The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Online Presence Monitor Infonitor Reviewed

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to find and count media content. With new technology coming out seemingly every day, there's always an opportunity to try something new. I'd recently heard about Infonitor (a free online presence monitor from Newbase) and I wanted to see if it was accurate and expansive enough to replace the current content providers we use to gather and count media mentions. So I compared it to Radian6, Factiva, Nexis and SocialMention. I found that, while Infonitor is free and offers unique data analysis charts, I'm not sure how good it currently would be for clip counts. 

First of all, if you are searching a popular name or topic, be prepared to wait literally hours for it to compute the data and give you the numbers. Long searches often stall out as well. Even fairly unusual proper names take three or four minutes to search. 

I did a number of searches where Radian6 found Twitter posts that Infonitor did not. Social Mention did not perform as well as Radian6 either (although Social Mention results seem to vary by subject; some more accurate than others). 

Infonitor does have a unique feature that I haven't seen anywhere else and that is the ability to do E-bay searches. The downside is that it only searches E-bay in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So if you want to see how well your brand is doing in the aftermarket, then it would be good for that. Being that it's only good in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland I imagine it would be most useful for tracking used David Hasselhoff CDs.

Conclusion: I can't think of any reason for Infonitor to replace Factiva, Nexis, or Radian6, other than the fact that it is free. It just isn't as accurate and it's incredibly slow on big searches (I guess that's the trade off for the cool charts). The ideal Infonitor user would be someone with no budget to work with, lots of time on their hands, and a whole lot of patience.

-- Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners

 

Berlin Protocol thoughts

Barry Leggetter, AMEC's Executive Director and the force behind last week's Berlin Measurement Summit, very correctly asked me for specifics of "The Berlin Protocol" that I proposed in my post last week.
So here's a start.

 

• 1.       We agree to use no research methodology that isn’t based on solid research and facts
• 2.       We agree to a standard principle that the best measurements are business outcomes not exposure, AVE or OTS
• 3.       We all agree to avoid to not use multipliers and other non-proven false statistics
• 4.       We agree that transparency is key to credibility in  our industry, and so we agree to reveal, if asked, our methodologies and our intercoder reliability scores and eschew “black boxes” and mystery algorithms
• 5.       We do not promote or offer or endorse AVEs, and if they are used, they must discount negative stories, stories that do not contain key messages, and stories that do not mention the brand in the headline or top 20% of the story. (i.e. stories you’d actually be willing to pay for)

Further thoughts? Additions? ?

Five Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed

*

Twitter Search, Social Mention, Twendz, Twitter Sentiment, and Twitrratr

by Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?" The sentiment analysis tools in the article on this page look specifically at the tone of individual tweets, while the Twitter analysis tools of the other article rank a person's entire Twitter profile in terms of popularity and engagement.

There is big, big, big demand for the ability to measure sentiment in social media. Sentiment -- also called "tone," and typically rated as positive, negative or neutral -- is shorthand for what the world thinks about something. And everyone, from junior high kids ("Do they like me or not?") to billion-dollar corporations ("Do they like our latest product?"), wants to know what the world thinks of them.

So, now that Twitter rules the social media roost, it would be very, very handy to have an accurate sentiment analysis tool that could quickly and easily gauge the tone of Twitter conversations.

When my company, KDPaine & Partners, wants to do very accurate measurement of Twitter, we have to use human readers. It's the only way to really understand the language. But, to have human eyes read and rate every tweet often takes a lot of time and money. For fast and free measurement, there are automated online sentiment analysis tools, five of which I review below. They, however, have their own set of problems.

Yeah, right. I got your total accuracy right here!

For a computer to determine sentiment for traditional print media is difficult enough. But when you try to get a computer to understand and interpret social media, it gets infinitely harder.

Social media, Twitter especially, is a very casual format, one that lends itself to inside jokes, symbols, emoticons, abbreviations, and jargon. Oh, and don't forget about sarcasm; what might appear positive might really be negative, and vice versa. Add to that the fact that Twitter only allows 140 characters (fewer characters and words makes it more difficult to assess tone) and errors in automated analysis go way up. So we may never attain total accuracy in measuring sentiment for Twitter. (Even with human readers you often don't get 100% accuracy.)

