You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis®, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal™ for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment®, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

Today we’re announcing the latest addition to our social media analysis capabilities: MediaSignal™ for blogs. It’s a significant development that enhances our customers’ ability to tap into the blogosphere for insight and information.

At Biz360, one of the guiding principles of our product development process involves taking a pragmatic approach to fulfilling our customers’ needs. In this case, there’s a clear need for marketing and PR professionals to be able to measure the relative impact of blogs—from the top professional blogs to the fringes of the long tail—and to be able to make direct comparisons to traditional media coverage. Because here is no definitive standard for blog impact measurement, we saw the need to come up with something new.

Most of the current methodologies for measuring blog impact involve either estimating site traffic or counting inbound links from other blogs. Limitations of these methods include:

• With a list of blogs ranked by their overall authority or influence, it’s impossible to know which blogs have the most impact in a given market—is it the highly-ranked blog that occasionally writes about the market, or the lower-ranked blog that covers it incessantly?
• Links from mainstream media provide an interesting view into which blogs are influencing traditional media, but they typically aren’t counted.
• The impact of the “linker” typically isn’t accounted for, even though a link from a top-tier blog implies more impact than a link from a less popular blog.
• The impact of the reader typically isn’t taken into account. PerezHilton receives more traffic than Engadget, but the topics over which they have influence differ greatly.
• Today’s site traffic panels are too small to estimate visitors to low-traffic sites in a statistically valid manner.

After a great deal of experimentation and testing, we settled on a methodology that provides a new estimate of reach that incorporates traffic estimates, linking patterns from blogs, and linking patterns from mainstream media. Our link analysis produces particularly interesting results, employing a technique that enables us to estimate not only the number of sources linking to a given blog, but also the impact of the sources.

The benefit of the detailed link analysis can be seen in the table below. Over a 3-month period last year, Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce received incoming links from similar numbers of sources. However, the sources linking to BuzzMachine received more than twice as many distinct links as the sources linking to Dooce, implying greater impact.

• Apples-to-apples comparisons. With MediaSignal, we have a single measure of brands, trends and issues across both traditional and social media.
• More relevant reach. Because our source rankings incorporate each source’s reach as well as its topical relevance, we are able to product a customized list of which publications and blogs matter most to each of our clients.
• More accurate reach. Our calculation of MediaSignal for blogs involves large-scale link analysis, calibrated by audience estimates to provide an understandable metric than pure visitors or pure link metrics.
• Tone impact. By factoring MediaSignal into the negative, neutral and positive impression counts we derive through our Point-of-View Sentiment engine, we’re able to weight our tone ratings by impact.
• Improved spam filtering. Thanks to the link-source impact analysis, we were able to identify and weed out many splogs that received many links but only from other splogs in the same farm.

I attended the annual WOMMA Research Symposium
today in Washington D.C. and had the opportunity to listen to and talk with some of the leading thinkers on word of mouth marketing. What became clear over the course of the day is that there’s a lot of good research on how word of mouth (WOM) works and how to measure individual campaigns, but the industry is looking for more guidance on how to sell WOM to senior management to secure budget, how much budget to put toward WOM in an integrated campaign and how to compare WOM metrics and results to other marketing metrics.

Research from Ed Keller of the The Keller Fay Group reminded us that the majority of WOM is still happening offline (90% if I recall correctly). Still, there’s strong and growing demand to measure what’s happening online. This is partly due to how fast the channel is growing and partly because technology makes the job much easier than it’s been in the past. Forrester’s Peter Kim led a panel to discuss the reasons why. It included six of the seven vendors from his Brand Monitoring report - Maxine Friedman (Brandimensions), Max Kalehoff (BuzzMetrics), Howard Kaushansky (Umbria), Jim Nail (Cymfony), David Rabjohns (MotiveQuest) and myself.

