ImpactWatch Blog

Last week, we created a SLURP140 to track #askobama and @townhall for the twitter townhall hosted by @Jack Dorsey at the White House. We tracked the data and then created a downloadble CSV file that anyone can download for further analysis.  In fact, over the course of four days, we collected 153,136 tweets from 59,000+ users.  Download the file here!

We also noticed that most of these users were tweeting from the web using standard browsers – which very different than the trends we often see with SURLP140-tracked events. The tweets themselves were longer than average; and chock-full of questions about jobs, the economy, and the debt ceiling.

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.

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)

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

In terms of the ability of social networks and online advertising to serve as predictors for the success or failure of candidates at the polls, the general consensus is that while the Internet alone will not necessarily predict the winner, leaving the online space to your competitor is a good way to lose money and support. In other words, a campaign that is not well organized online is probably not well organized off-line.

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.”

For the past week, I’ve been toying with two different recommendation systems for Twitter. The site’s own recommendation engine, “who to follow,” displays a couple of suggestions on your homepage sidebar, a “you may also like” list after you follow a user, and extensive lists of recommendations on the “twitter suggests” page.

So far, I’ve been pretty pleased with the “suggestions for you”  recommendations. These are based on who my Twitter contacts are following, so it makes sense that I might be interested in users that are followed by several others in whom I have already shown an interest (=I will like people that my friends like). The “Browse interests” feature on the “Twitter Suggests” page is a bit broader. Due to the sheer number of Twitter users, it is as difficult to pick out interesting users on this list as it is with a topical search. These are also organized by follower count, so you have to wade through a lot of brands and socialebrities to discover anyone new. Like most of Twitter, features are limited and there is no way to keep track of users you have been recommended but have no interest in.

As far as the pair of sidebar recommendations, I think that’s really just a way to get you to click to the main feature. I haven’t seen any good recommendations there but it does infuriate me that I can’t right click to open the profiles in new tabs. I would probably click through to the profiles more often if I didn’t need to leave my Twitter homepage to do it.

I’ve also been checking out a service from SocialOomph ( a site that I really like for tweet scheduling) called  FollowerHub. It’s a bit complicated to start but basically it’s a platform for buying visibility in the site’s search results and finding users to follow. First, you put a bid down on keywords related to your profile. When other users search for those keywords, you will appear in the results in a position relative to your bid (I think). The search function is quite well done, allowing advanced search syntax, tons of profile filters, the ability to automate search frequency and to organize users found through the search.

Searching costs 10 credits which is 10 cents. Following someone that you find on Followerhub through a search also costs 10 cents. Appearing in search results for others costs whatever you bid for that specific search, which can be as low as 1 cent. All users get 500 credits free to start. The system lets you track who you have found/who has found you through the system, as well as offering a platform for follower management in general. You can create organizational groups, take Twitter actions (follow, unfollow, block) and also add notes to user profiles, which could be very useful within the groups feature.

Now that we’ve found a bunch of new people to follow, how can we get rid of all of the old, boring ones?

I really like ManageFlitter. The service shows you which users that you are following are inactive, too active, and whether they are following you back. It would be great to be able to customize the filters (like finding users who tweet more than 10 times per day) but this at least gives you a list that you can work through to trim down your list a bit. I got rid of some users that have clearly stopped using the site, although I kept several that I hope will wander back to tweet someday.

Know any other good services for finding (or losing) Twitter users?