I’m proud to be a member of the Karen Learning & Education Opportunities Group (KLEO) – an Ottawa based non-profit corporation that supports the Karen people which is an indigenous ethnic minority group living in Thailand, Burma and Canada. The focus of KLEO is to provide educational opportunities for Karen people. One of our key initiatives is Jen’s House which supports and houses 24 children who attend Thai schools while they receive a level of education not currently available in their mountain homes. This year ten of these students completed high school and are entering post secondary education.

KLEO has been thrilled to join forces with the team at MediaMiser who kicked off their support of our organization with a substantial donation. Now, MediaMiser employees have offered to volunteer with Karen refugee families who are resettling in Ottawa. These volunteers help children complete homework, guide families on filling out critical paperwork, and assist with overall integration in Canadian society.

KLEO was founded by Coleen Scott, an Ottawa woman, in memory of her daughter who passed while teaching Karen children in Thailand in 2003. What began as a teardrop is now a flowing river of support for the Karen people by an expanding group of volunteers in Ottawa.

If you would like to join MediaMiser’s corporate lead and help us with our efforts please email kleogroup@gmail.com. We would be happy to offer an introductory presentation to your organization so they can better understand our needs and objectives. We are also always looking for volunteers, including some to help with our summer program which supports Karen students with their English language learning.

Marilyn Faulkner is the treasurer of KLEO and Coleen Scott is the charity’s founder.

Indeed, last week’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium attracted experts from various solution providers, academia, large corporations such as Kraft Foods Inc., the American Red Cross, and even high-powered media outlets such as Thomson Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

MediaMiser was also at the May 8 conference in New York City, as we have lately been doing a lot of work on cross-lingual sentiment analysis (in plain English: analyzing the tone of media and social media content in various languages). I presented our latest results – with a focus on experiments we’ve performed pairing English-based systems with machine translation to annotate French documents – to the crowd gathered at midtown Manhattan’s Lighthouse International.

But multilingual challenges weren’t the only items on the menu.

Presenters at the conference also focused on concepts such as machine learning, data acquisition crowd sourcing and user perspectives. On the machine learning side, the University of Pittsburgh’s Jan Wiebe gave some great insights on how to apply language models trained in a specific business vertical or domain (for example, oil and gas) to a different vertical (as another example, automakers).

There seemed to be a consensus around the room during the conference that machine learning gives the best accuracy compared to rule-based systems, and we saw a very good example of an accurate system concerning a narrow domain by Salt Lake City’s Sproutloop.

Building large collections of annotated documents through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or a specialized service called CrowdFlower – an enterprise crowd-sourcing solution – also seem promising where data acquisition through crowd sourcing is concerned. This could open an avenue to creating very accurate systems in extremely specific domains or subjects, for minimal investment.

But what about actual users?

They were there too, giving insight on how sentiment analysis can be most effectively used in the real world. They highlighted that multi-channel solutions are often required, as well as digging deeper into sentiment than the classic and often-used positive, neutral, negative classifications.

A great example was given by Rich Brown of Thomson Reuters, who highlighted that negative sentiment can hide or not fully explain the emotions of sadness or anger – the former usually means disappointment, and the latter could mean the person will try to harm the reputation of another.

The organizers of the Symposium called automated sentiment analysis “one of the most exciting applications to emerge in recent years,” and we agree – we’re very excited about the work we’re doing in automating sentiment, especially as it pertains to multi-lingual analysis of both social and traditional media content, and very much enjoyed seeing what others in the field are doing as well.

MediaMiser CTO David Nadeau is also the founder of InfoGlutton, a MediaMiser company that tracks social media mentions and sentiment for SMEs.

