ImpactWatch

A couple of months ago we ran a demo of our ImpactWatch™ product that analyzed media coverage around the 2006 Senate race in Connecticut. Today we’re launching another demo that looks at coverage on major gaming websites of the launches of the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii gaming consoles. By signing up, you’ll get access for 5 days to a fully functional version of our ImpactWatch system that covers this topic.Please sign up now to get access to the Playstation 3 vs. Nintendo Wii demo. For more information, visit ImpactWatch.com. Check back later in the week when we’ll release our first report analyzing coverage.

For the uninitiated, here’s our one sentence summary of what ImpactWatch is.

ImpactWatch™ is a web-based media management platform used by public relations and corporate communications professionals to continuously observe, track, gather and analyze high-volume media coverage of any brand, product, issue, event, or industry.

We launched a new look and feel for our ImpactWatch™ product a couple of months back. We are in the midst of rolling this out to our clients now. One cool feature we’ve added the last few months is a “Dashboard” version of the ImpactWatch homepage.

ImpactWatch users can now choose whether they want a “News” or “Dashboard” view of their ImpactWatch data from their homepage. We decided to add this feature in recognition of the different ways people use the system. Some folks login multiple times a day to read articles about their company. Others login less frequently and are looking more of an overview of what’s going on instead of to read the days news.

You can see screenshots of both views below (click the image for a bigger version). Both of these versions of the homepage are customized based on the clients needs.

News View

Dashboard View

You can learn more about ImpactWatch here and sign up for a demo here.

As a small company, we’ve always struggled with how best to market our media monitoring platform, Impactwatch™. We don’t have a dedicated sales force or the budget to sponsor every conference or present at every trade show. We also aren’t much for intrusive cold calling (unlike a lot of folks in this space). Plus, it’s difficult to explain Impactwatch™ on a marketing site with text and screenshots - it’s the kind of product that doesn’t really click until you see an in person demo and/or play with it yourself.We may be delusional, but we think we have a great product here. We just need more folks to give it a try.

So we’re trying a different approach. Today, we are launching a new version of our Impactwatch™ marketing site that includes an invitation to sign up for a 5 day pass to a demo of the product. The topic of the demo is the Connecticut Senate race between Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman. We’ll run this demo until November 15th, and then launch a new one on some other timely, non-political topic soon thereafter. This initial demo will track only Mainstream Media (MSM) - in future demos we will show how Impactwatch™ can be used to help track the blogosphere in addition to MSM.

I would encourage anyone who is interested to sign up for our demo now. You can also check our our FAQ about the demo to learn more. We’ll begin issuing usernames and passwords for the demo tomorrow.

If you have questions or comments about the demo, please feel free to send me an email or give me a call at 202-741-1500.

Our media monitoring product, ImpactWatch, has always been able to accept and display non-English news articles. But we recently had a client that wanted to take things a step further and create a version of ImpactWatch entirely in Japanese (navigation, drop downs, everything). We just finished the work (see sample screenshot below) and the infrastructure improvements we made mean that we can now rapidly deploy ImpactWatch in just about any language a client requires.

The other cool thing here is that for global companies we can create versions in a variety of different languages (say Spanish, English and Japanese). Each individual user within a company has the ability to to choose which language they want ImpactWatch to render in.

Anyway, good stuff.

The latest Beta version of Internet 7 was released a few days ago and the reaction of the blogosphere has been mixed. Based on what I’ve read, my guess would be that the the reviews are probably 20% positive, 60% middling and 30% negative. You know what though, it doesn’t matter all that much.

The blogosphere isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t representative of typical consumers. Bloggers tend to own Macs and use alternative browsers like Firefox at much higher percentages than typical Internet users. And I’d speculate that the people who have downloaded IE 7 and written reviews at this early date are mostly Internet professionals who use Firefox and other alternative browsers more heavily than even bloggers. IE 7 is playing to an extremely tough crowd at this point. The browser is being judged by some of IE’s harshest critics.

So how do you track the reaction of the blogosphere to the release? I’d avoid the kind of good/bad approach I took in the opening paragraph. As mentioned, it just doesn’t matter that much. In this case, the conclusion a reviewer reaches is far less important than the details of what they have to say (what specifically do the like and not like). It’s sort of like playing for a coach like Bobby Knight. The fact that he calls you stupid and lazy doesn’t matter - he’s always going to call you are stupid and lazy. What’s important is what you did in this particular instance to make him reach that conclusion.

We’ve been working the last few months on a sister product to our ImpactWatch media monitoring tool and one of the real struggles has been coming up with a name and accompanying URL. Anyone who has tried to name something in the last five years knows that most good, short URLs are taken by legit companies or being poached by domain name brokers. It’s one of the reasons for the boom in creatively spelled company names like Flickr and Zooomr and scraped together names like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. In doing research, I came across some good articles/blog entries on naming that I’d figured I’d share. So here goes:

The new rules of naming by Seth Godin. The marketing guru and author of Purple Cow outlines his process for naming his new Web 2.0 venture, Squidoo.

The Name Game by Guy Kawasaki. The venture capitalist and Apple evangelist provides tips on how to name your company.

How they named companies by the Day to Day Activities blog. This entry details how some of the largest companies in the world came up with their names. Sample factoid: eBay became ebay only because the domain name echobay.com was taken.

The Name Game by Salon. Great (but lengthy) article that takes a close look at consulting firms that specialize in naming. The article opens with a description on how one naming company made one million dollars coming up with the name Agilent (Agile + Lucent = Agilent).

Let’s ban “cool” codenames that don’t pass search test by Robert Scoble. Microsoft blogger on how placeholder code names can be dangerous for large companies. A discussion ensues on the struggles Microsoft has naming products.

I have a bit of an Alexa problem. I spend a bit more time than is healthy analyzing the reach of website A compared to website B. The result is cheap posts, but I’m going to do one more before I swear off the practice. So here we go: (1) Of newspaper websites, the New York Times is by far the most popular, despite being only the third most popular paper in terms of print circulation. The Washington Post is the second most popular newspaper website (it’s fifth in terms of print circuation). (more…)