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.

On August 26th we deployed Slurp140 to start tracking mentions of Mayor Adrian Fenty and City Council Chairman Vince Gray. Since then, as of 11am today have seen a total of 4,696 tweets by 1,896 people that specifically mention a candidate by name or include the hash-tags #dcmayor or #dcdebate.

As most of us would agree, one of the most important factors for a political candidate is authenticity, especially in regards to Twitter accounts.  In this respect, the official Twitter accounts of Mayor Fenty and Chairman Gray leave much to be desired, as it is clear that both are largely, if not exclusively maintained by staffers. With a little over 9 hours to go until the polls close, Slurp140 is ranking @Fenty2010 slightly ahead with 124 tweets and 1,577 mentions and @GrayforMayor with 85 tweets and 1348 mentions since August 26th. Overall, @Fenty2010 is followed by 852 people and following 943 while @GrayforMayor is followed by 923 people and following 921.
Surveying a few popular Twitter ranking services leads to some potentially interesting insights:

According to Tweetlevel:

@Fenty2010 receives: Influence score of 56.3, Popularity score of 42.2, Engagement of 44.9 and Trust: 45.4

@GrayforMayor receives: Influence score of 55.2 Popularity score of 43, Engagement of 46.5 and Trust: 43.6

According to Klout:

@Fenty2010 has a Klout score of 12 and classification as a “Dabbler” which is defined as someone who: “Might just be starting out with the social web of maybe you’re not that into it. If you want to grow your influence, try engaging with your audience and sharing more content.”

@GrayforMayor has a Klout score of 26 and classification as a “Conversationalist” which is defined as “You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.”

According to Tweetreach:

@Fenty2010 has reached 15,006 people via his last 50 tweets and 27,703 Impressions

@GrayforMayor has reached 14,125 people via his last 50 tweets and 29,951 Impressions

For partisans and political junkies, taking the Klout score analysis for both candidate somewhat out of context aligns surprisingly well with the narratives about the candidates and campaigns we have seen in the media. For instance, Klout states that @Fenty2010 “Needs to engage more with others or be more active to gain influence,” while @GrayforMayor “Is influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger.”

27% of the companies admit to doing no measuring whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t monitoring (Guys? Please tell me you’re monitoring.) A little over half of the companies have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services.

Companies are also shifting resources from technology to staff. Internal staff now accounts for 53% of web analytics budget, compared to 42% last year, while technology spend has dropped 8% to 30% of total budget. Hopefully this shows that companies are finding effective tools that put the right data in the hands of employees who can act on it… and it doesn’t mean that companies need additional employees to sift through a bunch of unfiltered data (Guys? Please tell me you’re filtering).

Either way, companies are no longer shelling out for analytics that pile up without being analyzed or implemented in business planning. These numbers also show that media monitoring is being recognized as essential and included in the overall analytics budget and strategy.
-Stuff the researchers pointed out:

-) Two-thirds of companies (65%) have paid for online survey technology, while just over half (51%) have paid for media planning and competitor analysis services. Despite the increased importance of the mobile channel, only 12% of companies are paying for mobile analytics tools.

-) A quarter of companies (26%) are using multivariate testing (MVT) and optimisation tools, and this is the best-performing business tool from a return on investment perspective. Two thirds of companies (66%) using MVT report a definite bottom-line improvement to business performance.

-) Lack of budget and resources is the most significant barrier to an effective online measurement strategy, according to 57% of companies surveyed. This is now more of a problem than last year, increasing by 12% from 45% in 2009. The biggest factor cited as a barrier by agencies is still the lack of understanding by clients, although this is now less widely seen as a problem compared to last year.

Econsultancy and Lynchpin 2010 Online Measurement and Strategy Report
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• For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
• Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and Comcast Cares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now.
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

You can read all about their methods, results and other science-y stuff in this PDF.

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Their findings:

* Shock and awe – Stories with a surprise or twist were popular, but awe-inspiring pieces were sure to be sent around. Researchers found that articles which made the reader appreciate the vastness or complexity of the world were by far the most shared.

* Practical makes perfect – Financial, medical and domestic stories were also popular choices to share via email. People love to send information that is useful to their friends and family. Product reviews, tips and advice, local openings and events – readers shared information that made a difference in their everyday lives.

