The world is an unpredictable place and no amount of planning will get your story to the top if news of other events take precedent.
One of the points covered in AMEC’s (International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) revamped Barcelona Principles 2.0 was this concept of the analysis of the wider media environment at the time of a campaign. Or to put it another way, how your story competed against other stories on the day.
I recently worked with Syndicate Communications on a media evaluation report regarding Shakespeare’s Celebrations, which this year was commemorating 400 years since the Bard’s death. It was apparent the story had got a fairly good share of the coverage over the celebratory weekend at the end of April 2016. But the question was how much in comparison with the other events?
What was needed was a way of tracking what were the top stories in the news. Back in the traditional-only media days you could have said you had a couple of front pages, some inside news articles and a selection of national and regional broadcast news bulletins, and hence success. These days the landscape is more complex with additional sources online accounting for an ever increasing share of the public’s eyes and attention. But with this there are new ways to compare.
A good place to start way with a Google search set to news stories only and conditioned to capture just the weekend coverage. But Google needs a term to search under so try ‘news’ as a general catch-all phrase. This allows you to see what the key stories were during the period and to get an indication of what else was happening and even get a feel for where your campaign sits alongside, particularly if it is on Google’s first page.
I know many people will often go no further than a Google search but I am somewhat suspicious of the ranking as it often seems to permit irrelevant and repeat entries. Better to use it to compile a list of the top five other news stories against which you might compete before taking this information to the next (free) tool.
Twitter is a representative channel for story comparisons if the volumes are above a certain level. Once you have the Twitter hashtags for each of the top five news stories open hashtagify.me. Using this tool it is possible to see a time related graphical comparison of the hashtags entered over the past couple of weeks.
In the case of Shakespeare’s Celebrations it showed a strong comparison with President Obama’s UK visit and the death of the singer Prince. Having undertaken this analysis I would feel I had the data to support the assertion that it was one of the top three UK stories on the weekend of the launch.
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