Turning News Into Knowledge

It seems too often those involved in data analysis rely on only science when conducting a study. Which is fair enough, in some cases – science is, after all, a crucial part of any analysis.

As well, it seems there’s usually a heavy emphasis placed on process, methodology and even on the academic or scientific credentials of those conducting the study.

An ice sculpture at the 2012 All-Star Game at Scotiabank Place.

I certainly don’t want to take away from the importance of this. However, the coolest and most valuable analysis comes from determining the nuances of an issue and not just the numbers.

This is what I call “the art of analysis.”

In my opinion, the best results are derived from multiple data sources. When overlaid on top of one another patterns begin to emerge and real insights can be gleaned. Indeed, those looking to conduct the most valuable analysis need to get up close and personal with the information, and even more granular with the data to understand its nuances.

A good example of this was our recent report on the Keystone XL debate in the United States. After doing a deep dive into the data, we discovered that most opponents of the pipeline used the term “tar sands” when describing its proposed energy source. Supporters, on the other hand, typically used the term “oil sands.”

But sometimes even the data doesn’t give up the nuances. Sometimes, you may have to go directly to the source.

For example, we at MediaMiser recently conducted a report on the personal brands of various players at the NHL All-Star Game in Ottawa. Some of us were at the festivities at Scotiabank Place or watched them on CBC, and just being there gave us further insights into the data once we got back to the office.

Understanding those nuanced issues – such as the fact that the jokester Carey Price was a fan favourite, while Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin (who skipped the game) was clearly not – gave the report that extra edge. Having passion in what you are analyzing is extremely important, so much so that sometimes you need to completely immerse yourself in the issue.This helps spur truly great analysis.

There’s of course always the risk of not seeing the forest through the trees without a strong science-based foundation, which is why the science is also extremely important. After all, you don’t want to fall into a trap of being influenced by something coincidental.

But without paying attention to those nuances, you could be missing key insights. It’s the nuances that can help transform analysis simply from something credible, to something that people can’t live without.

MediaMiser, a leading media monitoring and analysis technology company, has acquired Gatineau-based social media and online reputation monitoring firm InfoGlutton Solutions.

The acquisition will provide MediaMiser with its own built-in, automated toning engine able to gauge the sentiment of news stories, tweets, blog posts and other content in multiple languages.

Previously, InfoGlutton’s technology had conducted online reputation management and social media listening specifically for the restaurant and hospitality industry. It was founded in 2009 and incubated via the Talent First Network’s Lead To Win program.

“This is our first acquisition and an extremely important one,” said MediaMiser CEO Brett Serjeantson. “Integrating InfoGlutton’s market-tested sentiment technology with MediaMiser’s own social media monitoring and analysis tools will help the company provide real-time, as-it-happens feedback to both large enterprises and SMEs.”

Mr. Serjeantson added the acquisition will allow MediaMiser to roll out a standalone social media product separate from its flagship software, MediaMiser Enterprise.

InfoGlutton co-founder and CEO David Nadeau, a PhD in computer sciences from the University of Ottawa, joins MediaMiser as Chief Technology Officer.

“We see this opportunity as a chance to grow from a relatively small firm into a large company almost overnight,” said Mr. Nadeau. “Working within MediaMiser gives us the means to achieve our ambitions.”

As November comes and goes, so too do thoughts of Christmas lists, holiday shopping and the much-anticipated Black Friday – an annual event that regularly spawns footage of eager shoppers being trampled underfoot.

With that in mind, we at MediaMiser have undertaken that most pressing of holiday tasks: a list of the most popular toys this year in online news and on Twitter!

After a month of analysis, we’ve found that tablet computers that emphasize learning such as the LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer have dominated this year’s online conversation thus far.

But not only have kids caught tablet fever – perhaps not a surprise, considering the popularity of gadgets with most parents – but they’re also personalizing their tablets, the report shows. The words “pink”, “green”, and “case” are three of the top-mentioned words associated with the LeapPad on  Twitter.

The Leapfrog LeapPad Explorer.

And though all toys in MediaMiser’s top five have some kind of technology component, the report also shows kids will always be kids and that parents can’t go wrong with purely fun toys such as interactive robots and radio-controlled fish.

MediaMiser’s 2011 Hot Toys in Media report – based on the Toys”R”Us® Fabulous 15, billed as “the 15 best toys of the season” – has used MediaMiser patented software to monitor mentions of the retailer’s list of must-have playthings since late October, along with overall mentions of the “#toys” hashtag. The report has monitored both online news sites and Twitter.

