Tip #4 - Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards.

I would venture to say that this is truer today than it was in 2003.  Savvy Internet users are ridiculously unforgiving if you don’t use the latest and greatest of anything and everything.  After all, with a simple search engine, you can find most of the new stuff, so there’s no excuse!

Tip #5 - Have a thick skin.

There are people called ‘trolls’ on the Internet, and you know what?  They hate you.  They specifically find grammar boo-boos, differing opinions, and design issues in order to flame you until you are practically charred crisp.  It’s the Internet, don’t worry about it.  As I’ve written about in the past, people act differently online than they do in real life.  That jerk that just told you where your gadget review can stick itself?  He’s probably a normal guy that had a bad day at the office and needs to blow off some steam.  Let him; get over it.

Tip #6 - Don’t ignore Slashdot.

Scoble didn’t provide any explanation for this tip four years ago…and it still really doesn’t need one.

Tip #7 - Talk to the grassroots first.

Mainstream sources can be particularly untrustworthy.  Get numerous quotes and site your sources as often as you can.  It’s the only way that you will build trust, and trust is key to a successful weblog.

Tip #1 - Tell the truth

One of the reasons that Walmart was trying so vehemently to change their blogging image was the uproar online after two of their supposed independent bloggers were found to be frauds.  They were not complete frauds (they were real fans of Walmart), but they did not fully disclose how much money they were receiving from Walmart for their journey, and made it seem completely independent.  Readers did not respond well.  You can read the full story here.

Be transparent in your blog.  If you make a mistake, tell the readers.  If you change you mind about a topic, tell the readers.  Readers like to respond to a human being, not a corporate robot (‘Corbot’?)

Tip #2 - Post fast on good news or bad

It may sound counter-intuitive to some readers, but being the first to respond when your company is negatively accused is the only way to lose less trust from your clients.  Admit your mistakes, and hold firm to your integrity at the same time.  In this age of Twitter and Blackberries, it’s hard to justify not responding as quickly as possible.

As for good news, why not help the search engines find out about that good news by posting about it?  After all, a product or service is only good if people know of its existence.  Otherwise, it’s just a marketing failure.

Tip #3 - Use a human voice

There’s a fine line between professionalism and personalization, but readers want to read something that sounds like a novel, not a textbook.  There’s a reason why the fiction section at Border’s has more people milling around.

Another reason why a human voice is more pleasing is that it lends itself to opinionated writing, which lends itself to the start of a discussion.  A new discussion is every corporate blogger’s dream!  I always thought that Kuro5hin had an awesome ‘human voice’ style, personally.

The other 17 tips will be reviewed and updated eventually.  If you can’t wait, click on the PDF file below for the complete published paper by Scoble.

Corporate Weblog Manifesto PDF

Analytics aside, it boils down to a matter of tipping points. Most organizations spend countless resources building their brands, and the reality is that these intellectual positions can fall at a moment’s notice. Trying to calculate ROI, tracing overall trends, semantic analysis — all of these take a back burner to public relations emergencies within the realm of new media.

Being aware of attacks on your image, misrepresentations of fact, and negative opinion from top influencers is simply necessary when positioning your brand.

The graph below illustrates what I’m talking about:

 Even from this raw graph of daily average favorability, the difference is quite noticeable. When I visualize by month to show overall trends, things get interesting:

These trend lines highlight the discrepancy between the two topics. While the Olympic Games’ average favorability has had its ups and downs, its average favorability has both remained positive and increased in positivity from May to August.

China has not fared as well in its coverage; while enjoying two relatively neutral months (May and June), its favorability rating began to falter in July (-.13) and August (-.29). Quite the opposite of the Games’ coverage, China’s trend line indicates both a negative rating and an increase in negativity from May to August.

As the Games’ opening ceremony nears, a new chapter in our ImpactWatch demo begins. With Beijing as a stage, the world — and our demo — is all eyes…anything could happen.

SVP Tom sent this to Hannah, our Director of Analytics, as a joke when she requested jpegs of the IW logo finalists.  When she arrived at our office soon after, she gave everyone on the team these magnets with the joke logo on them.  She wore a pink t-shirt with the logo that she had ordered specifically for herself!

Admittedly, this logo is kinda growing on me…do we need a recount?

