PR Newswire has announced a partnership with Umbria, a market intelligence company that specializes in blog research and consumer generated media for a new product by the name of “MediaSense Blog Measurement”, that allows clients to assess the impact of online conversations about their company, products and brands.
The new service builds on PR Newswires existing relationship with Technorati, and provides a graphical assessment of the conversational tone and participant demographics.
“Bloggers are thought leaders and opinion-shapers, so tracking who and how quickly they pick up on various news items has become critical for brand and PR professionals,” Howard Kaushansky, president of Umbria said in their media release. “If it’s positive, you want to know. If it’s a mushroom cloud of negativity, you definitely need to know. This partnership gives that knowledge to PR Newswire clients”.
Whilst the continued growth in companies tracking consumer generated media is a positive indication of the continued maturity and acceptance of one of the most important drivers of Web 2.0, the question must be asked: why?
Why do PR Professionals need a service to find out what bloggers are saying about their clients by a third party?
Media monitoring services still play an important role in supporting PR, but this old school model comes from a day before the Internet where national media monitoring via a third party was essential, simply because there wasn’t an alternative, and in many cases, for print, radio and TV there isn’t an all inclusive alternative today. And yet blogs and consumer generated media are the children of a new age, an online age where information is accessible online anywhere in the world at the touch of a button.
Many PR Professionals contact and read TechCrunch so perhaps we can get some answers: is it that some PR Professionals cant type “Insert Clients Name here” into Technorati or Google Blog Search?
How difficult is it to set up feeds from services such as Google News, Yahoo News and Topix which deliver results based on corporate brand names?
Isn’t the whole point of engaging with and participating in a Web 2.0 world one to one communications, removing the middle tier of information dissemination?
Having said that, if you’ve got a full corporate expense account and prefer your information spoon fed, then these sorts of blog tracking services are ideal.
It’s a question of core competency. Simply having information available to you is not enough (now I am taking a leap in the dark here, so pull me back if this doesn’t follow). Technorati and Newswire understand the blogger demographic , and are much likely to be able to generate competent analysis.
Or…this could just be another corporate money pit.
One way or another, it just goes to show that online identity is gaining more and more traction as the days go on.
Yeah it would seem worthwhile to have someone not only notify you, but possibly sum up the situation a little for you too. I tcan be done by anyone, yes, but there are only so many hours in the day.
I think there are a few reasons for this. The first being, that in the fast paced and technological based world we now live, we have become lazy (as well as busy) and having information on our screen rather than going to a few sources for it is more acceptable than what is used to be. Secondly, and along the same lines of being fast paced, the internet marketing world is evolving so quickly that some marketing professionals can’t keep up with the current trends (even though they should). That is one of the major reasons I started http://www.virt...ketingblog.com/ (that and I am very passionate about internet marketing).
I can see this as being quite a useful service if it could allow a company to slice and dice the data about “conversational tone” and “participant demographics” across different parameters that the company is interested in. For example if I could use this to figure out that most of the conversation about MyProduct-v3.1 is “negative” in the EMEA blogs, but mostly positive in Asia, that is good info. Or if I can figure out that MyOtherProduct-v2.2 is gathering positive buzz, especially amongst the 18-34 demographic then I can spend more money pushing it a bit.
By the way, the link to Umbria in the article above takes you to some tourism site. The correct link is probably http://umbrialistens.com
For many companies, looking at every blog post and news item is like asking Jeff Bezos to look at every order that comes into Amazon.
There is a lot of information out there to collect, to analyze and to put into archive. For many companies, they need help in order to make this happen.
A company I co-founded in 2000, Biz360, does this for many Fortune 2000 companies.
I would pour my $$$ (if i had any) on other languages apart from English. The Japanese and Portuguese speaking markets look green to me.
Duncan, you’re absolutely right for smaller companies. But think about companies like Microsoft or Apple. If you type them into Technorati, you’re looking at 5,000+ blog posts per day. And smart companies are tracking not just their own coverage, but that of competitors. They’re categorizing posts to see if the tone of coverage shifts if their CEO is mentioned. And they’re tracking the overall tone of the blog conversations about their company and competitors to see what the trends are.
