Read Between the Mines

Your activity online is resulting in a personal reputation score. Scared yet?

2012-01-14T14:58:00.000-05:00

An article in The Wall Street Journal today made me immediately go back to an event Factiva hosted a few years ago. At that Social Media Roundtable we were trying to come up with what the new metrics would be to measure influence.

In the piece Holly Finn talks about how more and more companies comping up with ways to assign reputation scores to individual people based on their actions on line. All of those drunken college posts perhaps will be codified just like your credit score is impacted by late payments. Scary, but predictable.

"Social capital" is the term now. I don't think we used that term in 2006, but we were talking about the same concepts.

Detecting Author Sentiment, Then Trading on It

2011-01-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

The New York Times summarizes some of the services for algorithmic trading that Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones have been providing for a while. The journalist, Graham Bowley, focuses quite a bit on the cutting edge stuff, like extracting emoticons and sentiment-bearing words from news reports, press releases, Twitter and other places.

But the real gravy to date has been extracting the more predictable, such as economic indicators, and allowing trading houses to get that data in milliseconds. This allows them to make real money in a flash before humans can react.

Men still run American business

2010-09-28T17:11:00.002-04:00

Or at least that is one conclusion you could draw from the list of most common first names of executives, as taken from Dow Jones Companies & Executives database on a scan I conducted recently. Of course we can't tell the race of a person based on a first name, though the names are certainly traditional Anglo-American in origin. So the data are more striking for what they seem to say about the gender of the executives than their heritage.
The database has global representation from millions of companies, but it is disproportionately of North American executives. Of the 13,000 unique first names in our database of millions of people, most of the top 100 are what many might be interpreted as traditional European-American male first names. (See below.) Of those that are obviously female, Mary is the top female name at No. 46, followed by Susan at 48, Karen at 71, Linda at 77 and Barbara at 90. As for the top 20 overall, it's a list most of which would not have been out of place 50, or even 500, years ago:

John
David
Michael
Robert
James
Richard
William
Peter
Thomas
Mark
Paul
Stephen
Charles
Joseph
Steven
Daniel
Frank
Mike
George
Gary

Visualizing Obama's speech --- but making it harder than it should be

2010-06-16T12:58:00.000-04:00

Thanks to NPR for pointing out this word cloud of Obama's Oval Office speech about the oil disaster. It's "fun" to look at.

These kind of views are often as interesting for what words are missing as for what words are there. What didn't the president say? "Kick some ass" isn't there. Nor are names of BP execs. Someone pointed out that "engineers" isn't there. I also noticed that "scientists" was hardly mentioned. But it's hard to find what's NOT in a visualization.

And the other thing that struck me is that this kind of visualization is a bit of a chartoon. Once you see the biggest couple of words, it's hard to really analyze what's next in line because the arrangement on the page is meaningless. It's just how the words fit together. I think this would have been much more usefully presented as one of the most simple of visualizations, a list -- most-mentioned word first, least-mentioned word last.

Mining the media for oil drilling volume

2010-05-14T17:35:00.003-04:00

I've posted over on TheConversationalCorporation on how the companies involed in the Gulf oil spill are not getting equal treatment in the press and from social media. BP is getting press and managing the message but Halliburton and Transocean aren't to be found on Twitter.

Why Won't AVE die?

2010-02-12T11:28:00.000-05:00

AVE (or Ad Value Equivalency) has long been recognized as an inaccurate measure of the value of a brand's message in the mainstream media. No one likes it, except a few executives who perhaps see it as an easy way to boil it all down to a simple dollar amount. But yet, it persists.

My colleague, Matt Donanhue, has a good post today on the topic.

Inspired by a blizzard

2010-02-10T20:25:00.000-05:00

The following isn't about text mining. But if' you're monitoring social media, Big Box Retailers, read on...

The best snow shovel I've ever used is one that's older than me. It's a steel blade pusher style which I rescued from my parents' house when my father died and replaced the handle on twice because I knew it would be hard to find another like it. No shovel I've ever used clears the ground so well.

Do they still make 'em like this? Perhaps, but it sure isn't easy to find one. You can easily find this "style" but not this quality. The aluminum and plastic ones they make don't work as well when they're new than the 40-year-old one I have.

And this isn't just about shovels. It's about faucets and screw drivers and drills and on and on.

The ones Home Depot and Lowe's stock are cheap to buy and practically disposable. I would gladly pay double or triple the price of an item if I knew it would last. But it seems retailers are convinced we want cheap, and are not willing to pay for high quality. Let's keep shipping poor-quality goods thousands of miles, toss them in land fills and buy more next year.

Nelson Mandela is not dead

2009-12-17T09:43:00.007-05:00

If you casually glance at Google Trends every morning, you will likely be starting your day with the latest misinformation from the Internet. Hey! Nelson Mandela died. Oh, wait, no he didn't. ~~But Chris Henry did. No, he's still alive, too.~~ (Unfortunately, it seems that Mr. Henry has subsequently passed away, according to the AP and other reports.)

Trends is just reporting back to us what we're searching on using Google, not what really happened. It is certainly easy to believe people will miss this point when they see the words "Nelson Mandela dead" on a page published by Google.

With the power of social media in the hands of everyone, it's easy for people to game the system. Did the Mandela rumor come out of marketing efforts behind the new film "Invictus"? Seems plausible.

Just as I cringe when my daughter is encouraged by her teachers to use Wikipedia to research her homework (like last night when she insisted to me that the average temperature of a certain part of Canada is negative zero because it says it right there, Dad), I lament how much we trust everything we see on the Web.

("Papa says if you see it in Wikipedia, it's so," right Virginia?)

In this age of truthiness, Wikitruth and need to know instantly, perhaps all the information available to us is making us a little less well informed.

Analyzing Newspaper Reporting to Predict Economic Direction

2009-06-08T18:22:00.007-04:00

Some Dow Jones colleagues are using text mining analysis across years of newspaper articles (back-tested to 1990) and have created an incredibly interesting analysis of how the media's reporting can predict the direction of the economy.

The new Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator analyzes the coverage of the economy in a handful of influential newspapers to quantify economic sentiment.

According to the ESI's Web site

The ESI represents one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching examinations of media coverage as an economic indicator. [Back testing shows] the ESI clearly highlighted the risk that the U.S. economy was sliding into recession in 2001 and 2008 and suggests the indicator can help predict economic turning points as much as seven months in advance of other indicators.

Rob Passarella, the Director of Product Strategy for Algorithmic and Electronic Products at Dow Jones, blogs about this and other things.

So many ways to think about measuring social media

2009-03-19T15:51:00.000-04:00

This wiki, Social Media Metrics, Measurement and ROI, run by Beth Kanter, who focuses on how non-profits can use social media, includes a very nice list of resources that apply to the for-profit world too.

Another Newspaper Obituary, as 146 years of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Ends

2009-03-17T12:08:00.000-04:00

The end of another era. (With the caveat that the P-I is going to give it a go as a Web-only publication.)

It's a case of 117,000 print customers not being enough to sustain what might soon be the archaic printed newspaper, as the Seattle P-I publishes its last edition.

It remains to be seen how these news gathers can make the switch to an all-digital future. Put differently, how easily can newspapers remove the "paper" and still be what they once were.

Look at the first line of the PI's web site's "about us" page.

"For hundreds of thousands of people in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest,
it's not morning without their P-I."

