Filed under: market intelligence
A topic that has been growing in popularity is “crypto-currencies” with the most common of these being Bitcoin. Bitcoins are a digital currency that are bought on an exchange and then used to anonymously buy and sell goods online. If you haven’t heard of them, check out this video.
Bitcoin’s pricing has proven to be very volatile. For example, on April 10th the exchange rate of one Bitcoin dropped from $230 to $165. With a 28% plunge in just one day, wouldn’t it be useful to see if there are any indicators of whether Bitcoin will rise or fall over the next days? To get some insight, we pulled data from our media monitoring product, Newsdesk, into Excel and matched it up against historical data for Bitcoin’s exchange rates.
Unlike gold or a publically traded stock, Bitcoin’s pricing is not tied to any physical assets so it is vulnerable to fluctuations not normally seen in stocks.
Digging deeper with Newsdesk, we wanted to see how much the media’s hype about Bitcoins seemed to impact its price. As the graph below shows, trading volume seemed to lag after media mentions. This makes sense since a lot of the people using Bitcoins aren’t necessarily professional traders, so there is a disconnect between the information available and the market’s pricing; often a full day lag from media mentions to a spike in volume.
As shown here, simply using media mentions to determine the increase or decrease in Bitcoin’s exchange rate is an imperfect model.
As we move forward in an increasingly digital world, it will be interesting to see what role Bitcoins continue to play; whether they will be considered an investment or simply someplace to flee when traditional currencies have problems. Until then, if you’re a Newsdesk user and want to follow Bitcoins, or to delve deeper into your company’s online mentions, here is a simple way to download an analytics feed:
- Click the Search Tab
- Click New Search
- Select News only
- Search term: bitcoin*(* is a wildcard that searches for bitcoin, bitcoins, etc)
- Default search settings: English only, 60 days, all languages
- Save
- Click Analytics Tab
- Line graph, 60 Days by Day
- Drag Bitcoin feed over, Click “View Analytics”
- Download -> Feed Statistics (Excel)
For the examples in this post, we copied the Bitcoin trading data from here and put it together with the exported Newsdesk coverage in Excel. Excel allows us to easily dig through both sets of data to identify any hidden trends we wouldn’t see otherwise.
Can you think of any topics you’d like us to mine for in Newsdesk?
May 14, 2013
In recent conversations with our clients, we’ve been hearing about the increased need for Competitive Analysis. Clients are telling us that it’s not enough to get a data stream from various media. They’re also looking for knowledge to help them and others make informed choices about the direction of products, services, marketing, and even staffing.
Whereas Media Monitoring is receiving a stream of relevant data, Competitive Analysis goes a step beyond that; it’s narrowing down that data until only useful and actionable information remains. It is understanding your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of the competition. It’s also about acting on that knowledge, which means sharing it with the right people.
Data: The Stuff Analysis Is Made of
So where can you glean the kind of information you need about competitors? Virtually everywhere!
Start by making sure you have online media covered. Corporate blogs and press release sites are a good beginning, but it’s not just official communications that matter. There are online news outlets, user blogs, Twitter, forums, social networks, YouTube, and more every day.
Even if all these areas are being monitored and analyzed, that still leaves the legacy media to think about. Are your competitors running commercials or getting radio or television buzz? Don’t forget that newspapers don’t always put everything online.
Sure, it can be information overload, but with the right tools, it is easily managed. Look for tools that will help you organize and analyze all media in a single location. Skip the headaches that come with juggling multiple tools for the various sites you want to monitor. They’re simply not worth the time or effort.
Analysis: Finding Meaning
Getting your hands on competitive information is just the start. Competitive Analysis is about being proactive in understanding what customers want and tailoring your message to them. It is about identifying trends in order to prepare for them ahead of time.
Tools for analyzing competitors should be flexible and thorough in the questions they answer including:
- Where are competitors driving conversations?
- How are they faring financially?
- What social media are they using?
- What new products or services are being launched?
- What buzz is being generated around them?
Data like this helps you chart the competitive landscape. Now you will need to use that information to plot your course. For example:
Perhaps you have identified industry experts and will engage them to capitalize on and appeal to their existing audience. Where are people talking? Maybe Twitter or LinkedIn is where you should be making a presence. Or, there may be neglected pockets of potential users that you can engage.
