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.

IABC -- Habitat for Humanity Build

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.