Social media

15 social media lies, myths & fairy tales - Hint: It’s not free, and you can’t use the same tactics you used in 1982 (via Business2Community)

Social media mavens get VIP service at SFO – People with a Klout score of 40 or higher are now able to use the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge at the San Francisco International Airport (via Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Crowdsourcing fashion opinions through Facebook – Fashion retailer C&A’s Brazilian arm has a new initiative allows people to ‘like’ items of clothing on their Facebook page, with customers able to view the real-time data in-store (via ITWeb)

Measurement

10 sentiment analysis issues to be aware of – Companies need to focus on the learning obtained from sentiment analysis, experts say (via Mediabistro)

Social media data: Time to stop just measuring and start learning? Social media measurement is about more than looking at pretty dashboards (via Econsultancy)

Copyright and content: Paywall site Ongo, backed by the New  York Times and Washington Post, folds after 16 months - On the heels of Google’s shuttering of One Pass, paywall and news aggregator Ongo (which had $12M in funding) is closing (via PaidContent)

Social media

Measuring the effects of social media marketing (via Business2Community)

Chirpify grabs $1.3M to bring digital payments to Twitter (via AllthingsD)

Facebook timeline: Help or hindrance for agencies? (via Federal Computer Week)

How much are you worth to Facebook? (via Forbes online)

How to get real engagement on your Facebook page (via Ragan.com)

YouTube launches advertiser playbook, gives away $50M in free advertising (via SocialTimes)

MailChimp announces integration with Hootsuite (via Biospace)

What your Klout score really means (via Wired)

Media measurement

The sarcasm machine: Measuring sentiment in social media mentions (via Memeburn.com)

How to measure the impact of Google+ (via Journalism.co.uk)

Traditional media/PR

‘Superficial’ polls missed the mark in Alberta election (via Toronto Star)

Can an algorithm write a better news story than a human reporter? (via Wired)

Ketchum named PR agency of the year (via TMC.net)

Many news sites, such as the New York Times and some Postmedia websites, are even re-experimenting with the concept of full or limited paywalls – which could end up doing more harm than good in our increasingly social and wired world.

The disruptive power of the web

It’s fair to say that most news organizations were taken by surprise by the emergence of the Internet when it first gained prominence in the mid to late 1990s.

That disruption inflicted great pain on news organizations’ ability to turn a profit, and directed a lot of misplaced animosity towards Google. Google was blamed for, among other things, draining newspapers of ad revenue. There’s some truth to that - It’s been reported that Google makes more money than the entire newspaper industry.

But really, Google isn’t to blame.

The industry simply failed to adjust its business model as the times changed.

With the emergence of social media, the next wave of innovations and challenges will not only have a direct impact on newspapers’ bottom-lines, but potentially on all businesses.

It is true that Google was extremely disruptive to the newspaper industry’s overall ad revenues. But that wasn’t their only source of income – classified pages, as well, represented a hearty revenue stream for most newspapers.

The Internet didn’t just change the way information was delivered and consumed. It changed the way people interacted with one another.

Classified pages go digital

The Internet’s rapid growth spawned dating sites, chat rooms, the crowd-sourcing of content and ideas, and – to the newspapers’ horror – free or very cheap online directories and classifieds, such as Craigslist and eBay. The need to interact or do business through a static, paper-based medium began to dissipate.

Via the web, deals could be done quicker and cheaper, and users were suddenly able to tweak their ad content on the fly, in real-time.

This is the true value of the Internet.

Innovations such as online dating sites and digital classifieds paved the way for social media. These technological icebreakers helped dull the inhibitions of older generations, and created a new social world for new generations that, quite frankly, don’t view social media as something revolutionary. No, for the next generation, it’s simply something that’s always been.

Now everything from finding a good restaurant to engaging in commercial transactions is migrating to social media, thanks to its open framework. This facilitates greater speed of communication and interaction between individuals.

And that’s the takeaway from the experience of the newspapers in the 1990s and beyond. Instead of fighting change, businesses of all types must now embrace social media as a way to generate leads, engage current and future customers, and market themselves in innovative ways.

Not only is the commercialization of social media happening right now, but when companies engage and listen to social chatter, they are able to be proactive by addressing issues as they appear – such as a steak restaurant responding to a tweet asking where to find a good steak in their area – and, in turn, better serve the public.

