The time for self-control has arrived

Posted on March 12th, 2010 by Guy Howard in iPad News

This morning Apple made the the iPad available for pre-order in the US, with the WiFi version shipping on April 3, to be followed by the 3G version later in the month.

We’ve tracked at over a thousand tweets posted in the first 30 minutes after the online Apple Store online for business,  and this is how their posters’ intentions appear to have broken down:

  • 53% contained the phrases “have ordered,” “on its way” etc.
  • 45% contained either the phrase “iPad now on order” or “will you order?”
  • 24% contained the phrase “will not order”
  • Out of the “have ordered” tweets 10% mention WiFi specifically, while 5% mention 3G only and 5.4% mention both (i.e. twitterers seem to have considered ordering both types).


Here are some that couldn’t resist:

By: Samuelrussell
Pre-order your iPad now before it becomes common place and no one thinks you’re cool! http://store.apple.com/us

By: Andrewdodson
pre-ordered my ipad… my Christmas is in 3 weeks

By: Ram2600
Just pre-ordered my iPad I am such a whore….

By: Mickaelmusic
iPad ordered ! She said I was the very first customer !! Yeah! Do I get a free one ??…. No :( ((

By: Imabuddha
Seeing all the iPad preorder tweets is like playing Nerds with Friends.

Others still need to see in order to believe…though there are waverers:

By: Sproutworx
Avoiding the Internet all day so I don’t accidentally pre-order an iPad.

By: Mburns13
sadly wishing i could be an apple freak with money, cause then i’d preorder the ipad

By: Alanashley
Will not order an iPad until I can play with one, if then. Why would anyone spend the money when they don’t even know the feel of it.

By: Lakitu41
Resisting the urge to pre-order the iPad….

By: Fordan
Holding off on ordering the iPad, since I want the 3G. Not sure I see a reason to preorder, and waiting means I get to handle one first.

By: Champs794
is not mobbing the preorder queue for iPad (Home/3G) (Basic/Premium/Deluxe).

By: Stalebetty
tempted to pre-order an iPad for Beetle but think it would be smart for him to SEE one in person first…

By: Keysie
Feeling incredibly tempted to pre-order an iPad, but I think I’ll hold off until later in the year when the competition is released as well.

By: Jungledave
So far have managed to hold off the urge to pre-order an ipad. Will probably wait for 2.0

By: Jeflnyc
Hoping to get to play with an iPad before committing $$ to the deal. At least, all models, including the 3G ones, are available fr preorder

By: Benfeldman
I’m pretty sure I promised myself I wouldn’t buy an iPad until I played with one, but that pre-order button is looking very tempting…

By: Thinktwice
I did not pre-order an iPad. Must resist.

By: Ytsirklin
Went online to preorder an iPad – total before tax brought it to $976. On second thought will wait for gen 2 and price drop. #ipadoverpriced

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see how other brands have been pigg-backing on the flow of iPad excitement:

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A Reputation on the Hard Shoulder

Posted on March 10th, 2010 by Guy Howard in EquityOptimiser

It was another day of grim breakfast reading for Toyota execs in the US yesterday, as major media outlets reported on the daring rescue that had to be carried out in order to bring a runaway Prius to a standstill near San Diego. The 61-year-old driver, James Sikes, was forced to apply the emergency brake as a Califormia Highway Patrol vehicle backed into his Toyota, which had been doing over 90mph on the freeway even with his full weight on the brake pedal.

It was reported that Mr Sikes had previously taken his Prius back to the dealer, only to be told it wasn’t one of the vehicles at risk from spontaneous acceleration. Sceptics might surmise therefore that this high-speed 911 call might have been his way of guaranteeing himself a full refund and a change of marque, but there can be no question about the wider impact this kind of news has for Toyota’s investors. Indeed, since the beginning of the year we’ve been taking a close look at the effect of recall stories on the company’s market capitalisation, and have discovered that the daily share price movements were on average 1.4% worse (per day) when there was coverage, compared to the days with no coverage on the subject.

This equates to a $2bn loss for each day of coverage in 2010 thus far, so it’s hardly surprising that there has also been talk today of a possible (and still rather conservative) $3bn class action suit.

