Category Archives: Media Analysis

Blogging Trends – The Decline of Heavy Text?

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Blogs, arguably, were the first social media tool to smack headfirst into the traditional news media world. They proved to be the first time anybody, almost anywhere, could put their view out into the public sphere – with no editor looming over their shoulder and ostensibly no publisher bias. When we first looked at blogs and how they were being used in 2009, we found they tended to be heavy in text, but were also rather gender neutral in terms of who was using them. A lot has changed. Here’s our update on the cyberland of blogs…

Gender Neutral….But…
Women write more than men. Except when we looked at age groups. In the 55+ demographic, men tend to write 14% more than women. In younger demographics, women will share more links on a blog post (on average) than men and men prefer to integrate videos into their blog posts whereas women will use static images more often. So why is this relevant? If you’re a marketer, then this kind of insight can help you determine the types of content you might develop for gender audiences and age groups.

People Continue to Write Less
In 2009, we found the average blog post was 800 words with 4 outbound links. In 2011 that had dropped to an average of 300 words but link sharing averages had climbed to 7 per post. Now in 2012 the average blog post number of words has dropped to 200 with outbound links increasing to an average of 9 per post.

Images & Video
We also noted much higher instances of embedding video and images into blog posts. In fact over 90% of blogs analysed always included an image and 54% of blog posts on average, included an embedded video. We do note the rise of Vimeo as a choice for which video channel is used. YouTube remains higher, but Vimeo has increased by 25% over 2011.

Age Factor in Content
We also found that the under 25 category only write an average of 100 words and will include multiple videos and images in a single post. The most popular  blogging platform for the under 25 segment remains Tumblr. In 74% of the cases of blogs with the under 25 group, text was only used to provide context, either through an opinion or how the image/video being shared relates to their world.

Our Conclusion
That blogging is still alive and well, but is where a position is stated for longer debate. Links are shared to provide evidence of statements being made (we did not check on validity of referenced sources.) There will remain a large audience for blogs for sometime and we suspect they will survive much in the way forums continue to thrive. Platforms like Tumblr will become longer-term value platforms for the under 25 moving forward. We suspect there will be generational shifts as age groups tend to stick with what has become familiar to them and where they have established audiences. Our opinion is that if a platform/channel rises in popularity to gain a usage base of 2 million or more people over 3 years that it will “move” with a certain group into having a longer lifespan than less trendy platforms or channels unless a more easily adoptable option comes along (i.e. Facebook overtaking MySpace.)

New Platforms to Watch
A couple of new services have opened up in the past year that we think will impact blogging habbits and warrant monitoring, which we will do. These two are 1) Storify and 2) Cowbird with one we are undecided on which is Makr.io, we shall see.

Methodology
We analysed the same 1,500 blogs we did in 2009, replacing those blogs that have been discontinued since 2010 with a blog where we could determine a similar age and gender along with topic. We did not place emphasis on the type of content (e.g. political, technology etc.) but we did provide for per  capita of online audience in looking at blogs in Canada, USA and UK. We used our proprietary search engine, our AI Engine and third party tools such as Alexa and WooRank to validate the findings. If you have specific questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Our technology is confidential as are many of our methodologies for analysis…because that is how we continue as a business so we hope you understand.

Authors: G. Crouch and T. Williams

US Presidential Election | The Trust Factor

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While the pundits of news media declared Mitt Romney the “winner” of the debates on October 3rd 2012, and certainly the Romney spin doctors are in a glorious tizzy, we noted something interesting as we watched the debate unfold – comments related to “trust” around the two candidates. So we decided to take a look at what American’s thought about Romney vs. Obama on the issue of trust. Sure, Mitt was slick and on the offensive, and according to some was offensive.

NOTE & CAVEAT: MediaBadger is a private Canadian company. The company does not work for any American firm that is monitoring the US elections. The company has a strict policy of not working for any political party in any country worldwide. This analysis is completely unbiased, is not paid for by any company, individual or political party or third-party in any way whatsoever. The analysis herein is done entirely on an entertainment and informational purpose. No money whatsoever was received for this analysis and the information herein will not be sold to any person, persons, governments or corporations now or in the future.

The Trust Factor
As the graph below shows, although Mitt Romney may have seemed to have won the debate, what was in doubt was the trust factor. As can be seen, Obama still maintained his lead in terms of words around trust. Romney was often stated to be: confusing, misleading, distrusting, contrite, smug or arrogant (words via Twitter and blogs.) Whereas Obama had words such as kind, meaningful, trusted, honest, humble, deprecating.

 

The Gender Factor
Then we get to gender. Seems Obama is the choice of women over men. This was interesting and we’ll let you decide what you want to take away from this analysis. We’re not a company that gets into analysing political minutae in the USA, but we wonder what the voter turnout on male vs. female might be?

 

 

 

 

 

Fun Data: Apple vs. Android Social Media Sentiment

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In case you somehow missed it, Apple unveiled it’s iPhone 5 last week. Some were swooning while others were mooning. Samsung, maker of the largest Android phone collection fired back with another lawsuit threat and Google quickly releases an Android vs iOS iPhone 5 comparison chart. And the social web lit up like a prairie fire under a 4th of July fireworks festival. The fight was on. So we ran our analytics to see what was going on with this Battle of the SmartPhone. Here’s what we found.

