ImpactWatch Blog

ImpactWatch now displays a real-time feed of custom filtered tweets right on your dashboard.

Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

The beauty of ImpactWatch is that you can literally add content from any source – this includes RSS feeds. Setting up a new RSS is easy using the administrative tools on your ImpactWatch system.

1. Go to the admin dropdown and select “feed config“. This will present a list of all of the content feeds presently available on your system.

2. Select “RSS feed” from the list. This page displays all of your current RSS feeds.

3. Select “Create a new RSS feed” at the bottom of the page. This will take you to an entry page for a new RSS feed.

4. Select your RSS options.

- Enabled – click this check box to make the RSS feed active. You can make the feed inactive at any time by unselecting this option.

- Warn Hours – enter the number of hours after which ImpactWatch will send you an email to let you know that no new content has arrived from this source. Keep in mind how active you expect the feed to be when selecting the time period.

- Feed Interval – select the frequency with which ImpactWatch will retrieve data from this RSS feed.

- Source Media Type – select the type of media that best represents this source.

- Article Type – select the type of article that is most frequently provided by this source.

- Name – give your RSS feed a name so that you can easily pick it out of your comprehensive feed list.

- Query URL – copy and paste the actual URL of the RSS feed.

- Full Text Feed – click this box if the RSS feed provides full text. This determines where the content will be entered by the ImpactWatch system.

- Parser type – select the name that corresponds to the type of RSS feed you are setting up – Yahoo, Google News, Google Blog, Radian6 or custom.

5. Click “Add New RSS Feed Configuration” and the system will retrieve data from your RSS feed at the time interval that you have selected.

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The whole process takes no more than a couple of minutes and your new feed is ready to go. Of course, you should feel free to ask your client manager if you have any questions. They will also be happy to set up your RSS feeds up for you.

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Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnysilva/ / CC BY 2.0

Thank goodness the media monitoring industry isn’t regulated by the FDA. They would probably make companies actually back up the claims they make in their advertising.

I’ve always found it interesting, for example, that every single media monitoring service monitors the most publications in the industry. You would think by definition that only one company could hold that honor, but not so!

Who really has the most sources?

ImpactWatch. I was going to make you wait for it, but I knew you just couldn’t. Really, any platform like IW that doesn’t limit the integration of content ultimately offers the most monitored publications.

Source availability is complicated in this industry. Some companies limit source number based on your monthly plan, some on whether the publication is public, some use secret algorithms to determine which sources to search for your news.

Another issue is the timeliness of new source integration by media monitoring companies that create their own data feeds. New blogs, forums, online news sources and social media platforms can be created at any moment. How long do you have to wait to start searching them for your coverage?

We avoid most of these issues by partnering with pretty much any content provider there is. If they make the coverage digital, we can put it in your ImpactWatch. And since they are professional, dedicated feed providers, they focus on offering the widest and most up-to-date source lists available.

Leaving us to focus on what we know – making cool web-based software.

What sources do I care about?

I really should have added this to the last Media Monitoring 101 installment. But I forgot, so I’m looping back.

In addition to figuring out what publication types (print, broadcast, online, SM) you want to monitor, you should also identify your top publications.

This is usually fairly easy. You want to take a list of important outlets that are talking about you now and add to that the list that you want to have talking about you in the future. These are the sources that you will verify as being offered by your media monitoring service.

Tangent: a neat thing we do for clients with this list is divide your coverage into tiers of importance.

As an example, we have a client who gets mentioned  – just between print and online news publications  – 30,000 times per month. It would be extraordinarily costly to have humans read and analyze every single one of these mentions. But the client still wants subjective analysis on their most important coverage.

So, the ImpactWatch system divides their coverage by importance. All mentions from their top publications are routed to human analysts, while the remainder is processed and tagged using computer automation.

How do I make sure my sources are covered?

Take the list you just made. Email it to your current/potential media monitoring service. Tell them you want to know which are covered. The company should be happy to provide you with availability.

What if my sources aren’t covered?

Find out if the source offers a digital version.

No – Some niche trade publications are literally only available on paper. Not a single media monitoring company can get these for you automatically. However, some offer the option of receiving your paper copy, analyzing and digitizing it for you. If you are a highly specialized or industrial company, this might be an issue for you.

Yes – Ask the monitoring services that you are using/considering if they can add your missing publications. Often, that’s all it takes.