In the graph below, taken from Commetric’s Equity Optimizer: Material Event Summary, the Y-axis shows the cumulative gains based on an investment level of $100. Meanwhile, the yellow line shows the cumulative performance on days of coverage, the green line represents the days without coverage of the recalls and the light blue line shows the performance of Toyota’s share price on all days. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge. Please note that there was coverage on almost all days towards the end of the period so the yellow (coverage) and light blue (all days) lines almost coincide. The data have been sector adjusted.)

Our report also looked back to 2006 —  another busy year for Toyota recalls — and found how investment returns tended to fall on coverage days then too. We have also outlined our suspicion that Toyota’s current approach may have been influenced by the 2006 prosecution of three company employees for shirking recalls for over a decade, and that coming clean in the manner appropriate to Japanese business culture may not in fact be the best approach in the more adversarial US market (as far as investors are concerned at least).

Toyota may also be paying a higher price in terms of market cap impact because of its erstwhile robust reputation for reliable products.

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Our iPad media coverage snapshot

Posted on February 10th, 2010 by Guy Howard in Uncategorized

When Steve Jobs appeared on stage with Apple’s new iPad like Moses with the tablet bearing the Ten Commandments, media coverage was bound to be extensive.

For some the launch of this much-anticipated device signalled the beginning of the end for the Netbook;  “A game changer” declared Stephen Fry.

For others it was just an awkwardly oversized iPhone….or as Charlie Brooker put it, it’s the thing you have to put down in order to answer your iPhone, which is exactly the same, but smaller.

You can make your own mind up perhaps after watching this handy 3-minute condensation of the iPad Keynote:

Here at Commetric, we conducted a quick quantitative analysis of the resulting buzz across different kinds of media, and found that nearly two thirds of all mentions on the 27th and 28th of January occurred in the blogosphere. (Click on image to enlarge.)

iPad media coverage

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Coverage of our COP15 research

Posted on December 9th, 2009 by Guy Howard in The Climate Conversation, Uncategorized

Hill & Knowlton’s Commetric-powered pre-summit monitoring of COP15 media coverage has come to the attention of PR Week.

Kate Magee’s piece reports how we established that 42% of all coverage at the start of the period analysed was focussing on how the summit might play out, and how more specific themes — such as the emissions of developed nations and the on-going role of the US — were increasingly gaining traction.

On Twitter for example,  discussion of the consequences of climate change became the second ranked topic.  Those contesting the data are getting little attention in print media, blogs or Twitter, but the apparent hacking of emails from a UK research centre — ‘Climategate’ — did indeed create a big spike in the discussion overall.

Read more about The Climate Conversation here.

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The largest media study on Climate Change

Posted on November 30th, 2009 by Petya Kamenova in Announcements, The Climate Conversation

This week we launched what is believed to be the largest ever media study on Climate Change.

The Climate Conversation, put together by Commetric in partnership with Hill & Knowlton (http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/climateconversation/), tracks the ongoing global media debate on the COP15 Earth Summit and seeks to answer key questions such as:

  • who’s leading it
  • on what topics?
  • in which media?
  • and how might this be changing?

The Climate Conversation will have analyzed over 15,000 articles/postings/tweets leading up to the Earth Summit in Copenhagen: a uniquely large sample of influential commentary synthesised from the global media with the resulting analysis presented as two complementary rankings tables:

  • Ranking League Tables: a quantitative ranking drawn from open source data from recognized third party aggregates; our tables show the top tweeters, bloggers, and journalists based on the actual number of articles/posts/tweets
  • Green Power Lists: a ranking based on the most prominent influencers and topics; the Green Power list specifically ranks six different categories of influencers and how their profiles changes over time.

topics_by_media_type3

To deliver a truly international sample we combined quantitative and qualitative media analysis — making use of advanced text-mining technologies coupled with experienced media analysts — processing opinion across the Blogosphere and the Twittersphere and other news formats in nine different languages. The final report provides a genuinely wholistic perspective as Commetric’s analytical tools are able to track and incorporate not only the original social media mentions, but also all the links and additional documents referenced by them.

topics-by_influencer2

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A lesson in networking

Posted on November 27th, 2009 by Angelina Penkova in Announcements, InfluenceAnalyser, MediaAnalyser

Being a young company with a higher degree of enthusiasm than experience, we’ve come to learn an important lesson recently: that we have tended to be better at selling our influencer network analysis (INA) solutions than we have at developing our own networking skills.

