Many American University students were tweeting up a storm using the ipad (1 and 2) while others were glued to the TweetDecks on their laptop screens. Overall, tweetdeck won as the most popular twitter service by a long shot. The #SLS11 hashtag was officially trending in Washington, DC by mid-afternoon on Saturday – thus bestowing the official social media stamp of approval on the student-run conference.

Big props go out to the AU Social Media Club (@AU_SMCEDU), specifically Alex Priest- the founder and president of the AU club.

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 -

While we do encourage our clients to create and maintain blogs for their  organizations as a way of reaching out to clientele and discussing topics of mutual interest, those topics should still be related to your organization’s mission and profile. Or if nothing else, always follow rule #1 and “do no harm,” and be especially wary of bringing up divisive topics like politics or religion tends. In short, leave the commentary to the commentators and keep your blog on topic. In this case, The Black Squirrel appears to be swimming far outside their assigned lane as many on Twitter are outraged over this line which has a particularly divisive opinion about undocumented workers. Commenting on the fact that  the man convicted of murdering Leavy was an illegal immigrant:

While the author attempts to walk back this generalization about undocumented workers, the last line of the last paragraph does not help: 

“Well-meaning souls on both sides of the political aisle can wax eloquently in favor or against illegal aliens. This is not to take a position on that. That is to suggest that it should not be played to cheap laughs, not when too many Americans have been vicitimized [sic] by it or live in fear of it.”  Emphasis here is my own. 

After this first broke on Twitter, it was soon picked up by the very popular Washington D.C. based political satire blog Wonkette, where in a short time it picked up another 847 views, 36 comments and 10 re-tweets.

Update: since I started writing this the Washington Post has also picked up on the story!

Of course, we created a instance of Slurp140 to track the buzz.

Given that I created this 30 minutes ago, we did not capture some older Tweets about the topic, but nevertheless the vast majority of these comments are very much negative in sentiment against the Black Squirrel. So far we have tracked at least 92+ people who say they will not be going back to drink or dine at the Black Squirrel. 

To sum it all up, when thinking of topics for your businesses’ next blog post, do no harm, consider the cost / benefit of swimming outside your lane and of course, check your spelling.

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.

• Three Metrics That Make PR Measurement More Meaningful – The PR Measurement Table

• How to Select a Social Media Monitoring Service – The IT Chronicle

• Listening Is a Skill Well Learned – ClickZ News

• The Importance of Monitoring the “Webiverse” – Fast Company

• Get PR Measurement Off The Island – Waxing UnLyrical

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SEE LAST WEEK´S TOP POSTS

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photo: x-ray delta one

• Social Media Metrics Beyond Small Victories – Engage

• Online Media Monitoring: An Essential Part of Listening – Burrelles Luce

• Try Being Unsocial with Customers First – Destination CRM

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SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

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photo: soulfish

• 10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring – Mashable

• Social Media ROI – is this the measurement framework we’ve been waiting for? – Smart Insights

• The 10/90 Rule for Social Media – Sysomos

• Ethics in PR Measurement – Philip Sheldrake

• The etiquette of eavesdropping – Research Magazine

• Rethinking the Value of Social Media: Measurement – WebWorkerDaily

• From WTF To KPI: PR Measurement In Acronyms – Shonali Burke

• Choosing Goals for Social Media – Amber Naslund

• Customized Social Media Metrics Are Important to Measurement – Spiral16

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See Last Week’s Top Posts

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photo: Mark Strozier

1. You don’t feel like a sitting duck.

One of the giant benefits of social media is the opportunity to get “out there”, you know, “with the people.” Social media coverage is an invaluable source of sentiment data so you can track consumer feelings about your product and head off any problems before they snowball. Social media monitoring means that you don’t have to wait until sales are affected to find out about changes in your market.

2. You know what you’re doing.

With solid media metrics, you will have a foundation for your marketing ideas. You can figure out what is working with your audience and do more of that. Archiving and monitoring over time provide trend data that shows where your efforts have been and helps you figure out where they should be going. If you just monitor sporadically for your one-day “push,” you won’t have a baseline to compare your initiative to and you’ll miss all the good stuff the market is trying to tell you even when you’re not bombarding it with messages.

3. You know what your competitors are doing.

With social media, it’s all out there. You can monitor your industry and competitor coverage just like you monitor your own brand. Is your competitor hiring 10 programmers all of a sudden? They’re up to something. Are dozens of tweeters complaining about your partner company’s customer service? Might be time to cut that cord. Your brand name isn’t the only one that affects your bottom line.

4. You’re not chasing back coverage.

Part of successful media monitoring is anticipating how people will talk about you. Let’s say I’m monitoring my social media coverage and I’m tracking “Hannah Del Porto” and “@handels.” Bases covered, right? Well, right up until Ben & Jerry’s releases a delicious flavor, aptly named “Hannah Banana,” in my honor.

I can’t just sit back and assume that anyone who talks about my flavor will also mention my full name or twitter handle. I have to be watching for developments related to my brand (a lot of these are internal, guys, so it’s not really a challenge) and change my keywords so the coverage comes to me instead of having to chase it down after the fact. This means I’m ready with immediate metrics and the ability to produce a report for that last minute meeting (likely about why the hell I have an ice cream named after me).

5. Your monitoring program is not an island.

A good media program costs money. You either paid for some kind of fancy software or you have an army of analysts locked in the basement wading through your media mentions. Either way, to get the most out of your investment, you have to integrate the results with your business activities. Customer service complaint via Twitter? Let your account managers in on it. Blog about 10 improvements that should be made in your industry? Forward it to product development. If you only have your PR/comm people seeing this information, you are missing out on a lot of your monitoring program’s value.

How do you know if your monitoring program is a success? Are you wringing out every drop of valuable information?

photo: visual.dichotomy

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!