ImpactWatch Blog

This week we are introducing a new angle to the IW blog, aptly named “Impact Watch Feature of the Week.” In these posts, we’ll explain and showcase one ImpactWatch feature every week to help illustrate how important using IW can be for a business or department.

IW's Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Tracking: Facebook and Twitter integration in ImpactWatch

Did you know, that in addition to tracking keywords and news across the blogosphere and open source media – that Impact Watch can also integrate real-time Facebook and Twitter information? ImpactWatch offers users the ability to look for certain keywords across unprotected and publically-available tweets and facebook messages. This includes messages posted to users’ walls, public groups, as well as Facebook Fan Page posts by companies and businesses who mention tracked keywords.

The data generated through Twitter aggregation (using a souped-up version of SLURP140) will be able to be graphed and charted, just like the standard IW-generated reports.  The the data gleaned through a real-time use of twitter will enable many organizations to use Twitter to detect new trends and hot-button issues in their business realm. With ImpactWatch, your business can have it’s very own trip-wire reporting system – with all the generated data coming from Twitter.

The advanced social media monitoring features within ImpactWatch enable users to search through hashtags and keywords within both Facebook and twitter posts – allowing businesses a greater understanding of their market and business climate. These social media features enable companies to stay in tune with the rapidly changing public perceptions and trends, while simultaneously being able to track changes through a customizable dashboard.

Of course, this social media information tracking is an addition to the already-extensive list of IW features such as

• Customizing report generation for your company’s needs
• Simplifying clip collection and tagging across open source media AND the blogosphere
• Creating custom graphs and metrics
• Automating daily email briefing

One of the most popular features of ImpactWatch is the email alert. Instead of logging into your IW site, the news comes to you!

Here are some of the basic features that can be customized in your alerts:

• Frequency – the email alerts can be automated to send at specified time intervals or you can send them out manually whenever you want to distribute information.
• HTML vs Text – in addition to setting a default format for your emails, you can also specify a preference for every individual user of your IW.
• Summary Content - you can always choose to include a written summary or message to your distribution list. The IW admin tool provides a simple interface for adding and formatting text.
• Coverage Format - there are tons of options for how mentions will appear in the email alerts. Choose to include any combination of headline, abstract, full text and URL.
• Organization – preset your coverage to appear in order of date, importance, by business unit or any other mention attribute. You can also manually order your coverage before sending.
• Individual vs Aggregate – choose separate emails for each mention or an aggregate email that includes all mentions since the last alert.
• Ad Hoc Search Results – distribute search results from the newscenter or archives.
• Appearance – email alerts can include your company’s logo and branding.

Of course, this is just the beginning of your personalization options. As a custom software developer, we can work with you to make sure  ImpactWatch fits your organization’s workflow.

If you can think it, we can make it happen!

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 ImpactWatch team would like to welcome Rahul Dubey as our new Vice President of Business Development.

Rahul joins ImpactWatch after working in Brussels and Malta on a 6 month project for an international media company.  He has been in the media monitoring and measurement world since 2007 and has worked with Global 2000 companies, NGOs, Non-Profits, Members of Congress and Government Agencies to develop their monitoring and measurement capabilities.  He worked with C-level executives to implement industry best practices and strategic research.  Rahul’s experience also includes advertising where he spent 5 years at Fox and CBS Television.

Rahul has a BBA in International Business and BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan.  He has lived in DC for over 7 years, but his heart still bleeds for his hometown Detroit sports teams (yes, Lions included.)  Rahul enjoys cooking, playing tennis, books with lots of pictures, and traveling.

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

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

How do you know what you know? It’s a question worth asking that seldom crosses people’s minds. When it comes to media literacy, few people stop to critically analyze the sources from which their news originates. After all the prestige and organization is stripped from it, mass media boils down to a story written by a biased individual.

One of the widely recognized normative goals of journalistic media is to remain “objective” and “unbiased”, a lofty and impossible goal. Unavoidable forces such as deadlines, ownership, the author’s personal worldview, editorial influence, and story selection all contribute to media bias. What I’m trying to get at is that news isn’t always fair, and anyone with a vested interest in their publicity should be wary of their perception in the media.

Take, for example, someone recently familiar with media coverage: Sarah Palin. Without speaking to my personal favorability, what comes to mind at the mention of her name? Does the term Malibu Barbie, the popular appearances of Tina Fey, or opinions about wardrobe selection come to mind? In reality, many people were turned off by Sarah Palin. Over her campaign for vice presidency, the media chose to zoom in on certain aspects of her personal life, imagery, and political history (as is the media’s responsibility for anybody vying for a spot as prestigious as she was). Whether you felt Sarah Palin was treated fairly or unfairly is irrelevant to my point: the picture you saw was painted entirely by the media.

