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Measuring Buzz

Math and… better math on the State of the Union

by Scott McAndrew on January 30, 2008

Following Monday’s State of the Union Address, both Time Magazine and Slate posted an analysis of its content on their site.  Time bunted; Slate swung for the fences.

Time’s visualization went with a view which scaled the size of the words in proportion to their frequency.  Think tag cloud.  The basic visualization technique was posted under the heading “State of the Union by the Numbers”.  Yawn.

Time Magazine’s Visualization of the State of the Union Address

With a simple explanation of how the technique works, a teenager could whip this out with a steno pad and a pencil.  The hardest part would be making it through the whole speech.  Reporting.  Not analysis.

Slate Magazine took a very different approach.  And they knew their results were in a different neighborhood than what Time and others were up to.  Slate’s work-up relied on the slick natural-language processing algorithms baked into Crawdad Technologies’ software.  A bit different than a simple counting exercise.  An excerpt from the Slate article (A Computer Reads the State of the Union):

By natural-language-processing standards, simply counting the frequency of words is unthinkably primitive. As computers get better at understanding the structure of sentences—think about that corrugated green line under a sentence in Microsoft Word reminding you to avoid the passive voice—they can do a much more thorough job reading political speeches and offering their insights.

Needless to say, Slate’s experiment is just a bit more interesting.  Looking at not only last night’s State of the Union, but all of Bush’s Presidential addresses, the software identified “four distinct voices” during his time in the White House:

  1. “Domestic Bush” – 2001
  2. “Security Bush” – 2002, 2003
  3. “Visionary Bush” – 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
  4. “Legacy Bush” – 2008

The table below provides further insight.

Computer Linguistic Analysis of Bush’s Addresses

For another example of their technology in action, visit the Wonkosphere, currently tracking buzz online surrounding the 2008 Presidential race.  Learn more about Crawdad Technologies and their software at their web site, crawdadtech.com.

What does this have to do with online marketing?  Good natural-language processing technology is a Swiss Army knife for measuring buzz—and its tone—online.  Before stumbling across Crawdad I had planned to post about a few companies I’ve been interested in whose offerings cater to online marketers.  As with Crawdad’s Wonkosphere, these solutions focus on monitoring social media outlets.  A few of those companies: Nielsen (BuzzMetrics), Radian6 and Relevant Noise.

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Online reputation management and the power of consumer opinion

by Scott McAndrew on January 27, 2008

Marketers spend great amounts of time and large sums of money ensuring their brand is perceived in the correct light.  Surprisingly, few practice any type of reputation management online.

If you aren’t familiar with it, online reputation management involves being aware of, and participating in, the perception of one’s brand online.  Three factors which have propelled online reputation management to the forefront of digital marketers’ minds:

  1. The power of search engines as an efficient way to research companies, their products and services
  2. Search engine’s affinity for user generated content, and
  3. The increasing amount of confidence consumers pus on the opinion voiced by other consumers, whether they know them or not.

The power of consumer opinion

While the first two points above are largely accepted, the third—the amount of confidence consumer put in the opinion of other consumers online—is both powerful and highly relevant.  An October 2007 Nielsen survey (Trust in Advertising – a global Nielsen consumer report) concludes that “consumers around the world still place their highest levels of trust in other consumers.”  Included in the studies breadth of platforms and sources were:

  • Ads before movies
  • Brand Sponsorship
  • Brand websites
  • Consumer options posted online
  • Email [the consumer] signed up for
  • Magazines
  • Newspapers
  • Online banner ads
  • Radio
  • Recommendations from consumers
  • Search engine ads
  • Text ads on mobile phones
  • TV

“Recommendations from consumers” topped the survey with 78% of respondents indicating “they trusted – either completely or somewhat – the recommendation of other consumers.”  How all platforms and sources fared can be seen in the chart below.

Nielsen Trust in Advertising Chart

Clearly monitoring how your brand is being perceived (and participating in that perception) is valuable to any organization. Depending on your need, online reputation management can be handled in house or a digital marketing firm can be engaged.

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