Sunday 19 February 2012

Social shares and trending news: A study (of sorts)

As a former student of journalism, a current social media professional, and as somebody with an unhealthy appetite for numbers, I've found a way to satiate myself this weekend with an amateurish combination of all three.

Using a week of tweets from Sunny Hundal's @RipplaNews Twitter account (more on that here), I've drawn together a rather simple data-set to provide a base for examining what news makes an impact on the social sphere, and what encourages people to share the news they share. 

Pie-charts (yum), bar-charts and other associated data-visualisations to follow:

Over-all seven-day share by news organisation:


I think it's fair to say that I'm somewhat surprised by this. I had expected the Daily Mail to have had a bigger share, and The Sun to be roughly on par with the Guardian. Bravo to the BBC for taking almost half of the social shares.

Daily number of trending tweets listed by news organisation:


Given the pie-chart above, this probably isn't terribly unexpected. That said, I would have expected a higher spike on Monday for the Guardian, given Charlie Brooker's weekly comment piece - but that might say more about my personal taste than anything else.


Number of article images measured against number of shares:

I spent some time trying to work out the best graph to display this data. I settled on this one, but I'm not entirely happy with it. To explain what it means - The blue dot in the '0' column means that there have been 12 shares of articles that had no pictures (this includes the same article/s shared twice, counting as two shares), the blue dot in the '1' column means that there have been 36 shares of articles with one image only (this includes the same article/s shared twice, counting as two shares), and so on.


This scatter chart has been skewed somewhat by a single 40-image article. It featured four times as a trending news article. It was part of the Daily Mail's coverage of Whitney Huston's death. That aside, it is clear that the most frequent shares come with articles that contain between 0-2 images. 


This is a misleading statistic though, given that few online articles (Daily Mail excluded) will contain three or more images, making it more likely that 'most-shared' articles would fall within this 0-2 image band. There are a range of variables here that I simply don't have the time to explore, but if you fancy it...


So, what does this mean?
I'm not really sure, although, if you're vaguely interested in this sort of measurement, please feel free to use the data (linked below), expand on it, improve it, and present it in a more sensible fashion

Get the raw data: You can view the raw data on Google Docs.

About this data: This data covers the top trending online news stories by measuring their social shares. The source for this data is Sunny Hundal's Rippla News application (http://rippla.com/). Details on how Rippla News works can be found here: http://rippla.com/ripples.php. This data has been recovered from the updates on the @RipplaNews twitter feed. This blog post (and linked data) is an example of a very simplistic way of examining the Rippla News data - It does not take full advantage of the rich data available on the Rippla News website.

Collection Timeframe: This data covers one week of retrievable tweets (78 Tweets), from 12:00pm Sunday 12 February to 12:00pm Sunday 19 February

Disclaimer: I make absolutely no claim that this is an exhaustive piece of reliable research, nor do I claim to be a researcher in any sort of professional sense. The data collection method  is imperfect, and the classification of the different strands of information is , in parts, highly flawed (For example, the terms in the "Category" column) - This data is also reliant on what I would assume would be referred to as a small sample set. The intention was to catalogue trending news in order to gain an insight in to what news tends to trend, and to perhaps allow me (or anybody else that cares to explore it) to identify themes in the social share trends of online news.

Sources: All sources are clearly referenced by way of hyperlinks in the raw data.

Re-use of data: If you find this data to be in any way interesting, please feel free to re-use, refine and redistribute this data freely in part or in whole. A credit to @pdarigan would be nice, but is by no means necessary. I would ask that you do reference the Rippla News application, either by way of a link to the Twitter feed or website (That's where the real effort went in, and I can't claim any credit at all for that).

Thursday 16 February 2012

#NFPtweetup 16/02/2012

I've quickly Storified the last hour or so of (personally speaking) key tweets from the #NFPtweetup hosted by @NFPtweetup this evening. It isn't perfect, Storify only allowed me to go back so far, and the event generated loads of tweets.