Some wisdom can be drawn from this. If revenue is driven by consumers, and consumers are informed by an inherently biased media, it is necessary to “maintain” public image with the public. This is nothing new. Public relations firms have been around since the days of Edward Bernays, and before that in other forms. Building relationships with the public, networking with relevant (and influential) members of the media, and responding to negative criticisms are all key qualitative elements to maintaining desired public perception.

Somewhere along the way, a little thing called the internet came along. It took some time to catch on, but it is unstoppable; a TV-killer. Please take advice from this youngster: Do not underestimate its influence. While traditional media personalities have come to terms and accepted the internet as part of their toolbox (see our newspaper study), nobody could predict the overall influence social media would have on media relations. Tweets and blogs and spaces of all varieties have popped up anywhere and everywhere I seem to be looking. For the first real time in history, a medium with virtually instantaneous feedback has become the norm. Opinions from virtually anybody have the potential to go viral.

That’s where we come in. At IW, we take care of that for you. There is simply too much noise out there to maintain relations the way one could in the golden days. Harnessing the vast scanning capabilities of machines and the sentiment of living, breathing people, we deliver information about brands to people who get it. If you think I’m wrong, you’re probably missing something.

You may have noticed something new.  Today we’re launching the redesign of the ImpactWatch website. 

Over the past several months, we have brainstormed, designed and written content for what we hope will be a milestone in IW’s life.

The idea for the site redesign came from the need for a new logo.  Last year, we attended the PDF conference in NY and used a temporary logo for all the swag that was handed out to potential clients.  We weren’t particularly happy with the temporary logo; it was hurriedly done, and it didn’t symbolize IW in our eyes.  Upon returning to the office, Eric and I set to work on a memo detailing all of our ideas for a new logo.  Our initial idea was to have an animal mascot, an owl to be specific, and you can see that vision in some of the rejected logos at the bottom of the post.

Eventually, the owl died (flew the coop?) and after some weeks of redesign, marketing meetings and discussion, we finally came to a consensus.

 The process of selecting a new symbol helped the team see that it was time for a complete marketing website remix.  The original site had been created years ago and we wanted to match our fancy new logo with a fancy new site.  And so began a whole new process of meetings, marketing strategy sessions and designer debates.

The old site was mostly narrative, with long paragraphs describing the features and benefits of IW.  People in the blogging age simply don’t read that way anymore, so the first order of business was to streamline the paragraphs into new bulleted lists and tabbed sections.  The end result is a complete overhaul of the information presented to you on every page.  It’s easier to read, easier to edit and just plain better.

Another tweak to the site was the addition of the Twitter feed on the homepage and secondary pages.  We started tweeting for our brand a couple of months ago, and love the response we’ve been getting.  I saw a great feed app on a favorite webcomic’s page , so I pitched the idea and we made it our own.  Look for that to evolve and grow over time, with the addition of some more Web 2.0 goodies.

With phase one of the site re-launch complete, we are already hard at work thinking of great ideas for phase two.  Feel free to post any comments or suggestions, but try to keep them free of owls…it’s still too soon for me.

As a bonus, browse some of the logos from the decision-making process that didn’t make the cut.  During the decision-making period, these were designed by graphics guru Teddy Taylor.  As you can see, we went through a LOT of different ideas before finally deciding on the one you see above. 

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?

Within the past month, we released our 2008 Newspaper Study, and the results aren’t all that surprising. It seems as if newspapers are finally catching on to the whole, you know, internet thing. With steady growth in most categories, the results show that the typewriter-types at Gannett and McClatchy are stepping up to the plate and transitioning into the digital forum. While they still have a few kinks to work out, let it be known that the nation’s editors are trying, desperately, to hold your attention online.

This trend has several implications for the industry and the way information is disseminated — namely, in our line of work, the division between traditional media and web 2.0/social media/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is being blurred. No longer are the days when scanning the nation’s top papers is enough to ensure you’re seeing most of your significant coverage. A media monitoring initiative must be all inclusive, spanning content types and niche audiences. Where people choose to receive their news is growing in diversity and complexity; as a result, so are the methods in which to keep up.

While some features like podcasts have dropped, more important factors like socially-driven bookmarking are skyrocketing among the nation’s traditional publications (92% of newspapers studied, compared to 44% in 2007). We’ve seen the way information flows turned completely upside-down with the Digg factor, which works in very much the same way. In addition, registration is at an all-time low (11%), meaning less obstacles to hurdle for the average user to access content.

On the ImpactWatch team, it is our priority to ensure that our clients see what’s being said about them — be it traditional print, online content, or socially driven media. When there’s simply too much clutter from too many sources, we help sort it out.