From March 24 to April 3, MediaMiser collected a sample of nearly 6,000 tweets mentioning the Juno Awards. We narrowed our search to seven award categories, comparing Twitter mentions of each nominated artist – and one big question we had was whether the winners would line up with the most-mentioned names.

The big winner in mentions was Canadian tween favourite Justin Bieber. In terms of volume, Bieber stole the show – the pop sensation had more than ten times the number mentions of other artists (probably unsurprisingly, considering the demographic of Bieber’s fans). Notably, over 90 per cent of mentions were in the same retweeted post – the following thank-you to fans sent out after he won the Fan Choice award:

@justinbieber: WE not me…won the JUNO!! #ILOVEMYBELIEBERS #THANKYOU

William Shatner also made something of an impact, being mentioned nearly 50 times in our analyzed tweets (garnering positive comments such as “Shatner made the Junos this year” to negative observations like “Top reason not to watch the Junos – William Shatner.”

But now, back to the artists. Among the remaining categories we looked at, a further three winners lined up with the most-mentioned artists: Adele, Feist and Francophone indie rock troupe Malajube.

The most-used hashtags during the Junos were #ilovemybeliebers and #thankyou, whose popularity was obviously affected by Bieber’s thank-you tweet. The next top three tweets were all direct references to the awards themselves.

The top words among all tweets further illustrate Bieber’s Twitter domination during the Junos, with both the Bieber-influenced hashtags and his name showing up in disproportionately large numbers (even exceeding mentions of the awards themselves).

Outside of the big winners, we looked at the overall patterns in tweets mentioning the Junos (or variations thereof).

Interestingly, as shown in the chart, the number of tweets dropped the day of the Junos – quite probably because the awards were held on a Sunday – and peaked both the day before and after. Many of the earlier tweets were anticipatory, or wishes of luck from fans. Following the gala tweets focused on results, with offers of congratulations and, of course, the rapid retweeting of Bieber’s thank you message.

Top influencers during the Junos included many artists whose fans were apt to retweet their posts. All eleven users shown in the influencers table had a high number of retweets, but didn’t post a large number of messages about the Junos. Instead, many of the top posters were focused on advertising or highlighting the Junos.

Among the top users by posting was @JimWatsonOttawa, twitter account of the Mayor of Ottawa (the host city of this year’s awards). The account featured 24 tweets about the Junos, highlighting the presence of the awards show in the city and his participation.

Social media

20 key points about social media measurement and metrics (via econsultancy.com)

Starbucks is No. 1 most socially engaged company (via QSRMagazine.com)

Use social media to measure what matters  (via Totallymad.co.za)

Canadian investors bet $20M on Hootsuite (via allthingsdigital.com)

Hootsuite's owl logo.

Media measurement

U.K. riots “made worse” by rolling news, BBM,  Twitter and Facebook (via The Guardian)

Traditional media

iPad users spending $70k per day on newspaper and magazine content (via Cnet.com)

NADbank releases new readership research on Canadian daily newspapers (via Newspaperscanada.ca)

Calgary Herald dominates online, print readership: Survey (via the Calgary Herald)

Vancouver Sun increases readership both in print and online in 2011 (via the Vancouver Sun)

According to MediaMiser‘s analysis Mr. Cullen had held the lead in mentions following the last leadership debate on March 12, as outlined in this Toronto Star blog article by Joanna Smith.

Shortly afterward, however, the two candidates swapped positions as described by this Canadian Press article by Stephanie Levitz (run online in the Hamilton Spectator, Winnipeg Free Press, Huffington Post Canada and other outlets). Mr. Mulcair’s lead, however, was by less than one percentage point.

But tonight Mr. Cullen has again passed the candidate widely reported to be the favourite, with results at 10: 45 p.m. as follows (percentage mentions of all mentions of all candidates):

Cullen   23.1%

Mulcair  22.3%

Nash  19.6%

Topp  13.9%

Dewar  11.7%

Ashton  6.5%

Singh  2.9%

Mr. Cullen has repeatedly gained momentum during and following the various all-candidates debates, but Mr. Mulcair seems to have kept more of a steady pace (see chart below, taken from past 13 days).