If a competitor does something to receive bad press, now is the time to scoop up those disgruntled clients. Are your own past decisions causing negative ripples? Maybe some damage control is in order.
Distribution: Fuel for Action
Once actionable information has been gleaned, it’s time for sharing and applying it.That means getting it into the hands of the right people so it can be used effectively. Find out how others want to receive information and accommodate their preferences. The most common media for distribution are:
- Company intranets/portals
- Email
- Spreadsheets
- Feed Readers
Distilling and acting on competitive knowledge is helping our clients stand out, build stronger customer relationships, and make more money. Whether you are looking to enter new markets, solidify existing business, or update your business plan, competitive analysis can work for you, too.
December 12, 2012
By Zachary Enos, Marketing Catalyst, 9Lenses
Sometimes business should ignore Mother Nature. Take “safety in numbers,” for instance. It’s usually a great survival strategy, but in business it becomes a liability. The more employees, customers, and exposure you have, the more opportunities your firm has, quite frankly, to fail. In today’s world, more people manage your brand than the “brand manager.”
The stakes are high. The social era equips every customer, employee, reporter, and media outlet with lethal weapons of brand destruction. Any cell-pic, twitter feed, or comment can bumble its way into the news. We’ve seen Twitter and YouTube debacles mar brands like Domino’s Pizza overnight.
In an effort to secure the castle, most brand managers focus exclusively on external threats. External reputation matters, but don’t forget that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Investment in brand loyalty amongst employees raises up more defenders of the castle, whilst mitigating internal risks.
9Lenses teamed up with Moreover Technologies to bring you these six tips to balance your internal and external reputation. Moreover Technologies brings home the bacon by monitoring news and media channels for some of the world’s biggest brands, while 9Lenses deploys a social platform that collects employee sentiment and thoughts across every part of a business.
I. “Our House:” Nurturing Your Internal Rep.
1) Listen to Your People
Quality people drive quality organizations. If you want to turn top employees into raving fans, you’ve got to help them fall in love with your company. How? It’s not that complicated: in fact, you foster company fans in the same way you’d grow a friendship. Friendships deepen when both parties really listen and hear one another.
You can do the same thing in every part of your company. Find a way to ask all of your people to comment on your business’s every process, system, and goal. You want to find out how your stakeholders perceive your organization’s health. Your people want to contribute! They want to be heard. Reward those who contribute at the highest level because high participation rates increase the quality of the resulting data.
2) Track Perceptions
Listening is only the first step. You must then act on the insights offered. Tell your people “we heard you, and seek to solve the problems you identified.” Next, create implementation teams and workflows to promote the best ideas offered. Reengage those teams over time to drive accountability, feedback, and execution.
Great employees can spot disingenuous engagement efforts a mile away, so make sure you’re genuine. If they’re given the opportunity to speak and your company doesn’t respond, you can kiss your internal fan base good-bye.
3) Empower Don’t Manage
Imagine for a moment, two coaches. The first, feels like he works hard but his team slacks off. They just won’t follow “the plan,” so he compensates by barking orders and refuses to hear any thoughts but his own. Does he drive performance? In a Machiavellian sense, sure. But in a world where his office tirades can be splattered all over your brand, his approach is a major liability.
The second coach is quite the opposite. “I hired great people, “ she reasons, “they ought to know how I can optimize their performance.” She combines her people’s feedback with her experience to create relevant KPIs. She distributes resources to empower not control, reduces permission seeking, and rewards employees who give back. She rocks, and people love working for her. Her employees become little brand evangelists who use their circles of influence to spot and mitigate brand assaults before they spread.
II. “Outside the Gates:” Building a Siege Proof Exterior Rep.
4) Build Trust
You’re halfway there! Your house is in order. Now it’s time to look outside into the mysterious beyond. This is a customer-centric world. Invest significant time, energy, and resources into discovering precisely who your customer is and what makes them tick.
Customers trust those who help them understand and solve their problems. Be that source of educational content on your chosen topic of expertise. Blog where they read and publish in their newspapers. When someone offers positive feedback, leverage it to gain the trust in his or her circle of influence.