There’s no replacement for the technological and human analysis that companies like Umbria, Biz360, or my own CustomScoop provide. Certainly, if you’re a startup, like many TechCrunch readers, there’s likely no need for such a service — yet. But as you grow your company, you will likely reach a point where the amount of discussion going on about your company outstrips your ability to handle monitoring and measuring it in-house.
There are a few reasons why I’m not surprised at the launch of a service like this:
- PR agencies (and even internal PR departments) are often put in the “justify your existence” position; develop a weekly, monthly, quarterly report that demonstrates your value and reminds the executive team why we spend so much on PR. PR people, unfortunately, tend to justify their existence by generating gobs of reports — the more ‘hits’ the better you must be. And in today’s Web 2.0 world, the pressure for more comprehensive results is that much greater. In my view, it’s unfortunate, because this defensive mentality actually devalues PR, and makes PR people forget where their true value lies.
- Someone else mentioned this, but it’s a good point, the amount of time it takes to sift through the blogosphere, even using Technorati, etc, is significant. Now add to that, pouring over traditional print and online media searching for coverage, mentions, etc. You can spend more time creating reports than you can actually being proactive and truly adding value to your client/company.
So a service that delivers a neat little package to your desktop is very attractive to the PR set.
Personally, having been in high tech PR for nearly 20 years, I have yet to find a service that delivers on its promise. So I’ll be watching this one closely.
Duncan, check out link to Umbria, it’s probably Umbrialistens.com.
Your link leads to some domain parking page.
I think the keyword is measurement. Many PR people can search and find these blog posts but are unsure how to measure the impact. A service that can put it into context with impressions and relevance would have them pretty excited. However, I haven’t seen any type of automated service that can contextualize blog posts accurately.
- Sounds like a decent idea
As I PR guy, I’ll say one thing, for starters: More than “understanding the blogger demographic,” as was commented above, PR Newswire, I think, actually just understands how to take money from people who don’t know they don’t need to spend it.
Tonja’s comment is pretty well on. The problem with “context” and “impact,” though, is a service like this only gives PR people things that make them think they’re seeing context and impact.
I do the Technorati/Google/Topix/Etc.-to-RSS free monitoring and then — wait for it…THINK about what the results mean. Then spend the savings on gadgets and whiskey.
Prior commentators have summed it up well. You indeed CAN just type in your name into Technorati or Google and get a number of hits.
But… 1) what if you’re Coke, or Apple or the movie ‘Vacancy’…what will you get?
2) even if you can narrow it down to just your product and what they’re saying in relation to your press release, it will be filled with spam if you’re a big name company, which will throw off your results,
3) Umbria gives them what no one else can: a breakdown by demographic segment, sentiment, and a tracking of how many new people are joining the conversation over time. And that’s how marketing decisions can be made.
Michael, I can understand how you would be perplexed by the arrangement. As a former employee of PR Newswire (full disclosure: my tenure left a less-than-favorable impression of the company), I see this move not so much as actually adding genuine value to the service. Instead, it achieves the following marketing and sales goals:
1. PR Newswire is giant in the industry, and charges appropriately so. However, the corporate heavyweights there are clueless when it comes to online distribution, with lean-mean competitors springing up everyday offering more robust, efficient digital distribution. This movve (as well as the Technorati move) gives the appearance that PR Newswire is catching up.
2. Every time a client issues a press release with PR Newswire, they get a colorful report that allegedly tracks the releases’ pickup (while in reality, it merely provides links to designated URLs where the release is posted for a few days). This partnership adds more pretty color to that report that says nothing. But at it looks pretty and it appeases the clients’ bosses and their own clients’ clients.
3. It’s another buzzword they can ad in their sales pitch to other clueless PR “professionals”, making it seem they’re up to date on new media distribution.