Most automated Twitter sentiment analyzers are very up front about the difficulty of what they are trying to do, and that they will be changing how they do it in the future. Before we get to the reviews, let's think about...

The Ideal Twitter Sentiment Tool

To my way of thinking, and for the type of work we typically do at KDPaine & Partners, the perfect Twitter sentiment analysis tool would include the following features:

• The ability to search by any word, abbreviation, symbol, or emoticon that would ever occur in a tweet.
• Advanced search features, including by date, by user, by hashtag, and by tone.
• The ability to distinguish between posts from a person/company, posts to a person/company, and posts referencing a person/company.
• Results charts with colors that distinguish between different sentiments.
• A dashboard with quick totals for each tone type, as well as overall numbers/percentages.
• The ability to search over long periods of time.
• Instant charts to show trends and relevant occurrences.
• At least 80% accuracy. 90% - 95% would be better.
• Real time updates.
• It should be free. (That's not too much to ask, is it?)

None of the tools reviewed below come even close to meeting this wish list. But some are on the right track. Here they are:

Twitter Search

Twitter's own Twitter Search sentiment option does not use words to gauge message tone, rather, it is limited to only those tweets that include certain characters used to symbolize mood, e.g., :) or :( or :D or :P. For this reason, when you use Twitter Search to search any given topic, you may find only one or two results showing positive or negative tone, because they are the only Tweets that used the above symbols.

On the day I used Twitter Search to run a sentiment search on #unfollowdiddy, it was the most popular topic of the day, with 2629 tweets (according to #hashtags.org.) But my search brought up only a single tweet, which Twitter Search mistakenly rated as positive:

Knot2serious: @TheTZA Glad to see you doing the #unfollowdiddy thing too! :D He really has a crappy ego & no talent. He's all hype. So, how are you? :) :P

The eye of the beholder: The above tweet exemplifies a major problem with sentiment search: Sentiment is many times a matter of perspective. Most sentiment analyses grade an item's sentiment based on the overall tone of the message and not necessarily the sentiment towards the subject of the message. For example, the above tweet has three positive sentiment symbols, yet the words make it clear that the tweet is actually extremely negative towards P. Diddy. To be fair to Twitter Search, all the tools reviewed here suffer from the same difficulty.

(#unfollowdiddy was a controversial effort to encourage people to stop following P. Diddy on Twitter. Each post on the subject usually included a reason why people should unfollow him. Taken from P. Diddy's perspective, most of those posts would be considered negative. Taken from the perspective of the person who started #unfollowdiddy, most of the posts attacking P. Diddy would be considered positive.)

Conclusion: Pretty much useless. If you are trying to gauge the overall tone of a topic or Twitter user, then Twitter Search is not the tool to use. Symbols should be part of a sentiment search, but they shouldn't be the only part. Twitter Search is sentiment search in its infancy, at best: It's a fun Twitter toy people can use if they want to see how many happy or unhappy faces were used in a tweet.

Social Mention

Social Mention, a social media search platform, assigns a tone/sentiment to every tweet: Positive, neutral, or negative, distinguished on their charts by color (green, gray, red). They also provide a sentiment ratio designed to give you an overall feel for the tone of a given topic. Social Mention offers an exhaustive breakdown of information by top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and top sources beyond Twitter. Their breakdown column lets you sort by sentiment as well, allowing you to see all the positive, neutral, or negative tweets grouped together.

According to Social Mention's creator, Jon Cianciullo, they, "use textual analysis, symbols, emoticons, and a few other things," to measure tweet sentiment. "We developed a method to achieve the highest level of accuracy that was reasonable to implement. We based it on some great open source projects and designed it specifically for the type of media we process. We leverage word, symbol, and phrase analysis to yield a ratio which is then used to grade the overall sentiment."