MediaMiser will provide live Twitter intelligence on CTV News Channel tomorrow morning as the first ballot vote unfolds.

We’ll release our next Intel Report next week. Until then, happy reading!

Gauging Interest in Pinterest: Pinterest has the fewest unique visitors among the seven major social media sites, but ranks third in average minutes per site visitor per month (via Worcester Business Journal online)

 How does Pinterest make money? After all, that’s what separates a cool idea from a business (via econsultancy.com)

CNN takes social media crown in cable … but where are the ratings? CNN accounted for almost 13 per cent of all social media mentions in February, but the network still trails Fox and MSNBC in the ratings (via TheWrap.com)

A New and Simple Way to Measure Social Media ROI: It’s called Social Equivalent Advertising Value (SEAV) (via Forbes.com)

Kony video proves social media’s role as youth news source: According to the Pew Research Center, the Kony video “provided striking evidence that young adults and their elders at times have different news agendas and learn about news in different ways” (via MSNBC.com)

Social Media Rocks But Don’t Forget About Direct Mail: Why do many marketers look at direct mail the way people look at the Jurassic Period? (via Business2Community.com)

Ready for Spring Cleaning? Start With Your  Twitter Account: The days of wanting hordes of anonymous, zombie followers on your  Twitter are over (via Business2Community.com)

Measuring Facebook – The problem with metric changes: New, exciting market offerings on the platform bring new headaches for Facebook data crunchers (via clickz.com)

It’s a normal day at the office, and your project is on time and on budget. You’re looking forward to maybe a few extra minutes at lunch.

Then your phone rings. It’s a reporter.

Whether the reporter is looking for an interview or just fishing for information, you’ve just had a whack of additional work dumped on your desk. As someone who’s been on both ends of a call like this, I’ve come to learn that just one query from a journalist can throw some organizations into disarray – even panic.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Media calls can be a great way to advance your key messages, get the word out about your organization, and build goodwill with the press and community at large. Here are a few things you can do to save your organization – and yourself – a lot of grief. And with a bit of luck, you might be able to enjoy a relaxed lunch after all.

1. Know the reporter: Media ask questions, and you should too. If you aren’t familiar with the journalist, make sure you’re at least clear on the name, including correct spelling, and the organization they represent. What is the journalist’s role? Does your caller follow your sector regularly as a beat reporter, or is he or she on general assignment? A journalist who knows something about your sector might ask more detailed questions but generally will be easier to deal with, and will have a more solid background upon which to write his or her story.

2. What’s this about? Some places will ask journalists for an advance list of questions, but don’t necessarily expect co-operation. Journalists usually loathe doing this, and for good reason – advance lists of questions often generate canned, boilerplate answers. And frankly you don’t want a list of advance questions either, because your proposed answers will have to run a gauntlet of approvals that will no doubt end up eating up your day. It does make sense of course to ask what the requested interview is about, and get a broad outline of the topics to be discussed.

3. So what are people saying? Journalists don’t like interrogation any more than you do. But in a friendly conversation, they may disclose who else they’ve interviewed and what’s been said. This information will help you  identify the angle of the reporter’s article, and how questions put to your organization may be framed. As well, journalists have become big-time tweeters – a quick scan of the Twitterverse may yield valuable intelligence on where the journalist may want to take the story.

4. When’s your deadline? As an effective media relations professional, it’s important to be seen by the media as a resource rather than an uncooperative gatekeeper. So be sure to note the date of the journalist’s deadline, and promise to get back to them so they have plenty of time to file their story. If you can’t come up with the right answers or proper information sought, get back to the journalist anyway and apologize for the delay. Courtesy goes a long way in establishing a good working relationship.

5. What’s in it for me? You need to decide if your organization or client gains from the media exposure being offered. After all, earned media you generate will be measured in terms of return on investment