ImpactWatch Blog

OK, more like top posts of the month at this point. I have been out for vacation and on the disabled list these past few weeks. I know, I know… I missed you, too. But I did keep up with the best in media monitoring news and here it is:

• Why You Shouldn’t Trust Automated Sentiment Scoring – Jason Falls

• Measuring the ROI of social CRM no easy task – SearchCRM

• The Debate About Automated Sentiment Analysis – Seth Grimes/ Intelligent Enterprise

• Are we there yet? Diagnostic versus objective social media metrics – Christopher S. Penn

• Social Media Expert: Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Social Media Expert

• Social Media Monitoring – Vesta Digital

• Marketing Analytics: How Do You Decide What to Measure? – Hubspot

• Using Social Monitoring to uncover the Analytics of Geolocation – Smart Data Collective

• Why is clippings still a PR metric? – Hill & Knowlton

• 5 Reasons Your Social Media Strategy Will Fail – Adweek

• Media Measurement: A Long Term Investment – BurrellesLuce

• Longitudinal Social Media Monitoring - BrandSavant

• PR people can measure social media. We just need to learn – Next Communications

• Social-Media Listening vs. Social-Media Monitoring: Truly Connecting, or Merely Collecting? – Marketing Profs

• I’m 100% Convinced that 50% of PR and Social Media Metrics Are Wrong – Katie Paine

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• Social Media ROI? Traditional Is Still More Accepted – Social Media Explorer

• Why Social Media ROI Is The Most Over Debated & Misunderstood Topic? – Social Media Marketing in India

• 5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 – Read Write Web

• Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts – The New York Times

• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet – ken Burbary

• Why Sentiment Analysis is About as Reliable as a Canary in a Coal Mine – Marketing Pilgrim

• Web 2.0 Rule #7: Social media programs are a choice, social media monitoring is NOT – CK’s Blog

• The Single PR Metric and Flying Pigs – Measurement Standard

• You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Tac Anderson

• Why Measure ROI of Social Media? – Regular Geek

• Are we too worried with finding the ROI of social media? – Mack Collier

• How To Measure Your Social Media ROI: Don’t – Social Media Today

Tools Lists

• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – Dan LaRusso

Presentations

• Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi – The Brand Builder

Photo courtesy of Lara604 on flickr / CC BY 2.0

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

For the second year in a row, non-profits have adopted social media at a faster rate than corporations or academic institutions.

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.

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.

The next step in creating a successful Media Monitoring plan is figuring out the logistics.

We need to determine out how big of a job it is and how it’s going to get done.

What is your budget?

Do you already have a dollar figure per month or year that you are prepared to spend to monitor and measure your media coverage? Try to at least ballpark a number before we determine your actual needs.

How much work is this?

Determine Volume

A giant factor in the scale of your program is your actual volume of media coverage. Go get your media plan handy and:

1. If you get low volume coverage/only care about online – use your tag lists to do some preliminary searches on Google/Twitter/other relevant outlets.

2. If you get high volume coverage/need print or broadcast – send your tag list to potential media monitoring partners or to the content providers directly (Factiva, VMS, Lexis-Nexis) and ask for a monthly volume estimate.

Your volume will of course vary over time, but you want to get a pretty good estimate of how many mentions your company (products/competitors/industry) is getting each month.

Determine Complexity

Next you have to guess how long it will take to analyze the articles. This depends heavily on two factors:

-Technicality/Analyst’s understanding of industry. Articles about cupcakes are usually easier to get through than articles about thermonuclear fusion, even with a specialist reviewing the mentions.

-Number and simplicity of tags. How many different attributes are you looking for in each mention? Are they easy to pick out (product mention) or do they take a little thought (message penetration)?

If you plan to do the analysis yourself, go ahead and do some timed practice. Read through the relevant mentions you found and analyze them according to the tags you selected. How many can you do in an hour?

If you plan to outsource analysis, your potential monitoring firm(s) will create this estimate for you.

Determine Reporting

Time spent creating metrics is really only an issue if you choose a DIY monitoring program. Pretty much all technology solutions will churn those numbers out for you in a blink.

But even then, someone has to read the results, right? How much time will you dedicate to reviewing your coverage metrics and reinvesting that information?

Determine Participation

Another factor that should be included in your media monitoring program’s budget is engagement time. Are you going to respond to customer inquiries/complaints? Comment on blog posts? Think about what actions you will be taking based on your coverage results and create a time estimate.

