ImpactWatch

We’ve just published the second in a series of reports on media favorability in the Connecticut Senate race. The race isn’t nearly as close as it was a couple of months ago, but come election day surprises are always plentiful! Even so, as a niche case study in media favorability on a major Senate race, we think it’s probably one of only a handful out there. We used our ImpactWatch(TM) web platform to generate this report — those interested can obtain access to a demo showing the nuts and bolts of the system here.

Key findings in our second Connecticut Senate race report covering the period from October 1, 2006 to November 5, 2006:

• Campaign Tactics, a category we created for articles about overall strategies employed by the candidates, particularly advertising strategies, was the most written about subject with 18% of all articles.
• The subject most written about in the last reporting period, the war in Iraq, was written about in 16% of the articles in this reporting period.
• Overall, coverage for both Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman was predominantly negative at 47 and 48% respectively.
• Local Connecticut publications favored Ned Lamont in the Campaign Tactics and Iraq War subject categories much moreso than national publications which tended to slightly favor Joe Lieberman.
• Poll results seem to directly affect the overall positive or negative media coverage of a particular candidate in a very significant manner.

To view the full report click here. We blogged about our previous report here.

The following graphs illustrate some of the trends in coverage available within the full report.

Lieberman Favorability Breakdown:

Lamont Favorability Breakdown:

Lamont vs. Liberman Average Favorability:

As mentioned previously, we are currently running a demonstration of our ImpactWatch™ media monitoring platform that tracks mainstream media coverage of the Connecticut Senate Race. As part of the demonstration, we have used ImpactWatch™ to create a report on media coverage of the race during the month of September. This is the first in a series of reports we will release in the days leading up to the election.

Following are some of the reports key findings:

• Iraq was the subject of 20% of all stories written about this race, making it the most popular frequently mentioned topic.
• Overall, coverage of Ned Lamont was slightly more favorable than the coverage of Senator Joe Lieberman.
• However, Senator Lieberman’s coverage became more favorable as September went on due to the release of positive poll numbers at the end of the month. During this same period, Mr. Lamont’s coverage became more negative.
• Connecticut media had a larger proportion of positive articles written about Mr. Lamont and negative articles written about Sen. Lieberman than the national media.

The following graphs demonstrate some of the trends in coverage.

Subject Breakdown

Lamont vs. Lieberman Avg Favorability

You can view the full report here.

If you are interested in learning more about ImpactWatch™, please sign up now for our free access to our demo on the CT Senate Race.

You can make yourself a free, categorized and searchable archive of news on any topic for reference and monitoring using free web-based RSS reader Bloglines in tandem with major news aggregators. This is not something that is immediately apparent, but it’s still relatively simple. Here’s how to do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose. (more…)

We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with Moreover Technologies to begin to use their online news content in ImpactWatch, our flagship media monitoring service. For those not in the know, ImpactWatch is a web-based media management platform used by a large number of public relations and corporate communications professionals. We are proud to announce that Moreover now joins other high-volume media content providers such as Factiva and VMS in helping to provide our ImpactWatch clients with a truly global combination of news sources, tools and information that give our clients a simple way to visually track, gather and analyze global news content.

After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.

Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.