Turning News Into Knowledge

With less than a week before the holidays officially begin, the Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure video game has claimed top spot on MediaMiser’s hot toys on Twitter list for 2011!

Since November, we’ve been tracking the popularity of items of the ToysRUs Fab 15 holiday gift guide. The list includes items like the Leapfrog LeapPad Explorer learning tablet, Let’s Rock Elmo, Air Swimmers and other popular items.

And while the LeapPad Explorer jumped out to an early lead back in November, it has since sunk to second place as buzz surrounding the Skylanders game works itself into a fever pitch.

It’s a trend that made the Ottawa Citizen‘s Vito Pilieci take notice – see his article on the ongoing study here.

There are still a few days before the holidays begin, however, and it’s anyone’s guess which product could eventually come out on  top.

Here’s a breakdown on the popularity of the top eight items on ToysRUs’s Fab 15 on Twitter, as of Dec. 19:

Total tweets (from Dec. 1-19 overall)

Tweets over time (overall)

We’ve also taken the opportunity to track items Future Shop’s Must-Haves gift guide on Twitter, but in this case we’ve looked at tweets only sent from Canadian IP addresses.

As the chart below shows, entertainment and video game-related products, led by the PlayStation 3 but followed up by the Nintendo 3DS and Apple TV, have thus far been the most popular products (with the PS3 out to a very healthy lead indeed – however as the chart shows, its traction has been slipping recently).

Overall, we’ve found that a relatively large amount of overall tweets have come from what appear to be consumers, while a healthy chunk has also come from retailers pushing their products. However, where Canadian tweets are concerned, a far higher proportion seem to have come from consumers.

Stay tuned for the full report, coming out after the holidays!

Tech tweets over time (Canada only)

As the holidays approach, the season of fundraising campaigns has also gone full-swing. But I often ask myself: what they did before social media? How does a simple shout out via Twitter impact a campaign, and how further can we reach our targeted audience through these new mediums?

It’s obvious that the recent #Movember campaign for prostate cancer research and awareness wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without social media. People tweet pictures of their moustaches, often with an attached link to donate. Would that be as efficient if just sent through an e-mail? Not likely – after all, e-mail can only target specific people while Twitter’s reach is remarkable in this regard. Plus, adding a hashtag to your message makes it searchable for anyone.

This past year, Canada alone raised $36.6 million for Movember, surpassing last year’s total of $22.3 million. Granted, last year social media was available and active. But in 2011 more people than ever are jumping on the social media bandwagon, with the understanding that you need to be part of the conversation to stay informed.

In a recent article from the Globe and Mail Mia Pearson asked Adam Garone, Movember CEO and co-founder, how the movement grew so fast. Interestingly enough, he said “Social media has fundamentally changed the way brands are managed. It is a two-way communication now and all about creating brand ambassadors.”

Social media has become a platform for people to share successes, and for others to either partake or donate. The one person that comes to mind right now is Nick Charney, who created a Movember blog entitled “MoCharney MoProblems”. Every day he posted a picture of himself aside his father, showing of their ‘staches. Brilliant! Talk about utilizing social media.

So, is fundraising ultimately about being social or is being social about fundraising? I think it all depends about your ultimate goal, but in the end, it’s always best to be social.

We’re giving away some great prizes throughout the month of December!

As a spinoff on the classic 12 days of Christmas theme, we’re giving away Kiva gift certificates, in support of global entrepreneurship. This means that you get to choose which initiatives to support. When the fund you’ve chosen is repaid, you get to gift it all over again. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving!

Here’s how it works: the MediaMiser Christmas tree will go up on our blog 12 days before Christmas. Each day there will be a new present for you to unwrap! Just click on an open gift to enter the draw. On Dec. 23 the MediaMiser elves will randomly select a winner, who will receive a $25 gift certificate to Kiva! Plus, at the end of December, all contestants will be entered in a draw to receive a $50 gift certificate to Kiva!

Prizes will be drawn randomly among all the contestants who entered. All contestants will be entered in the grand prize draw, winner to be announced on Jan. 3, 2012. We know you’re excited, but there’s a limit of one entry per person, per day.

Check out the MediaMiser Christmas tree below, and click on an open gift to enter the draw!

Update Jan. 3, 2012:

And the two lucky winners of our 12 days of Christmas draws were:

Heidi Richardson – $25 Kiva gift card

Nancy Lalonde – $50 Kiva gift card

Thanks to everyone who entered, and be sure to check out www.kiva.org to learn more about supporting global entrepreneurship in 2012!

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

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.