By inmedia
Here at inmedia, we’re big believers in monitoring the media to not only capture coverage of our clients but to scan for issues upon which our clients might have a worthwhile perspective, to see what competitors are up to and to get a general sense of what the media is covering. A more in-depth monitoring of the media, and a capability that inmedia also offers, is content analysis. This comprehensive monitoring of the media provides quantitative and qualitative data on the coverage that appears in the media and can be useful to organizations that are hoping to manage their reputations through media coverage. It is this methodology that seems to be behind the Cision Corporate Media Reputation Index for Q1 2008, released today.
According to an article at PRWeek online, “Cision’s Corporate Media Reputation Index ranks the largest 100 US companies based on positive and negative reputation-driving attributes in nationwide daily media, as well as business and news magazines.” To find out who the media darlings of the corporate world are this quarter, see the PRWeek piece; for last year’s lists, visit Cision’s web site to view the news release that includes several top ten lists for 2007.
By Linda Forrest
Today on MediaBistro, I was directed to a piece on Portfolio‘s web site that talks about WashingtonPost.com‘s tinkering with its links on several microsites to enable instant pop-ups of additional data on mouse rollover that doesn’t necessitate leaving the site. This is nothing new to those of us familiar with WordPress blogs as the Snap feature currently used on this site and others does the same thing. Some grumblings in the media about the glut of interactive content on online news sites fly in the face of the theory I introduced yesterday in my post about online news and the process being the product. Is this indicative of a widespread dislike for too much dynamic content or a holdover of viewing the new media with old media sensibilities, the very point of the Buzz Machine article that spawned yesterday’s post?
By Linda Forrest
I read an interesting blog post today at Buzz Machine on the changing nature of the media. The post illustrates that news, unlike in the print-only days, has mutated online such that it’s a collaborative endeavour best summed up by the following Marshall McLuhan-esque line from the article, “In print, the process leads to a product. Online, the process is the product.”
The post has a number of charts and diagrams to help illustrate this point and it did get me thinking with the axiom that with online media, the process is the product. Indeed, since I began my career in media relations close to a decade ago, generating media coverage has changed considerably. It used to be that this was a clearly defined process and that once the article had been published, that was that. Now, with the organic nature of the web, a variety of other voices can be added to the piece in the form of comments, opinions, corrections, links, and any other range of inputs.
Well-known technology blogger Om Malik stated a month ago, “I have often said that the real value of blogs lies in the intelligence embedded in the comments.” and perhaps it is fair to extend this to online news as well – the news isn’t in the news itself in the traditional sense, but in the conversations that it starts and the resultant collaborative coverage as a whole. If indeed this is true, the challenge then becomes managing one’s brand and messaging as other inputs raise their voices and add to the conversation.
By Francis Moran
I wrote earlier this week about Sprint’s new all-you-can-eat rate plan, and the excellent black-and-white television commercial I saw announcing it. I wrote that I was particularly impressed that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse’s personal email address flashed on screen at the end of the commercial, a clear invitation, it would seem, to engage with Hesse.
Alas, it was not to be.
I took Hesse up on his implied invitation and dropped him a line. My colleague Danny Sullivan was closer to the truth when he said the email address might as well have been info@sprint.com, not dan@sprint.com, because sure enough, I did get a reply but it was bland pablum from some peon named Cindy.
An all-you-can-eat rate plan from a North American wireless carrier might indeed qualify as a “revolution,” as Hesse claims in his ad. But while I applaud Sprint’s move, it’s a sad commentary that what has been standard fare in most of the rest of the world when it comes to mobile phone rates passes as revolutionary here.
As a signal that Sprint was going to engage with its customers in a new, revolutionary way, though, it was strictly business as usual. Not revolutionary. Not awesome. Not even close.
