For many Web startups, the elections offer an opportunity to showcase their technologies and reach people who might never otherwise hear about them. Vineet Choudhary launched his startup Perspctv around the elections. The site is a one-page dashboard that gives a snapshot of how Obama and McCain are doing in the polls, the news, the blogosphere, and Twitter, among other things. The site proves nothing about the election’s outcome, but it does provide a useful dashboard for monitoring it from different perspectives.
But the election site was just a dry run. The real point of Perspctv is to give marketers a way to monitor how their brands are being talked about across various media. As the election concludes, Choudhary is transitioning the site to become a new-media dashboard for marketers. You can already search for any terms and see how much online buzz they are generating. The screenshot above, for instance, shows a comparison of “Android,” “Blackberry,” and the “iPhone.”
The iPhone dominates across news mentions (60%), the blogosphere (77%), and Google search volume (68%), but the blogosphere is disproportionately obsessed with the iPhone. Blackberry comes in second, with 38% of news mentions, 20% of blog mentions, and 30% of Google searches. When I did this search a few days ago just after all the news came out about the new Blackberry Bold, the iPhone’s share of blogosphere mentions was about the same at 76%, but the Blackberry was actually getting more coverage in traditional news outlets (59% to the iPhone’s 41%).
Perspctv shows these shares in charts based on data from Technorati for blogs, Daylife for news, and Google Insights for search volume. Underneath these charts arethree columns of feeds showing the latest blog posts, Tweets, and news (from MSN Live News Search) for each search term.
You can try it for any term, from brands (such as BMW versus Audi) to issues (politics vs. religion vs. sex).
Perspctv’s business model is to create custom dashboards for clients using whatever data they feel is most useful. So, once again, the public site is just a showcase, but one well worth looking at.