Turning News Into Knowledge

Fresh from the recent hiring spree, we thought it will be a good idea to do an informal “qualitative” check on how MediaMiser is perceived by the budding Mediamites on our Client Services team. Caught amidst the memories of prior work places still lingering on their minds, and the silent mental appraisal of the new work environment, our newest staff sure had some great insights on our work culture and atmosphere.

Here’s a peek at some of the thoughts:

“There are a lot of opportunities to be creative in this constantly changing media landscape, and innovation is definitely embraced at MediaMiser, which is what makes it such a great place to work.” – Jayna Hart, Media Analyst

“There is a great sense of team unity which is embraced at MediaMiser. Anyone lucky enough to join this great group really wants to be a part of the work ethic and values that all MediaMiser employees demonstrate towards their clients and each other.” – Greg MacDonald, Media Analyst

“The first thing I noticed as an intern starting at MediaMiser, is how everyone immediately made me feel welcome and part of the team. MediaMiser is a very comfortable and easy going place to work.” – Tiffany Bleackley, Media Monitoring Specialist

“From day one, the staff and atmosphere at MediaMiser made me feel right at home. The people who work at MediaMiser are very friendly and extremely easy to get along with. The beautiful, modern office provides a comfortable environment for employees to conduct their work. Besides the great people, stimulating work, and elegant office, the abundance of coffee and cake definitely makes working here that much better!”    - Paul Koziara, Media Monitoring Specialist

“MediaMiser is as much, if not more, about the people as it is about the software. Getting to know the people behind the company has greatly helped me understand MediaMiser and what they offer. The fun-loving people behind the scenes are what make this company great and I am delighted to be a part of that growing family.” – Peggy Prahl, Media Monitoring Specialist

MediaMiser is a solutions company founded by PR professionals. We are always interested in dynamic self-starters from the public relations and the technology industry. If you feel you can help make a difference on the MediaMiser team, you could be the person we are looking for. For updated information check out our careers page

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Pragya Dubey, Tiffany Bleakley and Greg MacDonald

It’s often been said that a company’s corporate culture is one of the most valuable assets that a company can own. But as a company grows, how does growth affect its corporate culture?

Recently awarded a Bronze for Fastest Growing Bootstrap at Exploriem.org’s Bootstrap Awards, it’s no doubt that MediaMiser has been growing rapidly over the past few years. The award provoked a thought about the relationship between MediaMiser’s ‘bootstrap’ roots and its affect on our corporate culture.

Beginning as a ‘bootstrap’ organization, the idea of “getting up on your own” has made itself a part of our culture, by empowering employees to develop innovative approaches to media analysis.

By definition, “bootstrap” refers to a group of metaphors that share a common meaning: a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.”

The smaller nature of bootstrap organizations enables colleagues to work closely both professionally and socially, which may play a major role in the development of corporate culture.

Boosting morale, teamwork and efficiency, a positive corporate culture is key to recruiting the most suitable candidates for a growing company.

As the media landscape changes so quickly, MediaMiser’s culture of synergism and innovation has become a central part of our growth and success.

Because bootstrap organizations start out smaller, is it possible that they have a stronger sense of teamwork and interconnectivity which carries through as the company grows?

What do you think?

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Shirley Schiavo, Jayna Hart, and David Kalec.

It’s no secret that technology rapidly changes. While this may be frustrating to some people on the consumer level, it poses many benefits in the business world. These benefits are especially true for media monitoring and analysis.

To illustrate this point, Tammy Mazerolle, Public Affairs Counsel with Atlantic Lottery, explains how the advancement of technology has benefited them with regard to their media monitoring process.

1) Better on the environment – monitoring has gone virtually paperless

“…before, all media clips were faxed to us in a clipping package that contained the actual, clipped and scanned news article. We then had to photocopy the package page by page and then manually distribute the photocopied package to senior management,” says Mazerolle.

In recent years most print sources have been made available online through news aggregator services, eliminating the need to purchase individual newspapers, and in turn producing less paper waste.

2) Quicker dissemination – everyone can receive the daily monitoring clips at the click of a button

“Today, with the new tools available to us, we simply distribute the daily media clipping package in electronic format to our core team,” says Mazerolle.

Rather than having to deliver paper copies of reports to everyone on a team or within an organization, the process has been made much simpler. With the tools and technologies available today the necessary information can be sent instantly to a much larger number of people than before; geography and number of people is no longer an issue.

