Month: April 2008

del.icio.us as a PR measurement tool

The communications staff at Missouri University of Science and Technology (that’s where I work) recently created a del.icio.us account to keep track of our online news stories and blog posts. (We use Google Alerts and Technorati to find the stories in the first place, then we select the ones we think are the most important or most closely tied to our key messages to post on del.icio.us.)

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Using del.icio.us makes it easier for us to keep track of media coverage, but we’ve also discovered a side benefit: del.icio.us gives us yet another tool for measuring and analyzing our media relations activities in the sphere of online social media.

del.icio.us shows you which stories are saved by others, which is an indication of popularity. If no one else is saving your stories, then there’s a pretty good chance that either:

  1. the online world finds your stuff borng, or
  2. the stories aren’t getting to the right websites

A quick case study: Last week, when the earthquake hit the Midwest, we touted one of our quake experts (J. David Rogers, the Hasselmann Chair of Geological Engineering) to the media. He spoke to 15 different media outlets that Friday, most of them from the Midwest but including our state’s two largest daily newspapers and a couple of TV and news radio stations. But none of the stories were saved by other del.icio.us users except for a LiveScience.com story that quoted Rogers and appeared on Yahoo! News. Now we know that 10 other del.icio.us users also saved that story. We also can find out who those users are and what else they’re interested in.

Another recent news release — about some research on biodegradable plastics bags — got picked up by Popular Science magazine’s blog PopSci.com, and that also was saved by 10 other users. (Another popular sci/tech blog, Gizmodo, picked up the story, and although no other del.icio.us users have saved it, a quick look at the comments shows a high level of interest among Gizmodo readers.

So, the takeaways here, I guess, are:

  1. del.icio.us is a great, simple tool for posting and tracking your institution’s online news and blog mentions
  2. del.icio.us gives you an opportunity to see who else is interested in the story, which could possibly lead to new connections and conversations with alumni, researchers, other academics
  3. del.icio.us may give you insight into which online sites are most popular for niche readerships, which in turn may help you adjust your media relations efforts

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Now playing: The Raveonettes – Blush
via FoxyTunes

Gradzilla vs. Facebook

godzilla.jpgAs Karine Joly pointed out a few days ago, U.S. News & World Report — already the monster of the college ranking games — has unleashed a new Facebook application on the world, Gradzilla.

The magazine says this new app is designed to help students find grad schools by accessing data from the magazine’s rankings for graduate programs. U.S. News blogger Alison Go probably pegs it to Facebook culture with her post/announcement: “Keep track of schools, and—in that quintessential gen Y narcissistic way—tell all your friends about it. The polls are probably the most fun; designed for you to ask friends which school you should attend. But the polling questions aren’t limited to that (or anything, really). The possibilities are endless—and not necessarily so innocent.”

grad_zilla02120x120.jpgWill Gradzilla be a killer app for undergrads looking to further their education? Time will tell. But so far, according to the Gradzilla Facebook fan page, the tool isn’t necessarily tearing up Tokyo (30 users and 23 fans as of this morning). Perhaps this social media experiment will meet the same fate as so many other Facebook apps. To misquote Blue Oyster Cult, “History shows again and again how fickle social networkers point up the folly of apps.”
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Now playing: Blue Oyster Cult – Godzilla
via FoxyTunes

Analytics overload: Yahoo, Alexa, Metrica, BlogPulse

Some items from the world of web analytics that web folk, marketers, fellow bloggers and even PR types (last bullet item) might find interesting:

  • Yahoo is entering the analytics arms race, reports ReadWriteWeb. With its recent purchase of IndexTools, Yahoo is planning to make the analytics service free “for any current [IndexTools] customer willing to sign a new Yahoo! service agreement.” IndexTools COO Dennis R. Mortensen discussed this on his blog. While it’s only available for free to current customers, RRW speculates that it’s only a matter of time before the service becomes available to the rest of the online world. “[W]e can probably expect Yahoo! to release a free version to the general public at the time of the next IndexTools update.”

