Filed under: Products
Mining Newsdesk for Data
This past weekend, super hero fans received some exciting news at the 2013 San Diego Comic Con; the next Superman movie will feature fellow caped crusader, Batman. Both Batman and Superman have had an on-and-off again rivalry and in that spirit, we looked into Newsdesk to see who’s won the battle for the people’s hearts.
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In the run-up to the announcement, Superman had the edge in international news coverage, though it was close.
Since the movie was announced, Batman has edged out Superman in overall news coverage by 10 percentage points.
This is just one example of the kind data that can be tracked in Newsdesk using simple keyword searches. From here you can create a daily newsletter to see charts of coverage and read the latest news from your inbox.
Drop us a line to see how we can help you track coverage of big announcements.
July 26, 2013
Newsdesk makes it easy to keep employees and clients informed of the latest news and trends. Large companies may have hundreds of different alerts and newsletters, distributed across multiple teams, each with a different purpose and audience. We have recently implemented some ways to simplify managing these emails.
New Email Tagging
With our opt-in Email Tagging, you can create custom categorization systems to help track alerts and newsletters. You can tag emails based on departments, products, country or office location. It’s as flexible as your imagination.
New Email Filtering
Last month, Moreover released several filtering options to help Email Managers find specific alerts and newsletters. In case you missed it, here’s a quick overview, including the new Tag filter.
Owner Filter
This is useful when you want to look at an individual Newsdesk user’s newsletters and alerts.
Recipient Filter
This filter is best when you want to see which emails a single person is subscribed to.
Feed Filter
In order to find which alerts and newsletters a particular saved search is powering, you can use this filter. This is particularly helpful when the saved searches are in Shared Content or another shared group.
Tag Filter
Using your own custom hierarchy, you can drill down to the emails with a particular tag.
Contact us to discuss how we can help you manage your email workflow inside Newsdesk.
July 19, 2013
Continuing our look at advanced searching in Newsdesk, this week we’ll examine the START operator.
START allows you to specify that keywords should appear in the first X number of words in any articles returned in your search results. Simple searches look for keywords that appear anywhere in an article. The drawback to this is that a passing mention at the end of an article will still match, but it’s less likely to be relevant to your search results.
Keywords used in the introductory paragraphs are likely to be the subject of the post. START gives you the option of distinguishing between items that are simple mentions and those that are the focus of an article.
Examples:
Here is a simple search, designed to find articles about Google (i.e., where Google is mentioned within the first 10 words of the article) and that mention smartphones anywhere in the article.
START/10:(Google) AND (smartphone OR “smart phone”)
We can do some simple Boolean logic with START as well. This query will find articles where Tumblr and Yahoo! are both mentioned in the first 10 words.
START/10:(Tumblr AND Yahoo)
This next search is looking for items about the major search engines.
START/10:(Google OR Bing OR Yahoo)
This search will return articles mentioning the search engines, but does not include Tumblr in the first 15 words. The idea here is that Tumblr should not be the focus of an article, though it may be mentioned.
START/15:(Google OR Bing OR Yahoo NOT Tumblr)
Emphasis Tab:
Another option for position-based keyword searching is to use the Position filter under the Emphasis tab in the Advanced search options:
Position doesn’t provide as much granularity as START, but it’s quick and easy, only requiring the tick of a radio button.
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Test it out and feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
May 30, 2013
To help you get up-to-the-minute information faster and easier using Newsdesk, we’ve put together a few quick tips for you:
Do you frequently make the same changes to your searches? If so, setting up a search template can save you time. Then, when you search, it’ll use your template already customized to your search preferences. Here’s how:
- From the “My Content” drop-down menu, select “Edit search template”
- Add keywords, set media types, languages, etc. to customize the template for the types of searches you usually perform
- Click “Save”
Want to add your own articles to your search? You can manually insert articles and company information such as a link to PDFs and announcements to send out to your website or intranet using an RSS feed via the Export tab or in a Newsletter from the Email tab. It’s easy:
- Open the drop-down menu for the search you would like to add an article to
- Click “Add Article”
- Enter the headline, body, source name, etc.