Their mission has to change now. Their readers no longer read what they write just with their morning coffee. It's hard to do so in the subway (ok, maybe not in Seattle) or at the diner counter or while waiting for an oil change or in the bathroom. Newspapers fit many scenarios where the digital medium doesn't.

So with another mighty giant now reduced to bits and bytes, the question remains will the readers follow.

zysz

The New Meaning of 'Newspaper Obituaries'

2009-02-27T11:54:00.005-05:00

Every time I read one of these newspaper obituaries (a term with new meaning) -- Rocky Mountain News Ceases Operations -- I am saddened and shocked at what is happening to this once vibrant industry.

As the paper stated on its fairwell message, Goodbye, Colorado

"...We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history – the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed. We are confident that you will build on their dreams and find new ways to tell your story."

I'm not confident that we as a society know what those new ways will be.

The press has been called the fourth estate as it is a vital check on our government.

Can a democracy remain healthy without a strong press? Can "the press" be in the hands of just a few media powerhouses? We need diversity of reportage.

Who is going to fill the gap when newspapers die? The pulp news of CNN, MSNBC and Fox? I hope not. The AP? Not, if they have no member newspapers to pay for their reportage? Perhaps we need the BBC model of taxing the people to pay for journalists. Not sure Americans are willing to pay for that.

Online news publishing needs a new model and probably one that requires micro-payments of readers. Information can't be free. It costs money to produce it. And you get what you pay for.

And don't tell me "blogs". Blogs, with almost no exceptions, write commentary based on articles written by professional journalists. they are not out working beats, getting leads, interviewing public officials, and the like. Will they fill this gap? I can't see that happening any time soon. What's the business model to pay for that?

I'm reminded of a poster in my journalism class in college with a caption stating: "If the press didn't tell us, who would?"

Who indeed?

Hey are you listening to me?

2009-02-23T13:16:00.000-05:00

This post is the first time I've seen these thoughts pulled together, summarized as:.

As a presenter, the idea of presenting while people are talking about you is
disconcerting. But to balance that, there are huge benefits to the individual
members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting.

Dealing with the "back-channel" is a fascinating challenge for presenters at conferences. Perhaps now this happens more in IT conferences than other industries, but if that's true, it will change quickly.

I'm sure professors are already dealing with this too.

Press Release Tweets Seem Logical but are Journos Plugged In?

2009-02-09T13:08:00.006-05:00

Vocus is adding a feature to allow PR professionals to notify their followers when they've put out a new press release. It sounds like a logical thing to do and probably was pretty easy for Vocus to add, so it makes sense to offer it.

I wonder however, how many folks in PR are now embracing Twitter and perhaps, more to the point of this feature, how many journalists are expecting to hear about news releases via tweets. Certainly some journalists are already embracing Twitter but does that skew toward those covering IT?

The Ethics of PR - 'not an oxymoron'

2008-11-20T10:34:00.003-05:00

I'm speaking today about media measurement and monitoring at the annual conference of the Maryland Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. Here I met Jeff Julin, the outgoing national chair and CEO PRSA. He's quite a knowledgable fellow about the world of PR and is a real believer that PR is an ethical, honorable profession.

In a well-attended session, Jeff said that despite all the changes that have come to the profession because of the new flow of information on the Internet, PR is still all about relationships with your publics and being honest with them. He pointed to the groups Code of Ethics which focuses on the following values:

advocacy (for the public, not for their companies)

honesty

expertise

independenc

loyalty (to the organization, but not a blind loyalty)

fairness

loyalty

A question came up: How do you stay loyal to a client and to your ethics (think Edelman and Walmarting Across America.) if they are at cross purposes? Jeff said the good thing is that major personal crisis of ethics don't come up all that often. I asked what a company like Edelman should have done if approached by Wal-Mart to create a "fake" blog.

Jeff said in these cases, like all that PR does, you have a responsibility to stand up to your client and challenge something that you feel is not ethical. Jeff admitted that the realities of "paying the mortgage" come in and walking away from accounts is not always realistic but standing up for what you believe is the first step and showing WHY you think the idea is bad is the way to go.

One of the attendees followed on that and suggested you should challenge such ideas on the basis that they are bad business ideas and show examples of others' missteps. (Oh and there are lots of them out there.)

An aside: Jeff also talked about how PRSA no longer talks about "press releases" but "news releases" in a nod to the fact that information goes out to more than just the "press" today.

Measuring the U.S. Election without Counting Votes

2008-11-04T12:26:00.001-05:00

PRWeek posted about one of Dow Jones Insight's observations last week about how George Bush has dropped out of the news hole during the final stages of the 2008 election campaign.

It was one of the many things we wrote about on Dow Jones Insight: Election Pulse blog, which was one practical use of media measurement.

We've devoted a significant effort over the past several months to measuring McCain and Obama campaigns via the footprint they've left on the mainstream and social media.

Of late we looked at the breakdown by battleground states to see if the press was covering the candidates in step with what the polls show. (In general the color of the state does not seem to be an indicator of the volume of coverage of a candidate.)

Another thing we did was a recurring "Issue Tracker" analysis to see which issues were sticking to which candidate as the months ticked by. (September was strong for McCain as he took over coverage of most of the 25 top issues we were tracking. He then lost that lead a bit at a time to Obama in October.)

Also of note. We caught the eye of the folks at XM Radio's POTUS '08 and were a recurring guest on the Thursday afternoon show.

All in all, a fun project. But it's kinda nice it's Election Day. One more summary post coming in a week.

Practice what you preach when it comes ot social media

2008-10-17T16:10:00.000-04:00

David Meerman Scott, a PR strategist, practicing what he preaches -- a nice YouTube video marketing himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0HgzS0QEY8

Reporting on the reporting of Vytorin Cancer Data

2008-08-21T10:07:00.001-04:00

Our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal used some data from Dow Jones Insight to blog about the size of the spike of press coverage of a possible link between use of cholesterol-fighter Vytorin and increased risk of cancer.

A few of the comments were hostile toward the post. This one was from someone called "Steve Walker":

So now the WSJ is going generate and report statistics on how frenzied the press becomes over junk science flowing from questionable meta-analyses? Then try to analyze why some junk science leads to less or more press frenzy?...

I disagree with this criticism. I think reporting on the media coverage of a story such as this is valid as is the methodology used to count the media mentions.

Public Relations Metrics blog

2008-07-12T14:26:00.000-04:00

Just came across this blog, Proving the Value of Public Relations, by Don Bartholomew of MWW. Not sure how I've missed it in the past.

Looks to be a lot of great thoughts on measuring the value of PR output. Can't wait to dig into it.

Blogging about the Election -- and now the Olympics

2008-07-01T21:25:00.000-04:00

I haven't had too much time to think about Read Between the Mines lately. Much of my spare time has been focused on a couple of other blogs. Both of them are based on media measurement via text mining and both are based on data coming from Dow Jones Insight.

To see what we're up to check out:

Dow Jones Insight: Election Pulse at http://dowjonesinsight.blogspot.com/ and the newly launched Dow Jones Insight: Olympics Media Pulse at http://djinsightolympics.blogspot.com/

The election blog has been tracking the candidates' coverage in the social media and the mainstream press. We've caught the eye of XM Radio's P.O.T.U.S. '08 channel, with a recurring spot on Thursdays (exact schedule varies). I've been fortunate enough to be asked to explain the data there each week. It's been fun -- but I'm not giving up my day job.

PR Week has also picked up story and is running updates through the campaign.