I personally find this a little ironic, because most people turn to networking as the first way to promote their business and generate sales. Not only do they rely on personal contacts, but they also sign up for all kinds of social media, adding a stack of people they’ve never known as “friends”, blog and tweet about 50 times per day, attend conferences, write commentaries and…(the list is too long). Yet it seems that here at Commetric we started with marketing and only later came to understand the power of networking. Maybe building connections and building sales don’t always go hand in hand? Perhaps networking is not about sales after all?

Anyway, as we’ve grown organically, we’ve come to realize that networking should be a central part of our efforts to change the surrounding environment, to raise awareness and to show the world how we’d like things to be done. So here’s the plan…

  • Make small but meaningful steps towards promoting the benefits of research
  • Prove that innovation matters, big time
  • Show interest in others’ work and achievements and build long-term collaborations with people and companies that have the potential to change the world.

And here’s how we’re doing so far:

  • Back in April, we presented Influence Analyser to a group of students at Sofia University
  • Then in October we were unanimously accepted as members of AMEC – the Association of Media Evaluation Companies http://www.amecorg.com/amec/index.asp , adding to our credibility in the media analysis space whilst providing us with thought leadership and training opportunities!
  • We’re tweeting more actively.

And we are becoming ever more active bloggers and plan to post interesting facts about research and innovation on a regular basis here, whilst making ourselves available to discuss them with you.

Let’s talk!

“If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”
Thomas Edison

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Introducing the Board Visualiser

Posted on November 25th, 2009 by Simeon Ianchev in BoardVisualiser

In a world of increasing regulation, organisations have to become more transparent: more people are asking more questions, more regulators are issuing more fines.

Board Visualiser is a new Commetric tool that brings a new transparency to corporate structures. It can help you answe the following questions in real time:

How can you identify the links between one organizations and another?  Who is in a position to use or abuse influence?  What are the risks associated with non-executives who sit on multiple boards?  Do organisations know?

It does this by mining the premium management database from Boardex, a unique business networking resource with listings for over 330,000 of the world’s most important business and organization leaders.

Using social network analysis (SNA) methods, Board Visualiser locates indirect connections between organisations and individuals, pinpointing those which are located in important or unique positions within the ‘network of the corporate world’.

The tool works with any database where a link between two ‘actors’ can be identified: they may have worked on the same board of an organization, exchanged emails or phone calls, shared ownership of a property, studied together or declared their friendship. The filtering functionality of Commetric’s network visualization and manipulation engine (VizEngine) allows shaping of the results according to any of the key attributes — e.g. age, gender, nationality, education or interests.

And our proprietary data mining routine (based on Dijkstra’s algorithm) parses the database in waves — which means that if you wish to discover the shortest path between two organisations through their board members, the first Board Visualiser wave will identify the individuals sitting on the boards of the two organizations to see if there is any overlap and, if none is found, a second wave will initiate seeking further directorships held by these same individuals and looking for connections there…and so forth, until a link between the two starting pair of organisations has been found.

The video below demonstrates the functionality of Board Visualiser in greater depth:

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Afghan, Pakistani Media Provide Interesting Take on the U.S. Strategy

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Petya Sabinova in Fire Watch, InfluenceAnalyser, MediaAnalyser

During the months of August, September and October, Commetric monitored and analyzed local media sources in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Our findings point to the conclusion that NATO messages relating to goals and strategy are not coming through.

Fire Watch Themes 07-13 Sep 09 Fire Watch Themes 24-30 Aug 09

Titled Fire Watch, the weekly reports I helped prepare revealed that faith in the Coalition Forces has been deteriorating, as they have faced mounting criticism both in Afghanistan and at home.

The graphs above, extracted from Fire Watch, indicate that while the Strategy and War on Terror topics predominated, the secondary debates around them shifted, moving away from Troops Deployment towards an increasing fixation with casualties, civilian and military.

The period we covered was ripe with controversies. Doubts were expressed about the legitimacy of the Afghan elections, and locals were encouraged, then disheartened, by the pledge for a change in strategy, closely followed by military action which resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Equity Prioritiser and Equity Optimiser are launched

Posted on November 16th, 2009 by Petya Kamenova in Announcements, EquityOptimiser, EquityPrioritiser

Commetric has launched a new service suite geared to help companies determine the financial impact of every instance of media coverage, and thereby place a financial value on good and bad communications by mapping them onto share price performance.

