Using Newsdesk to Monitor Olympic Coverage: Wrap Up

August 13, 2012 Chad Bolender Leave a Comment

The 2012 London Olympic Games have come to a close and so has this blog series, looking at which of the Top 11 Corporate Sponsors received the most news coverage.

Newsdesk played the leading role in our ability to quickly find and understand the news coverage for each of these sponsors. It is clear from our data that Visa (Gold), McDonald’s (Silver), and Coca-Cola (Bronze) were the winners in terms of highest volume of news mentions.

The coverage was not always positive. Each day there was backlash against the International Olympic Committee for allowing the sponsors to dictate the food, payment methods, and even logos that appeared on clothing worn by spectators and athletes at the Olympic Games.

It wasn’t all negative, though. Visa’s series of real-time congratulatory commercials for medalists were quite popular. Also, several athletes had their victory celebrations at McDonald’s after winning their medals, which was widely covered.

The primary goal of this blog series was to quickly find and report relevant data . To this end Newsdesk performed very well.

We built searches beforehand for each top sponsor and included variations on their brand names (e.g. Coca-Cola and Coke). The search results automatically fed into dynamic charts, which helped us visualize the leaders for the previous day. Creating these searches took a little time and thought up-front, but after that it was “set it and forget it”.

Each day we used our charts to identify the day’s leaders. Then we scanned the headlines to see which topics were driving coverage. This took us just a minute or two. From there, it was simple to see trends and find single articles that typified them.

We wrote the blog posts and were done. All-in-all, it was a very quick process and easily repeatable every day.

This is something you could do for your own blog. Tell us in the comments if you would like someone to show you how.

Filed under: Newsdesk,Olympic News

Tags: Newsdesk, olympics, top olympic sponsors