At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of the scale of your media management program. You know if this is 5 hours a week checking blogs for product mentions or if you’re going to need serious help processing 13k company mentions per month.

Do you need technology?

Using software vastly reduces the man hours required to monitor and measure your media coverage. It:

1. Automatically aggregates your content.
2. Automates a great deal of your tags.
3. Faciliates searching and sorting of content.
4. Allows the creation of digital report templates.
5. Creates instant metrics and analytics.
6. Helps you keep track of reporting/participation actions.

Take a look at your volume and determine if it is reasonable to manage without automation (by using Excel or some other non-specialized program). Software is available at literally every price range, with scaling features, so there is very likely something to fit your workflow and budget.

Who is going to do the work?

Media analysis is a very difficult full-time job unless a large portion is participation. Media analysis is tedious. It takes a lot of concentration and it’s difficult to maintain quality over many hours.

For this reason, I suggest breaking the task up among two or more people if the analysis portion will require more than 4 hours per day. These people can spend the balance of their hours doing reporting/engagement/quality control or working on other tasks.

So, keeping this in mind, determine who at your organization is available to work on your media monitoring program. Do you have the resources available to deal with the volume you determined above?

If you do not have the man power or the skillset necessary, you can also outsource analysis, reporting and/or engagement activities to outside firms. I will cover this in more detail separately, but your PR and media monitoring firms will offer these services by the hour or on a monthly retainer.

How much will it cost?

So, let’s figure out where we are on resources.

[(Coverage volume/mentions processed per hour) x $/hr of analyst(s)] + (reporting/participation hours x $/hr of participants) + software spend + content spend (if applicable) = total cost of media management program

Using your original budget, you can determine what mix of humans and software will fit your needs and how much you have available to spend in each area.

Next, we will go over some software options at different price points.

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Photo courtesy of:  AMagill

Lots of good stuff this week. If you have other resources, please leave them in the comments.

4 Easy Steps to Better PR Measurement – David Mullen

Understanding Social Media Metrics: Basic Modeling – Left the Box

How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit – IIG – From the masters of Social Media lists. If you’re not familiar with their resources, check out “Superlists and Top Posts” in the right navigation.

PR Measurement Interview with Katie Delahaye Paine – Top Rank

The Advanced Quick ‘n Dirty Guide to Social Media Monitoring – Social Media Explorer

Using Social Media to Listen to Consumers – Ad Age -  “Know your customers’ social media habits” – yes!

Why Social Media Marketing Fails (and How to Fix It) – Web Expo 2.0 – Session was covered by CRM, Marketing Mystic, ZDNET and Horn Group.

Barry Leggetter: Evaluation Important in Recession – Institute for Public Relations

Social Media and the Cult of Marketing ROI – Scenes from the Superhighway

Experiments in Social Media Marketing: A Recap – PSFK

How to Embrace the Process of Social Media – Social Media Explorer

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Other Cool Stuff:

MediaOn Twitter Database – Growing  (free and online!) database of media contacts by media outlet and twitter ID (courtesy of @prsarahevans, @skydiver, @melissahourigan and @edunigan)
Full Story via @PRSarahEvans blog.

Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music. Still in beta, but neat idea.

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Last week’s top posts.

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Photo by: Somadjinn

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!

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Photo Credit: Benjamin Rossen

The mostest of the bestest…

Your Social Media Goals Drive Your ROI Analysis – Inner Architect. Gosh, this sounds so familiar…

Measure or Die: Why Communications Executives Need to Become Fluent in Web Analytics – PRNews

The ROI Metrics That Will Help Make PR Agencies Relevant Again – The Science of Listening

Measure what matters – Rethink success in a new-media world – MAD

How Do You Measure Social Media Marketing? -SinoTech Blog

A Call for Creativity in New Metrics for Liquid Media – Journal of Interactive Advertising. OK, the fatty IPR paper last week was just a warm up for this bad boy.

Making More Than a Good Impression: Moves to value-engagement metrics challenge traditional measurement criteria – AdWeek

Fire your ad agency – What They’re Saying

Social Media Marketing Industry Report – White Paper Source

PR Measurement Conference, Washington, DC June 3 – PR News.

