August 14th, 2008 by Sten Franke
At the moment ethority is working on a study about the US presidential elections 2008. Our database for this study is a compilation of user opinions found in social media such as forums, weblogs and newssites.
These user opinions concern the two candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in general, as well as their image, climate protection, immigration policy and campaign topics such as education, trade, health, foreign and security policy. Since this is an international matter, we will account for English speaking as well as German and Spanish speaking internet users. Our crawler technology searches for all relevant user postings, verifies and categorizes them automatically.
The Financial Times Germany (FTD) will be presenting this study exclusively for the German market in August. Moreover, to accompany this study, we interviewed Stefan Prystawik (Republicans Abroad) and Shari Temple (Democrats Abroad) and produced a podcast focusing on campaign strategies 2.0 in the USA. The podcasts will soon be available on our Website.
Another highly interesting project we are working on at the moment, is a CEO reputation index of the Fortune 500. In collaboration with manager magazin, ethority already conducted a similar study focusing on the “German” Fortune 500.
Now, we are looking for a partner outside of Germany who is interested in presenting a social media study. Of course, we are open to further suggestions and appreciate new ideas. You can contact me directly at Fiana.de.Guzman(at)ethority.de
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Fiana de Guzman
August 13th, 2008 by Sten Franke
| In June, Manager Magazin presented ethority’s reputation index. Next to “image” data, it also displays the overall buzz the CEOs’ names generated. The analysis of over 60,000 contributions in forums and blogs yielded the following ranking: |
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| Furthermore, we conducted a topic oriented analysis of those blog postings. The following graph shows what topics bloggers addressed in combination with the different CEOs: |
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| The findings of this study clearly show that the “commanders” of German corporations are discussed intensely in consumer generated media. Therefore, the question for corporate communication should no longer be if those channels should be integrated but rather how soon the monitoring of social media can be started. Whether you choose to listen to it or not – the buzz concerning companies and their leaders will not stop. And to bury your head in the sand is certainly not the right strategy to achieve new goals. Weblogs, forums, twitter and social networks with their online conversations have long surpassed the state of being marginal phenomena. Today and in the future, public is created and happening online. Therefore, being aware of such channels and monitoring them can only be the first step in this context. Corporate communication departments and PR agencies have to go even further: only the ones that “listen” to discussions in social media and actively communicate online will be able to participate in building the image of their company in this rapidly growing part of society. |