We’ll release bi-weekly updates of activity on Twitter and in online news regarding the Fabulous 15, with a full report due just before Christmas.

The most popular Fabulous 15 toys on Twitter, as of 10 p.m. on Nov. 21, were:

1)       LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer Learning Tablet: Tablet computer for kids ($99.99) (4276 mentions)

2)       Air Swimmers: radio-controlled toy fish ($19.99 – $39.99) (1749 mentions)

3)       Fijit Friends: Interactive, robotic toys ($7.99-$47.99) (1369 mentions)

4)       My Keepon: Interactive dancing robot ($34.99) (1026 mentions)

5)       Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure Start Pack for Wii ($49.99) (984 mentions)

The five most Tweeted-about toys of the Toys"R"Us Fabulous 15, including the LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer.

Total Twitter mentions of any of the Fabulous 15 or #toys hashtag.

Online news coverage trends of the top five since late October.

As you may know by now, this year’s MediaMiser Turning News Into Knowledge Award required Algonquin College PR students to promote the hashtag #workinPR on Twitter. And though Chels Murray brought home the hardware this year after taking some great initiative, a number of students showed impressive skills on the platform during the campaign.

Being a traditional and social media analysis company, we thought we’d share some of the activity #workinPR generated – and is still generating – since its inception in early October.

Here’s some brief stats and graphs on #workinPR from Oct. 12 until this week. Enjoy!

Overall Twitter activity for #workinPR

* The two activity spikes on Oct. 27 and Nov. 3 were spurred by student-organized #workinPR tweet chats.

Top mentioned web links

MediaMiser blog: Keep an eye on #workinPR from Algonquin College PR students!  - 13 links

5 things all PR students should know about their choice of career – 8 links

Personality types geared for a career in public relations - 7 links

The PR Closet blog – 7 links

PR vs. advertising: What’s the difference? – 5 links

PR internships: 3 tips for finding the right fit – 5 links

Top handles by influence (retweet ratio)

Top handles by followers

Top handles by number of postings

It’s not often OC Transpo makes the national media. But when it does, you can count on it being in very much a spectacular fashion.

That was certainly the case this week, when - as during 2009′s seven-week bus strike in Ottawa - the city’s transportation service made Canada-wide headlines once again. The culprit this time wasn’t picket lines, but rather a now-infamous and seriously ticked-off bus operator.

The incident, posted to YouTube Nov. 3, surfaced in public chatter over the weekend. It quickly went viral (of course), garnering more than 116,000 hits by this morning.

By Monday, both traditional media and Twitter commentators were heaping large slices of scorn onto to the organization. And by scorn, we mean it: after toning a random sampling of #OCTranspo tweets from the past few days, 54 per cent were negative and 38 per cent were neutral. Only eight per cent of tweets were positive or supportive of OC Transpo.

Worse, reports on Tuesday indicated a second OC Transpo video was making the rounds, this time showing a driver on a cell phone.

Here’s who led the conversation so far both in the traditional media and on Twitter (all data is as of 11 a.m. eastern time on Tuesday, Nov. 8), gleaned via MediaMiser’s software solution:

 Media trends

After the initial posting of the YouTube video on Nov. 3, #OCTranspo Twitter activity didn’t begin its acceleration until late on Nov. 5 and into Sunday.

The traditional media, while it did cover the story on Sunday, didn’t devote significant space to it until Monday the 7th.

Please note coverage and tweet levels shown in this chart until are only until 11 a.m. on Nov. 8.

Twitter

The top influencers by retweet ratio (the number of retweets each user garners, compared to number of original tweets) were:

1) @StefankeyesCTV (retweet ratio of 14)

2) @Ottguy (retweet ratio of 7.5)

3) @stuntmanstu (retweet ratio of 6.33)

4) @crimegarden (retweet ratio of 5)

5) @Ottawasuncom (retweet ratio of 4.83)

Four of the top five most retweeted users were either journalists, media outlets or former journalists, and six of the top seven (including @CTVNews and @globeandmail, which finished sixth and seventh, respectively).

The top tweeters by number of followers and volume were as follows:

Traditional media (print, online, television, radio)

Danielle Bell of Sun Media had at least 36 stories published on the incident in publications such as the Ottawa Sun, Sudbury Star, Owen Sound Sun Times, Niagara Falls Review and Sarnia Observer.

Ms. Bell and her colleagues at Sun Media dominated print and online coverage, with five of the top six authors from the outlet (Scott Taylor, Jon Willing, Kelly Roche and Errol McGihon).

