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Techcrunch blogged skeptically about Umbria’s* service, specifically its partnership with PR Newswire. The comment thread had a fair amount of pushback, largely from vendors with skin in the game.
*Note: Umbria has a non-obvious URL.
I haven&#8…

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://toughsledding.wordpress.....ogosphere/

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

As you all know I was out on Friday and resolved to not log in all weekend. It was a grand success and bought me a nice reprieve from all things digital. But I’m back in the office catching up on my blogs and had a bunch of things to comment on…

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for covering the news of our new partnership with Umbria - http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/prnewswire/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

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.

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.

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

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.

(via the almighty TechCrunch): PR Newswire and Umbria are teaming up to offer a new blog influence/conversation tracking type tool. Rather than simply announcing the news, Duncan Riley instead takes a step back to wonder:
Why do PR Professionals need a…

Walk2Web, created by San Jose-based Siteheart, uncovers new places on the web in a similar simple fashion to that of StumbleUpon but has its own gimmicky twist….

- 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.

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.