ImpactWatch Blog

I absolutely love movies; I probably go see every single one that comes out in theaters (and yes, that includes such gems as Stepfather).  I was excited to see a Twitter application come out that proposed the idea that it could tally a movie review total from tweets.  It’s called TwitCritics.

We already have plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to movie reviews, so why use this?  Well, I like to think that most Twitter users would immediately tweet about whether or not they liked a movie they just saw.  Think of this not so much a review summary, but a ‘first impression’ summary.  The system searches for tweets that include a movie title, and then assigns a tonality based on the content of the tweet.  A handy ‘mistake’ button is present under each individual tweet to ensure that users can report a faulty rating.

Does it work?  Not completely.  Its success is on a movie-by-movie basis.  Some films that have unique names such as The Men Who Stare at Goats and the tweets for that film are easily recognizable.  Other films such as Fame suffer the issue of having a common word for its title.

Most of the tweets were not actually about the movie but were still rated in the system and part of the film’s overall tonality.  Often, tweets about an actual film were still not rated correctly.  A prime example is below:

Currently, the system doesn’t seem to account for popular acronyms for longer movie titles (such as TMWSAG).

The website is still in its infancy with the Beta only about a month old.  Hopefully, they will find a way to work some of the kinks out.  It doesn’t really subsist as a standalone product, but I could easily see something like this incorporated into a more robust site like Rotten Tomatoes.

The Royal British Legion is trying to appeal to the young generation (nicknamed the “Afghanistan Generation”) this year by promoting their Remembrance Day poppy campaign through social networks such as Twitter.  With a hefty donation goal of £31.5 million, the Legion hopes that by reaching out online they will be able to target the younger demographic.

They also have an iPhone poppy application, an online social hub (http://legionlive.org.uk/), and heavily encourage soldiers to use Twitter to stay in touch with their loved ones.

The Two Minutes of Silence is a way for people to wear a ‘virtual poppy’.  On November 11, at 11AM, the Legion asks users to refrain from tweeting for two solid minutes.  It’s an interesting approach to the campaign, similar to the Earth Day campaign to go without electricity for an hour.  They are hoping that people will help spread the word beforehand with the simple #2minutesilence hashtag.  I certainly bet that two minutes of no activity on Twitter would be noticeable.

Another timely way Twitter is used to inform the masses is by simple one-shot accounts aimed at specific news items.  Statesman.com created a Twitter account to follow the tragic Foot Hood shooting that occurred recently.  They also created a list to capture all the national attention the shootings were garnering.  This kept families and loved ones informed of what was happening with hourly information and up-to-date news.

Personally, I think it’s wonderful to see these two recent examples of Twitter used to have a positive impact and keep people informed of important issues.  It bolsters my opinion of the platform quite a bit after realizing last week that the most followed and listed people were nearly all celebrities.

In “someone finally did this” news, Laura Fitton, author of Twitter for Dummies, recently launched a directory for currently available Twitter apps known as OneForty.  Fitton, whose career pretty much hinges on Twitter, is attempting to fill the gap where a formal Twitter app store might fall.

I like the site’s motto:

Twitter is confusing.
What’s the value? How do you start?
Apps make Twitter better. Find yours!

It’s true.  Twitter still confuses people, users still aren’t sure of the value, and there’s still got to be a way to make it better.  While the site still has a long way to go (at launch it listed only 1200 of an estimated 4000 apps), the idea is a good one, and I can’t wait to start messing around with it.

[Original story from the LA Times]

MarketingProfs, an online resource for marketers, released some rather interesting results from a case study they recently did.  The survey was conducted in June 2009 across several marketing and social media outlets, and it included a total of 338 completed responses.  It shows that more companies understand the relevance of using social media to grow business.

Interesting findings:

• Lack of resources was the most cited reason (30%) for lack of social media engagement.
• Almost 80% of the respondents plan to increase social media involvement in the upcoming six months.
• 87% said that social media was either “important” or “somewhat important” to their companies.

MarketingProfs has also released a study called “Social Media ROI Success Stories: How 11 companies – like OfficeMax, Nissan, BMC and Microsoft – are listening, engaging and measuring.”

“While social media marketing remains hugely popular, it’s clear from these results that few have confidence in their ability to track and measure it from an ROI perspective,” said Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs. “Until marketers figure out the measurement game, brands may resist increasing their social media investments.”

It’s interesting that lack of resources is the number one reason that companies claim lack of social media work within their business.  I would have assumed lack of tools, but perhaps there is an over-abundance of those while companies simply don’t know what to do with them.  In the coming months, there will probably be more and more listings for dedicated social media positions/jobs at major corporations.

Lately all brands are trying to get into the social media game, but which ones are doing to the best job?  A new study by Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top brands by social media engagement.  Below are the top social media mongers:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The brands are categorized from “mavens” (those with the best social media engagement) to “wallflowers” (those with the least).  The study claims that there is a correlation between a high ranking and revenue growth.  Erick Schonfeld disagrees, stating that the brands with the most revenue are likely to be the most socially engaged anyway.  Decide for yourself which way the circular logic turns by reading the full report.