Gemma O’Reilly has covered the story in PR Week, quoting Anthony Payne, the founder of Peregrine Communications Group:

“Any tool that helps quantify PR impact is to be applauded. Our client M Capital is in fundraising mode and has been tracking traffic to its website, which has spiked in line with media coverage. We also noted an exact correlation in the jump in JP Morgan Private Equity’s share price to a story by Nick Hasell. This new tool, which attempts to put news into the context of built-in investor expectations, could be an excellent addition”

Read the full article here >>

But the strength of Commetric’s new Equity Prioritiser and Equity Optimiser services goes significantly beyond PR optimisation: our clients are starting to make use of them to accurately quantify the share price reaction — and over-reaction — to hundreds of different business activities that are reported in the media.

The new services were developed in partnership with CommEq Asset Management (an abbreviation of ‘communication equity’), whose patent-protected methodologies are used every day to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The technology uses advanced natural language-processing software and sophisticated mathematical models to automatically, consistently and objectively map millions of news items against hundreds of thousands of stock price movements and billions of intra-day movements. We isolate the abnormal share price impact of more than 350 distinct business issues, and track more than 1,600 public companies across several exchanges.

Whereas traditional reputation analysis has tended to rely on the subjective assessment of positive and negative coverage in the mind of the analyst, Equity Prioritiser and Equity Optimiser by contrast, identify good and bad news with reference to the expectation of key stakeholders, analysts, traders and investors.

I’d like to share with you a recent interview given by Commetric’s Christofer Solheim in which he explained the importance of this innovation:

“For some time traditional media analysis has been the defacto method for measuring communication success. What we have now is a tool that not only identifies the issues in the media that are most impacting on a company’s share price, and what corporate news and actions are to blame, but also gives a clear indication on future business strategy and communications tactics. In an age where every marketing pound must see a return, such analysis will be vital in ensuring those pounds are effectively spent.”

He went on to illustrate the complex nature of City communications, using the example of a pilot we recently undertook with the construction industy in the UK. We analysed three major PLCs and found that:

“Sometimes a share price can rise even when a major PLC announces losses or falling earnings. On the face of it, you might expect ‘bad’ news to impact negatively on share price, when in fact the losses might not have been as bad as the City expected. Conversely, ‘good’ news such as a major new contract win can result in a share price fall. It might be that commentators adjudge the business to be over-reaching itself financially, or it could just be that news of the win is contained in an article that generally talks about a downturn in the industry, and this again may cause a share price to fall.”

A subsequent project we carried out in the banking sector indicated that the three biggest long-term reputation drivers for HSBC’s share price were:

  1. Financial performance
  2. Shareholder activism
  3. Explicit references to business strategy. (In contrast, for Barclays the key driver was the coverage of the planned sale of assets.)

Another pilot, this time in the US, revealed that coverage around Pepsico’s CEO often unnerves the market, and is strongly and persistently associated with a decline in the stock. We also found that the most sensitive driver of share price for another Fortune-100 client in the food and beverage sector was news of lay-offs.  Christofer affirms that the benefits are sure to be incontrovertible:

“Having these insights, and being able to demonstrate and visualise them in unequivocal terms, will I’m sure help many businesses seriously re-think their business priorities and communication strategies.”

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Commetric Market Reach Enhanced with Jonny Rea Driving European Sales

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by Petya Kamenova in Announcements, EquityOptimiser

We are very pleased to announce that Commetric’s management team — already brimming with experienced experts in media relations, mathematics, natural language-processing and technology — now includes Jonny Rea,  who joins as Director of Equity Optimiser and European Sales from Research International where he was CEO for Italy.

Zurich-based Jonny brings significant experience applying sophisticated analytical processes to help companies gain competitive edge. Prior to his role with Research International, Jonny spent over 10 years at Accenture Strategic Services where he worked with major European clients to optimise their Marketing ROI. He began his marketing career at Marks & Spencer as an assistant merchandiser, after which he moved to senior marketing roles in both Kraft and Wrigley.

“We’re really delighted to have Jonny join the team, he brings not only a good commercial sales acumen but real client understanding in the areas of using analytics to make better decisions, ensuring such data driven insights really get used” (Chris Shaw, Commetric’s Managing Director)

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