Best New
Measurement Product of 2004
The Measurement Standard's Third Annual
Product of the Year Award.

The Measurement Standard's search for the best product of the year revealed several interesting facts about our industry. On the one hand, we were startled by just how few new products there really were; we received only two qualifying submissions. Despite the growth of importance in technology to our industry, only Benchpoint and Cymfony produced truly new products that actually were in use in 2004. Granted, one of the requirements for submission was to provide a actual user who could comment on the usefulness and robustness of the product. This disqualified several products that were announced but as yet had no actual customers. What we observed was that after several major new product innovations in 2003, in 2004 most companies simply tweaked their technologies, rather than adding any major features.

Best New Product of 2004:

The simplest way to describe Benchpoint is SurveyMonkey on steroids, but it's more like SurveyMonkey with an internal research department built in. Because the folks at Benchpoint are experts in research, and have designed their product specifically for communications professionals, it's much better adapted and robust than Survey Monkey. With a price tag that starts at $5000 and ranges to ten times that, it should be. But if you are doing regular surveys of your internal or external constituencies you should definitely look at this product. In past issues we've reviewed other high-end products like Perseus and judge that for our own clients, we'd rather use Benchpoint.

Most Improved Product of 2004:

While Cymfony submitted its BrandDashboard last year for best product, we passed it by because it wasn't all that different from other automated content analysis machines we'd seen and its interface wasn't nearly as user friendly or as pretty as Biz360's. But with BrandDashboard 3.5, and specifically its Executive Benchmark Report Card (EBRC), all that has changed. They've put the most important metrics right there on the landing page so you don't have do anything more than sign in to see up-to-the-minute trend charts on your most important benchmarks, specifically:

• Share of Key Messages Over Time
• Share of Positive Coverage
• Share of Negative Coverage
• Share of Voice by Impressions
• Impressions
• Impressions by Favorability

There are several other key advancements in version 3.5, like the ability to automatically track VIPs and other people associated with your brand (which is great when you want to see whether your spokespeople are getting their fair share of visibility). Another nice new feature is the ability to establish multiple key publications lists within one account. While this may seem obvious it has huge cost implications for large complex organizations. Rather than establishing individual accounts or dashboards for each division, which gets very costly very quickly, you can define specific key publications lists for each division and set up "watchlists" so all a division or regional PR person needs to do is click on his or her own watchlist to get a customized report.

Another new feature with potentially huge applications (see our blog story also in this issue) is the ability to automatically analyze Internet postings. Now don't go relying on computers for too much in the blogosphere (they can't tell the difference between humor, irony and sarcasm), but if you're facing some 10,000 postings a month that mention your brand, it's a lot easier to get a computer to sort through them first before you start your manual analysis.

Other new features include improved duplicate detection and the ability to exclude content from specific publications. All in this entire product is a 100% improvement over the previous version. (In the interest of full disclosure, the new EBRC was developed at the request of our mutual client Hewlett-Packard and we're thrilled that they extended that functionality for all their accounts.)

The Best of the Rest

Here are some other promising new products or developments we hope will qualify for an award next year:

• Ernie Martin's release-article similarity index, which measures the extent to which press release messages and concepts eventually end up in print, see this article
• Nanette Bresson's methodology for an integrated measurement program
• Jim Macnamara's on-line version of COMAudit
• PRTrak's new Media Prominence Index, see this article in this issue
• Precis' new Cubed system

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