The Olympics blog is focused on the business of the Games, measuring which sponsors are getting the most coverage, which athletes stand to get the best sponsorship deals and which negative issues are being attached to whom.

Dow Jones Election Media Pulse on PR Week

2008-06-04T16:20:00.000-04:00

PR Week picked up one of our recent posts over on the Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse blog. The blog is a demonstration of one way to make great use of media measurement tools to closely follow a news story.

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

2008-05-07T13:23:00.003-04:00

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 trifle 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

2008-04-30T15:56:00.001-04:00

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'

2008-04-30T15:39:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-07T16:32:00.001-05:00

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

2008-03-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-05T10:29:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-20T16:24:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-08T13:36:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-05T12:39:00.000-05:00

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.

Social Media Webinar Data shows about half of coporations are engaged

2008-01-31T13:56:00.000-05:00

I just finished up the Webinar with Jeremiah. We had several hundred people on the line and received dozens of spot-on questions. We will be posting information on that shortly, including a copy of the presentation.

In the meantime, we also conducted a few polls during the event, and here is some data:

In one we found that 48% of attendees' companies are using some sort of social media to connect with customers.

Another question showed us that the number one reason attendees' companies use social media is to attempt to gauge sentiment about products and brands.

A little data mining for your Football Squares

2008-01-25T12:31:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering your chances of winning that "Football Squares" office pool you got into (assuming the numbers were assigned randomly) you can see an analysis of which of the 100 squares are most likely to win. This was done a couple of years ago, but after the addition of the 2-point conversion rule.

BTW: The best six squares are:

7-0/0-7
7-4/4-7
0-3/3-0

The worst: 2-2

Join us for a social media webinar with Jeremiah Owyang

2008-01-23T15:08:00.000-05:00

I will be working again with Jeremiah Owyang, now of Forrester, later this month, this time playing the role of host to his feature presentation on the latest trends in effectively measuring social media.

We will be talking about such things as communication is taking place through social media and what things businesses should do to get involved.

Sure blogs are established and you have to listen to them - or ignore at your peril. But the presenations will likely dip into things like talk of the hot, new tools like Twitter and whether they should be monitored or if they are too new to even cause a ripple.

If you'd like to attend the event, being held Jan. 31, 2008, from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. EST, you can sign up here.

Different Parties = Different Issues in the Media

2008-01-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

The issues on your mind might not be the ones the candidates are talking about nor the ones the press is reporting on. What's further is that issues that are "sticking" to the candidates tend to differ by party. See below: The Democrats' top issues are health care and the economy and the Republicans' are immigration and taxes.

This analysis covers December 10, 2007 to January 10, 2008 and counts issues only when they co-occur with the candidates with 50 words of each other. Documents come from 6,000 main stream media publications, broadcast transcripts, 10,000+ Web sites, 2 million influential blogs and 6,000 message boards.

Communications ROI is too expensive so why bother?

2007-12-10T13:20:00.001-05:00

This video posits perhaps the most unusual answer to the question of how to you measure ROI on your communications efforts.

The question posed in this scripted-conversation video clip from Ragan is: "Can the ROI of Communications Be Measured?"

The answer that is returned seems to be "yes, but it's too expensive so why bother." It goes on to say that if you have a communicator who can express himself well to an executive, then the statistics, true or not, just don't matter.

Alexa, you coulda been someone

2007-11-27T16:58:00.000-05:00

I've been looking at companies who provide Web tracking data for the purpose of understanding how many people are seeing a company's message as it spreads around the Web.

This post really rips poor Alexa, who I thought previously might be one of the good sources of this data.

Alexa was all the rage back during the dot-com boom but what have you heard about them since Amazon bought them? Not much. I'm sure they had great plans back when A9 the next big thing, but that seems like ages ago.

The comments to this post really outline well the main problem with Alexa data: faulty sampling methodology based on the sad fact that the adoption of their toolbar is probably quite small and in niche areas.

Lost in Barcelona

2007-11-19T15:49:00.000-05:00

Some of the members of the Factiva Insight management team proved on a recent trip to the Factiva Media Lab's office in Barcelona, Spain, that we can get lost just about anywhere. It's not a metaphor for our business. Really, it's not.

The trip was a great chance to sit down and discuss the state of our business with the multilingual team of Dow Jones media analysts who call this great city their home.

Photo credit: John Costanzo, staff photographer and technical lead.

How's your Bulgarian? Ours is great.

2007-11-09T09:41:00.000-05:00

The business champion of Factiva Insight, Мартин Мъртланд -- er Martin Murtland, was recently interviewwed by the Sofia Echo while on a trip to Bulgaria. They talked about how Dow Jones is making use of the local software development talent in our offices there. If you read Bulgarian, have at it here: Компании & Финанси | Мартин Мъртланд: Водим прего�

Heineken – unlucky, clumsy, ill advised or a clever marketing ploy…

2007-10-30T15:42:00.000-04:00

Heineken received significant coverage around the Rugby World Cup last week as 25% of all articles that mentioned a partners, sponsors or official suppliers mentioning the company at least once.

The company was struggling to navigate the sport's sponsorship rules, getting publicity in ways they might not have intended.

How'd I know? Do I know anything about Rugby? Hardly.

This came from the attached Factiva Insight media analysis of the sponsors of the sport's championship.

Blog Hype is Over and Blogs as Core Tool Continue

2007-09-25T12:49:00.000-04:00

I received an email survey today about the state of corporate blogging. (It was a bit more interesting for me because it is commissioned by one of our competitors.)

The hypotheses behind the survey seems to be that the hype around blogs has died down and now it's time for corporations to see them as part of their core communication strategy.

Questions also focused on what's next for corporations to follow in the world of social monitoring: online communities? second life? video blogs?

Facebook Becoming a Platform for Consumer Discontent

2007-09-25T09:30:00.000-04:00

I have to give props to eagle-eyed Down Under colleague Lorraine Worley on this one. But it's a great example of new media impacting a corporation so I have to share.

Recently some students in England successfully used Facebook to take on HSBC, focusing their anger on a specific action taken by the banking giant -- its reversal of a decision to do away with interest-free overdrafts for recent college graduates.

Using Facebook's "groups" tool more than 6,000 students threatened a boycott, which seemed to work, because HSBC just decided to change course in their favor. The bank says it now wont be chargning studetns for overdrafts and would be refunding recent interest charges.

This is another great example of social networking sites being used to focus protests on niche decisions. This feels conceptually related to the concept of micro-trends.

We're done. Everyone who could possibly grasp it, now knows what a blog is.

2007-09-06T16:31:00.000-04:00

It would seem that 80% of Americans now know what blogs are, according to WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), siting recent research from Marketing Daily and Synovate. Which, apparently, is the same percentage of Americans who can find the United States on a map, according to Aimee Teegarden.

I think this is not likely a coincidence but rather clearly means blogs have the largest mindshare possible. What chance do we have to reach that last 20%.

“Enhanced Speed Reading”

2007-09-05T22:16:00.000-04:00

A colleague of mine, Lou Paglia, has a post about a genre of text mining / text analytics tools. I think of them as personal text mining applications. Greg Merkle calls them "enhanced speed reading" tools. These are things like Concept Q Pro, Concorder Pro and DEVONagent. I haven't tried any of them yet but will have to put that on my list.

