ImpactWatch Blog

In addition to the great resources available on the United Nations Education Scientific and Culture Organization’s (UNESCO) website for World Press Freedom Day, we humbly submit our own Twitter tracking and analysis tool Slurp140: http://www.slurp140.com/wpfd/. Also be sure  to check out the livestream going on right now!

SLURP140 – TBG’s twitter monitoring tool has been redesigned and re-tooled to be better, faster, stronger…and more accurate. We’ve mentioned the product time and time again on the IW blog, but this new re-design is serious business. The biggest changes have been the re-tooling of the twitter-stream as well as the addition of the Klout Score. Now you can log into your twitter account and participate in the SURP140-tracked conversation right from the page itself. Likewise, you can now see just how popular or influential members of the leader board really are.

All of these functionality changes are all in addition to making the site much more visually appealing. The new streamlined design (with added customization functionality) is aimed toward conferences and events who have SLURP140 up on their screens continuously. It also follows TBG’s mantra of practicing what you preach with good design and best practices in social media marketing.

Our signature tracking charts are still in full effect and can be relied upon for accurate monitoring of events that in progress as well as those that have already passed.  And now every user who pops up on the leaderboard can now check out their own Klout score as well as see how well they rank when it comes to tweets and @mentions.  For new instances of SLURP140 in action, you can take a look at:

• Earth Day 2011
• The release of Obama’s birth certificate
• the April Georgetown Day holiday
• And, of course, tracking ImpactWatch

This is the full screen-shot of the product of our hard work. And don’t forget – it’s still completely free to use for conferences, events, and organizations. All you have to do is fill out the contact form on the left-hand side of http://www.slurp140.com/

What do YOU think of the new SLURP140?

This weekend, several members of the Bivings Group client services team attended the Social Leaning Summit held at American University by the AU Social Media Club.  But we didn’t just moderate panels and network with attendees – we also create a SLURP140 for this particular conference. This new and improve tracking tool helped over 300 attendees keep track (and compete with one another) when it came to twitter use during the conference.

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.

These are a couple of those statistics pages that we pulled from other SLURP140 sites.

Mixed up in today’s extremely active Twitter stream,  you may have noticed  one topic that seemed out of place, namely that Trendsmap or @TrendsDC was showing a fairly popular dive bar called The Black Squirrel was suddenly a trending topic. Looking into the issue further,  I found that the traffic was being generated after someone discovered the following post on the restaurant’s blog: “Spare Us Your Cheap Laughs" which attempts to critique Stephen Colbert’s handling of the Chandra Levy murder trial.

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.

We are passionate abo0ut social media monitoring here at ImpactWatch. Therefore, we wanted to share some of the social media statistics for two recent blog posts on the The Bivings Report about our 2010 newspaper facebook fan study.

Infographic entry (published on 12/14)

• 132 likes on facebook
• 52 tweets
• 1,485 page views since 12/14 (making it the #5 most popular TBR post in the last month)
• 7 total disqus comments
• Picked up by Facebook News, feedburner, twitter, sites on tumblr, and poynter.org

Top 10 List (published on 12/17)

• 167 likes on facebook
• Average time on site for the post – 1:50
• 109 tweets
• 2,820 page views (making it the #3 most popular TBR post)
• Picked up by feedburner, twitter, sicrono.com and facebook.

Are you curious about what other developments the Bivings Group is monitoring? Check out our two new new SLURP140s – one about the CES 2011 conference, and one about the launch of Drupal 7.  With SLURP140, we are able to track multiple hastages and usernames via the global twitter stream – and track the most influential users and keywords pertaining to a certain event.

• http://www.slurp140.com/ces/
• http://www.slurp140.com/drupal7/

Online media monitoring is our bread and butter here at ImpactWatch.  Thus, we were very excited about retailers using Foursquare check-in specials to encourage visitors to use social media and get discounts.  Using social media monitoring software like Slurp140, it was possible to track the number of users who tweeted their check-ins and/or used the hashtag #blackfriday .

