I saw a provocatively titled post on the PRSA wesbite yesterday, called, "Analog vs. Digital: Traditional Media Fights to Remain Relevant". Like everyone else, I've seen a lot of these stories lately and it seems that mainstream media has been pronounced dead. But, based on what I've seen in our own research on traditional and social media, calling mainstream media dead or irrelevant seems very premature and it misrepresents the actual dynamics and information exchange between mainstream and social media. The ...

Forrester and Google announced the results of their study on trends in enterprise web analytics yesterday and the results suggest that companies are starting to realize that analysts, not software, produce useful insights. The study, which surveyed the web analytics decision makers at 198 companies with annual revenues of at least $500 million, found that 60% of respondents believe that web analytics analysts are more valuable than software and that 52% prefer free tools because it allows them to invest ...

The topic of emotional loyalty has been a topic of interest for us for a while, as it gives tantalizing clues to decoding what it is about certain brands that give them a halo effect in media coverage, and how to ascribe value to that intangible asset. This halo gives them the ability to defy gravity by trading at multiples in the stock market not necessarily explained by financial ratios; garner share of voice percentages that are out of proportion ...

Context recently completed an ROI study for a client, tying online media analysis (e.g., sentiment, key message penetration, product mentions, etc.) to their web analytics. I thought I would share a really top-level finding here, showing that many types of earned media have produced higher conversion rates than Google AdWords. Given most marketers’ strong faith in the highly-targeted nature of paid search, I think these results will surprise some people: // // PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... ...

So says a new study examining traditional news and blog coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Researchers at Cornell used computer algorithms to identify, track, and pinpoint the origin of repeated phrases on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. While a small subset of blogs such as Hot Air and Talking Points Memo generated internet widespread memes, most blogs lagged behind mainstream media by about 2.5 hours. With Twitter getting all the credit for breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death, ...