ImpactWatch

You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again. Monitoring the jumble of user-driven media is essential for the health of any brand. A few days ago, Jeremiah Owyang highlighted the importance of this on his blog entry about a recent brand-jacking involving Exxon Mobil. Apparently, a user account “ExxonMobilCorp” was created on Twitter, and a user known only as “Janet” posed as an Exxon Mobil spokesperson. This is not the first time that brand-jacking has been been identified as a problem within social media.

Analytics aside, it boils down to a matter of tipping points. Most organizations spend countless resources building their brands, and the reality is that these intellectual positions can fall at a moment’s notice. Trying to calculate ROI, tracing overall trends, semantic analysis — all of these take a back burner to public relations emergencies within the realm of new media.

Being aware of attacks on your image, misrepresentations of fact, and negative opinion from top influencers is simply necessary when positioning your brand.

In the last post, I did a micro-study of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads and the way they are being portrayed in the realm of YouTube. In addition to analyzing the “views” count on the website, I adjusted the quantity by minutes to give a better representation of the exposure YouTube is actually giving the Kinoki brand.

This time around, I will examine the user feedback to the videos that were part of the study. If I had been the one who had actually posted these videos, I would be able to utilize YouTube Insight, a powerful built-in tool that turns an ordinary YouTube video into something that resembles an online focus group (there will be more on this tool in the future). Seeing as how I am not interested in posting my own videos about Kinoki Detox Foot Pads, I will have to rely on the inexact method of comment analysis and “feel it out”.

First, a red flag. On the positive videos, there were only a couple of comments that were all positive and framed as customer testimonials reiterating their “refreshing feelings” and how using them had changed the users’ lifestyles for the better. After three or four comments, the commenting feature had been disabled, thereby locking in a few positive comments and keeping naysayers from commenting on the wall. That, and the videos themselves were infomercials in the guise of “health update” news reports. Rather suspect if you ask me.
On the videos that allowed commenting, the tone was overwhelmingly negative. A couple of comments would be users who have actually used the product and would claim that the Kinoki Detox Foot Pads actually made them feel better, to which users would instantly become outraged and prove them wrong with their elite high school chemistry knowledge.

In review, the coverage of Kinoki Detox Foot Pads on YouTube is quite negative, both in videos and commentary. If an undecided consumer were to consult YouTube to make a more informed decision, they would more than likely decide not to purchase these foot pads — maybe changing your diet is the way to go after all. I still swear by my twice-daily regiments of snake oil.

According to Alexa’s listing of most visited websites (sorted by country), YouTube is ranked as #4 in the United States, #6 in the United Kingdom, #4 in Japan, #5 in South Korea and #2 in Germany. It has the power to launch overnight public-relations Cinderella stories such as the Blendtec miracle (yes already, it will blend) as well as broadcast to millions a reputation-killing moment even more swiftly. These occurrences, once posted to YouTube, are available indefinitely.

How does one quantify the amount of successful or damaging exposure YouTube is causing them? Here are some measurements of a micro-case study crafted specifically for this blog post: an analysis of YouTube exposure of the television infomercial product, Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. Note: The Bivings Group and the ImpactWatch service are in no way affiliated with Kinoki™ Detox Food Pads.

I manually aggregated data by watching YouTube videos related to the “miraculous detox system”. You can see the raw data that I collected here in an excel spreadsheet. Using the resulting data, I created some visualizations within ImpactWatch:

The first graph shows a raw view of the types of videos people watch related to the Kinoki™ Detox Foot Pads. This is strictly measured in views, which is valid because YouTube only counts views once from each unique IP address, and only if an overwhelmingly large portion of the video was viewed. However, this unit of measurement is often misleading and does not give an accurate representation of the actual exposure Kinoki foot pads have received. That’s where a little spreadsheet manipulation and the second graph comes into play.

In the second graph, a new unit was analyzed. Taking the number of views for each video and multiplying them by their length in minutes, an adjusted unit that more accurately represents total “exposure” was created. This graph provides a much better metric for gauging the float-or-sink status of the product. Although in both graphs negative exposure was dominating (I wonder why?), the adjusted quantity of “YouTube minutes” shows that it wasn’t as bad as just a raw views count might have initially demonstrated.

In the next part of this two-part case study, comments for the videos and other forms of responses will be analyzed.

After last week’s debacle with Barack Obama’s MySpace page, lots of bloggers have been discussing whether or not political campaigns should take control over MySpace profiles and other voter-created websites and online groups. It’s no surprise that bloggers have been covering this issue, but I wondered to what degree the story had reached mainstream media (MSM) outlets.

I did a quick Google search for articles about Barack Obama from May 2 to May 4. I limited my search to print media outlets (newspapers and magazines) and major online news sources (such as CNN.com or MSNBC.com). I did not include blogs, international sources, or TV/radio outlets in my search. To further narrow my search, I only considered articles that were directly about Barack Obama–his name was either in the headline, or he was a substantial part of the story. I did not include political overviews or articles where he was mentioned in brief.

I found 51 articles over the three days, 10 of which were about Barack’s MySpace page. I marked particularly negative articles with an asterisk.

Political blogging growing like a vine*
Barack Obama Could Lose Some ‘Friends’ In MySpace Debacle*
This Should Make Bloggers Happy *
Learn from Obama: Hire a Professional *
Campaign takes control of ‘official’ MySpace site
Between Barack and MySpace
I’m Sorry, Barack, We’re Through*
Obama Campaign Asks: Is it MySpace or Yours?
Obama Takes MySpace Page from Backer
Obama to MySpace: That’s MyPage

These 10 articles were spread over 8 different publications and make up 20% of Barack-specific coverage during May 2-4. I was pretty surprised that such a variety of MSM outlets, some of them very significant publications, picked up on this story. I was also surprised that MSM outlets were so critical of Barack’s efforts at regaining control over his MySpace page. I expected that since most newspapers and magazines maintain top-down strategies in most of their media coverage, they would be supportive of the transition to the “official”, rather than voter-controlled strategy.

To see the articles I included in my survey, please take a look at my datasheet.

Our media monitoring platform, ImpactWatch, would be perfect for tracking an issue such as this one. In order to complete this analysis, I had to manually search through Google results. If I had used ImpactWatch, this search would have been automated, allowing me to pre-determine which news sources I would be tracking. In addition, ImpactWatch would have given me a mechanism for sorting, graphing, and ranking the results according to subject, source, author, and bias (positive, negative, neutral).

For more information about ImpactWatch , check out the website and our current free demo, which tracks coverage of the PS3 and Nintendo Wii.

I was against promoting Ajit’s music on the blog. But then his cover of Gnarl Barkley’s Crazy got over 10,000 views on YouTube, so I realized we needed to jump on the bandwagon and support our own. So here’s our Senior Director in charge of Impactwatch, Ajit Verghese, singing Crazy:

Listen to Ajit. Buy ImpactWatch. Love the Bivings Group.

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.