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 ...

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, ...

Today we bring you the full Power 50 Blog report. When my colleagues at Context Analytics and I set out to conduct this study, we wanted to provide PR professionals with research that would help them navigate the blogosphere by identifying who the new influencers are, and the nature of their newfound influence. Rather than simply providing another list of “top blogs” based on opinion, we wanted to address three specific questions: 1) Which blogs are driving mainstream media content? 2) When ...