Posts Tagged ‘media measurement’

If you have no idea what has been going on between Southwest Airlines and actor / director Kevin Smith, you have probably been living under a rock. The purpose of this post is not to give a recap of what happened. You can find that by going to CNN.com, ABC.com, Kevin’s Twitter account and Southwest’s Twitter account and blog. The purpose of this post is not to take sides, or ruminate about what this incident means for airlines and airline customers of all sizes and shapes, either. The purpose of this post is to measure the buzz created by this situation across all social media sources, as well as to address the impact on sentiment towards both parties involved: Mr. Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.

I scoured the social web and found close to 45,000 relevant mentions of Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines within the relevant time period, across blogs, microblogs, discussion boards / forums, and online news. On the trend graph below, you can clearly see that the event occurred on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, garnering 14,000 mentions that very day. The next day, even more discussion ensued, with 16,000 conversations taking place on the 15th. At this point, however, this topic has pretty much run its course, as interest waned after the 16th.

Judging by the chart below, the incident was discussed in microblogs more  than in any other medium (66% of total conversations). This makes sense, because Twitter became the hub of all activity, as this is where Kevin Smith voiced his strong opinions against Southwest, quickly mobilizing his followers.

The key issue that SWA and Kevin Smith should be concerned about in the aftermath of this proverbial storm, is the impact that the whole ordeal may leave on their respective brands. Yes, Kevin Smith is a personal brand, and, just like SWA, he should be concerned about what happens to it. Perhaps he is even monitoring social media with a monitoring and engagement solution? Hey, Kevin, we can help you with that! Southwest, we would be very happy to help you too!

So how does the public feel? Let’s take a look. For this type of discussion, I like to use sentiment trend graphs to understand how sentiment ebbed and flowed each day. For the purposes of this discussion, I did not analyze neutral sentiment, as it adds less value to the discussion. Looking at sentiment towards Kevin Smith (below), it becomes obvious that this incident has hurt his brand in the short term. Whereas negative was a bit above positive even prior to the incident, the gap between the two was never as large as it became during the 14th and 15th of this month. The day after the story broke on Twitter, negative sentiment soared high above positive, returning to a lower level, albeit still higher than positive, on the 16th and 17th.

Now let’s take a look at sentiment towards Southwest Air. During the days prior to the big event, SWA tended to have mostly positive sentiment. However, between the 14th and the 17th, positive and negative sentiment were both elevated and went pretty much neck in neck. Of note is that although fairly evenly split, negative sentiment never exceeded positive.

Based on sentiment data presented above, I would say that both brands suffered in the process with increased negative sentiment; however Southwest Airlines has netted out ahead of Kevin Smith (in terms of sentiment) by garnering more positive support than Smith did. It’s important to realize that these are short term effects only; the real key would be to understand the long-term effect, if any, that the episode has had on public perception of both brands.  I am going to do a follow-up post on this, to track sentiment in a couple of weeks and maybe even further out.

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As the news of Apple iPad broke on Wednesday late morning, Twitter was abuzz with the news. So much so, that  a friend of mine asked in a tweet, prior to the announcement: “What will get more press: the Apple announcement or the State of the Union Address?”, to which I retorted “I bet it will be the iPad”. Was I right?

As a data junkie, I was fascinated on the spot, and recalled this question immediately when picking a topic for this week’s Biz360 trend report. So without much ado, I tracked social media mentions for the following topics: Apple iPad, State of the Union Address, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is another big world event going on currently (which seemed to be getting a little lost amongst all the iPad chatter). I analyzed two days: January 27th, the day of the iPad announcement and the State of the Union Address, as well as the following day. I tracked these topics across Twitter, blogs, forums / discussion boards, and online news, and this is what I found:

The iPad coverage did, in fact, far outweigh the coverage received by the State of the Union and Davos, resulting a crushing 58.8% share of voice. People talked about iPad more than twice as much as about the State of the Union (at 34.8%), and completely obliterating any Davos conversation (at 3.8%). The Apple iPad received a staggering 164,000+ mentions across various social media channels.

