ImpactWatch Blog

Here at ImpactWatch, we’re always looking to the future; whether that be information aggregation, social media tracking, sentiment analysis, or mobile communication. So imagine our bewilderment when we saw the following video and realized that the augmented reality that it depicts may not be all that far off. And furthermore – users may not be able to opt-out of facial recognition/social media hybridization.

Read Write Web may have said it best:There’s very little gray area on this one: You’re either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.

Watch the video about video and face tagging (and how it can be synchronized with augmented reality mobile software) and let us know what you thought in the comments:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

(Re-posted from the Bivings Report)

In comparing the Facebook pages of the top 86 magazines by circulation, while those with the highest circulations generally had the highest number of Facebook fans, much like our newspaper study this presents a problem when trying to quantify engagement. In short, how do you avoid biasing your results towards magazines with a small, but engaged numbers of Facebook fans.

For a magazine like Playboy with 2.3 million fans, what is the best approach  to compare engagement on their Facebook page to engagement on Time’s which has over 2 million fewer members? While there are some  statistical methods can compensate, at the end of the day we believe  it’s going to come down to a qualitative, rather than quantitative judgment. In this respect, we present our own views as to the top ten magazines on Facebook. If you agree / disagree or have a better method please let us know in the comments!

Please feel free to share or embed this image on your blog w/ attribution: Download at http://bivin.gs/i93iiJ.

See the speadsheet of our raw data after the jump -
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(Cross posted from the Bivings Report)

The Bivings Group has just completed a newspaper online interactivity report looking at Facebook fan engagement amongst the nation’s top 100 newspapers (as determined by circulation). Our main focus was to compare large and small newspapers across the nation by looking at the number of fans that interacted with the newspaper and amongst themselves via posted content via Facebook Fan pages. Over 1,000 individual wall posts were used to determine the averages seen in the above picture.

In addition to ranking each paper by the number of Facebook fans, we also looked at number of comments per post, and the variety of post on each page. The overarching intent was to create a ranking that allowed large regional newspapers to compete on an even digital playing field with large national papers.

1. The Washington Post – The Post ranks 3rd in number of Facebook fans within the top 100 US newspapers, but it’s particularly effective form of audience engagement is what ranks it at the top of our list. It averages 41 likes and 55 comments for every post on it’s fan page wall, and maintains a very high fan-to-circulation ratio. The Post also features two custom tabs and its editors periodically use HootSuite to schedule posts and ensure a consistent stream of information to its readers.
2. The Chicago Tribune – It may be ranked 9th in the US in terms of circulation, but the Chicago Tribune has its Facebook engagement down to a science. It boasts a custom Welcome landing page, a number of newspaper-specific sub pages,as well as a discussion tab. This is in addition to it’s high average number of likes and comments on every post, and its continuous reader questions.
3. The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com web portal) – Due in part to its collaboration with AZcentral.com, the Arizona republic is ranked 3rd on this list despite having a 40% lower circulation than the first-ranked Washington Post. Its average number of likes and comments on posts (as a function of its total number of Facebook fans) shows that Arizona Republic routinely engaged a larger number of its fan base.
4. The Denver Post – This regional powerhouse newspaper has a greater number of Facebook fans than the nationally-distributed Los Angeles Times. The average number of likes and comments on newspaper’s posts are similar to newspapers with much larger circulations. Likewise, the Denver Post utilizes custom tabs to post Contests and Classifieds on its fan page.
5. San Jose Mercury News – This newspaper ranks 8th in circulation within the United States, but we’ve ranked it 5th on this list due to its consistently active Facebook fans. Often, the fan page will feature simple status updates (sans links) and will ask the readers questions or just wish them a good morning. It is this variety in fan communication that earns the Mercury News a spot in the top 5 of this list.
6. The New York Times – This is the nation’s third largest newspaper in terms of circulation, but is by far the most popular news source on Facebook with over one million fans. In fact, their number of Facebook fans actually exceeds their daily circulation – which is something no other top 100 US newspaper has accomplished. However, the number of comments and likes that their posts attain do not show proportional engagement of their one million fans.
7. The Los Angeles Times – This west coast paper’s fan base is surpassed in number by much smaller regional papers such as the Denver Post. However, its fans state engaged and its numbers of average likes and comments remain fairly high.  Distinctive feature: their posts are often published using HootSuite – as opposed to manually sent on Facebook.com.
8. The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland.com web portal) – By partnering up with the Cleveland.com web portal, the Plain Dealer’s Facebook an page become a hub of all things Cleveland-related.  The page also encourages fans to post pictures and otherwise interact with the Plain Dealer news, sports, and entertainment stories that they post.
9. USA Today -   The page boasts an impressive number of Facebook fans and often asks their fans questions relating to the links that they are posting. However, with a circulation of over 1.8 million (and being one of the best recognized national newspapers)– one would think that USA Today can attain a higher number of fans than 38,000.
10. The Wall Street Journal – This may be the largest US newspaper in terms of circulation (and one of the only ones with a profitable content paywall on the website) , but it’s follower and fan engagement numbers are still only a fraction of those on the NY Times Facebook page. Nonetheless, the page is frequently updates and fans are able to have lively discussions about each post.

