Barack Inching Ahead -- in Media Mentions

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

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

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

Jeremiah's Complete list - 2008

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

Mossberg addresses Web's impact on journalism, lifestyle

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

How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

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

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

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

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

Social Media Webinar Data shows about half of coporations are engaged

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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”

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

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

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

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.