Earlier this week, a few of the bloggers at Engadget posted what they called an open letter to Palm. In their typically sarcastic tone, they actually spelled out some intelligent critiques of Palm and their lack of innovation with the Treo. The post was a critical look at what's needed from Palm to get back to the top of the innovation game.

All this wouldn't necessarily be that exciting, except what happened next — and after that.

First, Palm's CEO actually responded publicly, on the Palm blog. Granted, Ed Colligan's response to the bloggers was pretty general, but the important piece for those of you in PR and brand marketing is he did agree with some of their points. He took a risk of engagement by participating in the conversation. In fact, he says he shared the critique with executives at Palm because he appreciated the fact that these bloggers cared.

I honestly haven't seen this too often. Typically, companies don't respond, either because they don't have a clue that discussion is happening, or they are frozen, not sure what to say because of fear of saying the wrong thing. Ed's reponse, from a PR perspective, was pretty good. He thanked them, said that he didn't agree with everything but did in fact agree with much of their critique. His post was short, so he didn't respond point by point, which was probably the right choice. He seemed genuine — another good thing.

What happened afterwards is the piece many companies could learn from. Yesterday the bloggers from Engadget posted again — excited and surprised that Palm responded. Many exclamation points in their posts. I would almost call it downright giddy. This from a blog that gets tons of traffic and attention.

And, other bloggers discussed Palm's response in a positive tone. 

The takeaway from this interaction?

If you're on the corporate side:

• pay attention to social media, it's an important source of information from the people who use your products.
• don't be afraid to engage.

Sure, its hard to control the message, and that can be difficult to let go of. But, remember, you have no control anyway. Information in the blogosphere and across social media will move quickly, so you have a short window in which to respond effectively.

Don't be afraid of your customers and critics. Embrace them. 

Tags: Uncategorized by Robin Seidner
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The big story in the political blogosphere this week (besides Rove’s resignation) is the Iowa Straw Poll. The results at first glance appear straightforward, but bloggers from both sides of the political fence are revealing multiple layers to the data, and vastly different conclusions as to who is actually the big winner.

Mitt Romney walked away with 32% of the vote, but he paid a hefty price. According to the Washington Post, the Romney campaign spent somewhere between $442 and $1000 per vote. Mike Huckabee seemingly came out of nowhere to claim second place in the poll, and he spent a mere $58 per vote. Third-place Sam Brownback spent around $148 per vote.

Many of the most popular political blogs are declaring Sam Brownback “the big winner.” He emerged from relative obscurity to second-place in this important (at least in the past) early poll, and he spent less money and manpower than the other candidates. Most bloggers conclude that how Brownback uses this brief moment in the spotlight will determine his future in this race. Some, though, reach a bit further, claiming the likelihood of a Gingrich-Brownback ticket in ’08.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Giuliani and McCain declined to participate in the poll, thus diminishing any claim of victory by any candidate. And Ron Paul’s Internet popularity did not translate into a major showing at the poll; however, his placement above Tommy Thompson was perhaps enough to embarrass the former Wisconsin governor into dropping out.

We looked at daily mentions of certain GOP candidates in Collective Intellect’s top-ranked political blogs, for each of the past four Mondays:

Mentions of Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson skyrocketed after the Iowa Straw Poll. It’s immediately obvious why Thompson dropped out. He was mentioned in the political blogosphere a grand total of 23 times over the past three Mondays. That three-day total tripled the day after he made his announcement. The writing was on the wall.

Huckabee’s rise is more interesting. His second-place finish was enough to triple his previous week’s mentions, making his percentage increase the most impressive. Romney was already a much-talked-about candidate in the political blogosphere, and his win in Iowa gave him only a slight push in volume.

New Media sentiment about Huckabee was slightly more positive than Romney in the days following the poll. However, Romney still gets much more blog coverage than Huckabee, and there’s still Giuliani and another Thompson to contend with. It remains to be seen whether Huckabee’s team will take the correct next steps to build on his sudden surge in New Media popularity. We’ll check back in the coming weeks.

Tags: Uncategorized by Kevin Yordy
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A week after the Democratic debate, the GOP presidential candidates are beginning to grumble about backing out of their own CNN/YouTube debate scheduled for September. Perhaps they saw how uncomfortable it could be to address heartfelt questions asked by real people from around the country— as close to face-to-face as technology can allow. Or perhaps one candidate's concern about answering a question from a snowman is the real reason. The GOP would do well to get past their reservations, roll up their sleeves, and dive in, since it's clear that so many Americans are engaged with social media. Using the latest Web 2.0 technology, campaigns can gain real understanding of the impact of their debate banter and put that to use in campaign messaging and direct outreach with constituents.

As a measurement of public interest in the various questions in the debate, a manual count of YouTube page views is practically useless. The first couple questions have the highest number of views, and then generally dwindle the further down the page you scroll. People generally lost interest fairly quickly. Exceptions are the gimmicky “turn to the person on your left” and “tax song”-type questions. One question which did seem to defy the odds and rise above the rest was Question 34- “Have we had the same two families in charge for too long?” Even at its position at the bottom of the page, this video attracted almost 76,000 views (as of 8/01). This alone should be a warning bell for Senator Clinton, and a bright light toward which all her opponents can flock.

But to create a truly useful metric for what are the most talked-about and contentious issues raised during the recent debate, and how much public impact the debate actually had, we dug a little deeper. 

First, we broke down the major issues that bloggers talked about most when discussing the YouTube debate:

Then we took three of those issues, and tracked the total number of blog posts focused entirely or partially on each issue over the past four weeks (we measured only blogs ranked by Collective Intellect for credibility and relevancy):

Post volume about “Global Warming” and “Health Care Reform” increased during the week after the debate. “Education Reform” bounced back a bit from a drop in blog-chatter the previous week. Given that there were no major Global Warming/Health Care events over the week, it can be inferred that the YouTube debate did in fact cause a significant rise in online discussion about the issues. Because of a minor controversy over Barack Obama’s stance on sex education, we can’t say for certain whether talk about “Education Reform” increased because of the debate.

We have developed specific search agents for each frontrunner’s health care plan, and we use a complex algorithm to analyze political blog sentiment.  This allows us to look even deeper into a particular issue. In this case, we see that the rise in “health care reform” blog-chatter caused a mostly positive reaction to each of the frontrunners’ plans. This is especially good for the candidates, because in this case we have included both left and right-leaning blogs into the data:

If they allow themselves the opportunity, campaigns can pull precise, actionable data from online political communities. This ability only increases each time a political event uses the Web directly. Candidates on both sides of the aisle may want to rethink their positions on snowmen.

Tags: Uncategorized by Kevin Yordy
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