Social Media analysis space dissected

2007-09-04T10:29:00.000-04:00

I was told by a colleague about this very comprehensive summary of the Social Media analysis space, which was recently released by Apex, N.C.-based Social Target LLC. The company is run by Nathan Gilliatt who has a blog over at http://net-savvy.com/executive/

Dow Jones (vis a vis Factiva Insight) is covered along with 30 other companies. The report (which isn't free, btw) provides analysis of the social media space, comparing and contrasting them. Here's the list of companies included:

Attentio
Biz360
BrandIntel
BurrellesLuce
BuzzLogic
CIC
Collective Intellect
ComMetric
Converseon
CoreX Technologies
CustomScoop
CyberAlert
Digital Influence Group
Dow Jones (Factiva)
Ethority/Buzzcentric
Integrasco
Kaava
Market Sentinel
Millward Brown Precis
MotiveQuest
NetMap Analytics
New Media Strategies
Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Onalytica
Radian6
RTGI
Scanblog
TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony
Umbria
Visible Technologies
Waggener Edstrom

This gives a good sense of how active this sector is. There's a lot of interest among large companies to measure their footprint on the Web and this list shows there is no shortage of companies stepping up to the plate. Many of them are very small (and therefore out of necessity, specialized) though, and only a few offer comprehensive features and even a smaller number offer comprehensive content to go with them.

Some data visualization approaches worth considering

2007-08-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

From the silly to the practical, this is a nice compilation of some contemporary approaches to visualizing data. As data become more and more part of our lives, there are more people thinking about ways to make easier use of it all. A very exciting trend. However, only the approaches that improve the human interaction with data -- not get in the way of it -- will survive. Many of these seem more complicated than useful, but there are a few nice ones. This nice demonstration of "elastic lists" caught my eye.

Tracking the Influence - the Conversation Index

2007-08-27T17:33:00.000-04:00

Some chatter starting up about a recent Dow Jones white paper about tracking influence in the blogosphere.

And here's Jeremiah's post on it.

IABC -- Habitat for Humanity Build

2007-08-03T14:30:00.000-04:00

My worlds colliding a bit here.

I'm passionate about Habitat for Humanity and certainly about business communications (not going to say which one is more important to me) and this is the first time I can post about both at the same time.

I recently attended the International Association of Business Communicators conference in New Orleans, where I was talking about Factiva's / Dow Jones's (um, News Corp.'s) media measurement products to a host of internal and external marketing professionals. I think it was wonderful that IABC didn't pull out of New Orleans like many other conferences reportedly have in the wake of the Katrina disaster. That city needs our tourism dollars now more than ever.

I also was pleasantly surprised to find that IABC had decided to team up with Wells Fargo to support Habitat for Humanity's post-Katrina projects. Too bad the Habitat trip for the conference attendees was filled so I couldn't lend a hand, but it was great that so many people were participating.

You can check out the video of IABC2007 sweating and building in the hot sun of the Big Easy.

(Habitat fans: Check out my New Jersey affilaite's blog and home page.)

Who's most ga-ga over the pending iphone?

2007-06-08T15:34:00.000-04:00

A quick text mine of "iphone" in the mainstream media for the past 90 days shows that

-- the Seattle Times has written about it more than any other U.S. newspaper
-- pre-launch coverage in newspapers has been greater in "business-focused" publications (The Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, The New York Times) than in "local" newspapers
-- USA Today has lagged behind other national newspapers in covering iphone
-- Investors Business Daily has mentioned iphone in 65% more articles than The Wall Street Journal.

Editorial Integrity Questions - Redux

2007-06-06T14:49:00.000-04:00

Journalists, politicians and others concerned about the quality of the newspaper, which is regarded as one of the best in the world, are expressing fears that it ... will change editorially if they are added to Mr. Murdoch's substantial international press empire.

A quote from another article this week about Rupert Murdoch trying to buy The Wall Street Journal?
Nope, that was from The New York Times on Jan. 21, 1981, right before Mr. Murdoch purchased the august Times of London.

Brand Monitoring Leaders Taken to Task

2007-06-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

A post from Alan Wilensky, What's Wrong with the Brand Monitoring Leaders?, gives a compelling and sobering critique of how the brand monitoring leaders are failing to deliver accuracy (and therefore value) specifically around the area of automated sentiment analysis because they rushed to market products that seemed to work on the surface, but that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

'New Media' Makes a bit of a Comebank

2007-05-21T17:45:00.000-04:00

Mining the term "new media" from The Wall Street Journal over the past seven years shows that it was mentioned more frequently in 2006 than at any point since the end of the dotcom era. Note the decrease in the term "dotcom" over the same period.

Information Professionals in the Text Mine

2007-05-14T22:18:00.000-04:00

An article from the May/June 2007 issue of Information Today: Information Professionals in the Text Mine, seemed promising at first, but ended up being a bit too basic as it gives an overview text mining for business information purposes.

There is nothing new here. The lede: "With access to more information freely available, and with the help of Google and other search engines, patrons have become 'information consumers' with very high expectations...", sounds like it was written a couple of years ago. Is there nothing new to say about text mining than: It helps with information overload?

Why not talk about all the ways it is being used successfully today: media monitoring, media measuring, benchmarking, reputation managing, measuring PR efforts, etc.

Reuters AlertNet a Strong Example of Text Mining for Current Awareness Monitoring

2007-05-09T15:30:00.001-04:00

Here's a great example of a news agency which built a Web widget and is using text mining to tell a story about a bigger picture. .
This is Reuters AlertNet's World Press Tracker. It uses Factiva's press archive. Factiva is now wholely owned by Dow Jones. This project dates back to when Factiva was half-owned by Reuters.
Here's what they're doing:

Our system analyses relevant articles from these [Factiva's 10,000 press] sources and decides whether they are about any of the 80 or so global emergencies AlertNet tracks at a given time. Emergencies are ranked according to the number of press mentions they get.

Blog Mentions in the Mainstream Media

2007-04-06T14:33:00.000-04:00

How fast is the buzz around "blogs" growing in the mainstream media? Here's a look at that.

Numbers that Color Our World: Red Cars

2007-04-03T13:32:00.000-04:00

A bit of a silly stat, but according to a quick Factiva Insight inquiry, the color "red" occurs in proximity to "cars" more than does "green" and "blue". Hey, I could work for the USA Today.

Nazdrave!

2007-03-29T10:53:00.000-04:00

I just returned from Sofia, Bulgaria, and what was my first trip to Eastern Europe, so I was not quite sure what to expect.

First It goes without saying that our team of developers there is incredibly talented and dedicated. They are passionate about the work and were a pleasure to meet with. I'm grateful for the hospitality they showed me.

I was eager to taste the cuisine of Bulgaria -- though people struggled to name many dishes that are truly Bulgarian (and not, say, Turkish) other than various dishes and drinks featuring yoghurt , which I found was first discovered by the ancient Bulgars in the region. I especially enjoyed a dessert made with yoghurt, honey and walnuts.

From what I can tell the city is an interesting mix of Old World Communism attitudes and architecture and New World capitalism. It seems to be going through growing pains and trying to find its way, which it undoubtably will. There are a lot of abandonned Communist-style concrete factories and office building everywhere and new apartment buildings being built in between the ruins.

Western High-Tech is taking advantage of the skilled local workforce, with HP and Microsoft among others setting up shop recently. A gleaming new terminal at Sofia's small but substantial airport welcomes you. It's very new. Lots of stores aren't open yet.

The U.S. State Department has recently finished a new embassy in Sofia near our office - built in the new style -- set back from the road, surrounded by steel, very few windows and no doubt lots of technology. The hole dug for the foundation I'm was told was massive.

