ImpactWatch Blog

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.”

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.

• Social Media, Monitoring, Engagement & Measurement – Beeline Labs

Beeline Labs recently conducted extensive research into how major corporations are monitoring, measuring and engaging via social media.

• The Difference Between Value and ROI – Metrics Man

Remember that silly distinction you learned in elementary school?  A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.  ROI is a form of value, but not all value takes the form of ROI.

• Tips to choose an Online Reputation Monitoring vendor – PhilGo20

Before evaluating the solutions, one would need some parameters to do so. Here’s a short list half-mine, half-borrowed

• Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples – Read Write Web

That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it’s a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation.

• No patience for the ROI of Social Media discussion – Buzz Marketing for Technology

And at this point in social media or even in the development of the web – we have plenty of ways to track and measure lead generation coming from Social Media. So much so that I have lost all patience for this discussion.

• Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate – Research Live

Who’s best at sifting through online chatter to find the insights that businesses need? People or computers?

• New technology turns social media into market research – Canada.com

A plethora of free services already exist. Google, for example, can alert a brand manager whenever a brand name is mentioned online. Other services scan Twitter or blogs for keywords. Yet they don’t break down the conversations by demographics or “sentiment” – whether people like or dislike a brand.

• Creepy If You Do, Clueless If You Don’t – The Net-Savvy Executive

Somehow, they’ve developed an expectation of privacy in public communication channels. They’re mistaken. But it’s in your company’s interest to avoid creeping out the customers, anyway.

• Online Reputation Management As Seen From The Outside – Read Write Web

Here, panelist Chris Gatewood, an IP, entertainment, and new media attorney, discusses a few important aspects of social media reputation management as it relates to the wider audience of social media users, not just the “new media gurus” who live online.

• Are You Monitoring Your Online Reputation? – Small Business Update

What this lawsuit shows is the need to be proactive at every turn when it comes to hearing the conversations that are taking place as well as securing your brand early on. Otherwise, you might just find that someone’s been proactive for you.

• Xerox embarks on social media monitoring program – Search CRM

Xerox is now establishing an internal task force to determine how it wants to monitor social media moving forward and whether it needs a single listening platform. It’s a broad group that includes corporate communication, corporate advertising, the vice president of the Xerox.com Web team, and a representative from each of the individual business groups.

• Five Easy Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success – Social Media Club

Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch a campaign. How do you define whether your campaign will be a success or not?

Slides and Conferences

AMEC Measurement Summit – The essence – PR Measurement in Germany

Assessing the assessors at AMEC’s Summit on Measurement – Katie Paine

Review of day one of AMEC and the IPR’s European Summit on PR Evaluation – Metrica

Driving ROI On Twitter – Hubspot

Unlocking Social Media’s ROI Through Monitoring and Participation – AMA Webinar
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Photo couresy of Willrad.

DailyRT is another retweet aggregator that ranks tweets by the number of times it is repeated. However, unlike most other aggregation services that simply rank and record top tweets, DailyRT offers several additional functions that make it valuable for social media monitoring and research.

The service features:

-Direct Retweet – sign in to join the retweeting action.
-Hot Tweets – sorts tweets by rank so you can quickly find the most popular.
-Live Tweets – real-time updates instantly update you on which tweets are on the move (great for events).
-Archive – system saves tweets so you can search past trends.
-Filtering by Topic – sort tweets by keyword or hashtag.
-Filtering by User – sort tweets by # of followers or filter to only those users that you follow.
-Filtering by Time Period – search past tweets by date range.
-Trends – select hot topics suggested by Twitter.
-My Searches – Save searches to easily check updates on your topics.

Of course, a large portion of the top Retweeted are twilebrities with such massive followings that even a small percentage retweeting takes them to the top. But there are also tweets that are just so funny or so interesting that everyone who sees it feels compelled to share.

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DailyRT provides the fun of finding tweet gems but also a powerful search interface that allows real tracking and analysis of Twitter trends.

Click on any RT to get detailed information on the originator.

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• Five Things You Should Know About Social Media ROI – Metrics Man

There is another group of online Zen Masters who would have you believe social media ROI is old school thinking and not in tune with social media Zeitgeist.   In that case, I’ll take’ Old School’ for $100, please.

