Republican National Convention and the Media
By Todd Murphy, Vice President, Universal Information ServicesWith the first full day of the 2016 Republican National Convention now in the rear view mirror, we can fully analyze the media mentions. The news monitoring and media measurement teams at Universal Information Services have pulled media mentions across all types of media for the past 24 hours: print, broadcast, web, and social media. Our analysis focused only on stories that showed the 2016 RNC topic was prominently featured. From over 53,000 media mentions today we distilled two graphs.
RNC 2016 graphs compare the top 10 personalities mentioned in yesterday's media.
We pulled all mentions at 9am CDT on Monday, July 18th and then ran a second pull of mentions on Tuesday, today, at 9am CDT to see how the personalities mentioned have changed. It's interesting to note how the speakers at the convention, and the topics they cover, directly impact the media coverage. Of course this is no surprise, you would hope, if not expect this to be the case. But to see the top 10 personalities change so much between days is interesting.
When you compare Monday's chart to Tuesday's chart, you can see that the focus has changed. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is now second among personalities mentioned after a full day of the convention.
The second chart of RNC 2016 media coverage looked at topical categories.
This chart indicates key topics that were covered or discussed by the media within the last 24 hours, of which we have represented the top 10 topics. Again, we compare Monday's chart against Tuesday's chart to show how the topics have changed over a 24 hour period... after the start of the speakers.
So what does all this media measurement mean?
The first level of meaning one can derive from this is that the traditional media and social media directly follow the programming, presenters, and topics mentioned as content of the Republican National Convention event. So for example, if an organization wants to be on the leading edge of discussion, or able to react to an evolving dialogue, tracking and measuring the media is an effective way to do that.At a deeper level, understanding the insights and how the media impacts discussion can help an organization predict what topics will be discussed later. Later could be the next hour, tomorrow, next month, or next year. For example, will Melania Trump's alleged plagiarism continue to be a source of controversy beyond the latest 24 hour news cycle, or will it be pushed out of our conscience by the new programming of Tuesday night's convention comments.For over 100 years monitoring the news has mostly been seen as a reactive model, a service to help organizations see what has already occurred. The field of media measurement has moved news monitoring into much more of a predictive model. Organizations can now track exposure and correlate the outcomes to future behavior from the media. In the world of public relations and corporate communications, having the ability to know where the discussion is going can be critical. Knowing what your next move should be, because you understand how the media will react, will directly impact the image of an organization.The team at Universal will keep our eye on the #RNC2016 discussion. Who knows where it will go tomorrow. I do know we will be monitoring it.