5) Target Niche Markets
As a marketer, I can tell you that great messages are tight. I can beat industry standard “click through” and “open rates” every time if the offering is tightly linked to my prospects personalities, pain-points, and needs. If you hit the nail on the head, adoption becomes viral and is rapidly passed from one relevant prospect to another, effortlessly.
A Belgium based company called Engagor helps clients like Volvo Group, McDonalds, Ikea, and the European Parliament target their brands toward niche clients by managing their brands online. Engagor partnered with Moreover to give clients confidence that websites of every size in every country were being thoroughly tracked, so Engagor clients could micro-sell their brands to key niches. Using technology like Moreover’s Newsdesk to track brand impressions in micro-markets is key to braking into niches.
6) 360 Your Rep
Even a king can fall to a stray arrow, so too can a healthy firm fall to a news article on an obscure website. You’ve got to find tools to help you see, assess, and respond to brand mentions in online/print news outlets, social media channels, word-of-mouth rumors, and tv/radio spotlights. In short, you need to see your brand from every possible angle—360 insight.
The world is moving too fast to drop the ball on this one. One of the best places to start is with news outlets. Take the Business Intelligence team at Shell Oil. They’re constantly on the lookout for tools to keep their team informed. Industry trends, brand mentions, competitive positioning, and political landscape refocus their strategies, constantly.
Like Engagor, Shell leverages Moreover Technologies’ Newsdesk service to set highly targeted news feeds that parse critical stories and brand mentions for employees at every level of the company. With one service, they get a nearly 360-degree view of their brand, market, and competitors all in one intuitive interface. That’s exactly the sort of technology communications professionals can leverage to snapshot their reputation from every angle.
December 5, 2012
A feature article by Moreover’s Senior Product Manager, Brian Mackie, appears in the latest issue of IntranetsToday explaining how companies can find and exploit opportunities within the challenges of Big Data.
His article, “Actionable Media Intelligence: Delivering a Competitive Edge”, argues that companies should be using the proper tools to turn unwieldy “mass media” into actionable “meaningful media”.
Great companies make decisions driven by data, not by gut feelings alone. The problem is that available “big data” is increasing very quickly. How does an organization make sense of it all and get it to the relevant people?
Employees are going to talk- to each other and to people outside the company. Are they informed? They should be reading targeted and relevant news every day without spending too much time seeking it out. Do you know how to get them there?
In the feature, Mr. Mackie gives a checklist of points to consider while evaluating tools for internal communication to solve these problems.
- What media sources does the service cover, does it match your particular industry needs, and can new ones be added on request?
- Check the news filtering options to make sure they will support the precisely tuned results you need (test with real-life news requirements)
- Look for flexible media distribution options: A user portal, newsletters, RSS feeds, possibly an API to integrate news search directly into an intranet
- Ensure it includes editorial control features to manage the content that flows out to the organization (e.g. the ability to quickly remove articles from an RSS feed on the intranet)
- Confirm whether customer service includes editorial support for building out searches
- Ask about their software development processes and how often they roll out new features (ideally at least monthly)
- Know the pricing – avoid ballooning content licensing costs, and beware the sweet entry level deal that is followed by a sudden not-quite-explained price hike in year two!
- Lastly, always run a trial and push the vendor to prove, not just promise, targeted business news that demonstrates value. If they can’t provide this during a trial, it’s probably because they can’t provide it full stop.
Companies can leverage their internal communication to gain an advantage in the marketplace. It is difficult, but there is opportunity in this challenge to rise above the competition:
Turning mass media it into meaningful media intelligence is a fascinating challenge – it is for vendors, publishers, and especially for the companies chasing productivity gains and competitive advantage. And therein lies the good business news: It is not too late to be an early mover and gain that edge.
Read the whole article here while it’s still free!
August 16, 2012
Today’s companies operate in a world of Internet-driven mass media with the power to shape our perceptions and blindside company reputations. At Moreover, our job is to help you turn this media maelstrom into market intelligence for competitive advantage.
In this series of posts, we’ll be going through the multiple aspects of a successful media intelligence strategy, and offer concrete advice and insight for turning global news and social media into a powerful strategic asset.
