ImpactWatch Blog

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

Cross posted from The Bivings Report

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

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.

With only three days left before things kick off in Beijing, our ImpactWatch demo has made itself clear: within the media, China is being portrayed at a far less favorable rate than that of the actual Olympic Games. Even with widespread buzz addressing athletic performance enhancers, coverage of China’s human rights record, air pollution, algae blooms, and authoritarian domestic policies have been pushed to the forefront of western media. While glittering articles about athletes’ preparations boost the favorability of the Olympics, China is struggling to find its own crutch topic under the strain of relentless criticism and unfavorable press.

The graph below illustrates what I’m talking about:

 Even from this raw graph of daily average favorability, the difference is quite noticeable. When I visualize by month to show overall trends, things get interesting:

These trend lines highlight the discrepancy between the two topics. While the Olympic Games’ average favorability has had its ups and downs, its average favorability has both remained positive and increased in positivity from May to August.

China has not fared as well in its coverage; while enjoying two relatively neutral months (May and June), its favorability rating began to falter in July (-.13) and August (-.29). Quite the opposite of the Games’ coverage, China’s trend line indicates both a negative rating and an increase in negativity from May to August.

As the Games’ opening ceremony nears, a new chapter in our ImpactWatch demo begins. With Beijing as a stage, the world — and our demo — is all eyes…anything could happen.

Since its launch in 1999, our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform has been focused on serving the enterprise market.  The product has been aimed at organizations that receive a high volume of coverage from both traditional and online media, require a large number of employees to access the data ImpactWatch collects and need high-end  reporting and analysis of coverage.  Due to its robust feature set and flexibility, ImpactWatch remains a great solution for these types of enterprise clients.

But in showing ImpactWatch over the years, I’ve run into a lot of people who love ImpactWatch’s interface and base tool set, but who don’t need all of the advanced features we’ve built into ImpactWatch over the years. They were looking for an elegant and affordable way to manage and report out on their media coverage as opposed to an enterprise level media tracking platform.

In an effort to provide these folks with a product they can use, we are in the process of rolling out two new ImpactWatch product lines that will enable the IW to serve the needs of organizations of all sizes.  Specifically:

1. ImpactWatch Basic – Aimed at groups that get a limited amount of coverage (approximately 1-50 clips a day) and only need for a handful of people to access data.
2. ImpactWatch Professional – For organizations with a higher volume of coverage (50-100 clips a day) and who need a few dozen people to access the system.
3. ImpactWatch Enterprise – This is our current system, which is aimed at organizations with a high volume of daily coverage (100+ clips), a large number of users and that need access to some of ImpactWatch’s high end reporting features.

I know this is vague, but we are in the process of a big development push and aren’t ready to talk about all the details yet.  Check the ImpactWatch blog for updates on our progress and look for us to roll out the new product lines later in the summer.

We’re excited.

Back in November, a number of us here at The Bivings Group were captivated by the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 launch – so much so, that we set up our ImpactWatch demo to follow the news about the two game systems. Now that both the launch and the Holiday Season have past, we decided to put together a report based on the ImpactWatch analysis and our own research. The following is a brief summary of our findings.

Sony PlayStation 3

Prior to launch, it sounded like Sony’s PlayStation 3 had captivated the imaginations of the gaming world. While the Nintendo Wii was quietly building buzz, the media was all over the PlayStation 3 like a pack of wolves on a fresh kill. The hype surrounding the PlayStation 3 launch was staggering, and going into the Game Console Wars, a betting man probably would have put his money on Sony. With the success of the original PlayStation and the even greater success of the PlayStation 2, it seemed like it would be a slam-dunk for Sony. That turned out not to be the case. Three things that stood out about the media coverage of the PlayStation 3 were:

• PlayStation 3 Launch Sees Rampant Crime. Buying a video game system was never so dangerous. Due to massive hype-driven demand, combined with severe supply constraints, the launch of the PlayStation 3 was tainted by theft and violent crime that spanned the globe.
• Sony PR and Management Blunders Abound. From Sony’s decision to include the Blu-Ray high-definition DVD drive, thus delaying the launch by almost a year, to Sony Australia’s General Manager, Nic Foster saying “Wii is a core gaming device. It’s a more fun, intuitive sort of product to pick up,” to Sony’s press release falsely claiming that they had won a Technology and Entertainment Emmy for the SIXAXIS controller, they managed to fumble the PR ball on every play.
• Developers Jump Ship, Express Angst. Reports show Sony failed to cater sufficiently to non-Sony game developers. They lost the platform exclusivity of the best selling game of all time (Grand Theft Auto) and alienated their third party developers to such an extent that the launch line-up consisted of only a handful of titles. Gabe Newell of Valve Software said that, “The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think it’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted.”

Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii can be described as the underdog going into the Game Console Wars. Initially, both Sony and Microsoft felt that it was not a direct competitor. Their machines targeted hard-core gamers, who are interested in the most realistic gaming experience, the best sound, and greatest speed. The Wii was considered more of toy targeted towards younger gamers. It turned out that the Wii was a more direct competitor than anticipated.

Three thing that helped to shape the brand perceptions consumers have about the Wii were:

• Media Stardom. The Nintendo Wii rapidly ascended to become a pop-cultural icon. From the beginning, the Wii was a media darling, earning free coverage in editorials, radio station contests, and television shows – including being prominently featured in episodes of South Park and The Colbert Report, as well as being given away to every audience member on an episode of Dr. Phil.
• Strapgate. In a public relations coup d’etat, Nintendo managed to turn a potentially damaging quality issue into a resounding brand victory. Within a week of the Wii’s launch, reports began to surface about Wiimotes slipping out of gamers’ hands and the security straps breaking. Nintendo responded promptly and decisively, announcing an investigation and voluntary recall of the straps. What could have turned into a significant issue managed to help solidify the Nintendo brand in the eyes of consumers.
• Broad Demographic Appeal. Nintendo’s NES gaming console was an 80’s icon and many people that were kids playing their NES console in the 80’s are now in their 30’s and want to relive the fun of their youth. In a piece on 1up.com, Nintendo’s Senior VP of Marketing, George Harrison, cites a 2006 survey by the Entertainment Software Association revealed that 25 percent of all gamers are 50 or older. Of the three next-generation game consoles, only the Wii has been positioned to really target such emerging market segments.

If you are interested in reading the full report, click here to download it as a PDF.

If you would like access to the ImpactWatch demo set up to track this issue, click here to request a username and password.

In the most recent volume of Communique Magazine , TBG’s Gary Bivings authored a featured article. “Watching the Web” is a great piece about how PR and marketing techniques are changing to incorporate the monitoring of various new forms of media, primarily the Web. The article cites several examples of how the Web has affected PR and customer involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, and discusses how content tracking platforms can be an effective addition to any PR firms strategy (this includes our very own ImpactWatch !). Among other issues, Gary listed the Top Seven Online Media Monitoring Practices in his article:

1. Get involved sooner rather than later
2. Implement a platform that will track online media for you
3. Categorize online activities of target markets/information seekers–blogging, message board posting, etc.
4. Make a list of the top sites to monitor per public/target audience
5. Track site statistics (eg, how often the site is visited)
6. Track bias of various sites with regard to your product
7. Decide how you will respond to the circulation of negative information about your product

You can read the article in its entirety here.