    This is an important development for the analytics industry, but also for Yahoo! If Yahoo! can successfully attract web publishers to their free service — and it is hard to see why they wouldn’t be able to — it means the ability to gather loads of aggregate data for their behavioral ad targeting initiatives.

  • Web rankings/analytics site Alexa has changed its rankings system (h/t: Kyle James at .edu guru). According to the Alexa blog, the service is broadening its data collection beyond those who use the Alexa toolbar.

    In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

    We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

    “The new rankings,” Alexa says, “should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.”

  • A global yardstick for measuring PR/media relations. This may be too big of a measuring stick, but PR folks interested in knowing how their media relations efforts stack up against the rest of the world (and I do mean practically the rest of the world), check out Metrica’s 2007 PR benchmarking report (h/t: K.D. Paine). Metrica analyzed some 3 million news stories (print and broadcast) for about 700 different organizations between 1997-2007. I’m no expert on PR analytics, but that has got to be one of the most comprehensive studies ever done on media coverage. As K.D. Paine points out, the report “definitely leans towards a UK perspective,” but “it does offer some useful datapoints.” Here are a few from K.D.’s list:
    • A little over a quarter (26%) of the coverage was classified strongly favorable.
    • The percentage of strongly favorable coverage was lower for government departments, independent organizations, charities, financial organizations and telecoms companies.
    • Only 8% of all coverage was classified unfavorable
    • An average of 23% of coverage mentioned an organizations’ spokesperson
    • An average of 42% of articles delivered a key message, although across all coverage this amounted to 2.3 message deliveries per article
    • IT and telecoms/internet were relatively weak on message delivery with just 31% and 35% of articles respectively delivering a key message. This highlights the problem that tech PR often faces in translating marketing messages into PR messages that a journalist will write about.
    • Despite concerns about the world economy in the latter half of 2007, there was actually more negative coverage in 2006.

    I only wish the report segmented higher education from the rest of the group. I suspect higher ed is lumped in with non-profits and government.

  • For conversational metrics, check out BlogPulse. Mashable recently touted BlogPulse, an often overlooked measurement tool, for its focus on tracking conversations in the blogosphere. (Hat tip, again, to K.D. Paine.) BlogPulse is “still not competitive on the comprehensiveness of their blog indexing as compared to Technorati and Google Blog Search,” but: “What they do have an angle on is a different way of measuring reach and value for a blog.” If you’re interested in measuring those aspects of your blogging program, take BlogPulse for a spin.

    • Who’s your referral daddy, BlogHighEd?

    It isn’t often I get to gloat. (I am a humble man, with much to be humble about.) So when the opportunity comes my way, I take advantage of it.

    Such was the case when BlogHighEd recently posted some stats about its first two months. Guess who was No. 1 in the referrals category? Check it out:

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    Impressive, if I do say so myself. I mean, I even top Google, and Guy Kawasaki. What’s up with that?

    The data clearly prove that you, gentle readers, are awesome.

    So keep up the awesomeness and keep me at the top of the BlogHighEd referral list. Clicky clicky clicky. Thank you.

    P.S. – Kudos to Matt Herzberger for winning BlogHighEd’s NCAA bracketology competition, the news of which somehow eclipsed the more important news about referral stats. Go figure.

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    Now playing: My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
    via FoxyTunes

    Summize, a Twitter search engine

    If you use Twitter the way I do, you probably struggle to stay up with the stream of messages that come your way. Summize may offer a solution. It’s a new search engine for Twitter posts, and it appears to be facile and robust.

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    The service’s “About Us” section describes its mission as “to highlight the topics and attitudes expressed within conversational media.” The site pulls the posts from Twitter’s public timeline and gives a number of search options. For instance, you can:

    You can also use a dropdown menu to do all of that. Plus, you can search for posts in 18 languages, and the site makes it easy to post your search results on Twitter.

    Via @steverubel, about a week ago.

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    Now playing: Black Francis – Angels Come To Comfort You
    via FoxyTunes