- Refresh your search and see your newly added article. It will automatically appear in any alerts or exported feeds containing that search.
Need to do further analysis? You can download data into Excel from Newsdesk. Here’s how:
- Open the drop-down menu for the search you would like to download the information from
- Click “Analyze Feed”
- Click “View Analysis”
- From the “Download” drop-down menu, select “Feed Statistics” or “Article Data”
May 17, 2013
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
Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent conversation between some Moreover employees. My hope is that this post will give you some insight into who we are as a company and why we do what we do.
Numbers Do Lie (or Can Mislead)
Moreover is strong in the Media Monitoring field — our online news coverage is second to none. But why do some other media monitoring brands tout vast numbers of social media sites, compared to our more humble-sounding index?
The answer lies in what information our customers are trying to glean from their research. There is a considerable amount of noise that becomes a distraction (information overload). Effective monitoring of impactful sources is the driving force behind our efforts to grow and maintain pertinent coverage of social media.
Quantity of Data vs. Quality of Understanding
Just like any media monitoring company, we have competing goals. We want more coverage and more data, while keeping the tools that our clients use lightning fast and giving them only the data that helps them solve their needs.
That “only” is important.
Beware the Big
Moreover owns the ping server Weblogs.com. We have access to data of millions and millions of blogs posting content daily. We know where to look if we’d ever want to inflate our numbers, but we won’t.
Instead, we choose a “White List” approach, in which sources are vetted before they make it into our clients’ search results. When our Newsdesk clients run their searches, the data they want is more likely to be at their fingertips, rather than scattered amongst poor quality data.
More data is better only so long as it can be seen and used. Adding more content to sift through can make finding usable content more difficult. Having too much data can be worse than too little when it hinders the discovery of relevant content.
Drawbacks and Trade-offs
Of course the White List approach has its own issues. An important blog may not be covered when it’s needed. And, it makes it harder to track all mentions of keywords across all social media.
To mitigate this, Moreover’s Client Services and Editorial teams work with our clients to add the blogs and other social media that are important to them. This customer-focused coverage expansion process ensures that we provide broad coverage across multiple industries and niches. We also look at our own data for mentions of new sites, while seeking out other high-value sources of data.
A brief note on “full coverage”: With countless blogs being created and abandoned daily, it’s unlikely that anyone has full coverage. It is more accurate to say “less incomplete coverage”.
Pride in our Numbers
Moreover is proud of our 3.5 million social media feeds and our 55,000 online News sources. The number that makes us most proud, though, is our 90%+ customer retention rate. That number clearly shows we are on the right path. And we’ll continue to grow our source list in ways that bring customers value and help them find the data they need to solve their unique problems.
If you’re a Moreover customer and there are sources that are relevant to your needs that Moreover does not monitor, let us know. Our Client Services team will be happy to work with you to get these into our coverage.
November 14, 2012
This week’s enhancements give you even more control over the precision of your search results and help you share the latest news more effectively with improvements to the Newsletter, keyword highlighting, and article extracts.
Precise Search Results:
Under the “Extras” tab, there are options to set which keywords get highlighted and which keywords the extracts center around. This is most useful for searches that use AND.
New search Parameters:
Start of article searches, START/x:(word1 OR word2)
Use the start option to specify the first x words of an article that your keyword(s) must appear in. This helps to improve the relevancy of your results as it ensures the search terms are mentioned early on in the articles.
search: START/150:(OECD OR “World Bank” OR IMF)
- Returns articles that contain the words OECR, “World Bank”, orIMF in the first 150 words.