Many media measurement companies now use automated systems to rate the sentiment of news articles. While this system may be able to read and rate the articles faster than a human, we feel that that the complete automation of the system causes the information to lose value. The Bivings Group will continue to monitor the automated sentiment analysis technology and will switch to it if and when it is warranted.

We have found that while great strides have been made in the field of sentiment analysis, things like sarcasm and colloquial speech can often throw the system off. Another weakness of automated sentiment analysis programs is that they tend to mishandle trends. If a company has made a mistake, but is being praised for their efforts to correct that mistake, automated systems will often rate that as negative, when it should be positive. Sentiment analysis software also seems to run into problems when it comes to rating the sentiment of different entities in an article.

It is for all these reasons that the Bivings Group has chosen to stay with human editors for the sentiment rating in ImpactWatch. We are confident at this point that the extra time it may take to rank the articles is worth it because we know that we are giving our clients the most accurate data possible.

I’ve noticed something as analysts try to pinpoint an exact metric to measure social media and all this talk of ROI as both return on investment and return on influence. The derivative (change over time) has taken a backburner to comparitive measurement. I’m a proponent of using this measurement, and I think it’s currently underrated and arguably more, or at least equally important, as comparitive analysis in social media.

Here’s my short list of ways to use the power of the derivative in social media campaigns (a friendly reminder, in case you’ve been distracted):

1. Focus on change over time for your brand. Sure, it’s nice to know how your competitors are doing with their online presences and how you stack up comparitively. However, unlike traditional print media, there are both logical and logistical fallacies that don’t always make this an easy task. As Maggie Fox from the Social Media Group points out, good metric aggregation for social media is a time-consuming and manual process (read: expensive). As my boss recently pointed out in an e-mail, in terms of actionable PR work in social media it is much more important to know where you stand and how to improve than where your competitors are: in social media, there are no press release standards, and there is no official staging ground for retorts. I don’t want to sound like a self-help book, but focus on you.
2. Keep in mind, “buzz”, by nature, is merely a rate. Internet buzz itself is a phrase coined to describe lots of conversations in a small amount of time. By identifying time spans that had the highest rate of change, you can reflect upon successes (or disasters) and find what works best for your specific brand. Comparing the rate of change for different campaigns can give you a metric as to what worked better — for your brand. Not all methods work similarly.
3. The double derivative can affect timing. Think real hard back to high school physics… the double derivative represents acceleration. When applied to aggregated data about social media, it is easy to tell whether the cycle of buzz is coming or going. Keeping up the momentum on a social media campaign is difficult, and one of the most common downfalls of an otherwise great campaign can be timing. The double derivative (acceleration) can help with increasing, or at least maintaining, positive headway for your social media campaign. Knowing when to play your cards is key to success. The gadget/computer manufacturers have their “product-leaks” to blogs down to a science.
4. The derivative of self boils down to constant self-comparison. It’s a tangent from point #1, but I cannot stress how much I believe that in social media, self-contained metrics are vital to a strong social media strategy. Allocate resources to where it really matters, and I think pushing said resources into creating change for your brand is the top priority. Self-comparison through time gives real results with actionable intelligence.

But in showing ImpactWatch over the years, I’ve run into a lot of people who love ImpactWatch’s interface and base tool set, but who don’t need all of the advanced features we’ve built into ImpactWatch over the years. They were looking for an elegant and affordable way to manage and report out on their media coverage as opposed to an enterprise level media tracking platform.

In an effort to provide these folks with a product they can use, we are in the process of rolling out two new ImpactWatch product lines that will enable the IW to serve the needs of organizations of all sizes.  Specifically:

1. ImpactWatch Basic - Aimed at groups that get a limited amount of coverage (approximately 1-50 clips a day) and only need for a handful of people to access data.
2. ImpactWatch Professional - For organizations with a higher volume of coverage (50-100 clips a day) and who need a few dozen people to access the system.
3. ImpactWatch Enterprise - This is our current system, which is aimed at organizations with a high volume of daily coverage (100+ clips), a large number of users and that need access to some of ImpactWatch’s high end reporting features.

I know this is vague, but we are in the process of a big development push and aren’t ready to talk about all the details yet.  Check the ImpactWatch blog for updates on our progress and look for us to roll out the new product lines later in the summer.

We’re excited.