On June 29th and 30th the ImpactWatch team and The Bivings Group had the pleasure of attending the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. One of the tools that we built for the conference was a Twitter aggregator called Twitterslurp so that everybody could keep track of the tweets about the conference on one web page.

Dave Witzel over at the Personal Democracy Forum has a great post up analyzing all of the data Twitterslurp collected to determine which people and topics got the most buzz on Twitter during the conference. These are the top five:

• danah boyd
• Micah Sifry
• Mark Pesce
• Andrew Rasiej
• Michael Wesch

Media monitoring and analysis is what we do over here at ImpactWatch, so we decided to see how online News and Blogs stacked up against the Twitter results. They tell somewhat of a different story.

Speakers

Looking at News and Blogs published between June 29th and July 8th the clear standouts were White House CIO Vivek Kundra and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Online News 6/29 – 7/9

Kundra’s announcement about usaspending.gov, an online “IT Dashboard” where citizens can go to look up how the government is spending their tax dollars on Information Technology was reported in over 54% of main stream news sites online. Bloomberg also announced five NYC government information technology initiatives including the NYC Big Apps contest asking developers to find creative ways to mash-up New York City’s data feeds so information could be better shared with the public. He garnered 17.3% of the media attention as a result.

Blogs 6/29-7/9

Comparatively, in blog posts, Kundra and Bloomberg again dominated the coverage with a combined 55% share from bloggers. The overall results, however, were closer to the trends that Dave Witzel found in Twitter. danah boyd and her presentation on class differences on Facebook and Myspace was the third most written about in 25 different blog posts. Anthropologist Michael Wesch’s session on the evolution of the phrase “whatever” managed to make a top five appearance with 19 blog posts, a tie with PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej.

Themes

The overall topics again reflected the “Gov 2.0” initiatives by Kundra and Bloomberg, earning 53.9% of the total coverage. Other top trending topics were health care, being driven by Obama’s health care initiatives and the call for an open data format for health care data. Iran was still on a lot of people’s minds as a result of the recent elections. Again, danah boyd’s discussion of classes in social networks received a lot of press. Rounding out the top five themes was the debate over whether or not Broadband is a civil right.

Shift to Real-Time information

The following two graphs represent the volume from June 25th and the days leading up to the conference, to July 9th, nine days after the conference ended. If we take a look at the total volume of Tweets, News, and Blogs, the spikes look pretty similar, but there are two big differences that stand out.

The most obvious difference is the volume. 19324 total tweets versus 91 News articles and 194 blog posts during the same time frame. Twitter has clearly become the communication method of choice, at least at technically oriented conferences like PDF.

The other noticeable difference is when the spikes in volume occurred. The peak day for News with 41 articles and Blogs with 61 posts was the second day of the conference reflecting the coverage of the previous day’s events. Twitter however peaks on the first day of the conference with 9615 tweets and is almost as high on the second day with 7959. The audience’s value of the real-time nature of Twitter conversations is clearly evident.

Twitter Volume

I am always passively on the prowl for better interfaces when it comes to getting things done and interacting with social media in an efficient way. Announced over the last few days at Google I/O, Google Wave purports to combine e-mail, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc. – all in semi-real time. This is definitely Google’s response to Twitter (and the transition to real-time internet in general).

Wave steps real time up to a whole new level – as you type an instant message, for example, it broadcasts the message character by character as it is typed. This is of course a toggle, as in many cases you’ll want to carefully craft a response that might be held against you. However, for everyday communication (like between co-workers), it allows for more efficient communication – I can begin crafting my response before the sender is done authoring their instant message.

I skipped around the conference video introducing Google Wave (it is an hour and twenty minutes in length), but it has definitely hooked my interests. My previous prediction about all of these messaging services coming together into one gooey mess of communication, one feed, is finally becoming a reality.

For those users who struggle to keep up with their social networking initiatives or goals, Google Wave might make it easier to handle everything – e-mail to Twitter – in one attractive interface. I’d definitely give the conference video a gander; when Google does things on a large implementive scale, masses tend to adopt.

• Metrica’s 6 Part Review of ROI Techniques

This is part one of a six part series about measuring the return on investment of public relations.

• What Is The NPV Of Social Media? – MediaPitch

The potential value added by using social media right is significant for both today and tomorrow. It all depends on how you measure the IRR, NPV and CLTV of relationships. Do you want a wider reach, a deeper connection and a greater return? Create better relationships and do the math. Get it?

• Social Media and ROI – The Green Market

In this article you will find tips, technology, and important questions to help you measure social media’s ROI for your business.

• Hurry up, the customer has a complaint – The Boston Globe

As blogs expand the reach of a single voice, firms monitor the Internet looking for the dissatisfied.