3) Personalization – easy to ensure people only get the information they need

“[Through MediaMiser] we also have the ability to customize our clippings package so that the core team get a clipping package with full articles every morning, and then a summaries-only version is sent to others…,” says Mazerolle.

With the advent of tools made available for media monitoring, it is now possible to do things the photocopier never could.

These days the wheel is rarely wooden, light sources are rarely candles, and media monitoring is rarely photocopied.

How can these changes benefit you and your media monitoring?

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Samantha Ingram, Mark Durand and Lindsay Polak.

In the age of the information society, with the development of Web 2.0 and 3.0, there have been radical changes in the ways through which people communicate and obtain news. The lives and capabilities of individuals and institutions have forever been altered. Governments and corporations have had to adapt to the internet in order to foster participation and communication, but it is perhaps the news industries that have seen the most radical transformations associated with the emergence of the net.

Throughout history, the tools used for journalistic production rested in the hands of a select few who had the means and capital to engage in such a process. The ability to gather and report information, to document events through photographs and video footage, and to disseminate the package to a mass audience was only achieved by media industries with professionally educated journalists. All of this has now changed.

As technology evolves at an alarming pace, the capabilities of average citizens continue to escalate as the costs for equipment such as cameras, camcorders, and computers spirals downwards. In the contemporary state of society, just about everyone has access to the tools of production and distribution with which they can disseminate almost any type of information they please to the masses. As a result of Web 2.0, defined by interactive social networking sites such as weblogs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, the exclusivity of information broadcasting that journalists held for so long has diminished. However, there are many implications – both positive and negative – which the internet and what is known as citizen journalism have brought about.

Perhaps the greatest ramification that the internet has had on news and journalism is that corporate and mainstream media have lost their stranglehold on citizens as the only outlet for obtaining daily news and information. The mass media rely heavily on the concepts of framing and agenda setting in order to perpetuate and propagate information which often furthers their interests. Through the selective construction and manipulation of news stories, audiences are told what to think about and from what perspective. Often, relevant parts of a story are omitted or an important event may not be covered in a newscast at all. It has been said that the news shapes the pictures in our heads. With the rise of citizen journalism, we now have the ability to paint our mental canvas with whatever pictures we want.

Citizen journalism can be loosely defined as the ability of an ordinary citizen to collect, report, analyze and disseminate news and information. This provides alternative views to what the mainstream media feeds the public. This has had profound effects not only in democratic societies but in dictatorial, state-media controlled ones too. The barriers to the free flow of information in the public sphere have been knocked down. The model of news from a one-way flow of information has now become a two-way flow. Also, because alternative media is not profit driven, there exists an unprecedented amount of consumer sovereignty and cultural citizenship.

The democratization of the media has brought reason for celebration; but there is reason for concern as well. As the mainstream media has lost control over its tools of the trade, and is no longer the only focal point of societal and political influence, can the online communities of citizen journalists be trusted to provide accurate reporting? Maybe some stories are not written with the rhetoric and professional linguistic styling of some reporters, but we are exposed to news and information which we would never have access to if we relied solely on the mainstream media. For instance, independent media brought the attention of the world to the brutal, dictatorial happenings in Burma and other places throughout the globe where citizens use cell phones to record footage and then disseminate it on the internet. Furthermore, can we actually rely on the mainstream media to provide us with accurate accounts of events – or real events at all?

Jayson Blaire, a once well known and renowned journalist for the New York Times, resigned in 2003 after he was caught and admitted to fabricating and plagiarizing news stories. How about the events leading up to the Iraq war? The spin and packing of political news used to regulate the flow of information is highly unsettling. Embedded journalism, press-releases, and staged press events all function to control the opinion and behaviour of the masses. The Bush administration created fabrications related to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which were never found, yet resulted in a war that is present to this date. Before the rise of Web 2.0, and what can be called journalism 2.0, society had no control over the flow of information. Now, if you don’t like the press – become the press.

There are many websites that have established themselves as credible, alternative news sources to mainstream, corporate media. A few examples of these are:

• Independent Media Centre
• Rebel News
• Canadian Alternative News Media

Blogs have made mainstream media more accountable. As these alternative news sources now exist, media industries must adapt to the new model of journalism. Most media outlets now provide online versions of their stories where a forum is provided for discussion. The public can give their viewpoints and insight…sort of. These discussion boards are moderated and therefore only acceptable arguments are posted. This illustrates that media industries are trying to appear transparent, but continually strive to control the flow of information.