* Mixed feelings – Articles with a positive tone were popular choices to share…but so were articles that revealed a threat or inspired fear. People love cats rescued from trees, but also want to know if there’s a burglar in the neighborhood.

* Longer and smarter – Longer articles were more popular than quickies, but this may be related to readers’ preference for in-depth coverage. Researchers were surprised at the popularity of science articles, even those with heavily technical content.

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What it means to you:

Your audience is made up of human beings. They want to learn. They want to feel things. They want to share experiences.

It’s common for businesses, especially the older and more established, to keep a distance between the inner workings of the company and their clients. There are lots of reasons for this – they think the details are boring, they want to protect proprietary info, they’re focused on doing “real work.”

Well, as Apple can tell you, there are true benefits to connecting with your audience. In addition to increasing visibility, it’s an opportunity to improve customer loyalty and – by using the tactics above – having those loyal customers share your information with others.

You don’t have to give away the secret sauce, but share some of what is going on with your business. Close a big deal recently? They will be happy for you. Have a setback or a hard decision to make? They will be sympathetic. Share tips on using your products or an in-depth explanation of a new technology.

And don’t be limited to what you’ve done so far. Want to inspire a little awe of your own? Tell customers how you envision the future of your industry or tackle a controversial topic that affects your business. If you share real information and opinions on your business, your readers will share them too.

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Below is a chart of the various social media channels that respondents to their survey claimed they had used when gift researching this year.

I find it interesting that user reviews influenced purchases more than expert reviews.  Consumers obviously value recommendations from others, but the expertise level of the source doesn’t matter quite as much.  Also, don’t the numbers for Twitter seem kinda…low?  I would have expected the amount of those following a company and those influenced by a friend’s tweet to be at least a combined 10%.

The release also contains a graph showing the amount of online purchases by week leading up to New Year’s Day.  The recession doesn’t seem to be affecting online holiday shopping for 2009, although this may be due to consumers hoping that the Internet will provide them with better deals than stores.  The week beginning with Cyber Monday (November 30th) sees a huge jump in online spending, although as this Focus article explains, Cyber Monday is never the biggest online shopping day of the year.  It typically begins about a week or two later, though still on a Monday.

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

A new research study, “Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities” compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007 and 2008 by the nation’s top 200 largest charities.

The study was conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm.

The study reveals that:

• 57% of charities have blogs, compared to colleges/universities at 41%, Inc 500 corporations at 39% and only 16% of Fortune 500 Co.s blogging.

• 90% of charities feel that their blog is successful.

• Use of at least one form of social media has increased from 75 to 89% of respondents.

• Usage increased for all social media tools studied: 79% of charities are using both social networking and video blogging, up 38 and 47% respectively over a year.

• 66% of charity respondents conduct online media monitoring, compared to 54% of academic institutions and 60% of the Inc 500.

• Over 80 percent feel that social media is at least “somewhat important” to their future strategy; 45 percent responded that social media is very important to their fundraising strategy.

“These organizations are demonstrating an acute, and still growing, awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives,” said Barnes. “They have found a new and exciting way to win the hearts – and maybe even the dollars – of potential donors. For volunteers and donors looking to have a conversation online about particular aspects of the charity’s mission, this increased interaction can be significant. These nonprofits are clearly learning to use social media more effectively.”

A full copy of the new research report can be downloaded from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

With these three designations, the study draws a series of conclusions about what goals and processes lead to successful use of social media monitoring to protect brand reputation.

My main problem with the study is that it was fairly difficult to separate cause from effect. I outline some of those issues below.

Additionally, the study makes several points and recommendations about consumer-generated content and engaging customers, despite a strong emphasis throughout on legal issues such as fraud and trademark abuse. I agree that legal issues can arise through social media monitoring, but believe that the response process, after identification, is far different than for most other media monitoring issues. I think the study might have been improved by treating these functions separately.

Who is Best-In-Class?

The nexus of the study is the definition of their company tiers. “Aberdeen used two key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class (BIC) companies [from the other companies]…These companies experienced the following performance gains over the past 12 months.”