Near searches, (word1) NEAR/x (word2)
Use the near search to specify the maximum number of words between your search terms. This allows you to qualify search results by specifying relationships between the keywords in your search.
search: (Vodafone “T-Mobile” O2) NEAR/10 (iPhone iPad)
- Returns articles than contain Vodafone, T-Mobile or O2 within 10 words of iPhone or iPad.
Multiple occurrence searches, MULTIPLE/x:(word1 OR word2)
Use the multiple occurrence search option to specify the minimum number of occurrences of your keyword. This is especially useful in avoiding single passing mentions of keywords, thereby boosting the relevancy of the articles.
search: MULTIPLE/5:(ScotRail)
- Returns articles that contain at least five mentions of ScotRail.
Wildcard searches now work for phrases:
search: “flu vaccin*”
- Returns articles that contain the phrases “flu vaccine”, “flu vaccines”, “flu vaccination”, “flu vaccinations” etc.
A More User-Friendly Newsletter
We redesigned the Email section to give you better control of the way that Newsletters can be formatted. There is now a larger area to edit your Newsletter contents, and you instantly see the effect of styling changes on your email such as turning on keyword highlighting and user comments. Expect further enhancements in a few weeks time!
You can now hide or show:
- Paragraph Breaks
- Highlighting
- User Comments
It works great in conjunction with the custom highlighting and extracts above.
Contact your salesperson or Client Service to learn more.
October 30, 2012
Please join Rick @ricklombardo and Jim @jimcollish through the 16th at the PRSA 2012 International Conference. Once again, Moreover Technologies is a proud exhibitor and this year you’ll find us in Booth #26 next to Google. Enter our drawing to win an iPad and take a first hand look at Newsdesk our award-winning solution. Come by and Rick or Jim will set up your own customized Newsdesk dashboard with automatic alerts. See how you’ll never miss a beat with Newsdesk from Moreover — and enjoy a cup of coffee on the guys with a Starbucks Gift Card.
October 15, 2012
Newsdesk now in German and French. Commensurate with our growing presence in international markets, we are very pleased to announce that Newsdesk now comes in 4 languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. You can switch to your preferred language via the Settings page which is in the dropdown menu top-right of the screen.
Much improved article clippings feature. It’s considerably faster to copy (‘clip’) articles from one feed to another, thanks to Newsdesk now remembering which feeds you have recently clipped to. The Clip/Email/Delete buttons now also stay visible on the page as you move down the list of articles so you no longer have to scroll back up to the top of the page to email, remove or copy an article.
Cleaner User Interface. The links that appeared top-right on the screen are now inside a neat dropdown menu, so the screen looks much less cluttered.
Enhancements and bug fixes.
- We have updated the feed dropdown menu so it no longer remains visible after moving the mouse away.
- The analytics download button now appears for all browsers again.
- Articles can now be clipped over to regular, non-clippings feeds.
- When you hit enter after typing in keywords, it runs the search as opposed to producing a carriage return.
Let us know what you think about the new features in the comments.
October 3, 2012
Do you use Newsdesk’s clippings feeds? Upcoming changes are about to make your life much easier. If you don’t use them yet, here’s why you should give them a try.
Clippings feeds are manually-managed collections of articles that can be created from any number of automatic searches. The problem with “any number” is that lists of saved feeds can get very long and unwieldy.
With this latest update, it’s just a simple click to add an article to a clippings feed. No more having to drag and scroll through the list.
While you can still drag and drop like before, the clickable list of recently used feeds gives more flexibility.
Why Clip?
For those of you unfamiliar with clippings feeds, they are a good way to editorially manage which articles get distributed by RSS or Email alerts. While Newsdesk lets you create tightly-focused searches, occasionally there will be bad articles that get by. A trusted source could be hacked or slang could cause previously innocuous words take on new meanings. By using automatic searches to cut through the chaff and clippings feeds to manually select the best, you know exactly what your clients or colleagues are going to see.
This feature idea came directly from customers. We are always interested in hearing about how Newsdesk can be improved. If you have any suggestions, please contact us.
September 28, 2012
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