Media monitoring to behaviour changes
July 11, 2006 at 5:39 am 3 comments
Can we make the logical step to “output” with media monitoring – measuring changes to knowledge, behaviour or attitudes? With traditional media monitoring we cannot. And that’s the missing link of most media monitoring – how can we tell if the media exposure led to a change with a given audience? Polling of audiences and making an informed assumption linking their media use with changes observed is possible – but cost and complexity are the main deterrents for many organisations.
But with the online environment, there are some interesting developments in the ability to link media exposure with an actual behaviour change of an audience. Take this example: people who read an article online and then link to it in their blog have made a behaviour change – a simple example. If we could show the path from media exposure to the triggering of thoughts, comments, actions and ideas we are heading in the “outcome” direction. David Phillips of Leaverwealth blog is working in this area and is developing software to summarise content of RSS feeds under subject headings and show the path to the original stories and posts. This uses a statistical/mathematical technique, Latent Semantic Analysis which extracts and represents the similarity of meaning of words and passages. Now, that’s much more valuable than clip counting.
Glenn
Entry filed under: Evaluation tools (surveys, interviews..), Media analysis & monitoring, PR evaluation, Web metrics.
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David Phillips | July 11, 2006 at 7:36 am
Thanks Glen.
This research, initially by one of my students is likely to have considerable value. She looked at a genre of press tactics to see if they had any effect and discovered that press coverage enticed bloggers to comment showing a level of comitment. The research is of good quality (First Class Degree stuff and with work an MA) It would be a very good evaluation technique.
We have also been looking at how this can help with blog monitoring. The problem here is that a company may get a mention but a link in the post may point to the motive behind the mention. Reading all the links in blogs is a pain and hard work. What I think is now possible is to be able to identify relevant links because of their contextual affinity.
This also makes blog monitoring much more efficient and a by-product also identifies and monitors emerging, high and declining subject matter across all mentions in blogs over time.
Fascinating stuff.
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Glenn | July 12, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Thanks David for that feedback. The ability to analyze links based on contextual affinity is, I believe, an important step. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the research as it develops.
Glenn
3. Beware: dodgy Blog ROI in circulation « intelligent measurement | July 31, 2008 at 6:19 am
[…] The report does have some interesting points in that it attempts to pull out some of benefits of blogging (such as customer insights) and comparing this to the cost of market research). Certainly the idea of showing how visibility grows from a blog post (through generating comments, thoughts and referrals) to changes in attitudes and behaviors is heading in the right direction, as I’ve written about before. […]