So as society has been conditioned for so long not to question authority through critical thinking, web and journalism 2.0 has provided us with new tools to break free from this. Without a doubt there exists information on the internet that lacks substance or credibility, but the same goes for traditional media. What is required is a higher level of education and media literacy in order to be able to distinguish between bona fide and debatable information. So remember: If you don’t like the media, become the media.

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Paul Koziara, Paul Williamson, Stephanie Luedee and Eric Maciejewski.

If you’re new to analysis, terms like qualitative and quantitative analysis may be just a little confusing. To look at the differences between, and benefits of, the two systems of measurement, a working definition is needed first.

According to WikiAnswers, qualitative analysis focuses on non-numerical data, such as words, pictures, or artefacts. Conversely, quantitative analysis focuses on numerical data.

Boiling it down, quantitative analysis will tell you what topics people are following, as in trending topics on Twitter.

The strength of each form of analysis can be seen in a recent report by MediaMiser’s own Samantha Ingram about media coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

This chart, taken from the Olympic report, used quantitative analysis (counting the number of times each paper ran a story) to show the papers that contained the most coverage on the popular Olympic mittens.

Using quantitative analysis lets us see which areas are producing a lot of coverage, and which aren’t. Without this measurement, we wouldn’t have known that some of the top coverage was coming from outside Canada, although the mittens were only available here.

While quantitative analysis looks at what people are talking about and how much they have to say, qualitative analysis is more interested in why people are talking, and the contents of their conversations.

The above graph, also from the Olympic Snapshots report, looks at the overall tone of one of the Olympic coverage issues. Using a simple three-point positive/neutral/negative system (and rated by people, not computers), a large amount of articles can be sifted for some basic information.

Though it looks like quantitative analysis on the surface, the tone graph isn’t simply counting who said what. Instead, tone is focused on how people feel about a topic, and the broader content outside of basic keyword analysis.

Qualitative analysis is also used in open-ended surveys, looking at the reasons behind people’s concern rather than just the concerns themselves.

While each will give effective information on their own, without qualitative measurement, pure quantitative analysis can lead to number overload. Knowing how much people are talking is good, but knowing how they feel about a topic makes the information much more valuable.

Likewise, knowing people’s, perhaps customers’, concerns is important, but the information is far more useful if you can also look at which problems are getting the most attention.

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Jen Hogan, Sophie Jodouin and Daniel Enright.

Today there are far more “influencers” than ever before. An influencer is simply someone with an audience who can influence the buying behaviour of that audience. The ultimate example is Oprah—when she endorses a product or service, millions flock to it.

As magical as that would be for any business, it’s definitely not easy to be endorsed by Oprah. The good news, however, is influence isn’t just for celebrities anymore. There are hundreds and likely even thousands of influencers blogging and on social networks who can get the word out about your product or service and in a beneficial way. Think of it as an extension of media relations.

However, it’s not exactly like media relations—influencers usually aren’t journalists, and many don’t take nicely to an unsolicited pitch. So how can you reach influencers and get a positive return? Here’s a few pointers:

• Make sure it’s the right influence: Don’t be fooled by numbers—these days people can build up large numbers of Twitter followers, but still not carry a lot of influence. Influence involves a lot more than big numbers. Google the person, find out what others say about him or her and most importantly make sure his/her audience is relevant to what you do!

• Forget pitching, build real relationships: If the influencers you’re targeting are involved in your industry, you should have no problem finding common ground. Invite them for coffee, seek them out at trade shows, stop pitching and take the time to really get to know them first!

• Create a spark: When people talk about products they really love—it’s obvious and that passion is what attracts others to follow suit. So instead of asking an influencer to talk about your product, consider giving him/her access and guidance. Hopefully she/he will fall in love and want to talk about it. Also, look to your existing user base for influencers, if they’re already there and in love, approach them about making the love more public and offer to help.
  

• Be weary of paying for influence: Many do, and I’m not saying it can’t be a successful strategy, but know what you’re getting into first. Last year, the FTC passed a law stating that bloggers are required to disclose payment or other perks received from companies. The reason for this is because readers are less likely to trust an endorsement if money is involved (and probably rightly so). If you do choose to go the pay route, make sure you know the law and won’t get yourself (or your target influencers) in trouble. Also be sure to measure the impact and ROI of paying for influence and make sure it’s worth your investment.

• Measure your success: While it’s important to measure the buzz generated from an influencer’s endorsement, make sure you can trace it back to your bottom line as well. A great way to do this, is to offer a discount to the influencer’s readers and provide a unique discount code. Or simply ask the person to use a custom URL to measure traffic and how it converts.