Here is another re-post of a 2004 item from my blog about changes in media:
Great follow-up to the post I had yesterday about readers picking stories. Lou Rosenfeld blogs about a conversation he had with Guy Valerio of the Financial Times of London. The discussion is about using search logs to predict what stories may be out there.
If a company name shows up with great frequency in the search logs but hasn’t been covered recently in FT articles, it may indicate a developing story about to hit daylight. Guy finds that this sort of anomaly is often a useful predictor of what the FT should consider covering in the coming days. Conversely, if a company name drops off the search logs, interest in a related story line may be waning, and FT can choose to invest its reporting resources elsewhere.
On the surface it may sound similar to a per-click tracking, but the search logs can help expose what is not on the site that readers are looking for (they can’t click on the story if it’s not there).
Of course now that the cat is out of the bag so-to-speak, how long before a PR flak looking to generate interest in a client enters the name of the company in the search tool repeatedly?
I make it a habit to analyze client’s search logs and to show them how to as well. It is amazing some of the things that appear. You quickly learn what your audience is looking for.
3 comments
1/30/2005 at 1:24 pm
Megan R
This is really interesting. I hadn’t realized before that people could predict stories like that. It is definately a useful tool for the media. As for the PR person typing in the company name multiple times to generate interest in a client, would this really work? Even if a writer saw the comany name come up over and over, wouldn’t the company have to have something interesting going on to generate a story? So although the name might come up a lot, I doubt it would make the news if there was nothing of importance to write about.
1/30/2005 at 4:25 pm
Jonathan H
The multiple entering of a clients name into a search engine by a practitioner
raises a couple of red flags to me. The first is the importance of ethical standards.
This practice of multiple entering is clearly unethical to me because the client is
being misrepresented. The other issue is the importance of research. With face-to-face
communication waning the importance of knowing exactly who you are talking to
and how qualified they are is greater than ever.
1/30/2005 at 5:24 pm
Emily
I think that analyzing an audience by search logs is a great idea. Test audiences can be restrictive. This method has a lot of promise, but of course there are obvious risks that you mentioned. This method of analysis could be ultimatly benefitual to a company. But only if it is used along with other forms of research as well. That way if some kind of tampering is being done, the company will be able to see that.