If you are missing many of your top publications and your monitoring firm can’t make them available, email your list out to other firms to compare offerings. This should tell you if you have a tough list or if your service just isn’t up to par.

How many sources does ImpactWatch offer?

Millions. Certainly tens of millions. Possibly hundreds of millions.

But it’s unlikely that your company will be mentioned in more than a few thousand of these, so make sure we cover the ones that you need!

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Rossen

As Twitter use explodes, tracking your brand and/or issues on the platform is becoming increasingly important to companies and organizations.  Through a variety of free tools that are out there, it is possible to easily find out what people are saying.  However, no tool that I’ve seen has the metrics and collaboration layer that I’d really like to see on a tracking platform.
Here is my own personal wish list as to what I’d like to see in a Twitter tracker:

• At the most basic level, display tweets relevant to the client along with meta information about the tweet author (number of followers, frequency of updates, etc.).  I think it would also be cool to show related tweets as discussion threads to provide some context, and provide a way to sort tweets based on the authority of the author.
• I would want a way to graph trends over time as a way of seeing how my brand is doing.  Are the tweets positive or negative?  What are recurring topics that come up about my company or issue?  How is the volume of tweets changing over time?
• I’d want to be able to quickly look up which Twitter users are talking about my brand the most, and which of those users have the most authority.
• Integrated within the platform, I’d like a way to track the success/failure of my own Twitter account.  What is my follower trend?  How often am I being retweeted?

These are just my initial ideas.  What would you like to see in a Twitter tracking tool?

Two weeks ago, I showed you how to change your password under the My Account section of ImpactWatch. 

This week, I want to make sure that everyone is aware of the other customizable options in My Account.

Want to receive your daily email alerts in plain text as opposed to HTML?  Easy; simply change the selection under My Account by using the content box shown below:

You can also check the boxes of all the daily email alerts that you want to receive.

Want to skim the News section at your leisure, but view all the trending graphs and analytics when you first login?  Select Analytics under the Home Page Format section and check Remember Me to always see the graphs upon first login.

Don’t forget to click Submit to save all of your changes!

ImpactWatch lets you customize the way you view the news that is relevant to you and your company.  Use the My Account section to make it even more impactful.

With the Beijing games’ conclusion in August, the Olympics Demo we’ve been running has a lot to show for itself. Over the course of the summer, we picked up thousands of news stories ranging from athletic scandals to the cuisine of China, medals sweeps to Tibet supporters.

Overall, as noted in our previous posts, the Olympic games held a much higher favorability rating than that of host China. Nearly all articles reporting on sporting results were much more correlated with the Olympic Games or other countries, while China’s stories consisted largely of pollution, Tibet, and human rights.

As the games began, the “Phelps Fever” swept the press. With the flexibility of the ImpactWatch platform, I was able to add attributes to tag all articles related to Michael Phelps. Taking data from August, here is a graph I generated showing the topics breakdown:

It is incredible to see that out of the articles published about athletes, Phelps-related stories comprised of nearly 1/5 of the total news about athletes. I had expected it to be slightly higher, but this is still an incredible percentage.

Our demo worked out just as we had intended. Aggregating articles about the Olympics and arranging them in intelligent and meaningful ways yielded interesting results, as well as provided an outlet to showcase the features of the ImpactWatch platform. As this demo was my first IW experience, I am convinced that the platform is a valuable tool for monitoring media (our clients agree!).

We’re throwing some ideas around within the IW team for a smaller-scale demo in the future, and so far we’ve come up with UFOs, assorted B-list celebrities… have a suggestion? Drop it in the comments, we’d love to hear it.

I have spent this summer working for the Bivings Group as an intern. The main focus of my internship has been working on ImpactWatch. One feature that strikes me as particularly interesting is the use of human editors to rate the sentiment of articles.

Many media measurement companies now use automated systems to rate the sentiment of news articles. While this system may be able to read and rate the articles faster than a human, we feel that that the complete automation of the system causes the information to lose value. The Bivings Group will continue to monitor the automated sentiment analysis technology and will switch to it if and when it is warranted.

We have found that while great strides have been made in the field of sentiment analysis, things like sarcasm and colloquial speech can often throw the system off. Another weakness of automated sentiment analysis programs is that they tend to mishandle trends. If a company has made a mistake, but is being praised for their efforts to correct that mistake, automated systems will often rate that as negative, when it should be positive. Sentiment analysis software also seems to run into problems when it comes to rating the sentiment of different entities in an article.