Online media monitoring is our bread and butter here at ImpactWatch.  Thus, we were very excited about retailers using Foursquare check-in specials to encourage visitors to use social media and get discounts.  Using social media monitoring software like Slurp140, it was possible to track the number of users who tweeted their check-ins and/or used the hashtag #blackfriday .

An AdAge article article looked into the Foursquare check-in statistics from the shopping-filled day – and determined that many of the stores who angled the most of Black Friday check-ins fell short.  Case and point – Radioshack. This retailer has not typically served as a ringleader for Black Friday deals, but it was offering Foursuare users a discount of 10% for checking in, 15% if they’re the mayor, and 20% for unlocking the “Holiday Hero” Badge. Nonetheless – as you can see in the graph – Radioshack failed to crack into the top 10 most-checked-in retailers on Friday.

It is also important to note that without any special promotions or discounts, Starbucks beat out every retailer with over 25,000 check-ins throughout the course of Black Friday.

Engaging a tech-savvy consumer was a good marketing idea for the electronics company,  but when it came to the sheet volume of check ins  – it fell short.  This does not mean that partnering with Foursquare to offer deals to customers is an ineffective idea  – (Gap accomplished it effectively on Facebook Places this month) – but measuring the impact of social media and geo-location campaigns can be tricky when larger retailers are crowing out the little guys when it comes to volume. For more information on IW’s media monitoring tools, click here.

(image source: mashable.com)

As mentioned on The Bivings Report, last Thursday we launched a new instance of Slurp140 to track discussions on Twitter surrounding Facebook’s fairly well hyped “Project Titan” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified is in fact, not a “Gmail Killer.”

Looking at the results of http://www.slurp140.com/titan/ a few things stand out:

1. Discussion about Facebook’s announcement were largely confined to a small and specific set of people.
In other words, total insider baseball.

For the Facebook announcement, the ratio between total number of tweets (13,813) and people tweeting (12,257) is much closer than breaking news stories we have tracked. When we used Slurp140 to track the story of a armed man holding hostages in the Discovery Channel building, there were a total of 16,665 tweets by 9,639 people- The majority of which happened in a shorter 3-hour time frame.

As for the reaction to the Facebook announcement, while @petershankman, founder of HARO was certainly not impressed, from reviewing the stream majority of tweets were informational in nature or related to questions about privacy and possible Facebook data mining: via @jeffsayre: “Facebook email? All they’ll need now is an online bank, restaurant and bathroom. No one will ever leave. #bigbrother #privacy”

Secondly, just like a photo rumored to be of the Discovery channel shooter circulated widely, misinformation and rumors about the Facebook email system did as well.  While I agree with Peter’s sentiment that applying for jobs with your new @facebook email account generally isn’t a good idea- In the strict sense this really isn’t possible. As Zuckerberg explained in the Q&A- the Facebook email system & spam filters are configured  for communicating within your current network of friends. In most instances, you’re probably not Facebook friends with your future boss. If on the other hand you are,  it might actually be a good idea to shoot them an email over Facebook inquiring about the job opportunity.

Third while concerns about privacy and data mining are of course legitimate, in comparing Facebook email to Google, Facebook is actually less intrusive. As Zuckerberg explained, Facebook’s ad targeting is based on what users list as their likes and interests, while Google actually does search the content of your email in order to display ads. In this case, Facebook is technically the more private option.

2. Spikes in conversations correspond to live video / main stream media coverage.

This seems obvious, but at the same time it has some interesting implications- Namely that while a topic which originates on Twitter can certainly gain momentum and become a trending topic, most people don’t tune in or join the conversation until the ‘traditional’ media picks up on the story. Secondly for any kind of press conference, seminar or major announcement, having some kind of live video stream will almost certainly lead to a bump in conversations.  This is evidenced by the smaller bumps in traffic when news outlets such as Reuters filed their first reports about the announcement.

Slurp140 stats for Project Titan are on the left whereas Discovery stats are on the right. In the near future we will be analyzing the entire archive of Tweets to determine sentiment analysis.