Posted May 18th, 2012
by Damien Dupont
Before today’s IPO, the biggest story around Facebook for co-founders not named Mark Zuckerberg was the 2010 film The Social Network. While Mark Zuckerberg continues to dominate coverage, I was curious about coverage of his Facebook co-founders, so I took a look at how the media profiles of Christopher Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin have fared lately.
Of course Mark Zuckerberg’s media presence is far and away beyond anything around this group, but a couple of numbers might serve as a baseline for comparison. Using Factiva’s intelligent search capabilities, I created a search of highly relevant mentions of Zuckerberg in relation to Facebook and to Facebook’s IPO. In the last 8 days (May 11-18) he’s received 9,209 media mentions regarding Facebook, including 2,114 in social media. In the two years previous, he received 42,287, including 7,442 in social media. When specific reference to the IPO are included, I found that over the last 8 days 73% of references were related to the IPO (55% of social media references), while over the previous two years 38% were IPO-related (38% of social media).
What about his co-founders? The least well known, Dustin Muskovitz and Christopher Hughes continue to stay out of the Facebook media spotlight, with Hughes totaling just 9 highly-relevant media mentions over the last two years and Muskovitz 3. Out of those 12 combined mentions, 11 came in the last eight days.
The story is a bit different for Eduardo Saverin. His media exposure has always been far ahead of that of Hughes and Muskovitz, and has skyrocketed thanks to recent events. In the two year period ending May 10, 2012, Saverin received 1,221 mentions (including 420 in social media) related to Facebook’s IPO. That’s a mere 8% of Zuckerberg’s total. But in the last week news broke that Saverin had renounced his American citizenship, leading to all manner of speculation due to the fortune – and taxes – expected for him from the impending IPO.
This twist in the Saverin storyline propelled greater media coverage. In the previous two years, Saverin registered 1,333 English-language media mentions related to Facebook, while in the last 8 days the total 1,958 such mentions. That’s 21% of Zuckerberg’s total and an increase of 47% in one week! And considering that Muskovitz and Hughes totaled 198 mentions in the last eight days and 1192 in the two years prior(when not restricting mentions to highly relevant IPO mentions), Saverin moved from 10% more mentions than the pair over two years to having almost ten times as many.
From WSJ’s Digits: Facebook Investors’ Worth on IPO Day
Tags: Facebook, measurement, media analysis, Social Media
Posted in Damien Dupont, Measurement, Social Media
Posted April 17th, 2012
by Damien Dupont
Baseball season has arrived and Yankee stadium is now officially open for business, so before I get completely caught up in diving grabs and long bombs I should do as I promised and give you the final March Madness results for Buick and Infiniti!
As I noted in the first post on auto advertising during March Madness, car manufacturers spend big on the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, and if social media buzz leads to cars driving off the lot then it looks like it’s a wise investment. These spiffy graphs will show you what I mean and why Buick in particular should be as happy as Kentucky fans.
Buick hit 200,000 on March 18th and 300,000 on the day of the championship game, April 2nd!
Given Buick’s major gains on Facebook and Infiniti’s impressive performance on Twitter I’d say it’s a safe bet they’ll be back in the tournament next year, at least it’s a safer bet than Kentucky winning it all again!
Tags: Basketball, Buick, Infiniti, March Madness, Public Relations, Social Media Measurement
Posted in Damien Dupont, Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media
Posted March 15th, 2012
by Damien Dupont
“Show Your Gold!” is one of the chants used by my alma-mater (#5 seed Vanderbilt – Go Vandy!), and it fits as a battle cry for numerous major companies who crave March Madness’s massive TV and online audience. And while major brands such as AT&T, Capital One, and Coca-Cola are locked in as major sponsors, one sector that has been committed to travelling the “Road to the Final Four” is the auto industry. According to Ad Week, it delivered 21% of ad sales for the 2011 tournament and 17% in 2010. But what sort of social media growth will returning sponsors Buick and Infiniti get for their bids? We’ll track their social media growth during the tourney here and let you know!
Clearly, Infiniti has done a tremendous job so far, especially considering how much bigger brands Coca-Cola and AT&T are.
Additionally, we see that Infiniti’s page, which references their Coaches vs. Cancer and Coaches’ Charity Challenge partnerships, has a clear advantage over Buick’s page, in spite of its inclusion of a “Human Highlight Reel” video page. The story was much the same on Twitter:
Now, get out there and watch all the excitement and come back at the end of the tourney to see if Infiniti’s lead held up!
Tags: advertising, Buick, Facebook, Infiniti, March Madness, marketing campaigns, Social Media, sponsorship, Twitter
Posted in Damien Dupont, Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media
Posted March 17th, 2011
by Damien Dupont
This week, a couple of us got to talking about the recent New York and London Fashion Weeks. And we wondered: who got the most buzz? We did a bit of research and number crunching and the results were really interesting! We decided to put together this little Prezi and share what we found. Hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think. Check it out in full screen for best viewing, then click autoplay.
Tags: media measurement, Social Media
Posted in Damien Dupont, Measurement, Public Relations
Posted June 1st, 2010
by Damien Dupont
Facebook is in the news a lot lately regarding privacy, but it’s not new: A Factiva search reveals that for the roughly five month period from July 1 – December 8 2009, there were 3, 482 mentions of ‘Facebook and privacy.’ But this time it’s different: in the roughly five months since, there were just under 70,000. And, the tone of the discourse is overwhelmingly negative. What happened?
On December 9, Facebook issued a press release to publicize a “transition tool” to aid users in taking advantage of multiple changes they made to their service. It downplayed the changes to the company’s privacy policy and weren’t explicit about how much of their users’ information would be publicly available after the change. Close watchers of the company began to question the changes.
The press release alone didn’t cause any noticeable buzz: A Factiva search of “Facebook and privacy” for 1-8 December found an average of 35 mentions per day, while a search for the same terms from 9-31 December found 33 per day. And the chart of average daily mentions below reconfirms the chart above that January was pretty quiet regarding privacy as well.
The dramatic, continuous groundswell of mentions began on February 17 when Facebook announced a second major change to its privacy settings. This time Facebook used a blog post from a software engineer, and it appears that the change in medium helped bring different results, but the messaging also had a lot to do with it.
The company’s December release touted that the changes would help people connect and share and explained that they’d taken privacy into consideration when they engineered the new default settings and fine-grained controls. Facebook was telling users to trust them to continue their stewardship of users’ privacy. The blog explained that Facebook would now extend the December changes to third party content and again assured users that Facebook would protect them and improve their experience.
As the chart shows, there was plenty of discussion about Facebook and privacy, but more was in store. In April, days after Facebook’s spokesman explained to The Washington Post that Facebook would provide a universal opt-out, an IT security firm released a survey which found that 95% of respondents thought Facebook’s privacy changes were “a bad thing.” They also lamented that most Facebook users are unaware of safe privacy settings and the confusing nature of Facebook’s privacy controls.
While Facebook must have seen the groundswell forming, better media analysis would have allowed them to understand the nuances of the negative tone shaping their coverage. A deeper understanding of the specific conversations people were having and how they were evolving could have allowed them to properly calibrate their messages and PR strategy.
By mid-May, several major influencers spoke out against Facebook, and in the last week there have been extensive negative articles in major outlets. Predictably, this week Mr. Zuckerberg announced – in a letter to a tech blogger – that Facebook would add simpler privacy controls.
Damien DuPont is a report writer and quality assurance specialist in the Dow Jones Media Lab and is based in New York.
Tags: Facebook, Factiva, media measurement, Privacy, Social Media
Posted in Damien Dupont, Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media
