ImpactWatch Blog

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.

My Stuff is a new ImpactWatch™ feature that enables individual users to save stories in the system that are pertinent to them. To do this each story is listed with an icon that saves the item in a place where they collect articles. Further, it uses AJAX so that saving items is a smooth process that doesn’t involve multiple web pages.Visit the ImpactWatch™ site to learn more about the program. We also offer a free demo that features analysis of media coverage about the launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 and provide case studies about how ImpactWatch can help any organization manage its public relations.

Click on the picture for a video demo of My Stuff.

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.

You can make yourself a free, categorized and searchable archive of news on any topic for reference and monitoring using free web-based RSS reader Bloglines in tandem with major news aggregators. This is not something that is immediately apparent, but it’s still relatively simple. Here’s how to do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose. (more…)

We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with Moreover Technologies to begin to use their online news content in ImpactWatch, our flagship media monitoring service. For those not in the know, ImpactWatch is a web-based media management platform used by a large number of public relations and corporate communications professionals. We are proud to announce that Moreover now joins other high-volume media content providers such as Factiva and VMS in helping to provide our ImpactWatch clients with a truly global combination of news sources, tools and information that give our clients a simple way to visually track, gather and analyze global news content.

After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.

Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.

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.