I tweeted back and forth a little bit with him, and he told me candidly that sentiment analysis is extremely difficult. Their research has found Social Mention's sentiment analysis to be roughly 60% - 80% accurate. He also said that they are developing a new Social Mention product which will provide more analysis, saved searches, and reporting.

Based on a #unfollowdiddy analysis using Social Mention, those numbers seem to be accurate. Social Mention's Sentiment Ratio was listed as 2:1, twice as much positive as negative. Of course it's all a matter of perspective as I noted above, (for Twitter Search), and as demonstrated by the following examples:

• Mistakenly listed as having positive sentiment:
  • 1. @jamalahmad lol yeah the #unfollowdiddy is getting pretty old and quite mean, why cant they just not follow him like us?
  • 2. #unfollowdiddy cuz it's his fault that the Palm Pre ain't out in stores yet, they had to put a Let's Go button on it, BOOO, lol...
• Mistakenly listed as having negative sentiment:
  • 1. got lots done...time to relax but I won't #UnFollowDiddy!! Go diddy go!
  • 2. #unfollowdiddy or #followdiddy.. oh shit damn he so gooood lol

Conclusion: Moderately useful. If 60-80% accuracy is close enough, then Social Mention is a tool you can use. It's the best overall among the five reviewed here.

Twendz (beta)

The Twendz site, a project of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, is an in-the-works-project entirely devoted to measuring sentiment in Twitter conversations. It uses a combination of keywords and symbols to compare and cross reference against a dictionary to make an educated guess on the sentiment of the posts. It measures tweets as positive, neutral or negative. Beyond that it breaks down sentiment by topic and then by reoccurring words found in the tweets. Twendz lets you highlight all tweets by individual tone type as well.

Twendz is really geared toward current topics. When a search term is entered, it pulls the 70 most recent tweets with that term, and then updates the results as newer tweets on that subject come in. There is currently no way to look at tweets prior to the first 70 they pull up. My impression is that Twendz is somewhat less accurate than Social Mention.

Conclusion: May be useful, depending on your needs. If you are only interested in the most recent 70 tweets, great. If you want to do any history at all, this one can't do it.

Twitter Sentiment

Twitter Sentiment, also entirely devoted to measuring sentiment in Twitter conversations, is, as it says, "strictly a school project." Like many of the other sites it ranks sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative (distinguished by color – green, white, red). It's probably the simplest looking of the five sites reviewed here.

It offers a feature that allows you to change the sentiment results if you think they aren't correct and submit your feedback. That doesn't mean that your edit becomes permanent, but I like the idea.

The bad news -- really bad news -- is that no matter what topic you search, Twitter Sentiment only pulls up one page of results: If you click the "next page" button, it starts your search over. So your results are limited to about 17 or so tweets. With such a small sample, it's hard to determine how accurate Twitter Sentiment is. The good news is that the site's "submit feedback" button works. So you can tell them the "next page" button doesn't work. So maybe they'll fix it.

Conclusion: Very limited usefulness. For a school project, it probably gets a A. But in the real world, it's only useful if you are only interested in the most recent 15-20 tweets. I'd use Twendz before I'd use this one.

Twitrratr

Twitrratr is another site devoted to tracking sentiment on Twitter. It cross-references your search term against a dictionary of positive and negative keywords. It offers a clean, polished dashboard that shows the total number of tweets containing your search term and how many were positive, neutral, or negative. The individual tweets are then shown in corresponding columns, with the category-triggering words highlighted.

At the bottom of the page are links showing exactly which words and symbols count as positive and which words and symbols count as negative. Twitrratr shows 174 positive words, abbreviations, and symbols, and 185 negative words, abbreviations, and symbols. Certainly not an exhaustive search and a lot of room for contextual error, but at least you know what you're dealing with. My impression is that there were not enough tweets categorized negative, and that Twitrratr is less accurate than Twendz.

At the top of the page they show the number of all the posts, but I couldn't find any way to actually see any of the other posts beyond the results that appear on the first page. Under their About link they make it quite clear that this site is a Startup Weekend project, and a work in progress. At least they are aware of their limitations and freely admit it.

