The Conversational Corporation

Leading headlines highlighted the newly arrived athlete’s dissatisfaction with the transport in London, some of whom were caught in London roads’ maze for hours between the city’s main aiport, Heathrow, the Olympic Park and Olympic Village. U.S. hurdler Kerrong Clement tweeted “Um, so we’ve been lost on the road for 4 hrs. not a good first impression London”.

“G4S Olympics security described as chaotic and shambolic by police groups” (Wales Online)

Security was yet another topic of discussion when the media informed readers that G4S failed to provide enough staff for the Olympic sites, forcing the government to assign an additional 3,500 Armed Forces personnel to security work for the Games. The problem grew on July 16 when police were forced to step in to guard hotels around the country where arriving national Olympic teams were checking-in.

An analysis by Dow Jones Insight showed that indeed, despite the various variables analysed (such as ‘Tourism’, ‘Opening Ceremony’, ‘Ticketing’, ‘Infrastructure’ and ‘Sportsmanship’), ‘Athletes’ in the context of their arrival to London and ‘Security’ in connection with G4S peaked on July 16 in the international media, in both traditional and social media, as the two trend charts on the below illustrate.

In the wake of these two main news stories driving the conversation in the media this week, the present analysis will take a deeper dive into the media lanscape related to ‘Security’. A Dow Jones Insight Discovery chart revealed that the news around ‘Security’ had been prevalent in the media for quite some time, exploding on July 16. Over the past week, as the graph below shows, topics such as ‘defense ministry’ and ‘vast security operation’ rose 600% and 420% respectively over the previous week. Even the term ‘security mess’ rose over 129% compared to the previous week, indicating that the media was anticipating an issue.

Taking a deeper dive into the four regions, Canada, US, UK and Australia, and as the two share-of-voice charts below demonstrate, ‘Security’-related coverage was mainly discussed in the US and UK. The social media sphere was particularly active discussing the news.

Perhaps not surprisingly, compared to their US counterparts, the British traditional media was more unforgiving which is reflected in the negative spikes on July 16. The trend charts below compare the sentiment between the US and UK traditional media: