In the movie version of "Clear and Present Danger," Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan character advises the President to acknowledge a friendship with someone who has become embroiled in scandal. Being forthright about the friendship would defuse potential controversy arising from someone finding out the President had been less than truthful.

The President takes Ryan’s advice, truthfulness trumping what would have been a failed grab at perfection. Thirteen years later, Alan Scott had similar advice as he discussed Factiva with WebProNews, and the need for companies to be aware of how they are being discussed all over the Internet.

Plenty of places for discussion exist. Scott said Factiva Insight tracks thousands of news and topical websites, and millions of blogs and message boards. They can do this thanks to the scale they have built in to the service.

Lots of forward-thinking companies have embraced the need to keep aware of conversations, before they turn into full-fledged public relations nightmares. Scott invoked Sony and its DRM missteps as the now-classic example of how not to manage one’s corporate image in this highly interconnected world.

Sony displayed an old school way of thinking, dismissing unprofessional blogs and social media as lacking the ability to have an impact. They found out, by painful example, this was not the case.

"What’s rewarded is authenticity," Scott said. He noted the marketplace as a whole tends to be tolerant of problems a company may have. Truthfulness and candor have become the hotly-valued commodity over perfection.

Factiva’s approach to building sophisticated profiles of brands, products, executives, and corporate initiatives feeds its ability to understand when a ‘bursting phrase’ may represent an issue for a company.

Using Sony again as an example, Scott illustrated that even though the company may not have been looking specifically for digital rights management conversations, the text mining Factiva can do as an automated service would have keyed the company’s PR team into understanding the strength of feeling building up around DRM.

Sony could have avoided some of the unhelpful responses they initially gave as the controversy grew. The scandal over their DRM rootkits on CDs remains a prime example of why any business, whether a Factiva client or not, needs to understand people want transparency from the businesses they deal with regularly.

Imperfection can be fixed. Trustworthiness is harder to patch.

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There were people from Sun, Cisco, Text 100, Fleishman Hillard, Weber Shandwick (well, me), Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis, Podtech, Andy Lark, Jory Des Jardins / Blogher that were in attendance (plus others), and Jeremiah Owyang from Podtech helped germinate the idea and Daniela Barbosa from Factiva ran with it – and, in a way, yes it was a Factiva focus group.

The measurement of social media – how is the best way to figure this out, and Factiva reached out to figure out how to measure such social media the best way.

Do you want a centralized algorithmic or a localized, emergence type data. Is it just about interesting data points or simple data points – but since there is money being moved, you need to figure out what people are asking for, and what data they need to bring back to the bosses. In deploying social media, you need to figure out how to best measure the results.

What needs to be measured: relevance, influence, reach, audience …. What is the high influence, what is the audience measurement? Niche blogs might not have a high audience, but they are reaching the right people.

Relavence, influence and reach all have to do with the goal – what might be influential for one person and / or company might not be for other groups. It’s the metrics (a la Nielsen Netratings) versus goals and objectives (what the company is looking for as an end-result is probably most important). A community activation – a call-to-action from the blog or post. A conversion rate, a download of a PDF or maybe a podcast.

But is there a difference between reach and influence? Someone might not have reach but is influencing the right people. It’s the attributes of the audience. And participation – social media platform via comments, post a blog ….

How is traditional marketing transitioning into social media and marketing. Can you measure the same way? Is it possible to measure?

Should we even call it consumer generated media, or social media – or for that point, is it new media? Not everyone is necessarily a consumer (according to Stowe) – but I disagree. We are a consumer society, dammit. When you participate, there is no consumption but more production – it’s a wrong, silly term (Stowe again). But, he has a nice hat on today (see photo).

We broke out into brain storm sessions – here are those notes.

Beyond metrics – there needs to be a standard on how they are produced out there. Statistics are radically different – if there was a standard set, a consistency, there is an issue in reliability that needs to be addressed. A working standard on social media – getting people to adhere is hard to do to begin with.

Click-thrus, who are we reaching is the important question. How do we define this in social media. Podcasting – who is watching, how long they watching, what’s the dropoff rate? What’s the engagement there within Podcasts – a “lurk” index, in a way.

Very basic web metrics tools – if you have those – you apply it to a blog, you get nothing truly valuable. To connect the domain name to a user behavior or a company would be great – like the top 500 people that you want to reach.

Should CGM be measured and is it important?

For us, yes, of course we want to be able to measure it.

Who is creating social media? What are they creating? And is the “who” more important than the “what”?

Blogs, wikis for how-to sites, newsgroups, message boards – all to help each other use products. Have to consider who the company – there are 100′s of millions of people that are probably creating the content that is just for family, that is just being done for fun. Do you mean relevant to commerce and business, or who is just creating social media? You have to figure out and distinguish the relevance versus the cabin blogging person who no one is currently reading. How do you find those bloggers that you want …. So, tagging does become an important role. Isolate who is relevant discussions – by being involved that does help.

Somehow create a filter to tag the blogs, in a way of importance. Media itself is very structured. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality – specific influence.

If you are producing social media as part of your PR marketing plan, how do you measure ROI? Answered above.

Do you think that social media needs structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metics (eg MSM’s ad value equivalenceand article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?

What kind of standards – transparency. How are stats created in a clear way … a level of confidence that this information is confident – the executives can pull it apart, and it still stands – it needs to be digestable . Start creating advanced statistics, such as reach, media signal (prominence, etc). What are the metrics, creating of algorithms. There needs to be some structure – but there is a softer side of measurement, some guidelines … flexibility, adapted by …. There is that pie-chart desirability, but is it possible. Resistance and uncertainty from advertising to PR, as the money switches hands. There are a ton of companies that are getting into measurement of social media, but needs to be an understanding. It depends on what you are doing – from the PR side, we are the first adopters bc it is lower risk and just part of outreach. Influencers is what PR is trying to figure out. CYA metrics – that’s what the corporate side also. The idea metrics – it’s a PR thing that wants.

So … what should be measured and how do you want it to be delivered?

In a simple way that can be modified for each companies / corporates needs. And, RSS to cut and paste into an email.

Thoughts from other breakout groups:

The metaphor that matters – a blogger is a blogger, even if he is a journalist.

ROI – no metrics, beyond engagement. None for new acquisitions, call to action, click throughs. Is there importance for these metrics, or is anecdotal information yet. Next year (prediction) is when company’s get over it – they are all looking for a decent metric, and page views is not the one. There has to be some better measurement, and 2007 is where it is going to likely going to come from. Engage or die.

Does ROI even matter – no one is going to ask for ROI on email or IM.

Who and what varies on the situation. Nothing is equal, not everything is quantified the same way, depending on the needs and interpretations.

Salesforce dashboards – the next board meeting, where you explain how many days it took to sell what and why. Should we measure – it depends, and why comes into play.

Open networks – open source metrics – the metrics to be embraced by them all. Need standardization, in order for there to be success. Paying for measurement is for the rich and the famous (it costs cash).

One of the who’s – it’s not about big far reaching community, but about narrow, gated community around the “who” more so than the “what” and vice versa.

There was a final overview at the end – see photo – that capsulated the whole thought about measurement and tracking, which is important in social media. It is something we all talk about, but are not thinking about solutions. Hopefully, there will be better than anecdotal solutions.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

The folks at Forrester have completed what looks to be a pretty comprehensive analysis of the most popular brand monitoring services (e.g., Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, Biz360, Umbria, Brandimensions, MotiveQuest, and Factiva).

I can’t tell for certain how deep this report goes, it costs a thousand bucks, but they’ve posted a Q&A and an executive summary along with the graphic you see embedded here, which tease some of the findings. A few of the nuggets (verbatim):

• Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony are market Leaders, thanks to their comprehensive technology platforms and extensive data source coverage.
• MotiveQuest – with the most services-focused and strategy-oriented offering – finishes as the leading Strong Performer.
• Biz360′s focus on traditional PR monitoring services lands it as a midrange Strong Performer.
• Rounding out the Strong Performer category are Factiva, with its strong print orientation, and Umbria, which excels at speaker segmentation.
• Brandimensions falls into the Contender category, with targeted expertise in the automotive, entertainment, and pharmaceutical industries and an approach that relies heavily on human filtering.

Brand monitoring online is top-o-mind for a lot of companies that recognize the need for conversational marketing and communication, but lack the tools and insights to analyze and measure the impact and success of their efforts. It’s a real pain, and unfortunately, where there’s pain there’s also exploitation. I think some of the popular brand monitoring services have a reputation of over-promising and under-delivering — which is why I’m glad to see a report like this surface.

Brand monitoring and sentiment mining online is a tough nut to crack, I personally don’t think any of these companies have it nailed yet, but some are getting close.

For that reason, it’s good to see that Forrester will be revisiting this report next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a big shake up in the rankings, perhaps even some new players to watch. Forrester, if you’re listening, I’d totally understand if you wanted to send this to me for “review.”;p

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Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

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Several tracks will be offered at this year’s Search Engine Strategies 2005 conference in San Jose. For those just entering the world of e-commerce, a Fundamentals Track will touch on an Introduction to Search Marketing, along with other topics like Buying Search Engine Advertising and Successful Site Architecture.

The Advertising track should be of interest to online retailers facing the upcoming holiday season. One session will walk advertisers through Creating Compelling Ads, while a later session on Landing Page Testing & Tuning tells them what to do with the customer once they’ve clicked through that ad.

Blogs have become so much of a phenomenon, companies like Factiva and Umbria Communications offer products and services specifically focused on delving the blogosphere for advanced marketing intelligence.

What do blogs and news mean to advertisers operating in the search engine medium? The News, PR, and Blogs track will hit on that over several sessions. Presenters will discuss how search engines handle blogs in their listings.

WebProNews will have two of its finest search engine reporters, Chris and Mike, in attendance at SES 2005. Be sure to keep up with WebProNews and discuss the breaking topics from the conference in the WebProWorld forums next week.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Factiva, company created from Dow Jones and Reuters announced on Thursday the launch of their new “Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence. A tool they say will “empower executives to monitor known issues and discover emerging opportunities and threats from across the mainstream media, radio and television transcripts and consumer generated content, including blogs and message boards in one solution.” Wow! That’s a lot of ground to cover.

“There are millions of blogs and message boards worldwide and any one of them can affect your organization or brand. To fully manage corporate reputation, companies need to pay close attention to what is being said not only in the media but in blogs, message boards and online media too,” said Alan Scott, chief marketing officer, Factiva. “The sheer volume of information makes it impossible to read and analyze its impact on your business – until now. Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence provides the sophisticated tools to sift though millions of pages of information, and visualize potential threats as well as hard to spot opportunities. It all adds up to tremendous competitive advantage.”

So let’s put this in perspective. This tool provides some incredible marketing and public relations opportunities for companies. It allows companies to track all kinds of behaviors and vocalizations regarding the Internet. It can allow one more venue to find out what a company is doing right and doing wrong. It can give them another avenue into the world find out what works and what doesn’t, see what the buzz is about the particular business one is in. If you’re McDonalds and you want to find out about what people on the net are saying about your new Sextuple Mac, then you can get the low down from burger enthusiasts, the beef industry, health enthusiasts and even potentially employees who’ve notice special sauce consumption has increased dramatically.

The other side of this is something potentially dangerous and that’s the big brother possibility behind this. This will allow execs to keep close tabs on what all their employees are saying about them online and if an employee has a bad day and decides to slam their boss in the Live Journal, it may be all she wrote. Also, another thought is it could offer new ground in SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits. This tool could certainly be abused.

The marketing and PR potential of this tool will be quite significant. Many people probably won’t realize though just how much information companies already have and how much more they will get from using this information. As I said, Factiva now knows

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Congratulations, Technorati, you just became a focus group.

Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence was disclosed in a statement this morning. The product offers a single source where content from radio, television, and online media and blogs can be assessed for marketing opportunities or damage control.

“To fully manage corporate reputation, companies need to pay close attention to what is being said not only in the media but in blogs, message boards and online media too,” said Alan Scott, chief marketing officer, Factiva, said in a statement.

The insights gained from discussions on message boards and in blogs can help a business target its marketing efforts. US Cellular used this approach when it worked with Umbria Communications to help it come up with more effective advertising.

Factiva says it can deliver content found by the product with an easy to use reporting tool. The computer-generated analysis will be provided by technology from Intelliseek, with whom Factiva has an agreement.

The company cites 9,000 authoritative sources, like the Wall Street Journal, and Factiva’s owners, Dow Jones and Reuters; it also claims to search 11,000 web sites and more than 4 million regularly updated blogs and message boards.

Being able to develop more proactive marketing strategies will influence the advertising seen every day. With more companies moving online with their ad strategies, the ability to drill into multiple online sources should be a very compelling motivation for firms to investigate the Factiva product.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Yahoo’s recent launch of a service that can sift through subscription-based content has gained access to the Factiva service. Factiva is a Dow Jones and Reuters company.

In a press release, Factiva disclosed the new agreement. “The addition of Factiva headlines to Yahoo! Search Subscriptions provides a wider audience of web searchers with access to the best of the business deep web,” said Greg Gerdy, Factiva vice president and director of channel marketing and strategy.

“Factiva is committed to integrating our news and business information into our users’ workflow, and the web is an important part of that.”

Yahoo Search Subscription users can now sift through 90 days of Factiva’s business news archives. Also, news and other information on current topics will be returned to a query.

Once a user clicks through a Yahoo result derived from the Factiva database, they will be taken to a Factiva page. Full access to the article can be purchased there for $1.50 USD, or access to ten Factiva articles may be bought for $9.95.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.