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Photo Credit: snap®

PLANNING

The most important component of using the media to further your business goals is to have a (good) plan. If you’re a bigger company with PR and Marketing peeps, ask them to do this or steal ideas from the plans they already wrote. Then skip to “How are you doing it?”. If it’s just you and a dream, read on.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

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Mission Statement

You should write a mission statement. I know it’s old school and all, but we need to get organized. Want to double the size of your business? Build a reputation as the warmest & fuzziest company in the world? Write down what your media program should be working towards.

Once you have a mission for your program, you have to figure out what objectives will fulfill your mission. Ask yourself – What do I want the end results of my media program to be? What business results are worth the work? Then think about ways to achieve each of those results.

Objectives, Strategies and Initiatives

I have made an example list below. These are just a few things that came to mind. Each Objective will have nearly unlimited Strategies to achieve them. Likewise there are infinite Initiatives you can include when building your Strategy. Your version of this table is going to look more like a bunch of webs.

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By now, you have a lot of pieces of paper lying around and are wondering why I’m having you make a marketing plan when all you want is to track your media coverage. I promise that there is a reason for this.

Monitoring your media coverage is utterly useless if you’re not going to do anything with that information. Additionally, we won’t know what to monitor until we know what you’re looking to accomplish.

HOW ARE YOU DOING IT?

Organizing Your Data

So, the next step is to look at all those little webs you just made and pick out data points. Make a list of all of the data you will need to inform your strategies and initiatives. You’ll break this up into two lists: Tags and Metrics.

Tags

You should think of this as topics and keywords – attributes that you will use to “tag” a media mention. So, “Products” is a tag, then you list all of your products. I think it’s helpful to imagine that you already have a monitoring system in place and are now creating reports and action items. What tags will help you sort and search your coverage data?

Other ideas:
-Business units/op cos
-Competitors
-Competitor product names
-Industry issues (subjects)
-Geographical distinction (country, state)
-PR campaign (if you have organized campaigns)
-Company executives
-Competitor executives
-Industry analysts
-Other actors (regulators, activists, any group affecting your biz)
-Promotions
-Product Initiatives
-Corporate Initiatives
-Marketing Messages
-Customer segment
-Customer comments
-Action to be taken on mention

Metrics

These are the measurements that you want calculated using your tags. Like the tags you choose, your measurement options are nearly unlimited. You can measure anything from traditional metrics such as volume, circulation and share of voice to a wide variety of social media metrics (note that many measurements will apply to all types of coverage).

If you decide to use professional media tracking software, the tags and metrics you use will be largely automated, so each media mention will have lots of tags and you will be able to quickly sort and search your data. If you are doing this by hand, you will probably want to pick only the most critical distinctions for categorizing your coverage.

For super bonus points, prioritize your lists!

Data Format

The next question is how do you want to see your coverage and measurements? Think about your current workflow and determine how your media coverage data will fit in. Also consider how you expect to be acting on your media mentions.

-    Will you pride yourself on immediate response to customer contact? You’ll want to receive email alerts of your coverage at short intervals (on the hour, 3x per day, depending on volume).

-    Do you have several product managers or business units managing their coverage? Get your alerts and reports divided by those tags and sent to the appropriate party.

-    Want to track trends in your media coverage? Monthly, quarterly and annual reports will do the trick.

-    Planning discrete PR or marketing campaigns? Short-term initiative reports can measure the success of your efforts.

Also think about what on-the-fly searches you will want to do and what other ways you will need your data presented. If you plan to do your monitoring and measurement work in-house, go ahead and use your tags and metrics lists to create report mockups. Creating templates ahead of time will help you organize your coverage as it comes in and help you get it out to interested parties more efficiently.

Your wishlists will also be useful if you plan to outsource any part of this to a 3rd party. Many software providers have one-size-fits-all systems. They offer the same data and options to all customers. Which is fine…if what they are offering coincides with what you want in a platform. This is why you made your list BEFORE looking at vendors. I want you to match their services to your needs, not the other way around.

Data Flexibility

How often will you need to change what you are tracking? Will you add new products, competitors, messages or other attributes often? This is an important point to consider when shopping around for an outside service. Are the number of tags or keywords limited? How often can you change them? What kind of access do you have to administrative tools? What is the process for adding a new metric or report template? Do they offer retro-tagging in case you want to apply a new tag to historical data?

Make sure you think through how you will use the data collected so you can find a service, or create a process, that meets your needs.

Next, we’ll focus on organizing your internal resources.

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Photo credits:
Tea bag – JanetMCK
Measuring tape – Aussiegall
Filing cabinets – Specialkrb
Flexibility – Nicolasnova