• Real Social Media R.O.I. – Part 4: FRY Metrics – The Brand Builder

Originally, F.R.Y. (Frequency/Reach/Yield) wasn’t meant to be applied to Social Media (or any media, for that matter). But as it turns out, it adapts super well to just about anything…

• The ROI of Social Media – FrogLoop

I had the honor of participating on the ROI (Return on Investment) of Social Media panel at the Women Who Tech TeleSummit with Monique Eldwell of Conversify and Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategies where we laid out some key metrics and useful case studies.

• Getting engaged: are we making a difference? – Strategic Social Media

Setting an objective that has community and organization equally in mind is at the heart of a comprehensive campaign strategy to measure how well you are engaging with your online community…

• Meaningful Media Measurement and the Tao of “G.I. Joe” – Vital Communications

Recall the familiar, episode-closing exhortation of G.I. Joe: “Knowing is half the battle.”  With media changing so quickly, G.I. Joe’s wisdom today is, if anything, an understatement.

• Monitoring the Conversation – The Drew Blog (Tool List)

To help me participate in this particular conversation, our digital director put together this mini-directory of online resources that I figured some of you might find helpful as well…

• 20 Free Buzz Monitoring Tools – eConsultancy (Tool List)

As the recession continues, so do cutbacks. So, we’ve listed 20 of the better (and free) online reputation monitoring tools in order to help you engage with the onslaught of social media.

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Photo courtesy of: Valerie Everett

Twitter has completely changed the ease by which viewers can quickly review a movie.  It only takes 140 characters to type “This movie was awesome!” or “This movie was an abomination of film!”  Many Twitter users even talk about the film while they are watching it, curtly ignoring the friendly reminders to turn off their cell phones before the film begins.

I decided to do a quick analysis of tweets from this weekend concerning the new Star Trek flick.  I haven’t seen the film yet, but the positive reviews and hype surrounding it have definitely peaked my interest.  After taking a gander at the tweets, I’m nearly raving to go see it.

I took a look at 500 tweets from Saturday, May 9, a day after the movie had premiered in theaters.  Below is a pie chart with the breakdown.

180 of the tweets were people telling the world that they were going to see the movie, in the middle of seeing the movie, or just leaving from seeing the movie.  155 tweets described the movie in some positive manner, with one-word compliments ranging from ‘wicked’ to ‘brilliant’.  15 tweets cited negative things about the film, from complaints about canon changes to bad acting.  If a tweet said something about seeing the film but included a positive or negative review, the tweet was classified as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ and not in the ‘going’ category.

Of the remaining tweets, 35 of them were links to reviews or news articles about high box office sales.  10 talked about how the film was not for “just fans” of the series.  The remaining 55 out of 500 didn’t fall into any of these categories.

In addition to the above categorical analysis, 50 of the 500 tweets contained @replies to someone, showing the conversation emerging.  Only one included the hash tag #startrek, while another one contained the hilarious #whyidonthaveagirlfriend.  Also, seven mentioned the Burger King collectable glasses sold in conjunction with the film’s release.

There were far more than 500 tweets on Saturday about the movie, and if this sample is any indication, the Twitter world highly recommends the film.  While I certainly don’t approve of people using their cell phones in the theater, it’s pretty amazing to think that you can immediately know your friends’ impressions of a movie before seeing it yourself.

Perhaps films should use Twitter to help promote their movies?  Specifically assigned Twittering employees of the production could answer question about the film as well as promote it online.  Several TV shows like Eureka are already going similar things so it’d definitely be worth looking into.

• Adding Wikipedia to the reputation monitoring mix – eConsultancy

A reminder to big brands to monitor what is being posted as “fact” about them on Wikipedia and a tool for keeping an eye on relevant entries.

• Are all Social Media Monitoring Tools created equal – Techrigy

A list of factors to consider before selecting a media monitoring service. I talked about how to determine your needs a couple of months ago. It’s crucial that you figure this stuff out BEFORE you sign the contract.

• Marketers Search For Social Media Metric – Marketing Daily

Fascinating write-up on how marketers are working to quantify the lifetime value of customers’ social media influence.

• Gov 2.0 Radio: Talking Social Media Metrics – Gov 2.0 – Blog Talk Radio

Discussion of how government agencies are using social media tools and how results can be measured. You can listen to the show at the link abov, but also check out the related slideshow on Adriel’s blog.

• 2 easy ways to track social networks in Google Analytics – eConsultancy

Two tactics for tweaking Google Analytics to measure social media traffic separately.

• 4 Ways To Monitor Facebook – Another Ad Wanker

What he said.

• JCPR Twitter Index – TechnoBabble 2.0

A list of the Top 20 Twitters Weighted by Popularity, Influence and Engagement, with a corresponding explanation of their methodology. A very comprehensive set of inputs, though I just realized that the “standardized score” by which the sum is divided is undefined. I’ve left a comment asking about it…

• IAB Brings Clarity and Definition to Social Media Advertising Metrics – IAB

It’s nice to have this info in one place, but I’m not sure it warranted the deluge of blog posts and tweets. Also not sure why they are calling them “advertising” metrics.

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