While not everyone agreed on the importance of measuring traditional media to understand how word of mouth is generated (a position Biz360 supports), we all agreed that technology is an important enabler for making sense of social media - the millions of thoughts, ideas and creations posted to the Internet everyday. Human analysis remains an important component, however, for understanding the finer nuances of language (Biz360 uses machine-learning techniques that rely on regular human analysis and input to take technology as far as it will go). The session ended with vendor recommendations on what questions companies should ask themselves before investing in a brand monitoring solution. A few of the top questions were:

• What are my program goals?
• What resources do I have internally to support a monitoring/measurement program?
• What level of service (involvement) do I expect from the vendor?
• How confident am I in the vendor’s ability to deliver insight, not just data?
• How frequently do I need information and to what depth?

There were several great presentations over the course of the day. Jim Nail presented research on the word of mouth of cereal brands, which he confessed was not an exciting topic and didn’t generate a lot of content. What I found interesting though were the motivational categories he used to break out the WOM - health & wellness (Wheaties), parental (Cheerios), nostalgic (Count Chocula), etc. Biz360 conducted similar research on yogurt brands and also found a relatively low level of social media content (yogurt isn’t nearly as exciting as Paris Hilton or Nintendo Wii, so we weren’t surprised). What we did find was that the health-based messages appearing in social media were coming from the health & wellness publications. This is a good example of how traditional media can drive word of mouth. Companies looking for word-of-mouth influencers only among consumers are stopping short of their ultimate goal.

For the full list of today’s presentations, check out WOMMA’s Web site. I believe you can also order audio recordings of the presentations after the event.

AdWeek published an article today by Wendy Melillo and Joan Voight called World on a String that outlines the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to consumers’ increasing power over the fate of brands. They explain that whether unprompted, such as the Mentos-Diet Coke video that gained fame on Revver and You Tube, or prompted, as in Chevrolet’s consumer ads gone awry, there’s little a marketer can or should do to push the direction of the customer’s brand experience.

In the end, more attentive listening to customers throughout a product’s lifecycle is the best way to avert unwanted negative word of mouth.

This past Friday, I participated on a panel with Jim Nail of Cymfony at Bulldog Reporter’s Advanced PR Technology in Practice conference in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was online measurement and was moderated by Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom. There were two overarching themes that came out of our presentations and Q&A. The first is that the movement of content online, the expansion of social media and the development of free and premium services for tracking all this new content make it possible to measure much more than you could just a few years ago - and get the results fast.

The second is that there is now more reason than ever for PR measurement to be placed in a business relevant context. That could be correlating results with internal marketing data, such as Web traffic or lead generation. Jim suggested that internal PR leaders get to know the folks doing marketing mix modeling (he referenced a PRWeek story - reg req’d - about P&G using market mix modeling to determine that the ROI from PR was higher than other types of marketing for four out of the six brands tested). It could also be correlating PR with changes in public perception using social media as a proxy. The ability to change opinions and behavior has always been the promise of PR. Measuring that change usually required surveys, focus groups or Web site data (how did you hear about us?). Social media changes the game by allowing PR to quickly assess public sentiment broadly or compare the buzz of individual news articles in the market.

There were many other notable sessions that day, athough I wasn’t able to attend them all, so I’m just going to note a few things that stood out for me. Dan Gilmor provided an overview of how citizen media is changing journalism and how the public consumes information. He even addressed the folly of citizen media, citing an example of a photo-shopped image of a man standing against the rail of one of the twin towers with an airplane in the background heading toward it.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR actually convinced me that the press release is not dead. At Biz360, we talk about how the rise of social media has made it possible to take your message directly to your target audiences. Jamie talked about how press releases, properly optimized for search, often rank above actual news stories on Google News and that you can take your message directly to the public in this way. His advice is to use Google Trends to figure out the top relevant search terms for your press release, use those terms in the headline and first paragraph and include hyperlinks throughout the body to drive users to your Web site (let me know if any of this works).

So if the press release isn’t dead, it’s definitely changing. Brian Solis of FutureWorks PR talked about how to write a social media press release that includes includes social bookmarks from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr and other Web 2.0 goodies. Naturally, at throughout the day, attendees asked if companies would eventually ruin social media. I expect this to be a topic at the upcoming WOMMA Summit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the topics here, Eric Schwartzman’s post includes links to all of the presentations, including mine. He also set up a del.icio.us page where the speakers could share links to supporting materials.