The Dow Jones office is in a small flat in an unmarked appartment building (no company name anywhere "for security reasons").

The Rule of Law is seems to an outsider somewhat arbitrary. People seem to drive and park however they wish. If you want to prevent people from parking on your sidewalk in Sofia you apparently put up steel pilons. Walking to the office was a bit of an obstacle course around parked and moving cars. And there is a bit of a laid back attitude. I was amused and scared by one of our cab drivers who was watching his TV mounted next to his steering wheel as he was driving.

Heads of companies are routinely killed in the street by precision rifle shots, I hear, because they run up debt and can't pay. This is backed up by the CIA World FactBook which states "corruption in the public administration, a weak judiciary, and the presence of organized crime remain" are the biggest economic chllenges for Bulgaria.

I'm sorry I couldn't stay longer to see the countryside. I'm told the mountains and the sea are beautiful. Ah, a reason to return.

Clare Hart describes how the Dow Jones brands fit together

2007-03-01T10:02:00.000-05:00

Robert Scoble sat down with Clare Hart, former CEO of Factiva and current EVP of the Enterprise Media Group at Dow Jones (my employer). It's a basic "so what does Dow Jones do?" kind of interview (with a minimalist Podtech office setting), but Clare does her usual great job of summing up our essence.

Scoble seemed pleased with having a chance to interview a thought leader like Clare, but his starting the interview with his trademark "So, who are you?" is always a bit jarring.

Other posts on it from Jeremiah and Daniella.

Hillary gets more mentions than Anna Nicole - barely

2007-02-28T14:11:00.000-05:00

Do you think Hillary Clinton's people see it as a victory that they edged out Anna Nicole Smith or a defeat that they just barely edged her out?

I just don't get tired of fun with text mining.

(Note: This is a continuing feature of Factiva Insight's text mining results being run in The Wall Street Journal.)

Spell Checking the Media

2007-02-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

This is another example of a fun use of text mining -- run by The Wall Street Journal sourced from Factiva Insight

Another Measurement Metric

2007-02-03T21:41:00.000-05:00

Biz360 just added another metric to its offering -- this one promises to measure media influence in the social media space. B360 has such a index for mainstream media already. Others, such as Delahaye, offer such a measurement too.

We've heard praise and criticism for this concept of "magic numbers" -- indices that fold together various quantitative and qualitative measurements (reach, influence, tone, etc.) into one number. The idea is that brand managers and others can more easily track the rise and fall of their brand's image by monitoring a single metric. I'm a bit dubious of the value of such a number, but people seem to gravitate to the simplicity of them.

Of course such numbers don't "mean" anything in an of themselves just like the Dow Jones Industrial Average has no meaning by itself. It's just a number -- but I suppose a very powerful one because it allows comparison of a concept over time.

But what many people don't think about is the fine-grain tuning that goes into these numbers behind the scenes. Are media magic numbers valuable if you don't know what goes into them? After all Dow 10,000 is not the sum of the value of a single share of each of the 30 stocks in the index. It is that sum divided by a something like 0.13500289 (known as the Dow Divisor). This number is changed from time to time to allow for continuity of the value of the index as the stocks in it change or are split, etc.

Why do people trust the Dow? it is because the number's been around for more than 100 years? Or because it's from Dow Jones? I don't think because people understand what the number itself means.

What have you done for me lately: Measuring Marketing’s Unmeasurables

2007-01-23T10:46:00.000-05:00

Fellow Dow Joneser Matt Toll emceed a session at Frost and Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing conference yesterday in sunny AZ. From what I hear the session was well received. Jeremiah, naturally, put together a nice summary post.

Question for Matt: Is this stuff really unmeasurable, or have we not yet found the best way to measure it?

I'm eager to hear more details about the event.

Thomson Business Intelligence Dismantling

2007-01-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

Major changes in one of the old-guard in the business news and information sector:

Thomson Business Intelligence Dismantling :
"Although the announcement from TBI that went out to clients stated that the current divestiture of product lines represented a decision to 'realign specific services within Business Intelligence Services' in order to 'best align our products and resources to the markets and customers we serve,' in fact, Paul Stutler, vice president and general manager of TBI, clarified that, when completed, the transition would mean the end of TBI."

In the wake of Web 1.0 and now Web 2.0, the old research companies (Nexis, Dialog, Dow Jones, Reuters) had to embrace the future or die. Unfortunately, not enough investment was put into Thomson to keep it relevant in this always changing market.

Chinese Bloggers Posing Real Threat to Western Companies

2007-01-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal (subscription) on Friday ("It's Called the Forbidden City for a Reason," by Geoffrey A. Fowler) about how bloggers in China have been pressuring Starbucks and some other Western companies to be more culturally sensitive as they enthusiastically try to capture market share in the burgeoning Chinese economy. The article focuses on a Starbucks located in the Forbidden City in Beijing. One blogger -- Rui Chenggang -- took his distaste for the Western coffee shop's location near such a sacred area to his blog. In a week, the Journal reports, the post was viewed more than 500,000 times.

Chinese it seems are much more comfortable taking their feelings to the blogosphere than other methods we might be more comfortable with in the West -- such as complaining about the government in the press.

This means Western companies (the article mentions Yum Brands' KFC, Dell and Procter & Gamble also being attacked by bloggers in China recently) now have to become acutely aware of how their brand can be criticized in the burgeoning social media space.

Full disclosure: The Journal is owned by Dow Jones, the company for which I also work.

Social Media Site HR Departments Will Hate

2007-01-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

HR departments take note. Here's a fairly new site -- JobVent -- that could really take off. It encourages employees to post anonymously about whether they love or hate their employer and state the reasons why. This is the type of site that companies are going to have to keep their eyes on as reputation issues could certainly snowball as employees feel they can vent without repercussions. This is a reminder that a company's stakeholders includes its employees.

Not that this is an entirely new concept. F'd Company has been around for a while but that site certainly encourages only negative comments, while JobVent encourages positive and negative comments.

Found on: The Net-Savvy Executive

Top Cliches of 2006 - from Factiva Insight

2007-01-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal ran what's become known around here as the "Factiva Cliche Index" today. (And lest you're wondering, just because Dow Jones now fully owns both brands doesn't mean we Factiva folk can walk right over to the editors and say "run this." Not that it hurts to be in the same building, or anything.)

Bottom line, this is a great example of text mining put to use to give information that single searches can't do. Clichés might be a fun example, but look for more hard-hitting ones coming soon.

PR News Online — Measuring Corporate Reputation, Part II: Unrolling The Road Map, Reaching A Goal

2006-12-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

Here's a nice summary of one approach to corporate reputation measuring from the folks at PR News Online. Many of the typical points we talk about are mentioned (clearly agree on and define your objectives, techniques and metrics). The article concludes that reputation management is more of an art than science and is imperfect but that "the numbers it provides are just as good as those offered by, say, the marketing department." And adds this metaphore.

Have you ever heard the story of the two guys in a tent contemplating the bear
outside? As one laced up his shoes to make an escape, the other looked on in
disbelief and said, 'What do you think you're doing? You can't outrun a bear.'
The other just smiled and said, 'I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to
outrun you.'

Nine Hours Ahead

2006-12-10T17:41:00.000-05:00

I just barely had time to unpack after the Factiva Social Media Roundtable trip to Palo Alto and I am off again -- this time to Germany and France to talk about media measuring in Europe.

