Inspired by a blizzard

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

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

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

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

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'

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?

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?

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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