Politics took center stage in U.S. news this week, thanks to mid-term elections. As expected, there was plenty of coverage in the mainstream media as well as blogs. Because bloggers commonly comment on news stories that they find interesting, a few sites that analyze blog content have become great resources for finding news about a given topic. My favorite free aggregator is currently Techmeme, which does a great job of surfacing the most-discussed technology stories online.

At Biz360, we monitor tens of millions of blogs—which gives us tons of data to mine. Because we also track thousands of mainstream media web sites, we’re able to track links between blogs and the media. In November so far, we’ve tracked 764,000 links from blogs to mainstream media web sites (and hundreds of thousands going the other direction as well). Analyzing the links enables us to surface some interesting nuggets, like this list of the most-linked news stories since November 1:

So why no articles on Democrats retaking Congress or Rumsfeld’s resignation? Even though these were two of the top topics in the news, they didn’t generate a definitive article that was linked to heavily by other writers. Because some of the stories developed over the course of multiple days, linking was diffused across different articles from many different sources.

The articles that did make this list span a number of different topics, but most of them share these common traits:

• Interestingness (a term coined by Flickr): the kinds of stories that spawn reactions and discussions.
• Authority: Many of the most-linked stories are based on exclusive reports or news scoops from trusted organizations. Half of the top 10 stories were from CNN, the third most-linked source after The New York Times and Washington Post.

Taken as a whole, online link analysis can be a valuable component of corporate early warning systems in market intelligence solutions like Market360. It’s important to know not only what’s being said, but also how far it’s being spread.

As I get ready to begin my role as CEO of Biz360 tomorrow, I reflect back on my decision to leave a leadership role with a very successful business enterprise and move my wife and two young daughters more than halfway across the country away from our friends and family. Really, it was an easy decision for us to make.

I am fortunate to have spent time working with many different world-class organizations. My career consists of more than 15 years of building successful sales and marketing organizations for both small and large companies. Much of my career has been spent with technology-based organizations. As a Partner in the Management Consulting Division of The Gallup Organization, I helped executives use scientific research to develop business strategies for engaging their employees and customers.

As I learned more and more about Biz360, I realized the tremendous market opportunity facing the company. With the increasing levels of media coverage and explosion of social media on the Internet, even the most advanced companies are struggling to measure and manage the fast pace of changing perceptions in today’s digital society. Biz360 has been and will continue to be a leader in developing innovative technology to measure and interpret market perception.

The company has the talent and the technology to deliver the full service offerings our most demanding clients require. From real-time insight to analyst services, Biz360 has the foundation to lead the way for years to come.

On a personal note, my wife and our two young daughters will be joining me in the Bay Area in November. After meeting the people at Biz360 and studying the business opportunity, we knew this was the right move for us. Personally, we love the outdoors and welcome the chance to live in a great place like the Bay Area. It’s an easy decision to make this level of commitment when you feel so confident about the opportunity.

You can expect great things to come from Biz360. And I look forward to your thoughts along the way.

How many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand? A trick question you say…

McDonald’s has built one of the world’s most durable brands around efficient, consistent and low-cost food. People save time and money going to McDonald’s - and they know what to expect from the experience. Of course, four men robbed a McDonald’s in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, last Saturday by gunpoint providing an experience far beyond expectations. At other locations, you might have a McDrug Deal, get carjacked in the parking lot and or shot on your way home. The security at a high school in Philadelphia can monitor the McDonald’s across the street. Why? Because you might be shot at McDonald’s for showing disrespect (this one happened in London, so it’s not just us, but it may be Western culture’s own brand of extremism).

It’s not just in the news. Bloggers are talking about these things. So much, in fact, that blog posts on crime at McDonald’s outweighs conversations about its breakfast menu (there is some overlap though, like this blog post talking about someone who was run down in a McDonald’s parking lot after eating breakfast there).