Mr. McGihon is a photographer with Sun Media and has been attributed a byline for this study, thanks to his standalone photo that ran in a series of Sun-owned papers.

CTV and Sun Media (especially the Ottawa Sun) picked up on the story in a big way over the past couple of days, with Ottawa’s CTV Two (formerly A Channel) and CTV Ottawa leading the broadcast pack.

CBC also ran with the story, with three of the top ten publications including CBC News Network and CBC Ottawa.

Postmedia publications didn’t seem to cover the story with the intensity of other major outlets, although the Ottawa Citizen did crack the top ten.

Talk radio station CFRA finished in 11th, just out of the top ten publications.

Coverage between outlet types was mixed, with news websites and daily newspapers each picking up at least 30 per cent of coverage each.

Television held its own at just under 30 per cent, while radio garnered just a shade under nine per cent of all coverage.

When on Aug. 15, 2011 Althia Raj broke the story of the re-branding of Canada’s navy and air force to include the ‘Royal’ moniker, she most likely knew it would stir a hornets’ nest of debate.

But it would have been difficult for even the Huffington Post Canada’s Ottawa bureau chief to realize just how passionate the arguments would fly from either side. Some – notably, many with past or current links to Canada’s military – embraced it as a return to tradition.

Private Chris Cole, Task Force Libeccio Aviation Technician taxis a CP-140 Aurora aircraft after landing from a functioning flight in Sigonella, Italy on 29 September 2011.

Others, such as preeminent Canadian historian Jack Granatstein, soundly rejected it as “abject colonialism.”

Whatever your opinions on what’s now the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Canadian Navy, you’ll no doubt be intrigued by some of our findings in MediaMiser’s latest report: “A royal debate: The rebranding of Canada’s military.”

For instance, how well did the rebranding go over with print and online media?

Pretty darn well, all told – out of the hundreds of media stories evaluated in the report, 91.7 per cent were either positive or neutral towards the rebranding (just 8.1 per cent of stories were negative). The media outlets that seemed to run the most favourable coverage of the rebranding were the Ottawa Citizen, Kingston Whig-Standard and Victoria Times Colonist.

Opinions of the name change were favourable on Twitter, as well, with just a bit more than 91 per cent of tweets either positive or neutral (eight per cent of tweets were negative).

Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) was the most positive Twitter user in the debate, with 76.9 per cent of his 13 related tweets  appearing to favour the name change. He also had one of the highest volumes of related tweets, as well as one of the highest retweet ratios of any user.

But the most popular tweet of the entire study? Look no further than that of the Queen of England’s spoof Twitter account, @Queen_UK, whose tweet “Have had “Royal” put back into the name of the Canadian Air Force and Navy, mainly to annoy the French” was retweeted 845 times in a day and a half.

Click here for the report.

So, can elephants really tweet?

If this morning’s presentation by IBM Social Business Strategist Delaney Turner means anything, they certainly can – as well as inspiring others to do the same.

Mr. Turner dropped by this morning’s Social Media Breakfast – the 25th event of the series! – at the GCTC‘s Irving Greenberg Memorial Theatre to explain Big Blue’s approach to social media (although this probably isn’t news to you at this point, considering the Twitter explosion that went off at around the same time. But still).

According to organizers, around 110 people also showed up to hear Mr. Delaney speak. His preso was all about IBM’s approach to spreading the good word via social media, which most of the attendees promptly did by tweeting and retweeting tidbits of  IBM-inspired information far and wide. Not a bad strategy, eh?

Here’s a peek at what people were saying about this morning’s presentation:

@GCTCLive (Great Cdn Theatre Co.)

Gotta love it when the #SMBOttawa people join us. You’ll never see more tweets per second in the building.

@Jason_Faber (Jason Faber)

About 110 people at #SMBottawa this morning. I have no idea how Simon and Rob get us here so early. Must be the coffee and bacon muffins.

@meghanmurray (Meg Murray)

#smbottawa no campaign or event goes out the door that don’t have a huge social media component. #IBM

@LeighMorris (Leigh Morris)

#SMBOttawa this is an interesting presentation, but could be much more effective with cleaner, less distracting slides.