• 95% improved their performance in protecting their online brand reputation
• 75% experienced an increase in shareholder value

But a key conclusion of the report is that “Best-in-Class companies are nearly twice as likely as Industry Average companies and 12.5 times more likely than Laggards to experience year-over-year increases in shareholder value.”

Isn’t that part of what made them Best-in-Class in the first place? Not to mention shareholder value = money = more resources for monitoring/brand intervention.

Do companies that monitor social media increase shareholder value? Or does increasing shareholder value lead to better monitoring programs?

Why Monitor?

Another conclusion is that “40% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 24% of Laggards, see the need to protect online brand reputation as a top-three reason to deploy a social media monitoring solution.” Sadly, “protecting brand reputation” – the raison d’etre of the study – is actually at the bottom of the respondents’ list of reasons to monitor social media.

The study provides the following chart of “Top Two Pressures – All Companies”

• Build Positive Market Awareness – 45%
• Increase return on Marketing Investment – 23%
• Increase Customer Retention – 19%
• Improve Brand Advocacy – 15%
• Increase Customer Satisfaction – 13%
• Protect Brand Reputation – 11%
• Improve Market Research Capabilities – 8%

I’m not even sure what these percentages mean (it’s 134%) but any way you look at it, 11% is not impressive.

If you look at the poll from the conclusion above, the situation gets even murkier.

Best-In-Class companies were the top 20% of 275, so there were 55 of those. According to the conclusion, 22 BIC companies chose “need to protect online brand reputation” as a top 3 reason to deploy social media monitoring vs 20 Laggard companies (30% of 275). That doesn’t seem very significant.

It was also kind of confusing to draw a conclusion from a Top 3 poll and provide a visual of Top 2 responses.

Focusing Social Media Response

That Top Two Pressures chart also got me thinking about who companies are targeting with their social media response strategies. With it’s focus on “brand abuse”, the Aberdeen report is heavy with warning examples of social media shysters spreading vicious rumors about corporations or illegally using their logos.

But the pressures chart shows that companies are focused on improving customer relations, not on targeting brand threats. Maybe that’s exactly what Aberdeen is pointing to as the problem.

In any case, I started thinking about spending time “building positive market awareness” vs “protecting brand reputation”. Reaching out to customers and promoting positive information about the company, instead of tracking down and trying to alter the behavior of brand opponents.

Maybe these companies do have the answer. In social media, maybe it’s more effective to vaccine the population than to quarantine the infected.

What are Best-In-Class Companies Doing?

The study goes on to say that BICs “share several common characteristics with respect to online brand reputation management”:

• 70% have a process for acting upon insights gleaned from social media monitoring
• 70% have dedicated resources devoted to SM monitoring
• 55% deliver info concerning potential threats to brand reputation to key decision makers in real-time or within hours.

So, using the definition of a BIC, we can conclude that:

Companies that are working to improve their online reputation and have money = companies that organize and support their social media monitoring process.

That makes sense.

How do Laggards become Best-In-Class?

Aberdeen has an entire chapter on recommendations and steps for companies to improve their media monitoring and response programs. It’s a pretty good list with explanatory paragraphs for each of the suggestions.

Some of the recommendations to improve Social Media Monitoring:

• Prioritize brand threats
• Create threat alerts
• Train employees to engage customers online
• Leverage digital dashboards
• Measure performance over time
• Define best practices
• Identify/measure key influencers
• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Correlate brand protection to financial outcomes

Other Interesting Stuff from the Study:

• Social Media use is increasing: 50% of respondents are increasing investments in social media.
• Nobody’s archiving their data: 55% of BIC and less than a quarter of others have a central repository for SM data.
• Everyone’s getting help: 84% of BIC and almost half of everyone else are using Social Media Monitoring tools.
• People need benchmarks and goals: Only 60% of BIC and a quarter of the rest have defined performance metrics for their monitoring program.

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Photo courtesy of: Swamibu

Some URL’s relevant to your interests:

• Social media expert Mark Evans details his thoughts on the long-term effects of social media.
• A TechCrunch report on internet advertising and how its growth is outpacing television.
• Snippet on determining browser market share.
• Tips for spotting users with fake Twitter followings.

Just a quick look at Monday’s web offerings.