Apologies to #NFPtweetup tweeters that I haven't listed here, it is a highly subjective list of messages that resonated with me for one reason or another. I am convinced, following tonight's event, that I absolutely must sign up for the next one.

Congrats to all involved, it was terrific to follow on Twitter, so I can only imagine how good it was to be there. Details of the next event will be available here, as and when

Sunday 5 February 2012

What news is buzzing in the social sphere?

Rippla News Logo | Sunny Hundal; Rippla News
Well, you need look no further than Rippla News, a tool created by Sunny Hundal. Rippla News aggregates the social shares of news stories and tweets hourly updates about which stories are trending at the moment:

Every hour, RIPPLA retrieves and evaluates thousands of news stories from across the British media that were published in the last 24 hours, and rates them by their impact.

Rippla is still in Beta, and problems with its algorithm have appeared (Noticeably, the tendency of the Daily Mail to re-publish articles, apparently automatically), but by-and-large, Rippla News offers an intriguing insight in to what news is making an impact when it comes to social shares.

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail makes up a significant number of shares, but beyond that, there may be an interesting study to be conducted – What news we share and why?

I'm a big fan for a number of reasons, but the geekish aspect of shares and social media analytics is one of the key reasons I follow @RipplaNews.

Saturday 4 February 2012

Social Media – Is it built in to your crisis comms plan?

Crisis Control Group. Credit: Tlcmgmt, Wikimedia Commons 

Picture it, a disaster, a tragedy, or a serious faux-pas and your organisation is at the centre of it. You frantically dust-off your crisis comms plan and follow the outlined steps. You edit one of your template statements, rush to seek sign-off and then circulate it and publish it to your website.

How long does that take, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, longer...?

The first place that news of the tragedy broke was on Twitter, if you’re lucky you found out about it five minutes after it happened. While you’re producing the statement and seeking sign-off, the story of the crisis is already developing on Twitter.

The first tweet went out within a minute of the incident, pictures, short videos and a hashtag start appearing after two or three minutes. Concerned people are using your Facebook page and Twitter account to ask questions and seek information.

Five minutes after the incident occurred, a journalist with a large following has picked up on one of the tweets and re-tweeted it. This is seen by a large number of people, including other high-profile journalists and politicians.

News of the tragedy has gone viral on Twitter, your Twitter account and Facebook page are being inundated with questions, what are you doing?

Some simple things you should be doing:

Internal comms

  • It’s likely that your PR & Comms Manager will manage the crisis comms plan implementation. If your Social Media Editor/Manager/Ninja isn’t based within the PR & Comms team, ensure that s/he is in constant contact with your PR & Comms Manager

Monitor conversations

  • Monitor related Twitter activity by using applications like TweetDeck or Hootsuite – Set up searches for the name of your organisation (If you don’t already have one running), the hashtag people are using, and variations of terms that people are likely to use when Tweeting about the tragedy
  • Get on your Facebook page, find out what people are saying.
  • If you have a presence on any other social media platforms, monitor them as well.
  • If people are providing links in messages about the tragedy, click on them and find out what they link to.
  • Google relevant terms – Google indexes new news stories and blog posts very quickly indeed, find out what people are saying

Say something (but not anything)

  • Do not go radio silent, the conversation is already happening, and false rumours are beginning to take hold. Talk to the person managing the Crisis Comms Plan and form appropriate responses – do this quickly, and regularly. Where possible, and appropriate:
    • Give out confirmed information
    • Post appropriate updates on the situation
    • Give out a helpline phone number
    • If you have scheduled Tweets or Facebook updates about great new deals and upcoming promotions, delete them (They will be very, very poorly received in the middle of a crisis)

A solid crisis comms plan is important for dealing with any unexpected major incidents, but never forget that you are communicating with real people, trying to manage an incident where people may have been hurt or upset, trying to deal with messages from people that have real concerns, and an incident that many people may have a passionate and critical response to – Don’t forget to be human.

Does social media feature in your organisation’s crisis comms plan, and does it look anything like the points outlined above?