Archive for the ‘media measurement’ Category

Nothing grabs the media’s attention like a good rivalry, just look at how the Clinton-Obama contest has helped the Democrats’ press coverage skyrocket past the GOP’s over the past few months. Over the past week, Romney has moved from third place to within one percentage point of John McCain in Florida media impressions. Strong poll numbers and a recent attack from John McCain have set a new rivalry in place and both candidates are benefiting.

Florida Media Impressions For GOP Candidates
Past 14 Days of Media Coverage

The perception of a tight race in Florida between McCain and Romney should help engage GOP primary voters. McCain’s strong national lead in traditional and social media impressions, on the other hand, indicates the strength McCain has heading into Super Tuesday on February 5th. If Romney wins in Florida, it could help to curb McCain’s media lead, while a McCain win could further increase the lead he already has.

Traditional and Social Media Impressions For GOP Candidates
Past 7 Days of Media Coverage

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to run a competitive race with 39 percent and 38 percent of all presidential election media impressions in Florida, respectively. While there are no delegates being awarded to the winner of the Democrat primary in Florida, Clinton has said she will campaign for a symbolic victory.

In a race where perception and reputation are everything, a symbolic win for Clinton could strengthen her position going into Super Tuesday.

Political candidates, companies and organizations all need to manage their reputations in the media. Perception can change quickly and without warning. Using traditional and social media analysis to understand your competitive position across regions and over time can give you the insight you need to know where and when your resources will have the greatest impact.

For more information on this topic, please see our related press release.

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

We’ve all heard arguments about whether or not there’s a liberal bias in the U.S. media. Politics aside, I think the one truth most of us could agree on is that there’s a media bias toward stories that generate readers (and stories that are easy to file, which is where good PR comes in). At Biz360, we wanted to know how European media coverage of U.S. presidential candidates compares to U.S. coverage and discovered that not only do Democrats get more coverage at home, but the top Democrats appear in 10 percent more of total candidate coverage in Europe.

The following charts show European and U.S. media coverage, respectively, for U.S. presidential candidates and hopefuls over the past 30 days.

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was held from January 24-28, 2007. Global warming and the potential for new talks on a world trade deal were the dominating issues. Media coverage varied from straightforward reports of the Forum’s events, to strong criticism saying that meeting of the world’s biggest leaders has become increasingly irrelevant.

The proposed resumption of the World Trade Organization talks dominated WEF coverage during the review period. Media coverage steadily increased, with a spike on January 26 when it was reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was hopeful the stalled global trade negotiation could resume soon, and Brazil’s president predicted a deal within months. Coverage spiked considerably on January 27 when officials announced they had agreed to resume the global free trade talks. While appearing to be positive news, a large portion of media coverage leaned toward the negative, implying that the probability of the talks actually resuming is still unlikely, that expectations were low, and the talk about restarting the global trade talks was, to a large extent, “hot air”.

The issue of global warming/climate change came in second in terms of media coverage, with coverage increasing just before the official start of the forum when President Bush acknowledged climate change in his January 23 State of the Union speech, and spiking on January 24 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel focused on climate change in her keynote speech. Coverage increased again on January 27 regarding an announcement of a partnership to standardize the reporting of climate risk-related issues. Media reaction to the announcements was mixed in tone; some positive reports commented on the constructive dialogue and potential solutions, others pointed out that no revolutionary strategies were developed and that Davos is the place to launch grandiose initiatives that never quite live up to their billing.

To read Biz360’s full report on the event and view analysis of the speakers and messages, please click here.

Today we’re announcing the latest addition to our social media analysis capabilities: MediaSignal™ for blogs. It’s a significant development that enhances our customers’ ability to tap into the blogosphere for insight and information.

At Biz360, one of the guiding principles of our product development process involves taking a pragmatic approach to fulfilling our customers’ needs. In this case, there’s a clear need for marketing and PR professionals to be able to measure the relative impact of blogs—from the top professional blogs to the fringes of the long tail—and to be able to make direct comparisons to traditional media coverage. Because here is no definitive standard for blog impact measurement, we saw the need to come up with something new.

Most of the current methodologies for measuring blog impact involve either estimating site traffic or counting inbound links from other blogs. Limitations of these methods include:

• With a list of blogs ranked by their overall authority or influence, it’s impossible to know which blogs have the most impact in a given market—is it the highly-ranked blog that occasionally writes about the market, or the lower-ranked blog that covers it incessantly?
• Links from mainstream media provide an interesting view into which blogs are influencing traditional media, but they typically aren’t counted.
• The impact of the “linkerâ€? typically isn’t accounted for, even though a link from a top-tier blog implies more impact than a link from a less popular blog.
• The impact of the reader typically isn’t taken into account. PerezHilton receives more traffic than Engadget, but the topics over which they have influence differ greatly.
• Today’s site traffic panels are too small to estimate visitors to low-traffic sites in a statistically valid manner.

After a great deal of experimentation and testing, we settled on a methodology that provides a new estimate of reach that incorporates traffic estimates, linking patterns from blogs, and linking patterns from mainstream media. Our link analysis produces particularly interesting results, employing a technique that enables us to estimate not only the number of sources linking to a given blog, but also the impact of the sources.

The benefit of the detailed link analysis can be seen in the table below. Over a 3-month period last year, Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce received incoming links from similar numbers of sources. However, the sources linking to BuzzMachine received more than twice as many distinct links as the sources linking to Dooce, implying greater impact.

• Apples-to-apples comparisons. With MediaSignal, we have a single measure of brands, trends and issues across both traditional and social media.
• More relevant reach. Because our source rankings incorporate each source’s reach as well as its topical relevance, we are able to product a customized list of which publications and blogs matter most to each of our clients.
• More accurate reach. Our calculation of MediaSignal for blogs involves large-scale link analysis, calibrated by audience estimates to provide an understandable metric than pure visitors or pure link metrics.
• Tone impact. By factoring MediaSignal into the negative, neutral and positive impression counts we derive through our Point-of-View Sentiment engine, we’re able to weight our tone ratings by impact.
• Improved spam filtering. Thanks to the link-source impact analysis, we were able to identify and weed out many splogs that received many links but only from other splogs in the same farm.