Redefining importance for PR at a story level rather than a source level

At Davos this year, Adrian Monck, the Head of Communication and Media of the World Economic Forum, asked us how to decipher which of their news stories were the most important. “We all know FT, WSJ and Mashable are important, but so far no one could answer the question, what was the most important story about us?”

In posing this question, our client was highlighting the difference between the significance of a source or of an author versus the significance of a story.

At Fisheye Analytics, we have always provided our clients with the most influential mainstream media sources or bloggers but doing it on a story level was something new to us (I guess to you too). Today, however, we are excited to announce that Fisheye Analytics has overcome this challenge! - We know now not only which story is the most important but also how important is each story in relation to others within the same context.

Sharing on social media

To determine the volume of interest and reactions a particular news story has incited, we look to social media for answers. People share news over Twitter and Facebook; they blog about it; they “like” it and they “dig”it. By tapping into these social media sharing channels and counting the number of times it is Liked, Retweeted etc, we are able to retrieve the reach of a news link. Its ‘Shared’ profile, so to speak.

Counting clicks - Beyond just sharing

A news article/blog post that is the most shared need not necessarily be the most read article. At present, only the webmaster of the news website can tell you how many clicks a particular article received. Because this information is not published, our engineers had to look into Bit.ly, which acts as a middleman for billions of links clicked, as well as Facebook and other such networks and, after ensuring statistical significance, they were able to retrieve the most clicked news articles - not just the most shared ones - for any particular brand, topic or personality.

Stories – Not just an individual article

Sometimes, it’s not just a single article which brand managers are interested in, but rather a story which might have been published in multiple articles in various publications. By using ‘story grouping’ and plagiarism detection techniques, we are also able to group them together and determine importance on a story level and not just on at the level of the individual article.

Mix all the above techniques and boom! What we have created is the latest tool for PR that has never been heard of before! Initial feedback from clients and agencies has been remarkable.

Please post your comments or questions and I will be happy to answer them. With constant innovation, Fisheye Analytics always aims to be a thought leader in media monitoring and analytics and this is yet another milestone.

If you are interested in getting access to a beta version of our media monitoring enhanced with story-level importance, please contact us at innovation@fisheyeanalytics.com.

Ashwin Reddy Gayam

President, Technology

The BP Oil Spill and public perception: Putting a value on the media disaster

'The Gulf of Mexico disaster' is only one of many emotive names given to the BP Oil Spill. This incident and the on-going media commentary on it have had a major impact on the principals - the Gulf Coast States, the Obama administration and most of all, BP itself - in profound and unanticipated ways.

According to sources, the eventual bill for this major mistake, including the clean-up, legal and liability payments, could go into the tens of billions. Furthermore, the damage to BP's reputation could be deep and long-lasting.

Fisheye Analytics calculated the negative impact on the public perception of BP by tracking all articles in mainstream news and social media starting on 20 May, the day after Lousiana governor Bobby Jindal announced that the oil had seeped inland. The reputation damage is worth at least US$73 million. In a joint study with RVInetworks and Yovia, Fisheye Analytics supplied the analysis and measurements to help concretize the media impact of this massive spill on BP's brand. The study shows how, with a new media listening and crisis management strategy, BP could have mitigated the deluge of angry, sensationalistic commentary and set up transparent, effective information-transfer channels between itself, the press and the public.

Download the full case study for free here.

Fisheye Analytics calculates the online marketing value of top athletes at the Winter Olympics

Key Findings:
· Lindsey Vonn of the US is by far the most valuable brand online generating nearly $65 million of online coverage during Vancouver 2010
· US athletes dominated in terms of online popularity, taking the top 5 places
· German skier Maria Riesch is the most valuable non-US athlete, reaching an average daily audience of 150 million and generating $23 million in online coverage

Who’s the most valuable Winter Olympics medal winner for Advertisers?
For Winter Olympic gold medal winners such as Lindsey Vonn, Shaun White and Bode Miller, now is the perfect time to cash in on their newfound success through sponsorship deals. But first, marketers need to figure out how valuable these athletes are in terms of their popularity. To help them do that, Fisheye Analytics has calculated the amount of worldwide online news and social media coverage received by all the gold medal winners between February 12th and March 1st 2010. We then quantified this coverage in terms of its average unique daily online audience reached and the total marketing value of that audience.

Marketing value is the value of the publicity generated by the athlete. In other words, that is the amount of advertising dollars you would have to spend to generate the same level of publicity for your brand name. It is also a good proxy for the benefit to your brand from being endorsed by the athlete. Unlike traditional Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) however, Fisheye has included a number of new factors such as sentiment, editorial credibility of the source, overlap of media audiences and repeated mentions in a single source on the same day. The top 10 athletes by marketing value generated are listed below:

Marketers will also be judging the image of each athlete. Lindsey Vonn’s image as a sex symbol, for example, has helped boost coverage of her online. 13.5% of news articles and social media during this period mentioned either her sex appeal or her appearance in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, which was published just before the Vancouver games.

What’s equally important is the media mix and the type of audience reached by each athlete. Lindsey Vonn gets just 12% of her total coverage from blogs and twitter, while Snowboarder Shaun White who is extremely popular among a younger demographic gets nearly a quarter of all his coverage from blogs and twitter.

About Fisheye Analytics: Fisheye Analytics is a media monitoring and analysis service providing vital information to organisations and businesses on their public profile in the areas of brand management, communications, product development and customer care. Our full offering includes not only online media but traditional, print and television media. Fisheye’s clients include the World Economic Forum, Axa Insurance and IMD business school. We are based both in Paris, France and Singapore.
You can find more information about us at http://www.fisheyeanalytics.com/. For further research or questions about our findings, please contact Deepanshu Bagchee +33643826595 or deepanshu.bagchee@fisheyeanalytics.com

1 Unique daily audience measures the unique viewers reached through online news and includes survey data for 20,000 news sources worldwide.
2 Total marketing value includes cumulative publicity value generated through online news as well as blogs and twitter during the period February 12th to March 1st 2010. The value is calculated using a proprietary algorithm, which includes unique daily audience, online advertising rates, sentiment of the article and credibility of the source. It corrects for a number of factors including the overlap of media sources and repeated mentions from a single source on the same day, such as article updates.