Conclusion: Only moderately useful. Smooth layout, and the total numbers are nice, but still limited by lack of history. I'd use Social Mention rather than Twitrratr. A bit limited in concept right now, but future potential to watch for.

And finally...

The current efforts to track sentiment through a machine are a great beginning and, even for the tools I ranked poorly, what they've accomplished thus far is quite impressive. The best of the group is Social Mention, but it's certainly not accurate enough for many purposes.

The big picture here is that, although there is demand for free automated sentiment search, the technology to pull it off isn't quite there, at least not yet. What it comes down to is: What percentage of accuracy are we willing to live with?

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?"

Chris Near is Director of Research for KDPaine & Partners. Chris recently graduated with his master's in communications and currently devotes most of his time to measuring PR and developing social media methodologies. That is, of course, when he's not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie, or chasing around his tireless two year-old son, Brendan.

* Thanks for the icon, SmashingMagazine

 

Seven Steps to Measurable Social Media Success

 

How to get started in social media --
and how to know if it's working for you.

This article is a summary of one of Katie Delahaye Paine's most popular presentations. If you'd rather just watch the PowerPoint slide show, here it is:

7 steps to measurable success in social media

View more OpenOffice presentations from kdpaine.

Step #1: Conquer your fears

• Typical fear: "I'm afraid of what I'll hear!"
--How to conquer it: Remember that, if you're deaf to the conversation, your enemies will still hear it. There is a lot of talking going on out there, you might as well listen in.

• Typical fear:"The lawyers won't let me!"
--How to conquer it: It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. Try it, prove that it works, and you'll trump the lawyers every time.

• Typical fear: "I'm afraid of losing control!"
--How to conquer it: Remember that you never had control, anyway. You just sometimes thought you did.

• Typical fear: "I don't have anything to say!"
--How to conquer it: Don't talk, listen. And learn.

Step #2: Set clear measurable objectives

Goals drive metrics, and metrics drive results. So figure out what problem(s) you need to solve, and those goals will determine your metrics:

If your goal is improving reputation or relationships with your audiences, then measure:

• relationship scores
• recommendations
• positioning
• engagement

If your goal is sales, then measure:

• engagement index
• cost per customer acquisition
• web analytics
• sales leads
• marketing mix modeling

Remember: You can't manage what you can't measure, so set measurable goals. And if, for some reason, social media is not going to add value to your program, just don't do it.

Step #3: Investigate your stakeholders: Who, What, Where?

Should you blog, or Twitter, or go on Facebook, or what? Before you can decide, you must find out about your customers or audience by asking them.

• What's important to them?
• Where do they go for information?
• What do you want them to know?

Step #4: Start listening

Search for relevant topics; what are people talking about that is important to you? Monitor those topics with:

• www.socialmention.com
• Google Alerts
• Join Twitter, then search Twitter and use TweetDeck.

Step #5: Take the plunge

Learn about social media by using it yourself:

• Join Facebook and find family and friends.
• Join Twitter and start following people important to you or your organization.
• Join Linked-In and find a job.
• Join Flickr and share photos and images.
• Join YouTube and podcast.
• Use Ping.fm, a simple and free service for updating social networks.

Step #6: Obey the rules

Do:

• Be interesting
• Share things that excite you
• Ask advice
• Join the conversation
• Comment on blogs
• Reply to Twitter

Don't:

• Talk about boring stuff
• Scream about your product
• Be a narcissist
• TWI (Twitter While Intoxicated)

Step #7: Measure success

These measurement tools are powerful, but most any marketing person can use them (no IT staff required).

• To measure web traffic, use Google Analytics. It's free and easy to use.
• To measure your incoming marketing (search) effectiveness, use Hubspot. Get started with their free Website Grader.
• Measure your relationships with online surveys at SurveyMonkey.

Finally, learn more by reading lots of blogs, especially those by these social media experts:

• David Meerman Scott
• Shel Israel
• Joseph Jaffe
• Brian Solis

The Very Best of The Measurement Standard

Measurement of a Measurement Publication

 

The top 10 most popular articles.