An AdAge article article looked into the Foursquare check-in statistics from the shopping-filled day – and determined that many of the stores who angled the most of Black Friday check-ins fell short.  Case and point – Radioshack. This retailer has not typically served as a ringleader for Black Friday deals, but it was offering Foursuare users a discount of 10% for checking in, 15% if they’re the mayor, and 20% for unlocking the “Holiday Hero” Badge. Nonetheless – as you can see in the graph – Radioshack failed to crack into the top 10 most-checked-in retailers on Friday.

It is also important to note that without any special promotions or discounts, Starbucks beat out every retailer with over 25,000 check-ins throughout the course of Black Friday.

Engaging a tech-savvy consumer was a good marketing idea for the electronics company,  but when it came to the sheet volume of check ins  – it fell short.  This does not mean that partnering with Foursquare to offer deals to customers is an ineffective idea  – (Gap accomplished it effectively on Facebook Places this month) – but measuring the impact of social media and geo-location campaigns can be tricky when larger retailers are crowing out the little guys when it comes to volume. For more information on IW’s media monitoring tools, click here.

(image source: mashable.com)

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.

As mentioned on The Bivings Report, last Thursday we launched a new instance of Slurp140 to track discussions on Twitter surrounding Facebook’s fairly well hyped “Project Titan” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified is in fact, not a “Gmail Killer.”

Looking at the results of http://www.slurp140.com/titan/ a few things stand out:

1. Discussion about Facebook’s announcement were largely confined to a small and specific set of people.
In other words, total insider baseball.

For the Facebook announcement, the ratio between total number of tweets (13,813) and people tweeting (12,257) is much closer than breaking news stories we have tracked. When we used Slurp140 to track the story of a armed man holding hostages in the Discovery Channel building, there were a total of 16,665 tweets by 9,639 people- The majority of which happened in a shorter 3-hour time frame.

As for the reaction to the Facebook announcement, while @petershankman, founder of HARO was certainly not impressed, from reviewing the stream majority of tweets were informational in nature or related to questions about privacy and possible Facebook data mining: via @jeffsayre: “Facebook email? All they’ll need now is an online bank, restaurant and bathroom. No one will ever leave. #bigbrother #privacy”

Secondly, just like a photo rumored to be of the Discovery channel shooter circulated widely, misinformation and rumors about the Facebook email system did as well.  While I agree with Peter’s sentiment that applying for jobs with your new @facebook email account generally isn’t a good idea- In the strict sense this really isn’t possible. As Zuckerberg explained in the Q&A- the Facebook email system & spam filters are configured  for communicating within your current network of friends. In most instances, you’re probably not Facebook friends with your future boss. If on the other hand you are,  it might actually be a good idea to shoot them an email over Facebook inquiring about the job opportunity.

Third while concerns about privacy and data mining are of course legitimate, in comparing Facebook email to Google, Facebook is actually less intrusive. As Zuckerberg explained, Facebook’s ad targeting is based on what users list as their likes and interests, while Google actually does search the content of your email in order to display ads. In this case, Facebook is technically the more private option.

2. Spikes in conversations correspond to live video / main stream media coverage.

This seems obvious, but at the same time it has some interesting implications- Namely that while a topic which originates on Twitter can certainly gain momentum and become a trending topic, most people don’t tune in or join the conversation until the ‘traditional’ media picks up on the story. Secondly for any kind of press conference, seminar or major announcement, having some kind of live video stream will almost certainly lead to a bump in conversations.  This is evidenced by the smaller bumps in traffic when news outlets such as Reuters filed their first reports about the announcement.

Slurp140 stats for Project Titan are on the left whereas Discovery stats are on the right. In the near future we will be analyzing the entire archive of Tweets to determine sentiment analysis.

This week SLURP140 has been tracking the TEDx MidAtlantic event being held in Washington, DC on November 5th.

Using the ImpactWatch Social Media Monitoring tools, this version of SLURP   140 can serve as your go-to guide to seeing what kind of information is presented during this set of TED talks. If you are unable to attend, watching this SLURP-stream should allow you to glean the most important facts and tidbits from the speakers. We will also be tracking the conference hastags and seeing which users stand out as the event’s shining (twitter) stars.

Interested in going to the always-informative TEDx event yourself? The details for the event are as follows:

• Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, DC
• Time: All Day (8am – 8pm)
• Number of speakers: 22
• Number of attendees: 750