We are holding a customer roundtable in Frankfurt on Wednesday. No bloggers at this one. It's more of a chance for Factiva to talk to our customers and prospects about media monitoring and about the new world of social media. My hunch is that Europe (I know it's dangerous to generalize) is a couple of steps behind the States on putting together corporate action plans on monitoring social media. It seems that outside of a few industries and locales in the States who already get it, much of rest of the U.S. is about 6 months behind. So I suspect Europe is 6-12 months behind that.

I'm eager to hear feedback on Wednesday to see if I'll be surprised or not.

An Aside (and generating my own customer content): Kudos to Continental Airlines who wisked me off my delayed flight into Berlin and onto my connecting Lufthansa flight. They met me at the door of the plane, ran me to a waiting car and we zipped across the tarmac -- but too bad they couldn't get my bag to my second plane as quickly. (Huzzah to Lufthansa, who several hours later brought it to my hotel.)

The Day After -- My Head's Still Spinning

2006-12-06T13:16:00.000-05:00

My head is still spinning from last night -- and not from the wine. There is simply so much to digest after a night with two dozen people who spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of social media.

What I'm saying is the Factiva Roundtable we held last night in Palo Alto was a success. Just about everyone in the room seems completely engaged and continued the conversations through drinks and dinner. Jeremiah Owyang, our guest emcee from PodTech, did a wonderful job and has written an amazingly complete post within hours of the event. He also managed to take some wonderful photos.

Huge thanks to Daniela, who took on this project with gusto because she just loves this stuff. Thanks also to Matt Toll, Saurabh Goorha and Sally Hammond, the others on our little team, for the hours they put into preparing for the event.

We are going to be working quickly to create some outputs from this -- white paper, blog posts, podcasts, etc. More on that soon.

Social Media Roundtable Attendees

2006-12-05T12:04:00.000-05:00

As I stated previously, we're expecting 23 thought leaders at the Factiva Social Media Roundtable today in Palo Alto. With the 6 of us leading the event, we've maxed out the room. The intent was always to keep this intimate. Daniela created a wiki and asked the attendees to post their names if they wished. Respecting those wishes I only list those who did so to date:

Andrew Lark, Founder, group lark www.grouplark.com
Ed Terpening, VP Social Media, Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo Blog Index
Christopher Kenton, MotiveLab, www.marketonomy.com
Jeanette Gibson, New Media Communications, Cisco, http://newsroom.cisco.com/, http://blogs.cisco.com
Brian Solis, FutureWorks PR, http://www.future-works.com/ / PR2.0, www.briansolis.com
Ian Kennedy, Product Manager, Yahoo, flashpoint
Jeremy Pepper, Social Media, Weber Shandwick / POP! PR Jots
Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder, BlogHer, LLC; www.blogher.org
Mike Manuel, Strategist, Voce Communications, Media Guerrilla
Andrew Vignolo, Director, Market Trends & Analytics, Levi Strauss & Co.
Jeff Beckman, Director, Worldwide and U.S. Communications, Levi Strauss & Co.
Tony Obregon, Director of Social Media, Cohn & Wolfe

The attendees are a mix of PR/measurement practitioners, independent bloggers and social media thought leaders.

The Questions: Should social media be measured by business?

2006-12-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

Daniela Barbosa (Factiva integration sales), Saurabh Goorha (Insight product manager) and I met for dinner with Jeremiah Owyang and John Aguilar of PodTech last night. The intent was to prepare for the Factiva Social Media Roundtable which is taking place in a few hours in Palo Alto.

(Jeremiah is just settling in at his new job at PodTech and you can tell he's jazzed because he can now focus all of his efforts on social media -- clearly where his heart is. )

Here are some of the questions we are going to be asking our slate of 23 social media thought leaders:

Do you believe social media is important to the business community? If so should it be measured?
Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?

Do your colleagues still tilt their heads when you say 'social media'?

2006-11-22T11:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a concise overview of "social media" from Spannerworks, an SEO company. The PDF is somewhat basic, but it's a nice tearaway to hand to your colleagues who still tilt their heads when you talk about "conversations" that don't happen face to face.

Factiva's First Social Media Roundtable

2006-11-16T18:21:00.000-05:00

A few months back several of us in the Product Development group at Factiva got into some conversations with Jeremiah Owyang, then of Hitachi Data Systems, about social media measurement. (Jeremiah has since moved on to Podtech.)

The conversation started around a product of ours, Factiva Insight, that Hitachi is using. Jeremiah basically told us, (paraphrasing) "hey, the product is pretty impressive, but it doesn't really suit my particular needs in the measurement of social media." We thought we were doing a pretty good job but we were open to hear about why Jeremiah disagreed.

Those discussions, helped greatly by the coolest Factiva employee, SF based Daniela Barbosa, grew into the idea that we should hold a roundtable event and learn from those who are in the social media what we could be doing differently and what the state of the social-media-measurement space is.

So, Dec. 5 at Zabbio in Palo Alto about five of us lucky folks from Factiva and 20 or so big brains in social media will spend a few hours chatting about where social media measurement is going.

It is an invitation only roundtable with no audience. But we will produce from it stuff like a podcast, video clips and a paper of some sort (which the always witty Matt Toll has promised will be spectacular -- no pressure).

Daniela and Jeremiah , who's agreed to emcee the event, have already been posting about it (I've been under water with my real job, not that they're just sitting around, I know.)

But I'm going to try to catch up and post some of the questions here that we will be throwing out to the participants. This will give people a chance to start a discussion online before and after the event.

More soon.

MSM Just Keeps Taking Blog Prophets' Word for It

2006-11-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

Michael S. Malone writing on ABC News's Web site has taken Technorati's word for it that the Blogosphere is N big. Technorati says 57 million blogs? OK, the number must be 57 million. 100,000 new blogs a day? 1 billion bloggers by 2010? Yup, they must be right.

Nowhere is the question that these numbers are at best only part of the story and at worst an exaggeration. How can you not even mention all the blogs that are created one day and abandoned the following week? Or the fact that many bloggers have multiple blogs? Or all the spam blogs that get counted as real blogs? It's lunacy.

57 million blogs ever created hardly equals 57 million people now blogging.

The number of active bloggers is growing and it's probably an impressive number but there are lots of caveats to those numbers and to understand their meaning the MSM has to ask questions. Remember J-school guys?

Lexis-Nexis Survey Shows News Still Comes from the MSM

2006-10-05T10:35:00.000-04:00

I hope Lexis-Nexis didn't spent too much money on
this survey which revealed that people don't turn to blogs to find out about breaking news.

I'm not sure why that question is even being asked. Is L-N feeling that threatened by new media? Do people really believe that bloggers are going to replace journalists? With few exceptions, bloggers aren't going out there interviewing sources, working beats, going to press conferences, running to crime scenes and working a Rolodex(TM) (did I just date myself?). Bloggers are performing analysis of the work that journalists do.

They say that journalists write the first draft of history. Bloggers, it seems, are now writing the second.

ROI of Blogging from Forrester

2006-10-03T13:42:00.000-04:00

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester, presented a Webinar today on the ROI of Blogging. Some of it was basic, at least for those who are at all familiar with corporate blogging, but she is an excellent presenter and made some good points:

-- Successful blog management requires measurement.
-- Recruitment blogs can be a very obvious place for companies to start blogging because hiring is all about reaching out to people -- and that's what blogs are all about.
-- Be honest with yourself about the potential risks your new corporate blog could have and put a risk management plan in place ahead of time.
-- When calculating ROI, remember that blogs have all different purposes (customer service, recruitment, loyalty marketing, product marketing, branding, sales gen, community relations, investor relations, etc.) so you have to start by outlineing your goals before you can measure success.

