Turning News Into Knowledge

Last night’s Girl Geek Dinner Ottawa  featured one of the  passionate founders of Girl Develop It Ottawa, Serena Ngai.

After ordering our dinners at The Black Tomato, Serena’s presentation got underway. Her goal in launching the Ottawa chapter of Girl Develop It was to increase the number of women in technology-related careers, and she hopes strong female role models will inspire girls to feel more comfortable pursuing this career path.

At one point in her presentation, Serena asked us to name six women in prominent technology roles.  Even as a group we couldn’t come up with six.

This is exactly why Girl Develop It Ottawa exists.

Serena also highlighted the ever-widening gender gap in technology-related careers, presenting the problem as three-pronged:

• Diversity – women may be uncomfortable being outspoken in a male-dominated environment;
• Advancement – women who have not studied technological fields at a post-secondary institution may feel it would take too much time and effort to learn now;
• Role models – without them, women don’t have anyone to look to for inspiration

The above illustrates the widening gap between U.S. women and their male counterparts in tech-related fields.

Girl Develop It Ottawa hopes to change this by creating a friendly, supportive environment where women can learn new tech skills. At its workshops, Girl Develop It Ottawa provides out-of-classroom instruction (with what they say is a low time commitment) to help women build their skill sets.

The next Girl Develop It workshop, Intro to HTML and CSS, is on Nov. 29 and Dec. 6, from 6:30 – 9:30 p.m., and Serena says she’s also looking for volunteers to help run workshops and share technological skills with Ottawa women.

As the evening wound down, Girl Geek Dinner Ottawa thanked its sponsors:  National Arts Centre, Used Ottawa, and of course, MediaMiser.

For information on the next Girl Geek Dinner, search its hashtag on Twitter… and remember tickets sell out fast!

A big congratulations goes out to Algonquin College second-year PR student Chelsea Murray (@Chels_Murray), who is the winner of the fifth annual Turning News Into Knowledge Award.

This year, students were required to promote the hashtag #workinpr on Twitter, by tweeting interesting and timely information about finding a job in PR, marketing or related fields. Chelsea showed both enthusiasm and professionalism in her approach to the campaign, and also developed a weekly Twitter chat around the #workinpr hashtag.

“I’m so excited to have won, but was also happy to have been given the opportunity to participate! I had a lot of fun doing this and really gained a lot from participating. I’ve made many new contacts within the industry,” says Chelsea.

We would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Turning News Into Knowledge award. The winner was selected based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative criteria including number of followers gained during the campaign, retweet ratio, number of @ mentions, and relevant links, as well as the overall quality of information posted.

Please join us in congratulating Chelsea!

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!

As I was about cast my vote to decide which party should govern the province of Ontario for the next four years, I decided to do a quick assessment of what issue mattered most to Twitter nation.

Hands down the number one issue was the economy, which by chance happened to be what a recent poll by Nanos Research said. That’s not a lot different from the results of similar issues-based tracking we did for the federal election earlier this year.

If so, this doesn’t bode well for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Unlike the ruling Liberals, they didn’t make this issue their No. 1 focus.

Pollster Frank Graves, from EKOS Research, has even gone as far as to predict a Liberal majority. No one would have predicted this at the start of the campaign.

This election seems much different than the federal contest earlier this year, when we said there would be a high level  of unpredictability amongst the electorate. This is mainly because the issues are a lot clearer this time around — especially on the economy. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, they failed to pick up on this.

Most are predicting a slim Liberal majority or minority government and I would have to concur with that assessment.

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.

I read an article in the Ottawa Citizen last Tuesday that struck a nerve. As mom to a little girl who will be celebrating her first birthday this week, I can’t help but feel especially moved by this story.

To recap: last month, Chris and Melannie Eldridge’s baby girl was born with a serious medical condition. Baby Charlotte has spent the days since her birth in the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), and her  parents, who spend all of their time with her at the hospital, have yet to actually hold her in their arms.

About a week ago, when the new parents returned home from CHEO, they found their Hintonburg area apartment burglarized. Anything – and everything – of value was stolen, and the entire home was ransacked.

While most people would be outraged by this – heck, I’m furious – the Eldridges remain optimistic. Melannie  demonstrates absolute poise and grace, and in a beautifully written letter to the community, comments on how touched she is by the outpouring of support from the community. She is quick to shine the spotlight on CHEO, commending the staff for the excellent care her family has received.

Here at MediaMiser we’re also members of the Hintonburg community, and like many others, we felt compelled to contribute in some way. Our donation is just a drop in the bucket, but we want to help the Eldridges not only replace some of the things they have lost but also give them the peace of mind they need in order to deal with what is most important: little Charlotte’s health.

To all the caring people and companies in the community, here’s how you can help:

Donations can be made at any Scotia Bank branch.
The account is titled “Charlotte’s Fund” account number 40006 002 02745 18

Donations by cheque can also be sent care of Cresa Partners Ottawa, 85 Albert St., Suite 502, Ottawa, Ont., K1P 6A4. Mark cheques “Attn.: Clayton Thorkelson for Charlotte’s Fund.”

Read the full article here: Update: Community rallies to help family of Baby Charlotte