4. They can write a press release about.
So, in conclusion, its a lot of smoke and mirrors, and like you said Michael, a “value-added” service that means nothing if they knew how to download Google alerts. But maybe I’m just being bitter
Corporate clients generally feel something free on the web couldn’t worthy of their use.
Hey Duncan Riley,
Change the URL for Umbria to http://www.umbrialistens.com/
http://www.umbri.com/ takes me to a site which looks like some travel website.
I’m wrapping up a research project that has involved a written RFI and in-depth discussions with 30+ companies in this space. In most cases, there’s a big difference between what they offer and an off-the-shelf approach using services like Technorati. You can see a very lightweight version of the analytics available at BlogPulse, which is the free, stripped-down version of the Nielsen BuzzMetrics service.
The typical vendor supplies a web-based dashboard that goes beyond the features of free search engines and analyst services that interpret the results and move into the realm of market research and consulting. They’re using a variety of automated and manual processes to select sources and content, filter and score it, and create reports and graphs that summarize the results.
Slicing and dicing along topic, tone/sentiment and influence are standard fare, and online/offline comparisons, demographic segmentation, and many other metrics are available. As for languages, the companies I’ve talked to cover over 30 languages.
Duncan,
Thank you for covering the news of our new partnership with Umbria – http://www.prne...newswire/28031/. We are very excited about this new offering. As an employee of PR Newswire for 9 years and the new Director of Emerging Media, I felt that I should respond to you and some of the other comments that are being written.
I’m a big fan and user of a number of free services such as Google Alerts, Technorati, BlogPulse, and more. You even mentioned that PR Newswire has an existing relationship with Technorati which is a simple way for us to help our clients monitor the conversation that may be forming in the blogosphere around their news and information – which happens a lot with bloggers commenting on press releases and often linking to releases either on our website or through our many distribution points such as Yahoo and Google.
This service is not simply about trying to help our clients find out what bloggers are saying. There is a big difference between helping our clients to monitor and helping our clients to measure. Monitoring conversations simply allows people to see what is being said and where it is being said. Measuring the conversation delves deeper into the conversation to see how someone is saying something, how much influence that person has (for instance, an article in TechCrunch carries much more influence with readers than say a blog that I might write in my spare time), and any other demographics about the conversation that may be available. This is increasingly important for anyone in the public relations and marketing field to be aware of.
Whether you are in a public relations firm or a corporation, time is of the essence to everyone. It is increasingly harder everyday to monitor. measure, and participate in all the conversations that may be going on around a company, organization, product, or service. We are not the first to try to help our clients out with this (although we’ve provided services to our clients to monitor and measure their messages for several years now) and we won’t be the last. Everyone is stretched thin these days so the timing of this new partnership is appropriate and, through our research, very much needed.
- Michael
Michael, how is this different than Buzz Logic or “authority” in Technorati. How does this new service quantify measurement in order to justify the story? Is it through ranking, threaded conversations, extended conversations, or does it actually track the amount of views, links, and hits to the company site?
Bloggers haven’t only changed the game for traditional media, they’ve flipped PR on its head and all of the usual metrics associated with former success. Coverage aka hits doesn’t cut it anymore…now companies want to AND SHOULD see how participating in conversations is impacting its business directly.
Many of us PR folks are tracking buzz on blogsearch.google, technorati and IceRocket. We gotta…it’s like reading WSJ, NYT or top trade pubs…but more enjoyable!
Tracking blogs is quick, easy, free and offers you a live look you can check over time. We’ve been doing this for a while now, but what I find is that marketing teams and business units often want to dive in and drive their “messages” through any means necessary, often seeing blogs and podcasts as vehicles. Having data beyond just hits is helping PR help marketing and business units think first about audiences and telling connected stories over time.
These monitoring/measuring services can help PR pros spread understanding of the real values and possibilities for using social media. To build a company’s social media persona it takes it’s people to get involved, and the best way to keep it sane, efficient, effective and meaningful is to integrate PR and Marketing approaches. These tools can help PR stay on top of it’s game, remain a trusted media and communications advisor and get better integrated with a variety of different teams inside and outside thier company.