One note: The Webinar was hosted by Cymfony, a message measurement company which recently received top grades from Forrester's Brand Monitoring Wave report. I'm not saying there is any quid pro quo here, but it seems Forrester is just asking for raised eyebrows when it puts its name next to a company that was a focus of one of its reports. Full disclosure: Factiva Insight was also rated in the same report (and scored less well than Cymfony).

Netflix offers $1 million for a better review | CNET News.com

2006-10-02T15:49:00.000-04:00

Pretty interesting look into how
Netflix is looking to improve its results.

Exploding Batteries Hit Different Companies at Different Times

2006-10-02T11:43:00.000-04:00

This analysis from Factiva Insight shows how discussion of the issue of the exploding laptop batteries hit different companies (Dell, Apple and Lenovo) at different times

Web 2.0 Media Acknowledged at PR Conference

2006-09-29T11:37:00.000-04:00

Jim Macnamara, Chairman and CEO of CARMA International, the last speaker of the IPR measurement conference ended his comments with a sentiment not expressed by too many others during the 1 1/2 day meeting. Namely that Web 2.0-based communications such as blogs and wikis, he said, represent a fundamental change in communications because they are a two-way conversation. "It's only matter of time before we see [something such as] 'Wikinews' dwarf" the major media outlets of the world in impact, he said.

Such communications media are rewriting the rules of PR and media relations with new networks of communicators and connections being created, he said.

Bridging versus Buffering

2006-09-29T11:12:00.000-04:00

Jim Grunig, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, talked about where PR measuring has been and where it's going.

Grunig spoke about PR as a strategic management function not a messaging, publicity and media relations function.

He also talked about the concepts of Bridging (the public relations approach focused on interpersonal relationships) vs. Buffering (the mass marketing/advertising approach) to PR. More can be found in a paper he authored. The bigger the organization, he said, the more likely they were to use the latter, less-personal, more advertising-centered approach to PR.

Media Measurement Can be Tied to Financial Outcomes

2006-09-29T09:46:00.000-04:00

Day two of the Summit on Measurement conference started with a case study from United Technologies and its study on measuring media relations messaging on financial outcomes.

The areas of communications that they rate themselves on include: Employee Relations, Customer Relations, Management Strength, the CEO, Corporate Culture, Brand and General Communications, Innovation, Capital Structure, and Cost Control.

They measure tangibles like financials and intangibles like leadership, human capital, technology, reputation, familiarity, favorability etc.

One side comment made that I found interesting: According to Jon Low, a partner at Communications Consulting Worldwide, the company who authored the study, "CEOs are enamored with innovation, but we've found that it's not a factor in [the company's] revenue growth;" it is the second lowest factor, he said.

8 Methods of Content Analysis

2006-09-29T09:36:00.000-04:00

Inspired by the measurement bug, I was looking through some earlier notes of mine and came across this list of "methods of content analysis" originally published by The Institute for Public Relations. The list is theirs; the notes are mine.

1. Clip Counting (volume counts) -- called the "most basic and perhaps most antiquated"
2. Circulation and Readership Analysis -- reported in "total circulation" or "total readership and includes number or readers, demographic profiles of readers and other lifestyle data
3. Advertising Value Equivalence (AVE) -- reportedly the dollar value of media impressions based on how much it would cost to take out an ad in the publication where the article was published. It is said to be "generally discredited by PR practitioners and leading researchers" however the PR folks I've been talking with all say their clients often ask for it and they give 'em what they want.
4. Simple Content Analysis -- counts of documents about certain topics
5. Message Analysis -- counts of documents that include specific messages
6. Tonality/Sentiment/Favorability Analysis - assessment of the entire article and individual messages in the article
7. Prominence Analysis -- Importance of the hits based on publication name, day of the week, word count, location of article in publication, presence of art work, size of headline. Each element gets a weight and roles up to a score for the article
8. Overall Quality of Coverage -- combination of tonality, prominence, message inclusion and volume counts

People like Pie charts

2006-09-28T22:32:00.000-04:00

Here's the answer to the proper way to decide on how to visualize data. (Note: This link takes you to Comedy Central, which seems to make you click again on the video in the playlist on the right. Annoying)

Attendees at the Summit on Measurement

2006-09-28T15:38:00.000-04:00

The 100 or so attendees at the Summit on Measurement conference could be broken down into the following groups: 1) PR agencies (DeVries, Fleishman Hillard, Ketchum, Millward Brown Precis, Ogilivy, Overkamp, Porter Novelli, RF Binder, Roper, MWW, KDPayne); 2) measurement vendors (Biz360, BurrellesLuce, Carma, Cyberalert, Cymfony, Delahaye, Echo Research, Factiva, PR Newswire, VMS) 3) end-users (Cephalon, E&Y, DaimlerChrysler, Florida Dept of Agriculture, GM, The Hartford, MetLife, Nortel, Shell, Southwest Airlines, Raythenon, Rockwell, United Technologies, SoCalEd, and several colleges and universities 4) academics

P&G Case Study Purports to Show PR ROI Beats other Methods

2006-09-28T13:59:00.000-04:00

Mark Weiner, President and CEO of Delahaye, Bacon's presented a case study focused on PR
marketing mix modeling (MMM) about a P&G new-product release in which he said the PR spend on the product had the best ROI of the four types of spends. For every dollar spent, the following sales were generated, he said: TV ($1.31), trades ($2.13), price promotions ($0.78), PR ($2.70). I'm not entirely clear how they got such exactly ROI figures, but that, it seems, is the MMM at work. (This was the first question that was asked by the audience. A: It's all in the data! which is able to show trends and very small, but meaningful spikes over time -- using regression analysis. For example, Mark said, they compare weeks where there were PR placements to weeks when there weren't PR placements.

The case-study was put together by three groups for
client P&G, according to Mark's co-presenter, (the literally, fast-talking) Jim Allman, CEO,
DeVries PR, a N.Y. boutique firm. He said the team that does the modeling is a 3rd party, not part of Delahaye or DeVries. "Delahaye and the modeler are getting paid lots of money, and the agency isn't," [laughter] he said. Modeling, he said, is very time-consuming and focused on the minutiae of the data.

For its long history as a super marketer, P&G has never tried to quantify PR results before, Allman said.

KD Payne Blogging Summit on Measurement

2006-09-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

The inimitable
KD Payne is also posting about the
Institute for Public Relations 4th Annual Summit on Measurement.

Shell Says it's Always Listening and Measuring the MSM

2006-09-28T11:28:00.000-04:00

We heard a case study on Measurement in Reputation Tracking
from Bert Regeer, Head of global planning at Royal Dutch Shell, a company which has had its share of
reputation issues.

He talked about which audiences they measure (financial, community, government, media, NGOs, academics, business partners, general public and employees) in 15 countries. He also listed some metrics they focus on (favorability by country, favorability by audience, brand mapping to characteristics, stakeholder expectations of brands).

Regeer said they have traditionally looked mostly at MSM and are now starting to look at blogs (though I didn't get exactly how they're measuring them) because it used to be that journalists were "sirs, and very well respected" saying that the Blogosphere has greatly changed that.

