TEXAS DROUGHT10/18/11

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The Ripple Effect

Challenge: Assessing campaign success requires more than media coverage analysis. Today, it hinges on tracking the way influentials interact with and share campaign coverage. To understand how content travels and morphs across the digital space over time, marketers must monitor this campaign afterlife. Failing to do so can leave your brand vulnerable to shifts in influence and missed opportunities.

Solution: Ripple Effect methodology identifies the influentials who fuel a campaign’s total impact. It pinpoints tweets, links and posts and exposes where that content travels long after a campaign ends. This knowledge helps brands confirm targets, sharpen messages and optimize communications budgets.

Benefits: Offers a broader view of the impact of a campaign beyond traditional reach measures

Portrays influence over time

Confirms that the right influencers are being targeted

Available in German and Chinese

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Texas has been in the midst of a drought for several months. To explore the coverage of the drought, influentials were identified in local and national media. This ripple looked at the last six months of drought coverage.

The 11 reporters considered produced 119 original stories, generated 3479 comments and

earned an average tone of 2.97.

The subsequent ripple through social media included

112 links to the original posts from blogs and

other online sources and 3217 tweets pointing to the original articles.

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The Texas Drought Ripple

Eleven reporters from Texas and the national press were chosen based on their coverage of the drought over the past 6 months. Only one reporter from each publication was chosen.

Biggest Ripple: Katie Galbraith of the Texas Tribune had the biggest ripple for both blog links and Twitter posts. Galbraith is a former New York Times reporter and several of her Tribune pieces were reposted in the Times.

Most Articles: Kiah Collier, who writes for the San Angelo Standard-Times, is located right in the heart of the Texas drought. She’s written numerous articles on the drought and its affects. Although her stories did not make a big ripple through the blogosphere, her Twitter ripple is on par with that of Wade Goodwyn from NPR.

Texas versus National News: Five of the reporters write for Texas papers, while four report for national press and two report for the wires. In general, the national press featured fewer stories on the Texas drought than the local Texas papers did. While Galbraith is an exception (with stories published both locally and nationally), the next biggest Twitter ripple came from the Wall Street Journal. Carey Gillam of Reuters also had a significant Twitter ripple.

In the blog ripple, there are few standouts at either level. Steve Campbell of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Hilary Hylton of Time have similar ripples, although Campbell wrote more articles.

Farzad Mashhood: Mashhood is the environmental affairs reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. He started reporting on the drought in June 2011, so his ripples do not represent a full six months of drought coverage. Despite the late start, he has written 13 articles on the drought, placing him in the middle of the pack of reporters. While his blog ripple is on the smaller side, his Twitter ripple is the biggest of the Texas reporters after Galbraith.

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This chart highlights the number of posts from each outlet, the average tone of the post as it relates to the drought in Texas and the number of blog links back to the original story.

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This chart highlights the number of tweets sent by other individuals which linked back to the original stories.

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Based on a review of coverage, these were the reporters who wrote multiple stories about the drought in Texas between April 10 and October 10, 2011. Only one reporter per outlet was included.

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