Here is your chance to catch up on the most popular writing about public relations measurement, but without having to wade through months of publications. Below are links to the top five most widely read articles for The Measurement Standard web newsletter, and The Measurement Standard Blog Edition (as ranked by Google Analytics' pageviews since Jan 1, 2009).

(The Measurement Standard web newsletter is posted on a website, with monthly email updates to subscribers (subscribe now at no cost, just click here). The Blog Edition includes the same articles as the newsletter, as well as a few extemporaneous odds and ends.)

Notice that only one article appears on both lists. Although the content of the two publications is almost identical, reader response to articles has always been somewhat different between the two platforms. The different platforms seem to reach different audiences.

The Measurement Standard Web Newsletter Top 5

1. The Measurement Standard's Social Media Compendium:
   A listing of all Measurement Standard articles about social media.
2. Measuring Community on Social Networking Sites:
   A detailed how-to guide for measuring MySpace and Facebook.
3. Easy Strategies To Get Started Measuring:
   Quick and simple techniques to start measuring your programs and impress your boss.
4. The All-Purpose, One-Size-Fits-All Public Relations Measurement Program Checklist:
   Everything you need to know before you start any public relations measurement program. Don't leave home without it.
5. 10 Social Media Metrics:
   How to make social media more measurable than traditional media.

The Measurement Standard Blog Edition Top 5

1. 15 Ideas for Low-Cost Social Media:
   KDPaine & Partners advises MADD on starting conversations without breaking the bank.
2. The All-Purpose, One-Size-Fits-All Public Relations Measurement Program Checklist:
   Everything you need to know before you start any public relations measurement program. Don't leave home without it.
3. The Geography of Buzz:
   Mapping Cultural Excitement
4. The Measurement Maven of the Month Awards:
   The Participants in the Non-Profit ROI Poetry Slam at SXS
5. How To Evaluate Events and Sponsorships:
   Six basic steps, five final lessons and four additional resources.

William Shakespeare's 5 Best Writing Tips

Rapid Writing

by Daphne Gray-Grant

 

"Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Almost 400 years after the death of William Shakespeare, theatres still regularly perform his plays, children study his work in school, and we are still moved by the complexity of his stories and the beauty of his language.

But what's less well known is that Shakespeare also provided superb advice for public relations writers. Here are five of his best tips:

1) On brevity

Since brevity is the soul of wit and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.
--Hamlet, Act 2, Scene ii

You cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense.
--The Tempest, Act II, Scene i

As a poet, Will understood the value of being succinct. And if this quality was important in 1595, just imagine how crucial it is today. Elizabethans didn't have to deal with the telephone, television or the Internet. Servants did the cooking and household maintenance and there were no traffic jams when you commuted by horseback.

In 2009, however, our society produces hundreds of thousands of words every day and yet we have less time to read than ever before. Will had to face the plague, but we have to deal with the Blackberry. Take pity on your readers. Be brief.

2) On how difficult it is to find just the right word or phrase

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
--Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, Scene i

In corporate- and copy-writing, it's all too easy to slip into cliches and jargon. When everyone around you says things like "walk the talk" and uses words such as "right-sizing" you'll start writing like that too. Fact is, we swim in a cesspool of boring, unimaginative language. It takes work -- and commitment -- to find the best words and turns of phrase. (Note: The best words are often the shortest, most concrete ones.)

3) On the importance of reading

My library was dukedom large enough.
--The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii

Like all great scribes, Will understood that to write well, you have to read well. This means reading more than your professional journal and daily newspaper. Read fiction; it will inspire you. Read outside your field of employment to gain breadth. Read essays and other forms of persuasive writing. While Will kept up with Christopher Marlowe, you may prefer Christopher Buckley. But read. It is a lifelong apprenticeship in the craft of writing.

4) On interviewing clients or co-workers for ads, brochures or employee publications

Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest.
--King Lear, Act I, Scene iv

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
--Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii

Much writing depends on interviewing. Through interviews you collect the stories, anecdotes, and metaphors that help your writing come to life. But too often writers try to put words in their subject's mouths. They go into the interview with preconceived notions and ask boring, ho-hum questions.