To an extent, I think this may be a function of the medium, as the lion’s share (86.6%) of the iPad conversations were happening on Twitter (see below), which in its early days tended to skew towards the “geeky and techie” contingent, with traditionally a high adoption rate of Apple products. Thus, it would make sense that the folks most interested in the iPad announcement, were tweeting up a storm about the announcement. However, since Twitter has gone more mainstream, this argument becomes a little flawed. Other than the possible Twitter medium explanation, your guess is as good as mine as far why the iPad received more coverage than Obama’s first State of the Union Address.

So how did the public feel about this very hotly debated new gadget? If you look at all social media sources (which is highly skewed towards Twitter, as we discussed above), sentiment is mostly neutral. Twitter is notoriously hard to measure because its character economy (maximum 140 characters per tweet) makes us forgo the grammar and correct spelling, making it difficult for a machine (heck, even a human!) to understand sentiment.

However, removing Twitter fetches quite a different result. Not counting Twitter, sentiment towards the iPad has been mostly positive (see below). In another post, I think I may dig into how we, the Social Media Republic, feel about the iPad name, which has been responsible for an avalanche of jokes about feminine products.

Since we have access to so much data via our Community Insights platform, I thought we would do something a little fun. Most of the time, we use our monitoring platform and smart sentiment engine to help customers engage and win in the buzzing, and often disorienting, social media space. But sometimes, we use our data and sentiment measurement to make predictions on what may happen next. For example, we used our sentiment measurement to predict the winner of American Idol last year.

Today, I want to ruminate and speculate about the Apple Tablet. It grabbed my attention, because the following FoxNews article is now in day 2 of being at the top of Techmeme. A read of the aforementioned article confirms the several-month-long chatter around the Apple Tablet rumors, and also tells us that Apple is in talks with two of the largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon. A data junkie wants to know if we can we use social media to: 1) understand who is talking about the Apple Tablet and where, 2) how people feel about it, and 3) how they feel about the Apple’s partnership with the two carriers?

Here’s what the data tells us:

Most of the Apple Tablet chatter is occurring in microblogs and blogs:

Sentiment towards the Apple Tablet has evolved over the past couple of weeks. We are ending the 2-week cycle with a more positive disposition than we started with (see below). Perhaps because before it was considered a bunch of unfounded rumors, but now it’s actually starting to look real?  A deep dive into each day of sentiment can help uncover who is driving the conversation. This is beyond the scope of this post, but useful information for an Apple analyst or the marketing and social media team at Apple.

Is there any difference in how the different media sources feel about the Apple Tablet? I am excluding Twitter from this discussion, because tweets are notoriously difficult to calculate sentiment due to Twitter’s own syntax and character economy, which makes grammar and spelling fall by the wayside. Other than that, seems that blogs (see below) are more excited about the Tablet than discussion forums. Among some of the largest (in terms of reach and impact) blog sources contributing positive sentiment on 1.21 were Yahoo! Tech Blogs, CNET, iClarified, MacUser, and many many others.

Interesting to note that interest in the subject peaked on forums on the 13th and the 21st of this month (see below), but seemed to languish in between. A deeper dive into some of the negative forums with the widest reach reveals: PC World Forums like this one, and this one and AfterDawn forums, MacWorld forums, Apple Insider and many others. The Apple Tablet community manager has her job cut out for her!

One of the coolest things that Community Insights can do is generate a tag cloud around your topic of choice. Let’s see what the bloggers are saying about the Tablet:

Most of the phrases are around rumors and confirmations of announcement, camera on the iPhone (it won’t have a camera and it will – hmmm so which one is it?), NY Times Paywall, Webcam, 3G, Apple Tablet coming to Verizon (is it really? I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that one), and other “truemors.”

Speaking of Verizon… Which carrier will Apple choose? Apple Tablet certainly seems to have a higher share of voice than AT&T:

And a closer look at the Verizon vs. AT&T tag cloud clearly shows that “AT&T is an Apple Tablet dealbraker” (wow, strong statement), and contradictory statements like “AT&T to get apple tablet” and “Apple is headed to Verizon”.

The Verizon & Apple Tablet tag cloud includes many of the same phrases, but the most frequently occurring phrase seems to be a more definitive one “Apple will be sold” (through Verizon), while many other occurrences include both “AT&T” and “Verizon” in the same phrase.