It is for all these reasons that the Bivings Group has chosen to stay with human editors for the sentiment rating in ImpactWatch. We are confident at this point that the extra time it may take to rank the articles is worth it because we know that we are giving our clients the most accurate data possible.

Only sixteen days after my last post about our ImpactWatch demo, the media has begun drifting away from Sichuan’s earthquake in light of high-tech espionage, Paul Hamm’s broken hand, and a record-breaking year for track and field. With the Olympic trials season in full swing, positive coverage on athletes and the games itself is steadily rising. I created an issues breakdown visualization using ImpactWatch, which reveals that just as quickly as the media surrounding the earthquake sprang up, most of it seems to be over:

While the stories surrounding the earthquake have subsided quicker than I had anticipated, it certainly set the stage for interesting coverage of the 2008 Olympic season. Stay alert, more updates to come.

In the last post, I did a micro-study of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads and the way they are being portrayed in the realm of YouTube. In addition to analyzing the “views” count on the website, I adjusted the quantity by minutes to give a better representation of the exposure YouTube is actually giving the Kinoki brand.

This time around, I will examine the user feedback to the videos that were part of the study. If I had been the one who had actually posted these videos, I would be able to utilize YouTube Insight, a powerful built-in tool that turns an ordinary YouTube video into something that resembles an online focus group (there will be more on this tool in the future). Seeing as how I am not interested in posting my own videos about Kinoki Detox Foot Pads, I will have to rely on the inexact method of comment analysis and “feel it out”.

First, a red flag. On the positive videos, there were only a couple of comments that were all positive and framed as customer testimonials reiterating their “refreshing feelings” and how using them had changed the users’ lifestyles for the better. After three or four comments, the commenting feature had been disabled, thereby locking in a few positive comments and keeping naysayers from commenting on the wall. That, and the videos themselves were infomercials in the guise of “health update” news reports. Rather suspect if you ask me.
On the videos that allowed commenting, the tone was overwhelmingly negative. A couple of comments would be users who have actually used the product and would claim that the Kinoki Detox Foot Pads actually made them feel better, to which users would instantly become outraged and prove them wrong with their elite high school chemistry knowledge.

In review, the coverage of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads on YouTube is quite negative, both in videos and commentary. If an undecided consumer were to consult YouTube to make a more informed decision, they would more than likely decide not to purchase these foot pads — maybe changing your diet is the way to go after all. I still swear by my twice-daily regiments of snake oil.

According to Alexa’s listing of most visited websites (sorted by country), YouTube is ranked as #4 in the United States, #6 in the United Kingdom, #4 in Japan, #5 in South Korea and #2 in Germany. It has the power to launch overnight public-relations Cinderella stories such as the Blendtec miracle (yes already, it will blend) as well as broadcast to millions a reputation-killing moment even more swiftly. These occurrences, once posted to YouTube, are available indefinitely.

How does one quantify the amount of successful or damaging exposure YouTube is causing them? Here are some measurements of a micro-case study crafted specifically for this blog post: an analysis of YouTube exposure of the television infomercial product, Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. Note: The Bivings Group and the ImpactWatch service are in no way affiliated with Kinoki™ Detox Food Pads.

I manually aggregated data by watching YouTube videos related to the “miraculous detox system”. You can see the raw data that I collected here in an excel spreadsheet. Using the resulting data, I created some visualizations within ImpactWatch:

The first graph shows a raw view of the types of videos people watch related to the Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. This is strictly measured in views, which is valid because YouTube only counts views once from each unique IP address, and only if an overwhelmingly large portion of the video was viewed. However, this unit of measurement is often misleading and does not give an accurate representation of the actual exposure Kinoki foot pads have received. That’s where a little spreadsheet manipulation and the second graph comes into play.

In the second graph, a new unit was analyzed. Taking the number of views for each video and multiplying them by their length in minutes, an adjusted unit that more accurately represents total “exposure” was created. This graph provides a much better metric for gauging the float-or-sink status of the product. Although in both graphs negative exposure was dominating (I wonder why?), the adjusted quantity of “YouTube minutes” shows that it wasn’t as bad as just a raw views count might have initially demonstrated.

In the next part of this two-part case study, comments for the videos and other forms of responses will be analyzed.