Part 2 – Drive Informed Decision-Making with Company-Wide News Distribution
A 2011 study from the Sloan School of Management, MIT, entitled ‘Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decision Making Affect Firm Performance‘, showed that companies that had adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains of 5-6% in comparison to companies that remained focused on experience and intuition. Enough of a difference, according to the authors, to “separate winners from losers in most industries”.
It is clear, then, that timely access to key news sources is crucial. Of course, information professionals and corporate librarians have long provided this important function for businesses. But media consumption habits have changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Decision makers up and down the organization now expect the experience of the Web: Fast, hyperlinked, and on-demand.
Companies that extended the original librarian-focused news services to the rest of the organization often found themselves with ballooning costs – businesses were suddenly paying a premium for all-embracing publisher licenses when a timely link to a news website would have sufficed. At the other extreme, employees have been left to fend for themselves, with Google News the de facto service provider. But ultimately, as research by Outsell showed, consumer-focused search engines fail to serve business needs, with too much time wasted on sifting through irrelevant results.
Consequently, new media intelligence services have emerged, combining the immediacy of a Google type service with the imperatives of a business audience. Company-wide news distribution that is personalized to department and even down to individual employee level is increasingly the norm, with businesses now actively managing the consumption of news within the organization.
Here are three key features to look for in a successful media intelligence solution focused on company-wide news sharing:
- Flexible news distribution options. The ability to serve business news through a variety of channels will improve the user experience and its effectiveness. Ideally, information is provided to users directly within the work-flow at point of use. Make sure that your media intelligence service supports automated email alerts, hand-edited newsletters, RSS feeds, and potentially an API to directly integrate business news on the intranet.
- Powerful business-focused search filters. The ability to curate highly focused search results that can be individually tailored to specific audiences is absolutely paramount. The aim is for every single article to be relevant. To achieve this, you need powerful filtering options, including the ability to segment the media (e.g. regional vs national vs trade), select or block specific sources, emphasize particular keywords, and remove duplicate articles such as press releases.
- Worldwide media coverage with custom source additions. A successful solution must satisfy the diverse information needs within a company, stretching across industries, professions, countries and languages, from mainstream topics to highly individualized interests. In order to cater to special interests and new projects, you must be able to add new sources on request at relatively short notice, including private publisher licenses.
Turning mass media it into actionable media intelligence is a fascinating opportunity for companies chasing productivity gains and competitive advantage. At Moreover Technologies we have made it our mission to help companies succeed at this challenge, with the award-winning Newsdesk servicedesigned specifically for this purpose.
If you’d like to learn more about Newsdesk and how Moreover helps corporate communications and information professionals achieve results, then contact us or visit our website for details.
Next post:
Part 3 – The Power of Consolidating Media Access Through a Single Enterprise News Hub
Previous post:
Part 1 – Encourage Employee Engagement and Corporate Identity by Sharing External Media
May 15, 2012
The award-winning Newsdesk service used by companies worldwide for media monitoring, competitive intelligence, and enterprise-wide news distribution launched new features this week! Read more about these new features and learn more about how Newsdesk gives marketing and corporate communications teams a powerful set of tools allowing them to turn unstructured mass media into actionable market intelligence:
Better Broadcast.
The TV broadcast coverage now includes ‘designated market area’ (DMA) data for local US TV channels. We are also showing keyword highlighting in broadcast transcripts for easier scanning, and have made improvements to the legibility of the transcript.
Power Search
Users adept at writing complex search queries can now use more advanced search engine parameters, for even more specialist and detailed search results. Contact your account manager to enable this new feature.
Refresh your dashboard
Update the articles in the feeds saved to your dashboard without having to refresh your browser.
Improved styling For Better Readability
The Dashboard and Saved Feeds list now sport sharper fonts and a cleaner layout, including thumbnail images, to make it easier to scan the latest headlines.
Rolling Out Shared Dashboards and User Comments
We recently announced “Shared Dashboards”, allowing administrators to customize a common Dashboard, and “User Comments”, enabling users to add comments to news articles. Tomorrow’s update will introduce these new features to all customers.
May 2, 2012