Although sentiment for both carriers seems to be about even, with the slight leaning towards Verizon, the fact that Apple is talking to both carriers makes me think that they will be able to offer it through both AT&T and Verizon. I certainly  hope so, because after the release of  the carrier-agnostic (sort of) Nexus One, all smartphone manufacturers should start to become available through many carriers. I guess only time will tell, on January 27th.

Last week’s CES brought us a flurry of exciting announcements, but the most exciting one (I think) happened the day before CES got underway. Last Tuesday (which also happened to be my first day with Biz360), marked the launch of Nexus One, the first official Google phone built on the Android platform. A topic that’s this widely discussed in the blogosphere and the Twittersphere is just music to the ears of someone like me. Imagine all the tracking, monitoring and measurement that can be done! Well, now you can stop imagining and just read this post.

I wanted to figure out not only what’s going on in the Nexus One land, but also how this news is affecting public opinion of its closest competitors. Is it really an iPhone killer? Where does the Motorola Droid fit in? For the purposes of this post, I tracked mentions of three touch-screen smartphones: Nexus One, iPhone and Motorola Droid, across 4 types of media: blogs, microblogs, online news and forums / discussion boards. Unless otherwise noted, data is based on a combined measurement of these media.

During and after its launch, Nexus One experienced a tremendous rise in coverage (coverage is an estimated count of online mentions across the 4 types of media at hand). Even so, at 102.4K mentions, it pales in comparison to the 866k iPhone mentions (that’s 8.5x the coverage of Nexus One!). Clearly, the iPhone is still top of mind across social media platforms and is the reigning king of the touchscreen smartphone sector. Based on mindshare, Nexus One is not the famed iPhone killer (at least not just yet). *Note: you can see a larger version of each chart by clicking on it.

Here it makes sense to make a distinction about coverage vs. impact and reach, the terms I will be using liberally in these trend reports. As I mentioned above, coverage is basically the number of mentions via the social web (by keyword, collection of keywords, however you define your “topic”). Each of these media mentions has reach and impact. Reach signifies how many visitors / subscribers that site has. Impact is a more finely tuned metric: with impact we actually estimate how many people read a particular article, and thus how much influence a particular post carries. For example, Mashable may have x number of unique visitors and subscribers, but does everyone read every post? Of course not! We estimate out how many people actually read a particular post; hence the two separate metrics of reach and impact. What does this mean in the context of our smartphone study?

If you look at impact, iPhone’s impact is only 4.9 times that of the Nexus One (see below left), as compared to 8.5 times Nexus One’s coverage. Also, Nexus One receives more comments per mention than the iPhone (see below right). What does this mean? This is how I think about it: even though there are a lot more instances online in which the iPhone is mentioned, readers are more likely to read and interact with articles written about Nexus One.

Now let’s take a closer look at where all of this action is happening; just as importantly, how people feel about these products, and how that feeling may have changed over time: pre and post release of the Nexus One.

Where is the chatter?

Nexus One was covered by all 4 types of media, but the majority of the activity happened in blogs (35% of all mentions), and in microblogs (29%) (see below). iPhone is covered pretty evenly by discussion boards (29%), microblogs (28%) and blogs (27%). Droid (not shown here) also was mostly discussed in forums, microblogs and blogs.

Coverage across the different sources is pretty clear cut, but what impact do they each have? Here’s an interesting finding: if we look at impact, microblogs are pretty much absent. If you look at the chart below, the majority (63%) of Nexus One conversations is happening in blogs. Where did Twitter go? Microblogs were, after all, the #2 source by coverage. We use a different calculation to calculate impact of tweets (based on retweets and other metrics), but it’s clear that the impact of each tweet is much less than that of a blog or news article (although there are roughly as many tweets as blog mentions).

What’s the implication for a community manager, social media marketer, or blogger? If you are trying to engage with your community in a place that’s relevant to them, you need to know where your community is. This is how you decide where you should focus your time and effort. Clearly, for the smartphone sector, blogs, microblogs and discussion forums are best. But where do you start? Well, a deeper dive needs to be conducted to figure out what the top sources are, and who the top authors are (bloggers, online journalists, thought leaders on Twitter), and engaging with them.