• 6 Directions on Social Media Measurement: How Will We Come Together? – Digital Influence Mapping Project

Still, the question remains – are we better off with this English-garden growth of discussions, forums, white-paper symposiums, or do we need “one ring to bind them all?”

• Social Media Marketing Measurement: Are We More Than 33% There Yet? – Digital Influence Mapping Project

The real power of social media marketing is when it becomes integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing – ALL sorts.

• The Twitter Metrics that will completely change the way you use Twitter – Site Visibility

But for some reason there really seems to have been a perfect storm for Twitter, as already some people have come up with some really valuable metrics to measure how well you are performing on the site.

• Using Cost per Click for Social Media ROI – Page One PR

While I’m not saying social media campaigns should replace advertising, the comparison will be highly useful to marketers attempting to justify spending a portion of limited budgets on social media.

• Social media was made to measure for marketers who know what to look for – Marketing Magazine

Regardless of whether a marketer relies on their own industriousness or a paid product, it is critical that industry executives recognize the importance of measuring social media endeavours. As Fox says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

• The Difference Between Hard and Hard Work - Altitude Branding

Social media and specifically measuring and tracking its impact is not difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s meticulous, and takes thought and insight. But it’s not hard.

• Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell – Andrew Chen

What are your customers measuring? By looking at how they define value, then you get yourself aligned to them as closely as possible. Answering this question sets your company up for value creation, which then unlocks the ability to gain something from that value, then you have to start here.

• The Skinny on Social Media Monitoring – Kuno Creative

If you’re using social media for business, you need a social media monitoring strategy. Period. Here’s why and what to do about it.

• Making Quantitative Sense of the Social Web – Dave Evans

In response to e-mail, this column will address measuring the impact of the social Web on your business and using what you learn to move forward.

• (Social Media) Listening When No One’s Talking (About You, Anyway) – Radian6

Unless you’re in a super-niche or groundbreaking industry, you’ve got competition. You’re likely not the only game in town, so if someone isn’t talking about you, they may very well be talking about your competitors, and you can learn a lot about what they’re saying.

• Nielsen Glitch Focuses Attention On New Online Measurement System, Impact Unknown – Media Post

A transition that would likely have sparked a firestorm of debate in Nielsen’s core medium of television – a complete overhaul of the system it uses to produce its audience estimates – has gone virtually unnoticed in the online industry.

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Tool Lists

• Paid Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Tools: The (almost) Complete Guide – Creative Traction [Partial list of larger monitoring firms]

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Slides and Conference Coverage:

• Tales from the Trenches: How Organizations Are Measuring Value in Social Media – KD Paine

• 10 superb social media presentations – eConsultancy

• Tweet this, blog that: PRNews panel explores measuring social media – Communication Ammo

• International leaders in media research come together at the European Summit on Measurement – Valerie Simon

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Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives

A Geek Chart is a web badge that displays your activity on social media sites as an interactive pie chart.

The process is extremely simple, just enter your username for each of the sites you use – Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, your blog (with RSS available), Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Last.fm.

After a little processing, a pie graph is generated which represents your activity in the last 30 days. Each slice links to your profile on the corresponding site and displays the percentage of your activity on mouseover.

Hcdelp’s Geek Chart

Mine is a pretty boring pie because I waste away my days on Twitter and our blog. The “Explore” section of the Geek Chart site shows a sampling of charts made by other users. As you can see, everyone has a different mix of site usage, but Twitter dominates most people’s social media time.

Geek Chart automatically saves your profile information, so you can log on anytime to see your updated chart.

You’ll also want to avoid the site at the bottom of the hour when Twitter’s API limit turns 3rd party platforms into pumpkins.

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Make your own Geek Chart.

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Follow me on Twitter – I’m on there 67% of the time.

Last week, when Twitter decided to remove then partially reinstate @reply visibility, I basically ignored the entire conversation.

I could not have cared less that Twitter would be hiding messages from one Twitter user to another. I had my user settings safely set to “No @replies”. I didn’t want to see other people’s conversations. If they wanted my opinion, they would have asked for it.

Which is why I was dumbfounded, days later, to discover @replies in my Twitterstream.

Here’s what happened.

