Demo Findings: An OlympicsWatch Update
With the month of May coming to a close, the new ImpactWatch demo about China and the 2008 Olympics has been fully operational for a couple of weeks now. The data collected already demonstrates the capabilities of ImpactWatch in real-world scenarios. Since May 6th, articles containing keywords relevant to China and the Olympic games have been aggregated and analyzed on a daily basis. Using the built-in tools of the ImpactWatch platform, I created this graph showing the average favorability (using a circulation metric) of both China and the 2008 Olympic games from 5/6 through 5/28 (today):
It’s no secret that China has had a rough time managing public-relations coming into the summer games because of media exposure related to questionable human rights practices, pollution, and the notorious Tibet fiasco. On May 12, about a week into our demo, the tragic earthquake in China’s Sichuan province shook the lives of thousands — as well as the focus of the American press, as the above graph illustrates. The average favorability of China skyrocketed on May 13, as media exposure shifted from criticizing the summer games host to covering the events surrounding one of the largest natural disasters of the year. As Economist.com has pointed out, amid enormous loss, China has largely gained positive press from this terrible tragedy. The results from ImpactWatch show that China’s favorability is holding relatively steady, at a higher level than just three weeks ago.
Here’s a breakdown of the articles that we’ve collected so far by issue:
As you can see, the earthquake and its effects is the most prevalent issue at the moment — expectedly so — and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.
Over the coming months, the data contained within the demo will become better and better, which is the nature of aggregation and media analysis. Trends will become more long term and the quantities applied to the data will become more meaningful. In addition, I don’t have to go searching for these news clippings; one of the great things about ImpactWatch is that it automatically pulls articles based on keywords from various sources and feeds, but leaves the analytics to real, breathing humans — we’ve talked about why in previous blog posts. ImpactWatch tracks and streamlines the work/analysis without misstepping about the most important part, the actual reputation.
More China/Olympics updates to come — the summer is just getting started.