Study Finds PR Is as Valuable as Advertising

2006-09-28T10:11:00.000-04:00

I'm up at the Institute for Public Relations annual summit on measurement in New Hampshire. First up: we're listening to the findings of a study which compared the relative impact of the results of PR (i.e. a well-placed item in a newspaper) and advertising on the public. The study showed that after being exposed to one instance, there is no real difference between advertising and PR. (Huh.)

The study's co-authors (David Michaelson, principal of his New York PR firm, and Don Stacks, of the University of Miami) conclude that in the instance of introducing a new product, PR appears to be on equal footing with advertising in terms of impact. The study found that:
○ There is no difference on a person's intent to purchase after being exposed to one instance of advertising and one instance of a well-placed news story.
○ There is no statistically significant difference on "believability" between advertising and editorial
○ Increased information does not translated into increased believability

Not surprisingly the study's authors seemed pleased with the findings, which they say is one of the first to so strongly justify what they do. (Though some in the crowd of about 100 felt this was similar to other studies.)

Questions came up with how this can be carried over to an online or broadcast studies. Discussion also talked to whether the idealized parameters of the study (point-for-point placement of the advertising claims in the fictional NY Times article) would have meaning in the real world. The authors admitted this was a best-case scenario.

John Battelle's Searchblog: Google Clarifies Philosophy Re: Content

2006-09-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

A good post from John Battelle responding to Google's recent post about its content philosophy (inspired by their recent court loss in Belgium). John is spot-on that this post of Google's is an important one as it seems to clearly state that Google has no interest in becoming a content company and taking away market share from the MSM. Rather, it states clearly, that they continue to see themselves enhancing the online business of the MSM. Symbiotic -- not evil. Now, do we buy it?

Subjectivity Mining Discussion

2006-09-26T12:52:00.000-04:00

An interesting coversation taking place
over here about automated sentiment tagging. This is something we're very interested in. It's a bit of a holy grail to do auto sentiment with high precision. The question is: Is good-enough, good enough.

Monitoring Comments on MSM Sites

2006-09-25T10:35:00.000-04:00

There is something of a growing trend whereby media Web sites are encouraging their readers to comment about articles directly on the the Web site. Read a story; post a comment. Makes a lot of sense.

I'm told by some colleagues in London that this is becoming particularly popular in Europe. So far I found one paper: The Guardian , which has put comments in its own area .

In The States, I found The Washington Post has comments on articles. CNet's News.com has its Talkback feature, which is a free area requiring a username. USAToday links some of its articles to its blogs area for comment.

What I'm not certain about is whether these comments are being captured by any of the blog aggregators or other search engines. Technically they aren't blogs, nor are they message boards, nor are they necessarily easily captured by the major search engines when they spider the content.

Are these comments falling into the media monitoring ether?

Bloggers Hold Dell's Feet to the Fire -- Business Week

2006-09-13T21:51:00.000-04:00

A great article from Business Week Online (spotted by Down Under eagle-eye Factiva colleague Lorraine Worley) credits bloggers with holding Dell and Apple's feet to the -- um -- fire in the wake of the recent laptop-battery story.

Business Week states:

"The cybermedia didn't merely expose the dangers of computers catching fire. They kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission [CPSC] conduct an investigation into the burning batteries."

Corporate America Behind the (Blog) Curve

2006-09-13T12:41:00.001-04:00

A study from the Institute for Public Relations authored by Robbin Goodman concludes that, in the face of the growth of the Blogosphere, "many senior executives seem determined to doubt the Internet's power to alter business communications." It went on to state:

The survey revealed that only a very small number of top executives are convinced to “a great extent” that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium (5%), brand-building technique (3%) or a sales or lead generation tool (less than 1%). In contrast, most executives are somewhat or not at all convinced of blogs’ growing credibility in these areas, (62%, 74% and 70% respectively).

I ealier posted about another study with similar findings

If those of us who feel that blogging can, indeed, impact others' perceptions are right, more large companies are going to get blindsided as have Sony, Maytag, Kryptonite, Dell, McDonanld's Starbucks and others.

Les Echos Continues to Feature Text Mining Data

2006-09-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

The Web site of French newspaper, Les Echos, continues to promote Factiva-sourced text mining data in an ongoing feature tracking the mentions of CAC40 CEOs in the press. We now have our own tab on their corporate news page, Palmarès Factiva-lesechos.fr.

(I love the disembodied floating heads, BTW.)

Google Gives Nod to the Value of Archived News

2006-09-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

Google adds a feature to Google News, labeled News archive search, in which it has partnered with several news aggregators and news providers to provide its users easier access to deep archives of news. In a few instances this goes back more than 100 years, but most of the data is from the 1990s through the present, it would seem. News aggregators Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, High-Beam and possibly others provide slices of their deep archives. MSM folks like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post are there too.

It's a bit too early to digest the full impact of this. But I see it as a nod by information giant Google toward the value of high-quality deep news archives. Google News users have often been stymied by a news search that only goes back a month or so. This will allow users to go further and push traffic to Factiva and the others. Google says it doesn't get revenue when users purchase individual documents from the vendors but that it's doing this as a way to provide more complete information to its users.

Factiva Moderates Event on Securing Trust of Your Brand

2006-09-04T11:51:00.000-04:00

Shameless promotion follows...

Factiva's CMO Alan Scott will moderate a Web event with leaders from Symantec, ChoicePoint and others about how security and privacy issues can impact a company's bottom line and the difficulties companies have measuring their true imact.

Chatting Web Strategy with Jeremiah

2006-09-01T12:04:00.000-04:00

Several of us in the Product Department at Factiva had a conversation with Jeremiah Owyang, a thought leader at Hitachi Data Systems, this week about his use of one of our text-mining based products. He blogged about it and said some nice things about us.

He also spoke frankly to us about how our product wasn't serving his needs and what he thought we needed to do to make it better. That was the best part of the conversation. Praise is great, but it doesn't help you make better products. Well-thought-out criticism does.

Keep those cards and letters coming, Factiva users. We love 'em.

Latest Whistleblower Slaps at Lockheed Martin via YouTube

2006-08-30T13:41:00.000-04:00

Michael De Kort, a former Lockheed Martin engineer becomes the latest YouTuber to make waves on the Web. He airs charges of corruption in a military contract he apparently worked on.

56% of Active English Blogs are Spam -- Wired

2006-08-22T17:01:00.000-04:00

An article on splogs in Wired's Sept '06 issue quotes Timm Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and two of his students as saying 56% of active English blogs are spam. "The Blogosphere is growing fast," but "the Splogosphere is now growing faster."

The article goes on to say that splogs contribute about 75% of all pings from English-language blogs. About 300,000 legit posts a day and about 900,000 bogus ones.

Factiva New Leader in News and Research Market

2006-08-22T16:49:00.000-04:00

The latest from electronic information industry watcher Simba Information shows that Factiva is now No. 1 in the Current Awareness News & Research market . I've been working at Factiva and previously at joint-venture parent Dow Jones for 13 years now and when I started we were a distant third in the market. Lexis Nexis was the giant that we really couldn't hope to slay but it always was the goal our leaders set for us. Since Factiva was formed 7 years ago (with joint-venture partners Dow Jones and Reuters) we've been inching our way closer and now we can officially say we've passed Nexis.

We had a bit of a celebration here in Princeton's HQ. Certainly wasn't a barn burner. Not sure if it was subdued because we kinda knew about the announcement or if it's because Factiva people are basically down-to-earth types.

But woo-hoo. We're number 1.