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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 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 media 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 1 – Encourage employee engagement and corporate identity by sharing external media
News forms opinions, and everyone is exposed to it. External commentary about a company can inform employee perceptions, in part precisely because it is external – an independent voice as opposed to perceived corporate spin.
Organizations may take a laissez-faire approach and let events play out, or they may choose to engage proactively and use external media perspectives to positively reinforce internal communications objectives.
For example, an effective media intelligence solution can ensure that upbeat articles about the company or sector are consistently shared across the organization, helping to buoy morale amongst staff, while a negative story can be assuaged by internal commentary explaining the situation.
Sharing targeted media coverage is a way to showcase any area that the company is involved in, from the success of a marketing campaign to the impact of a corporate social responsibility initiative, invigorating team spirit and a sense of pride.
Ultimately, external media perspectives hold up a mirror to the company. In a world where information is free, instant, and shared, honesty and openness become quintessential qualities of successful media intelligence campaign.
Here are three key features to look for in a successful media intelligence solution:
- Establish media distribution channels across a company. This gives corporate communications teams access to employees’ media consumption and a measure of influence over it. Delivering news through the intranet using RSS feeds and making it part of an employee’s day-to-day workflow is a typical aspect of such an approach. It offers an unintrusive “FYI” user experience and removes the issues around ad-hoc company emails such as whether to send and who to include.
- Full editorial control over RSS feeds. You need the option to manually add and remove individual stories from RSS feeds without having to go through an IT department, for example to remove an unwanted story. It must be easy to edit the search terms of feeds so you can cater for evolving topics and sudden events. You might also want full editorial control so you only publish articles that have been handpicked from a wider set of results.
- The ability to add the company’s view to news events. As a corporate communications team you should be able to add commentary to news articles, for example to explain the company position or to flag the importance of a particular article. A media intelligence tool should make this a quick and easy process.
Today’s media intelligence services such as Moreover’s Newsdesk service offer a great opportunity to turn mass media into a powerful instrument for achieving key corporate communications goals.
If you’d like to learn more about how the award-winning Newsdesk service helps corporate communications and information professionals achieve results, then contact us or visit our website for details.
Next post: Part 2 - Drive Informed Decision-Making with Company-Wide News Distribution
April 19, 2012
Yesterday, Brian Mackie from Moreover Technologies attended the Social Media Results “From Engagement To ROI” conference in London.
Several good speakers and insights, and it was certainly worth hearing how big brands and smaller ones are engaging social media—be it to get their marketing messages out, drive traffic, give customers information, improve support, be a voice, be human, and to just be trying and testing.
“Trying stuff” was one of the key themes, along with shoe-string budgets, small and/or voluntary teams, and lots of upward curving Facebook fans and Twitter-follower charts (but less sense of what that really means).
Indeed, the overall impression was that hard-nosed ROI remains pretty elusive. The scattershot and ad-hoc approaches were evident too when considering all the initiatives by the participating companies together.
This experimenting is not surprising. These are all recent technologies that are very much evolving, with new services coalescing out of new services all the time (e.g., Jeremy White’s example of phone app Loopt).
But instead of settling down, the pace is only increasing, as Will McInnes from NixonMcInnes showed. Experimentation, with inevitable and frequent failure as well as success, is a new norm in marketing.
You’ve got to be in it to win it, but you still have to decide how much and for what – back to ROI again. But can you
or should you really measure all of it in a traditional bottom line way? Not all agreed.
Here’s a quick digest of some of the impressions we picked up -
Most inspiring: Will McInnes from NixonMcInnes, for including John Boyd’s OODA loop, referring to a book titled, “Employees First, Customers Second,” and postulating —with evidence— that in the future our brains will all link up. Crazy indeed.
Most business sense: Giles Dunning of Barclaycard, for having proper business structure with emphasis on measuring and returns (they are a bank), for comments such as “measure, don’t monitor,” “test and learn, not test and leave.”
Most experimental: Jimmy Leach of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who is choosing to get on and do rather than measure (“difficult”), and for jettisoning traditional websites.
Most shocking revelation: Tom Hall from Lonely Planet—doesn’t have a Facebook page. Collective gasp.
Sound advice: Per Jeremy White of Phones 4u, you probably don’t want to outsource your “voice” to an agency.
Most genuine video: Gary Vaynerchuck’s 2 cents.
Most climactic video: Cisco’s Big Things Are Happening promo.
Least likely to lead to a sale for us: Fergus Boyd from Virgin Atlantic: “The marketing agencies are circling, beware.”
June 15, 2011
Very pleased to announce both. We’re up with a shiny new site design, and, frankly, looking all the better for it. (Thanks Joss!)
We’ve also kickstarted this blog to keep customers and visitors updated on the latest product news and other things we’ve got in the cooker, along with the odd link out to interesting stuff.
We hope you like! Stay tuned, keep sending us your feedback, and we look forward to doing business with you in the near future.
Yours,
The Team at Moreover
October 29, 2008