Savvy writers, on the other hand, ask pithy questions -- designed to extract anecdotes and feelings from their subjects -- and then keep quiet. As a student of human nature, Will knew what our mothers are always telling us: We have two ears and one mouth to remind us that we should listen twice as much as we talk.

5) On writing about what matters

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.
--Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene iii

No effective communications plan in the history of humankind ever hinged on finding "just the right phrase." True, a good plan or product may be helped by good words. Maybe even helped a lot. But words alone will not save a bad one. Your company or your client needs to be committed to what it is you're writing about -- otherwise you are doomed to be a hack.

If you're trying to communicate a company's belief in safety, for example, exhorting employees to act safely is not enough. Instead, you need policies and procedures in place that constantly demonstrate the company's commitment. Without this, you have what we today call a "disconnect." But I think Will said it better: "I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true "The empty vessel makes the greatest sound."

A former daily newspaper editor, Daphne Gray-Grant is a writing and editing coach and the author of 8 1⁄2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. She offers a weekly newsletter on her website Publication Coach. It’s brief. It’s smart. And it’s free.

 

Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?

*

Five online Twitter profile analysis services compared: Twinfluence, TwitterAnalyzer, Twitter Grader, Twitterholic, and TwitterScore.

by Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed." The Twitter analysis tools in the article on this page rank a person's entire Twitter profile in terms of popularity and engagement, while the sentiment analysis tools of the other article look specifically at the tone of individual tweets.

So you want to measure Twitter... The good news is that you have several online Twitter profile analysis/ranking services to choose from. The bad news is that you will probably find that none of them offer all the metrics that you really need or want. Especially if you are looking to do the kind of between-client comparisons that we at KDPaine & Partners are usually interested in.

To do very accurate measurement of Twitter, you typically have to use human readers. It's the only way to really understand the language. But, to have human eyes read and rate every tweet often takes a lot of time and money. For fast and free measurement, the online profile analysis tools are the way to go.

Automated analysis has accuracy problems, especially when it comes to the subtle language iinvolved in measuring sentiment. (See "5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed.") If we had a way to combine all the tools reviewed below, then we might have something really useful. Until then, we'll have to weigh the pros and cons of each and make the best decision.

So here's my report on five of the Twitter profile analyzers. I'm sure there are more out there, and I'd love to hear about them. (And if you think what I have to say here needs some clarification, please let me know).

Twinfluence offers interesting statistics (social capital, velocity, centralization) as well as a percent ranking system that compares the twitterer you analyze to other people. The catch is that it only compares you to other people that have previously been analyzed on Twinfluence. Their website says: "The #XXX score is your overall rank compared to all other twitterers that have been analyzed by Twinfluence. If your rank is #400, that means there are 399 other twitterers in the system who have higher reach scores than you."

To date, there have been less than 100,000 profiles analyzed on Twinfluence (that number is going up every day). So you can't rank anyone against the other 5 or 6 million twitterers out there (and that number is really going up every day, see Mashable). That makes the Twinfluence ranking pretty useless until more people get analyzed on their site.

TwitterAnalyzer is good for getting graphs that show your past month's message volume, your tweeting habits, the subjects you discuss, the links you use, and pretty much everything you would ever want to know. Which is great. But it lacks what is sometimes the most important thing: a ranking or scoring system that compares different Twitter pages. Without that you can't make competitive comparisons.

Twitter Grader sounds excellent, in theory. It takes the follow/follower ratio and combines measures of engagement to come up with a final grade of 0 to 100. It gives a score based on a large population (2,158,455). However, a recent hubspot Twitter grading blog post implies that their algorithm is still a work in progress.

And I do have problems with it. Consider the following results:

How can Vocus have relatively few followers, zero updates and still get a score of 87? Even if there were 10,000 people following Vocus, there are no updates so there is no communication or engagement between Vocus and its followers. Why does it get any score at all?