@VProcunier (Victoria Procunier)

Make sure your Google+ profile is up to date as Google searches it’s own content first. #smbottawa

@TechAlly (Alexandra Reid)

Rather than restrict access to social media, treat people like adults and trust they’re going to use it right for business @DTurnerBlogs

@spydergrrl (Tanya Snook)

IBM expert profiles raise visibility of their experts like a #socialmediaequivalent of a speaker’s bureau #smbottawa

@amyleehusser (Amy Husser)

Revamping IBM’s website for SEO took them from search ranking of 19 to 2, says @DTurnerBlogs #SMBOttawa

@VProcunier (Victoria Procunier)

IBM on negative feedback. Select what they respond to. They continuously monitor what is being said #smbottawa

@krusk (Kelly Rusk)

“A social business embraces networks of people to create business value” @DTurnerBlogs #smbottawa

And there you have it! These were just some of the great Tweets we rounded up via the MediaMiser system this morning.

To follow or join the rest of the discussion, check out hashtag #SMBOttawa on Twitter and have your say.

Last Thursday I attended Mobile Marketing: It’s still not too late to be early, with Google Canada’s Agency Lead Nectar Economakis taking us through trends and new technologies in the rapidly-developing world of mobile.

The event, held at the Hard Rock Cafe in the ByWard Market, was hosted by WebFuel with McGill Buckley and SEMPO Ottawa.

Mr. Economakis pointed out just how connected people are to their mobile devices. Since they’re always with us, many of us constantly rely on them for everyday tasks like finding directions, price-matching or simply killing time. A lot of time. According to Mr. Economakis, the equivalent of around 125 years of Angry Birds are played on mobile devices each day.

Mobile technology is moving extremely fast, Mr. Economakis said, adding that mobile users will soon exceed desktop users. Mr Economakis said those who utilize mobile technology already exceed desktop users at several points throughout a typical day, as well as on many holidays.

When it comes to marketing our clients, our brands and ourselves, Mr. Economakis said the focus should be on mobile first.  Since mobile is always on, brands are constantly able to connect with customers.

Mr. Economakis also shared some projects going on at Google, and one of my favourites was Google Translate. It connects people around the world by removing language barriers, and works with many languages to save valuable minutes when timely communication is essential. Mr. Economakis shared how it was used during the recent, devastating earthquake in Haiti to spread updates quickly and efficiently across the globe.

While Google Translate is still a work in progress, it’s amazing to see the difference it has already made.

Mr. Economakis stressed the importance of understanding the role of mobile in our lives, to properly know how to market to our target audiences. Whether creating websites designed for mobile viewing, mobile advertisements, or new apps, it’s important to remember that anything mobile should entertain us, help us stay informed, and perhaps most importantly allow us to interact and transact.

For this year’s Turning News Into Knowledge Award – an annual bursary provided by MediaMiser to an Algonquin College PR student – we’ve asked the college’s second-year PR class to design and execute a successful Twitter promotional campaign, in preparation for what they’ll encounter upon graduation from the program.

Students are required to promote the hashtag #workinpr, and to be considered Tweets must contain usable, interesting and timely information about finding a job in PR, marketing or related fields.

Tweets can either contain information on their own, or can link to information sources such as news stories, blog posts, job postings and other interesting content. At the end of October, a panel of MediaMiser employees will select a winner based on qualitative and quantitative criteria, including retweet ratio, number of @ mentions and overall quality of relevant links provided.

The winner will be awarded a cheque for $1,000, a summary of their work published on MediaMiser’s corporate blog, their accomplishment featured in a news release, a highlight for their résumé and an opportunity to meet key people from MediaMiser.

The campaign kicked off at 8:00 A.M. on October 13th, and will run until 5:00 P.M. on Oct. 31.

Best of luck to all participating students, and we can’t wait to see your creativity at work! Keep an eye on the #workinpr hashtag during the remainder of October for some great content!

Ever wonder just how much a front page story actually does for your bottom line?

Most likely a great deal, according to a recent MediaMiser report that studies potential correlations between media coverage and sales outcomes.

According to the report – featuring an analysis of Toyota Motor Corp.’s U.S. media coverage from January to May of 2011 – the overall number of Toyota-related articles and media mentions showed a direct correlation with that company’s sales figures.

As media mentions of Toyota climbed, sales figures did the same. And as media mentions dropped – well, you get the idea.

It’s a conclusion MediaMiser president Chris Morrison says many firms would be wise to heed.

“This study clearly shows a connection between media coverage and a company’s sales figures,” says Mr. Morrison. “It’s also an excellent indicator of why all organizations need a coherent media engagement strategy, one that includes measurement and assessments of media coverage at regular intervals.”

The report also explores how media coverage on different topics related to Toyota – topics such as recalls and production capacity – changed over time, as well as the relationship between the tone of media coverage and sales figures.

MediaMiser, a leading traditional and social media monitoring and analysis firm, is based in Ottawa and was founded in 2003.