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

Thank goodness the media monitoring industry isn’t regulated by the FDA. They would probably make companies actually back up the claims they make in their advertising.

I’ve always found it interesting, for example, that every single media monitoring service monitors the most publications in the industry. You would think by definition that only one company could hold that honor, but not so!

Who really has the most sources?

ImpactWatch. I was going to make you wait for it, but I knew you just couldn’t. Really, any platform like IW that doesn’t limit the integration of content ultimately offers the most monitored publications.

Source availability is complicated in this industry. Some companies limit source number based on your monthly plan, some on whether the publication is public, some use secret algorithms to determine which sources to search for your news.

Another issue is the timeliness of new source integration by media monitoring companies that create their own data feeds. New blogs, forums, online news sources and social media platforms can be created at any moment. How long do you have to wait to start searching them for your coverage?

We avoid most of these issues by partnering with pretty much any content provider there is. If they make the coverage digital, we can put it in your ImpactWatch. And since they are professional, dedicated feed providers, they focus on offering the widest and most up-to-date source lists available.

Leaving us to focus on what we know – making cool web-based software.

What sources do I care about?

I really should have added this to the last Media Monitoring 101 installment. But I forgot, so I’m looping back.

In addition to figuring out what publication types (print, broadcast, online, SM) you want to monitor, you should also identify your top publications.

This is usually fairly easy. You want to take a list of important outlets that are talking about you now and add to that the list that you want to have talking about you in the future. These are the sources that you will verify as being offered by your media monitoring service.

Tangent: a neat thing we do for clients with this list is divide your coverage into tiers of importance.

As an example, we have a client who gets mentioned  – just between print and online news publications  – 30,000 times per month. It would be extraordinarily costly to have humans read and analyze every single one of these mentions. But the client still wants subjective analysis on their most important coverage.

So, the ImpactWatch system divides their coverage by importance. All mentions from their top publications are routed to human analysts, while the remainder is processed and tagged using computer automation.

How do I make sure my sources are covered?

Take the list you just made. Email it to your current/potential media monitoring service. Tell them you want to know which are covered. The company should be happy to provide you with availability.

What if my sources aren’t covered?

Find out if the source offers a digital version.

No – Some niche trade publications are literally only available on paper. Not a single media monitoring company can get these for you automatically. However, some offer the option of receiving your paper copy, analyzing and digitizing it for you. If you are a highly specialized or industrial company, this might be an issue for you.

Yes – Ask the monitoring services that you are using/considering if they can add your missing publications. Often, that’s all it takes.

If you are missing many of your top publications and your monitoring firm can’t make them available, email your list out to other firms to compare offerings. This should tell you if you have a tough list or if your service just isn’t up to par.

How many sources does ImpactWatch offer?

Millions. Certainly tens of millions. Possibly hundreds of millions.

But it’s unlikely that your company will be mentioned in more than a few thousand of these, so make sure we cover the ones that you need!

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Rossen

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.