ImpactWatch Blog

The last several days have been busy for SLURP140 – as it has been utilized by a number of conferences and events to track Twitter use and statistics.

The ARNOVA non-profit organization is currently using SLURP140 for its annual conference, while the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference is utilizing the tool for its fifth annual leadership conference. Both organizations were new to using a Twitter aggregator, but are now able to glean new statistics and information from the online discussions that are going on around their events.

As we’ve written before on the ImpactWatch blog, the robust social media monitoring tools within the IW suite allow for the aggregation of analytic and statistics about the social media sentiment associated with certain products,  events, and ideas.  SLURP140 is the free analytical tool put out by the Bivings Group in order to showcase the social media functionalities present within Impact Watch.

If  you are interested in seeing how ImpactWatch functions outside of the social media sphere, check out our demo.

To show off the fantastic features of ImpactWatch (IW), we consistently run a demo highlighting a particular news topic, similar to how our clients track mentions of their brand or industry.  For the past several months, we’ve been running a demo on New Energy.  This includes everything from wind power to biofuel, and includes key stakeholders and various messages.  For this summary, I drew metrics from June 1, 2009 to August 31, 2009.  I also drew some comparisons with the previous three month period.

It’s about time for a new demo, so I created a report using the various graphing and reporting features which are fully customizable on IW.  I found out some interesting things about the various new energy sources by looking at the articles brought in from over 5300 online sources.  Make sure you click on the graphs to see them in full high-res.

Comparing the various “competitors” was interesting.  Wind Power was always on the top of the heap, but seemed especially high during the month of July.  Delving deeper into the articles which made up that month showed that criticisms of wind energy, a ban on the use in North Carolina, and home tips for wind energy resulted in the increased coverage.

Week-by-week, Water Power was consistently the second-lowest competitor with the exception of the week ending in the 24^th of August.  This week had a lot of news on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announcing an agreement with the state of Maine to coordinate schedules and procedures for the review of new tidal energy projects off the coast.  By the next week, this coverage had decreased and Water was back in its normal position among the competitors.

The stakeholders were of particular interest.  Within ImpactWatch, once a graph is created you can click on the segments to view the articles which made up that particular piece of the pie.  I delved deeper to find out why some politicians were in so many articles.  The reader should note that this graph does not include Barack Obama (though we were tracking him) due to the fact that his mentions represented over 70% of the graph when included.

Al Gore’s prominent number-one spot should be no surprise as he is known for his outspoken activism for clean energy and the environment.   Sarah Palin mentions are a mix between statements from her on new energy and criticisms of her plans.  Joe Biden is mostly mentioned in the context of current environmental plans and his opinion on them.

A supermajority of the articles contained messages about politics or development of the new energy sources.  When comparing the message pickup from the previous three months to the time period shown in the graph, articles containing global warming mentions were down over 5%.  This 5% was almost completely taken over by articles about politics while the percentage of articles about development stayed nearly the exact same (42.2% –> 43.2%).

This sample report shows off some of the great features of ImpactWatch.  Not only is it a platform for storing reports for an indefinite length of time, but it’s incredibly easy to use the system to pin-point the reasons behind fluctuations in coverage for a variety of messages.  Contact us for a walkthrough of the more advanced functions that IW can provide, including social media monitoring, advanced graphs, and more.

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.

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.