Perceived Media Bias in referring to 'Mrs' Clinton perhaps not true

I heard an interesting comment by a caller into "Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane" (this is a show produced in the Philadelphia areas by WHYY, a local NPR affiliate). Audio of show here.

The caller remarked that she was tired of suble sexism of the media in its repeated references to "Mrs" Clinton and "Senator" Obama -- often in the same sentence.

I thought I'd put that unsuspecting caller to the test and run the numbers against Dow Jones Insight. It seems that the caller's perception of bias might be just that -- perceived.

In the past two years of articles from more than 6,000 mainstream media sources, we found 89,540 references to one of the following: Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton. There were indeed more raw mentions of "Mrs. Clinton" than there were of "Mr. Obama". But there were also more total mentions of Clinton than there were of Obama.

Furthermore, if you compare the relative percentages of "mrs/mr" to "senator" you see that 29% of all mentions of either "Senator" or "Mrs" Clinton used the term "Mrs. Clinton" while 35% of all mentions of either "Senator" or "Mr" Obama referred to him as "Mr Obama."

So perhaps the media going out of its way just a little NOT to refer to Clinton as "Mrs."

When we dive deeper and just look at paragraphs where one title is used with a mismatch to the other, we see 69 paragraphs in two years where there was a mention of "Mrs. Clinton" and "Sen. Obama." While there were 99 mentioning "Sen Clinton" and "Mr. Obama." But to be clear, these 168 mentions are a triffle compared to the tens of thousands of articles mentioning them.

This shows clearly there has been no mainstream media bias in treating the two candidates differently because of their genders, at least in the use of courtesy titles.

My Starbucks Idea shines: How to do social media right

I've been talking up "My Starbucks Idea" as a great example of how companies can engage their customer base using social media techniques.

The sites about a month old and they are already touting the changes they are making and planning to make in their stores, etc. based on user ideas. The cynic might say these are changes they were going to make anyway and are just making it seem like the customers drove them, but that's not the impression I get.

Check it out.

(Also of note, they built this site on Salesforce.com's force.com -- the newest thing in software development is this idea of platform as a service.)

The magical life and quick death of 'Elitist'

One of my posts over on Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse shows how fickle the press can be. One day's "elitist" is another day's "electability." This election seems at times to be all about buzzwords. Buzzwords are the new talking points. He's an elitist. She wants progress. He's bitter. And on it goes. This graph really shows how fast a word can come on the scene and disappear.

Talking Media Measurement to the Next Generation of Measurers

I'm going to be guest lecturing to an undergraduate PR class at Rider University next week. The class is taught by my friend and colleauge colleague Diane Thieke.

Diane has been teaching, in part, about how blogging has become an important tool in the corporate world.

From a corporate perspective we're all in awe of how Gen-Y is changing the rules with their embrace of social media. But from reading some of their blogs (which they were required to create for class) one might get the impression they are not as ready to open themselves up in blogs as I thought. They get social media (Facebook, perhaps) is a tool for communicating but they might not be thinking about how corporations are listening. Or perhaps I'm dead wrong. Look forward to finding out on Monday and hoping to learn as much from them as I can try to teach.

Measuring the Language of the Campaigns -- Hundreds of Thousands of Documents at a Time

We're getting some interest in our new presidential-election-monitoring blog, called Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse. For this blog, the approach we're using is heft over manual analysis. We're able to look at nearly 1 million documents and posts a day to get a view of the broad picture.

The latest thing we did was track individual words and how they are sticking to candidates -- does Obama own "change" for example. Text mining is great for this because you can look at such a big picture so easily

2000 Press Mentions of 'Stagflation': NPR

There was a "cough-and-you-miss-it" mention of Factiva on NPR's Morning Edition Tuesday when Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel said he found 2,000 mentions of "stagflation" in the Factiva database. (Thanks to attentive listener John C. in New Jersey. )

We know that journalists use Dow Jones Factiva's archive of mainstream media to do this kind of light text mining all the time.

I took David's statement a bit further and looked for the word in the past 14 months using Dow Jones Insight. I'm not sure what time frame he used. I found 4,603 documents mentioning that term during that time and certainly a lot more interest of late. This was from about 6,000 world-wide mainstream media publications and wires.

(Full disclosure: The Journal and Factiva are both owned by Dow Jones, which also pays my salary.)

Barack Inching Ahead -- in Media Mentions

While we all know the news from the polls is that Barack Obama is on a roll and has taken over the lead in the delegate count, a more subtle switch has also occurred since about Super Tuesday. Obama is leading over Hillary Clinton since then in the total number of media mentions (the individual occurrences of the person's name). Before Super Tuesday, Clinton was most always ahead of Obama.

So while the number of documents in which each gets mentioned is about the same (essentially, you can't write about one without at least mentioning the other), the number of mentions within those documents has switched.

Have the members of the press shifted their collective mindset? Are they subconsciously jumping on the Barack bandwagon?

Jeremiah's Complete list - 2008

The blog post title (A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing) sounds audacious, but it's pretty darn accurate. Mr. Owyang succeeds again at codifying something many of us feel overwhelmed by.

Mossberg addresses Web's impact on journalism, lifestyle

Walt Mossberg addressing right now Dow Jones IT staff on how web is impacting Journalism and our lives.
- he doesn't have much time any more to read the paper versions of the "3 best newspapers in the world": wsj, washingtonpost, nytimes. Because more of his time is reading content that never existed before
- his kids don't read newspapers, but one subscribes to wsj.com rss feeds
- in 10 yrs the internet of today will look archaic - like a 1960s mainframe
- people will soon stop talking about "the internet" the way we don't say "I'm going to go on the electrical grid now"
- the PC has already peaked as the dominant digital device
- the iphone is significant milestone because it's at it's heart a PC
- multitouch features changing the way we interact with devices
-expects blackberry to take a big leap forward to catch up with iphone

How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

During our recent Webinar we received a few questions about how non-profits can make use of social media tools. I admit we didn't do the best job answering this question and some of you called us on it. Perhaps it's because Dow Jones (and perhaps Forrester) don't have too many clients in the non-profits space so our personal experiences don't go in that direction.

I mentioned during the Webinar, that I personally volunteer (with the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate) and we make use of the Web as a way to get our message out, to raise funds and to get volunteers. These are obvious examples.

But I'm sure others have better ones. I found this blog and will be spending time reading it.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Do other people have examples of how non-profits and social media have found happy marriages.