There were originally three options for @replies in Notice settings:

All @replies allowed you to see all messages from everyone you follow. You then had the option to reduce visible @replies to only those directed TO the people you follow. So, you could see what your friends were saying to mutual friends. Then there was the option to see no messages that began with @username.

Based on a variety of issues, Twitter decided to completely remove @replies from everyone’s twitterstream – great for me, not so much for the thousands of people who complained via blogs and twitter.

Twitter says that only 3% of users had ever modified this setting from the default – which was to include @replies to followed – but not surprisingly, those 3% were the most engaged (and vocal) of Twitter’s user base. And all of them (except me) wanted to stay in the loop.

To compromise, Twitter has decided to reinstate @replies that are not created using the “reply” function in twitter (little backwards curving arrow button).

So, now all of us get to see @replies to people whose usernames are easy to memorize? Who are responding to a tweet in a platform where there’s no direct reply button? Twitter claims it is trying to reduce confusion regarding how @replies work. I’m not so confident that they have achieved that.

Twitter is now working on a user-specific setting. No details yet, but I’m really looking forward to individually setting @replies for the 2,800 people I follow. Good times.

Am I the only anti-social tweeter who doesn’t want to see @replies?

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This is going to get messy.

Tomorrow, Facebook will radically shift its gatekeeping policies and allow for Twitter-like access to its data stream. The immediate effects: Facebook support in Twitter apps, a social networking giant declaring the need for connectivity, and a flood of Facebook apps, remixes, mashups, thawed and reheated in the morning.

The huge implications for Twitter aside, it’s also a significant step towards real-time interconnectivity. What’s in the right now — the derivative — definitely seems to be the way things are progressing. A good indicator could be the largest player in social networking blatantly declaring through action, “I will give you all of my data. Right now.”

I am quite sure that other services and networks will morph towards this trend (many already have), and soon the different “genres” of services will all congeal into desktop or mobile based mega apps, supporting dozens of communications services, from e-mail to messaging to Facebook to the next big thing. You can quote me on that. It’s coming.

This is of course a logical move for Facebook, and analysts have seen it coming — avoid the costs of developing various interfaces, but still grow out the user base garnered by third-party developers.

Will Facebook be able to get past its reputation as a more personal experience and dip into Twitter’s celebrity, news, debate, and networking share of the market? Nobody can say for sure, but I suspect it has more than a fighting chance to become a huge participant. Considering the figures for Facebook’s growth demographics, Zuckerberg and his associates have surveyed a nice set of trends by which to gauge their investment.

Over the coming weeks, more details and trends will materialize and the races will commence — I’ve already got my tickets.

Last week was an interesting week to be monitoring social media. There were several examples of consumers’ feedback running rampant on the social web and companies scrambling to keep up. Here are the big ones.

• Amazon.com delisted thousands of books from general search results, including many gay and lesbian themed books, prompting accusations of sudden policy change against such topics.
• Employees of Domino’s Pizza posted a video on YouTube of them defiling food while making it.
• Time Warner Cable revealed the details of its metered internet usage plans being tested in four major cities.
• Ashton Kutcher and CNN were involved in a challenge to be the first to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Only it turns out CNN didn’t even operate the CNNBrk Twitter account that was in the race.

All of these events created a massive amount of social media buzz, and the companies involved varied in their responses.

Amazon apologized and basically said the problem was “a glitch” but since then seems to be hoping that the buzz will go away leaving all of those who were outraged without much satisfaction.

Domino’s created a YouTube video response and set up a Twitter account of their own to answer any questions people might have showing that while they might not have been ready for something like this, they can certainly roll with the punches and respond appropriately.

Time Warner Cable backed off and has delayed plans to implement metered billing, presumably to polish up their PR and marketing machine before giving it another go. We’ll have to wait and see what the final outcome is.

CNN embraced the idea of the race to 1,000,000 followers while behind the scenes they hired James Cox, the owner of the CNNBrk account, as a consultant to run it for them. This well-played maneuver was a great way to make the best of the situation and let the hype about the race overshadow the possible branding nightmare.

The speed at which these story lines unfolded illustrates just how important it is to be monitoring your brand. But that’s only going to give you a fighting chance. The way you address the concerns of your consumers is going to mean the success or demise of your reputation in the long run.