-text, or part of a list of several other links to sites discussion different topics?

If a blogger is generous with links, then tracking the sites linked to is useful. It makes sense to connect two blogs to each other if one links to the other in at least half of its posts. But as I discussed above, measuring this way is hard since linking habits differ greatly.

Bookmarking and tagging sites like del.icio.us are helpful when establishing blog relationships as web surfers classify blogs and posts by using keywords and writing their own headlines. As David Weinberger explained in a commentary piece “The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet” during NPR’s All Things Considered on June 11, 2007, people can categorize web content in a variety of ways. For instance, tags like “Africa,” “animal,” “pachyderm,” and “mammal” are all applicable to a blog post about elephants. Further, one can tease out blog relationships by looking at how people have tagged or bookmarked a blog and posts. Granted, such categorization is rarely standardized, but Weinberger argues that not necessarily bad either.

These are just some ways I can think of measuring and defining relationships between blogs. What are some other methods?

ImpactWatch is one of our main products. It is a PR measurement tool that our clients use for mainstream media coverage, but blogosphere measurement is harder to assess since readership and authority aren’t easily quantifiable.

Companies simply lack the resources to closely monitor all that is said about them, and blogs have expanded their radar screen. I don’t know if the blogosphere has increased the number of people who chit chat about a company with others, but it has created a forum in which many more voices are measurable.

However, not all voices are equal in their importance to a company. Concerning this fact, one of issues I’ve grappled with is how to weigh general influence and influence within a specific topic.

For instance, using Dell as an example, most of the A-list bloggers very rarely discuss the company and its products directly. Granted, top blogs like Engadget and Techcrunch should interest Dell since they focus on technology, but what about other blogs like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post?

I use Dell as an example since the company has had to deal with a top blog that doesn’t focus on its arena. Remember Dell Hell?

Although Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog are prominent, they focus on media, not technology. Thus, they typically shouldn’t worry Dell, but when Jarvis blogged about his “Dell Hell,” the rules changed. In fact, sometimes when bloggers (especially an A-lister) complain about a company and its products, word can spread fast. Sometimes even the mainstream media picks up on such rants.

Measurement is tough in situations like Dell Hell. Does Dell need to devote resources to scrupulously follow BuzzMachine? No, since Jarvis mainly blogs about media and not computer hardware and software. However, Jarvis was worth Dell’s attention for a while.

How can a company determine which bloggers who don’t focus on the company and its field require their attention? Then, when should they start and stop monitoring such blogs?

My Stuff is a new ImpactWatch™ feature that enables individual users to save stories in the system that are pertinent to them. To do this each story is listed with an icon that saves the item in a place where they collect articles. Further, it uses AJAX so that saving items is a smooth process that doesn’t involve multiple web pages.Visit the ImpactWatch™ site to learn more about the program. We also offer a free demo that features analysis of media coverage about the launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 and provide case studies about how ImpactWatch can help any organization manage its public relations.

Click on the picture for a video demo of My Stuff.