Read Between the Mines

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%.