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.)