Cutting out PR, diving in and making things happen on-the-fly is bold, but experience, mindfullness, listening and relationships build appreciation and respect over the long haul.
Free services are great for consumer use or for the individual freelancer, but if you have a sufficiently financial or political interest in a topic the free services fall short.
Let me just give a few examples: First of all they tend to treat all voices with the same relevance. Intuitively we know that not all voices have the same influence and should therefore not command equal attention for someone monitoring a topic.
Second, professional services tend to add analytics capabilities on top of the monitoring. This enable businesses to measure trends, make better predictions and generally gain more relevant insight from the monitoring – and do so on statistically firmer ground.
Last but not least it’s a question of volume. If you are a pharmaceutical company you may find that there are 2-3000 posts daily on an average size therapeutically area. While you want to know the essence of what’s being said and what the trends are – you don’t want to sit down and read all the posts.
Interesting post Duncan!
I’m the co-founder of a company that tracks online communications with intentions to smear, harm, thieve, attack or target business.
From your post, I get the sense that a difference can not be identified between paid services and free tools.
I can’t speak on all PR agencies, but in our dealings with PR professionals and social media analysts who have used our paid service, they seem to understand the limitations of free tools, and how paid services are able to go beyond any vanity search or a collection of feeds.
Most business wanting to tap into social media do so because they understand that by the time negative publicity hits the mainstream, its too late to manage the damage. PR types would want to be the ones to catch the apple before it lands so to speak.
For instance, advanced warnings on consumers or employees expressing their dissatisfaction on a message board or a gripe site won’t get picked up by free alerting tools.
In addition, it is vitally important that one considers the depth of sourcing, monitoring scope and reach that draws on all forms of online discussion, including blogs (+ comments), forums, message boards, consumer sites, gripe sites, social networking sites, videos and images.
Then there is the all important content filtering and human analysis. High payoff execs get put off if they receive links to splogs or irrelevant alerts, wanting only to review information important to their business requirements (ie. *union talks over potential “strike”* as opposed to *yankees pitcher “strikes” out the orioles*).
Client consoles and analytic areas to conduct review and analysis on such things as tone/sentiment (ie. positive vs negative discussion), geography, media source (ie. blog, forum, news), and other measurement tools to draw on (ie. blogger influence, discussion reach, blogrolls).
Remember, information travels quickly across the internet.
As I see it, it can be summed up into an advantage where automated software, human intervention, core competence and best practices save business the precious time to compile, store and report on any and all online views that can make or break a brand. Timely reporting and precision monitoring that in my opinion greatly enhance reputation management strategies of business.
A recent Kent State/BurrellesLuce survey was discussed on Bill Sledzik’s blog and seems to indicate that there is still a large proportion of PR professionals that have not yet tapped into the blogosphere – Bill Sledzik writes:
“It appears not everyone, even public relations pros, have bloggers on their radar screens. According to data from a recent Kent State/BurrellesLuce survey, 72% of PR professionals say they have NO formal system for monitoring buzz in the blogosphere. Only 19% say they do.”
Link: http://toughsle...he-blogosphere/
A quick note on this survey: because this was a US study, I believe those figures would be very different if they took into account PR pro’s in Canada.
I guess one must first learn how to walk before running. Free tools do provide a good starting point. Free tools apply to some business types better than it does for others but basically everybody out there running a business should be aware of what people are saying online, and that includes your competitors.
Because there is no comprehensive and all encompassing “how-to” guide to manage your reputation and brand online, my advice would always be to call in the experts and let them do if for you if you are realizing that free tools aren’t enough.
- Joseph
The extent of a company’s reliance on an intermediary to give them useful intelligence about the people with whom they should be communicating is an indicator of the extent of their non-engagement or comprehension of the web2.0 environment. Hence the reason why so many companies are doing it.
I was thinking this was an interesting bit of timely information until I noticed the dates on the comments before this one…