Share of Key Issues and Messages for McDonald’s
3 Months of Blog Postings

And while analyzing the Blogosphere is a great way to get a sense of public discourse, there’s nothing better than good old-fashioned news media to pinpoint where the problem areas are (this may change soon, if geotagging takes off).

Top Publications Covering McDonald’s and Crime
3 Months of Media Coverage

But don’t expect local issues like crime to stay local. A local news attack at a Grand Prairie, Texas, McDonald’s was posted to You Tube where it was viewed 3,685 times in the four months between when it was posted (8/2/06) and when I checked it today. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloggers, like Dread Egos, post the You Tube video to their blog. A Google search for “McDonald’s” and “sucker punch” turns up 32,600 results. That’s not many compared to the 16,900,00 results that come up for McDonald’s, but “McDonald’s” and “crime” turns up 1,750,000 results (NOTE: the actual search results for McDonald’s, the company, would be less than a pure “McDonald’s” search and the content having to do with crime would be greater than the results from a simple “crime” keyword search).

Since McDonald’s is everywhere and crime is everywhere, you have to expect this is going to happen from time to time. But, is there any brand impact? And what could McDonald’s do about it? Knowing that it’s a topic of discussion greater than many of the products and messages being promoted is a big red flag that you might need to take action. Using local PR strategies to balance out negative perception is a good start, but in world connected by social media, that’s not enough. In the absence of a full-fledged corporate strategy to minimize crime at the stores, going beyond messaging to show some level of action is always ideal (in-store metal detector perhaps, remove shoes, toss liquids…).

I looked for some research on this topic and found a great article on the impact of corporate crimes, but not on the occurance of crimes during the brand experience. I’d like to conduct a study to find out what percentage of people who have experienced a crime at McDonald’s first hand will no longer eat there. Then ask the same question to people who heard about a crime from someone else? What’s the fall-off rate as you add more degrees of separation. You would have to take into account the number of times someone has heard about a crime, over what period of time and whether the negative impact was per location or at the brand level.

Ultimately, you could figure out the ripple effect of each crime and how many it would take to significantly impact McDonald’s brand. Then you could answer the question - how many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand?

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.

On August 15, 2006, a media flurry began when Dell announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Overheating batteries have been causing laptops to catch fire or explode. The following week Apple recalled 1.8 million laptop batteries, also made by Sony.

Seeing two of the industry’s most polar-opposite brands pulled into the same debacle made us wonder how the media treatment would play out. We looked at the tone and visibility of Dell and Apple’s battery woe media coverage and noticed Dell had far more visibility and negative tone than Apple.

Media Coverage by Tone
Dell and Apple Battery Problems, August 2006

MediaSignal^TM is calculated by adjusting the reach number for each article based on how prominently the subject (Dell/Apple) is mentioned and then adding together the adjusted reach numbers for each company’s total base of news articles. This chart is based on 6,986 online, print and broadcast news articles for Dell and 5,270 for Apple. Green corresponds to positive MediaSignal, blue/gray to neutral and red to negative.

One reason for this discrepancy in tone is that Dell was first to recall the Sony batteries and in that initial burst of coverage, Apple came forward to say that it was looking into the matter and examining its own Sony laptop batteries. Was it Dell taking a proactive lead on critical safety issues? Engadget and other blogs had been following the saga laptop by laptop, calling it to Dell’s attention. If you take a look at discussion of Dell and battery problems in the Blogosphere, the writing may have been on the wall for awhile.

Newscycle Report
Blog vs. Media Coverage for Dell Battery Problems

The chart shows the media coverage in volume (blue) over time compared to blog posts (gray) over time for discussion of Dell and battery problems.

InfoWorld reported that Dell and Sony knew about the problem as far back as 10 months ago. According to one Slashdot comment, Dell registered www.dellbatteryprogram.com on 11/10/2005, possibly anticipating a recall. One thing is certain though - with upwards of 50 millions blogs containing the personal experiences of millions of people, there’s no need to wait for customers to come to you. Public information on the Internet is often a better source of data for understanding your customer’s experience with your product.