I also looked at Twitterholic and TwitterScore, but found them too problematic to take seriously. On the day I tested Twitterholic over half of my searches resulted in page errors. (Since then, I've tested it with a little more success.) The site gives a ranking for your Twitter page, but it is based entirely on the number of your followers. It doesn't calculate anything like updates or other forms of engagement. It's good for popularity, but not activity or interaction.

TwitterScore gives you a rank comparing you to all the other people that have previously been ranked on their site. Right now the rank is only out of 43,048 users. They also give you a score on a 10 point scale, but there is no information on how they come up with that score or what their ranking is based on.

Which service rules the nest?

If your goal is to give the clients a final score or ranking that compares one Twitter page with others, then I would recommend Twitter Grader. (But look out for anomalous scores, as noted above.) If your goal is to track clients' competitors and how they use Twitter and what topics they discuss and who follows them, then I would recommend TwitterAnalyzer. I also recommend that you keep looking: None of these is perfect, and newer and better tools will come along quickly.

Don't miss Chris Near's other article on measuring Twitter, also in this issue of The Measurement Standard: "5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed"

Chris Near is Director of Research for KDPaine & Partners. Chris recently graduated with his master's in communications and currently devotes most of his time to measuring PR and developing social media methodologies. That is, of course, when he's not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie, or chasing around his tireless two year-old son, Brendan.

* Thanks for the Twitter icon, DesignReviver.

Time to Enter the 2009 Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award

The 2009 Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award, created by the Commission on Public Relations Measurement & Evaluation, is open for entry on the Institute’s website. Entry deadline is Aug. 15, 2009. The award recognizes superb examples of research used to support public relations practice. 

In addition to the Golden Ruler, the judges may also make silver and merit awards. The Institute for Public Relations publishes the winners as case studies on its website. Winners will receive their awards at the Summit on Measurement held in October in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (USA).

PR News is the award program’s media partner. The award is named for Jack Felton, who served as President and CEO of the Institute and was instrumental in founding the Commission.

“Any PR practitioner, researcher or academic who has conducted meaningful research that meets the award criteria should enter this competition,” said David Kistle, adjunct professor, Webster University and a previous winner of the award who now chairs the judging team. “Past winners have inspired others to pursue research methods and findings that are innovative, groundbreaking, and contribute to the practice of public relations.”

In addition to Kistle, the judges include: Pauline Draper Watts, Millward Brown Precis; James Scofield O’Rourke IV, University of Notre Dame; Don W. Stacks, University of Miami; and Louis C. Williams, Chairman, L.C. Williams & Associates

How to Measure Trust and Mistrust

Chapter 6 of Measuring Public Relationships:
The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success

Trust is in the news of late, so we thought we'd exerpt the chapter on measuring trust from Katie Delahaye Paine's book Measuring Public Relationships. The introduction is below. Click here to download the whole chapter as a pdf. (Click here to buy the book.)

Trust, or lack thereof, has a measurable effect on the financial health of an organization. The accounting firm Arthur Anderson was destroyed after the Enron scandal because its clients lost their trust in its results. Whenever news of tainted beef hits the airwaves consumers lose trust in the safety of their favorite burger, and fast food sales take a dive. Conversely, a key to FedEx’s success is that customers trust the company’s pledge to deliver “When it absolutely, positively has to be there” overnight.

When trust helps an organization build relationships with key constituencies, it saves that organization money by reducing the costs of litigation, regulation, legislation, pressure campaigns, boycotts, or lost revenue that result from bad relationships. A high level of trust helps cultivate relationships with donors, consumers, investors, and legislators who are needed to support organizational goals. When employees trust their employer they are more likely to support the mission of the organization and be satisfied with their jobs. Lower employee turnover has a direct impact on the bottom line. Trust from the financial community is critical to an organization’s access to capital and therefore its ability to grow. Good relationships with the media can often avert a crisis...

Click here to download the whole chapter as a pdf.

PRNEWS' Measurement Conference Pre-Conference Survey Results

63 measurement conference attendees reveal what they are interested in and what they want from a measurement conference. Big thanks to PRNEWS and the PR Measurement Conference. --WTP