Channel The Love
What we quickly found was that the love/hate factor was very much relevant to the channel being used. For the most part, discussions on Google owned channels (Google+, Blogger and GoogleGroups) the Android OS was getting the love and the iPhone was under hate attack. Outside of Google owned properties, the iPhone was love was on. It would be interesting, from a data junkies view like ours, to correlate use of apps compared in this channels to OS preference…another day>

 

 

 

It’s Not All Geek Chatter
The other interesting point we noted was that arguments over the OS weren’t dominated by technocrats or geeks. This was a rant by the average Jane or Joe. The arguments tend to be less about the underlying technology as they are about apps, viruses and speed.

So there you are, some utterly useless data for a Monday.

Note on Methodology
We collected over 4,000 tweets and combed through 1,500 Google+ comments and checked +1′s to Likes and sentiment in Twitter. We then ran a gross sentiment analysis across all text and then identified a sample size of 500 individuals (we do NOT collect or store personal/private data. Ever.) And thus our findings. Want more detail? Give us a holler.

(Authors: Badgers in the Den)

The Sad Failure of People Finding Social Media Apps

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Ok so you’re not a stalker and your ego isn’t that big, but perhaps you wanted to know how much data out on the Web is about you? Or perhaps you found someone you’re curious about and wanted to see if their “big” online? Or maybe you recalled someone you met and you’re looking for them…for business, romance or otherwise (we won’t ask why!)…so you do some digging. There aren’t a lot of choices of services that will help you. If you think doing a Google search will help, well, you’d be wrong. While Google is by far the best search engine, its not really designed for people finding…(i.e. human beings.) Note that we’re excluding Facebook, LinkedIn, ECademy and such from this research.

So we decided to test a few out and sadly, we’re still disappointed.

Peoplze:
If you find anything that works on this service, let us know. We suspect they’re pitching potential investors as of August 2012 and haven’t found anyone yet. Apparently they started in 2012, so maybe they’ll find someone. We tested this site against high profile social media persona’s such as Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki and Brian Solis. It’s largely French which means even with Google Translate it becomes frustrating to use. While French is a lovely language and French wines, food and champagne are sublime…they’ll need to learn English to find real success. So, a big PoundFail to Peoplze unless they can a) find financing, b) learn English or at worst Spanish or German and find an easier way to actually plug into social API’s.

123 People
Well, they keep trying (they have a US and Canadian site now.) Likely the best out there, we’ve seen little innovation from them in the past couple of years. It seems 90% of whatever revenues they scrounge must come from ad word affiliate programs. Where’s the technical innovation guys? Seriously. They can bring up content on people that are very active, but fall short on lesser folk who may have a presence in only 2-4 social networks or contribute in new channels that 123 People isn’t plugged into yet. Oh wait, “tag clouds”…sorry, yawn. They do have a good “related people” feature which works reasonably well. Of all the tools we checked, at least these guys plug into pretty much all of the main social media feeds.

Annoyance Factors
Most of these people finding services are focused only on America or the home country where they’re headquartered. Be warned therefore.  Probably 90% of people doing a search for another person are looking within their own country. All of these apps seem to forget that sometimes, people pick up and move to another country. So this means, you’ll have to do some fancy online footwork if a person resides somewhere else in the world. Good luck with that.

Summary Thoughts
In many ways, although the Web is global and over 2 billion worldwide are connected, companies and people still seem to think rather local. What content is out there on people tends to be fragmented and requires human analysis. While some companies and universities are working on what is called “Entity Mapping” (we’re one of them), algorithms are still in development. Additionally, people not only move around physically, they change their online identities and/or move into new apps and services where services like those above haven’t established an access agreement with.

So what are your thoughts? What tool do you find works best?

 

 

 

Hot Topics for Tourists in Social Media

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Food. It seems tourists in North America (USA & Canada) love to chat more about the food experiences they had on vacation than where they stayed, at least that’s the trend we saw in 2011 and are predicting into 2012. The topic of food has continuously increased since 2009 while discussions around property (hotel, motel, resort, B&B etc.) has steadily declined.

So why has food become more of an interest? We’re not sure there’s a definitive answer. Perhaps it has something to do with the increase in television food channels, cooking lessons via YouTube and a general gastronomy trend across North America? That might take a bit more research and we’ll be checking our aggregate data for insights.

 

When we delved into the topic of food, we found that 78% of the time tourists were looking for local cuisine and that ranged from greasy burgers to fine gourmet meals. We also found that food has become part of the experience planning for tourists; while they won’t plan all their meals they will look at having at least one posh meal and attempt to have a local experience. For restaurant owners, this represents an opportunity to partner with local inns, B&Bs or boutique hotels if you want a slice of that crowd.

Although it may be a trend, it is our view this will continue for sometime. Surprisingly we also saw a decline in the discussion of local attractions and this was largely around theme parks as we’ve seen a downward trend in family vacation planning unless it is more regional. We also note an increased volume of discussion by empty-nesters and professionals without families, perhaps as they have a higher disposable income in this tough financial period.

The data shown here is the aggregate data from over 40 online tourism research projects we’ve conducted for tourism authorities, boards and operators in the U.S., Canada and UK.

So…why do you think food is a hot topic?