Survey says… People like it!

So now we know there’s a lot of chatter, and we know where it’s happening. But what exactly are people saying about this new product? According to Biz360’s sentiment analysis, the vast majority of the Nexus One sentiment was positive (39.3%) or neutral (37.9%) (see below left). However, if you look at sentiment of impact, you will see that it was overwhelmingly positive at 66.4% (see below right). What does this mean? Simply that the articles that garnered the most readership happened to be positive; looks like the respected tech reporters and bloggers felt positively about Nexus One.

By comparison, Droid garnered the most positive sentiment at 67% (below left), and iPhone sentiment was the lowest of the three.

Let’s take a look at how Nexus One sentiment changed over time (see below left). Before launch (which is represented by the tallest spike of coverage, as expected), feelings were mostly neutral, but on 1/5/10 positive sentiment soared. Incidentally, in a sort of a halo effect, the Motorola Droid also got a lift of positive sentiment on 1/5/10 (see below right). This makes sense, as a major announcement like this gives rise to many blogposts and studies comparing competitive units. Seems that Motorola Droid fared pretty well.

On 1/5/10, articles with Nexus One positive sentiment were consumed by 170 million readers, which is simply staggering.

Topic discovery

The Biz360 Community Insights tool can also be used to discover relevant trends unfolding around your topic, presented in a highly visual tag cloud. If we include all media, we get a lot of Twitter vernacular like “RT, follow and RT, RT to win”. So this is what you get when you consider all media without microblogs:” Google”, “video,” “Endgaget”, “Google faces deluge of Nexus One complaints”, “Google unveils retail ambitions”, “Nexus One review”, “Nexus Motorola”, “Nexus iPhone” (below right). Hmm… so even if everything seems to be positively-toned on the surface, Google’s inability to service its device is definitely a trending topic. If I was Google, I’d take a deeper dive by building a topic about “Nexus One complaints”, and create a plan of action.

Note: Coverage metrics may differ depending on days and search terms you are including. The Biz360 monitoring platform, just like the rest of best-in-breed platforms, is a living organism, which picks up new sources as they become available, for better relevance. New sites get added and indexed all the time, that’s the nature of the ever-changing social media landscape.

How will you know in time if your brand gets associated with the wrong voice in social media — in Domino’s case an unfortunate “disgusting” voice?  It is a challenge for marketers to be everywhere and monitor everything to protect their brands. In today’s era of immediate visibility this can be any marketer’s nightmare.

As part of the Domino’s crisis aftermath, I have read some recent posts and recommendations that marketers should periodically be searching for their brands. But in a case like Domino’s, timing is everything. Having to rely on random or periodic searches is not a reliable method for protecting your brand. Neither is Google alerts when your brand is mentioned regularly.

The good news is that savvy marketers can arm themselves so that they are prepared for these types of situations. This is a good time to take a close look at your current solution. While there is a confusing number of social media monitoring tools in the market right now, some will be better than others at preparing you for these situations. To be in the defensive seat, your solution should not rely on you to conduct manual periodic searches within the tool, nor to periodically log onto reports to constantly check your status. You need to be alerted as these situations occur:

• Does your solution provide a clear, proactive easy way to notify you when you have an unexpected change in volume or tone?
• Will your solution alert you if there are changes to high-risk topics you are tracking?
• Does your solution discover relevant new high risk topics that can appear unexpectedly?

A social media monitoring and measurement solution should help you to detect these situations early on, as well as manage them once you are in the thick of it. Biz360’s Community Insights solution was built to do precisely this.

February 26th at 11:00 am Pacific Time,  Registration Required
Managing in a Crisis

Please to join Biz360 Client Services team as they highlight Best Practices for Crisis Management – featuring a recent case study and leveraging Biz360 Media Insights account information

In this webcast you will learn how to:
• Proactively identify and manage threatening issues before they peak as a media crisis
• Identify which issues are driving a media crisis the most
• Improve your position when your industry or competitors are in a crisis

We’ll also review key questions to ask so you can get the maximum value from your Biz360 solution in a looming situation. As well as real case studies of companies in recent crisis, utilizing Media Insights information to understand the full impact and help determine the best actions to take.

REGISTER HERE