ImpactWatch Blog

I’m proud to say that ImpactWatch was recently recognized for its work with Hewlett-Packard and Porter Novelli.  We have been awarded a 2009 PRSA Totem award!  We are honored that our continuing work to provide excellence in multi-media monitoring has garnered us another award, and I’m sure that it’s far from our last one.  Look for an update to this post with more details, including a link to the website as soon as the information for 2009 is added.

The Bivings Group, Hewlett-Packard and Porter Novelli together won the Platinum PR Award presented by PR News in the category of Research and Measurement. We are honored to be recognized for our development of HPWatch, a web-based platform that tracks and analyzes HP’s media coverage that is powered by our ImpactWatch product. The study, “A Swiss Army Knife for Measurement and Evaluation”, highlights the flexibility and breadth of the ImpactWatch monitoring and measurement tool.

A Little Bit about Our Project

HP’s original PR-measurement program lacked sophistication, required time-consuming manual processes and provided no insights into trends, competitors or campaign effectiveness. HP turned to PN and TBG to create a solution.

We worked through a series of interviews with stakeholders to determine the issues that the program needed to address. Porter-Novelli created a thorough outline of HP’s public relations initiatives and messages, mapping them to each of the company’s business lines. TBG customized a version of its ImpactWatch product, creating new modules to meet HP’s reporting requirements.

Working closely with PN, we developed policies outlining details such as tonality evaluation, created training materials and developed return on investment (ROI) calculations. To maintain objectivity, TBG developed subjective measures such as tonality, while PN used their expertise to identify coverage resulting from communication initiatives and events.

The project has been a huge success. HP’s Imaging and Printing Group now has a searchable database of six years’ worth of HP print, broadcast, online and blog coverage. In 2007 alone, the team wrote more than 150 reports with consistent metrics over nine market segments. The team has also used HPWatch to judge media event value, analyze product reviews, understand messaging effectiveness and compare coverage tonality. It truly is a Swiss army knife of evaluation.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the team members that helped in the venture. It was worth it (expect a picture of Chuck and me holding a trophy in the near future).

We’ve mentioned our media management and analysis platform, ImpactWatch, several times (in passing) on this blog. Last night, at the 2006 Sabre Awards Dinner in Manhattan, we learned that we had won the Iron Sabre for the Research/Evaluation category, beating out Hill & Knowlton’s Wal-Mart Media Day Analysis case study. H & K has won the category for several years in a row and is quite the formidable opponent. Thanks to tablemates Stanton Crenshaw (received the Bronze Sabre for Best Media Placement: Television) for their hearty congratulations and Denver-based MGA Communications for their kindness and their spirited applause.

We are very proud of our ImpactWatch product and also our work in assisting corporations and public relations agencies with continuous measurement and analysis of their programs and initiatives. The media landscape has been evolving rapidly in the past few years and we have been developing the system so that it reflects emerging media trends and represents each company’s communications goals and objectives, while staying consistent with best measurement practices. Measurement, as so many communicators know, is not very easy and it’s important to assess program measurement in context. Anyway, we sincerely appreciate the honor. (more…)