OnQ Social Media Consulting » Google

Google Wave and the media

Jeff Quinton — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:12:17 +0000

Over the weekend, I read a Mashable post by Leah Betancourt about how Google Wave is changing news already, despite the limited numbers of actual Google Wave users so far as its beta testing continues.

There are 4 examples of how media companies are using Google Wave given in the post.

Using Waves to Foster Engagement
Using Waves As ‘Town Squares’
Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool
Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves

Fostering engagement is something that Mashable’s Betancourt points out is being done at places like the Chicago Tribune’s Redeye blog. Redeye sent out its first public wave on November 10 and has been sending out a daily one since then. Their participation in the waves lasts a half hour (the wave itself keeps going) and discuss the cover story that day. They end the wave by taking suggestions from their readers. The wave is promoted via Twitter and on their website.

The Austin American-Statesman is given in the Mashable post as an example of using waves as town squares. They have started two waves and report that it gets troublesome to keep the wave on topic after 50 blips or so. They seem to be using it to engage their readers as well, just in a different way than Redeye. This model seems to be one that I like so far, if combined with a couple of the other examples.

Betancourt next gives the example of The Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and WFLA. These outlets share a common online editor and they use Google Wave to keep track of all the stories they are working on everyday so that everyone in the “converged” newsroom can see what is going on. The editor can track the stories that are in the pipeline through this wave everyday.

Andrew Nystrom and Mark Milian have discussed How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism and even embedded a blog post of that topic into Google Wave. Mashable’s Betancourt summarizes it thusly, “Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process.”

As I read the original post, some ideas hit me. After I got my Google Wave account a few weeks ago, I found it very useless at first, since hardly anyone I knew was on there yet to collaborate. The second week I had an account I discovered public waves and how to search for them. I parlayed this into finding several regional waves for Baltimore and DC that I have since used for networking. I also found a few waves for interests I have and the discussion there has been good. I even started some regional/local waves in hopes of helping the other people I knew on Wave at that point do some networking as well as add their friends to these waves to get more people together. I have noticed in the past week or so that there seem to be a lot more contacts I know on Wave but I’m not sure if that’s due to accelerated invitations by Google and other users or it’s just finding people I hadn’t found before who were already there.

In light of Betancourt’s post and my own rudimentary experiments with Google Wave I started a “news wave” yesterday on Inside Charm City, a Baltimore blog that I publish. I cherry-picked a handful of news items from yesterday’s headlines, mainly the ongoing Sheila Dixon trial and jury deliberations, and invited a few people in Baltimore on Google Wave to participate. It was promoted in a blog post and on Twitter. By the end of the day, the wave had grown to 29 participants and 47 messages (or blips if you prefer.)

Today, I started a wave and embedded this morning’s news roundup post into it. The discussion today so far includes 43 participants and 39 blips. I am going to probably embed this evening’s news roundup post into the Wave as well.

I see my posts as fusing some of the techniques given in the Mashable post. I hope to engage our readers more and I also hope to do some event-based waves. Had I been far enough along in the process of using Wave, I would have started a wave just for the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. I think that one would have been a really big continuing one, but I think there may have been problems keeping up with it or reigning it in if it strayed off-topic. Perhaps letting it go for a couple of days and then migrating to a new wave would be the way to go in a longer event-based wave.

I like the idea of embedding blog posts in a wave to help start discussion and conversation. That seemed to cause more conversation today than just mentioning some news items did yesterday. Today and yesterday both provided people with a sandbox to test out different functions in Google Wave that they weren’t sure about. I have yet to embed any graphics, videos or Google gadgets. I will be going in that directions next probably. I had avoided it so far because I was unsure how big the waves would get and whether some of these add-ins might make it unwieldy and cause freezes.

I really appreciate Leah Betancourt’s great post on this topic and all of the great ideas she was able to assemble from various media people around the country. I have definitely progressed from the first few days of logging in to Google Wave and wondering what I was supposed to do with it next.

Google search trends on campaigns in VA, NJ and NY

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:09:26 +0000

I just wanted to consolidate my previous three posts on the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia along with the congressional race in New York. Links are below.

Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month
Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:18:55 +0000

The first chart is the past 30 days worth of search trends from New Jersey for Chris Christie, Jon Corzine, and Chris Daggett. I initially compared just Corzine and Christine but noticed Daggett was showing up in rising search trends so I re-did the comparison.

Christie has been getting the most searches in New Jersey over the past month or so. Daggett had a spike earlier in the month. All the candidates had a dip last Saturday on October 24th and now Christie leads Corzine with Daggett in third. Corzine started a slow decrease before that across the board dip that seemed to follow President Barack Obama campaigning for him.

New York is the Metro area with the most searches in New Jersey, with Philadelphia in 2nd. As far as specific cities goes, most of the searches seem to be centered around Newark.

The next chart is the one with national search trends for all three candidates.

Daggett seems to be a little bit farther under the radar nationally at times, but he is also a rising search trend nationally. The dip last week seems to not be so much across the board nationally. It would seem that Corzine dropped last week after Obama’s campaigning for him while the other candidated didn’t fall off that much. Christie is leading searches nationally with Corzine second and Dagget third nationally as well.

The top three states for searches on these three candidates are New York followed by New Jersey and Pennsylvania.The New York metro area is dominating any other metro area nationally in searches.

After reading Doug Heye’s piece on how the Yankees and Phillies facing off in the World Series could impact earned media in the race, I did a comparison of all three candidates that also includes Yankees and Phillies. The chart for that (with searches originating only in New Jersey) is below.

As you can see, compared to searches on Yankees and Phillies, all three candidates have negligible results. Both teams got spikes immediately following their series-winning victory in the respective League Championship Series and then fell off afterward. The Phillies also seemed to enjoy a spike after their Game 1 win last night. Either way, much of New Jersey’s media will be focused on the World Series with either team being the local team for a signifcant number of voters in the state.

Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:10:30 +0000

The first chart below is a comparison of Google Insights for Search trends for Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell over the past 30 days. This first chart only covers the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The search trends for both candidates have been going back and forth over the past month as stories occur in the news cycle. Most of the search traffic in Virginia for these two candidates has been in the DC Metro area. After that, Charlottesville, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, and Raleigh-Durham round out the Top 5 metro areas with Virginia search traffic for McDonnell and Deeds. If you look at specific cities, Fairfax and Richmond are where most of the search interest has been in Virginia.

The next chart compares the two candidates nationally.

The results nationally are almost identical for both McDonnell and Deeds. The top 3 regions searching for the two candidates are DC, Virginia, and California. Richmond and Washington are the top two cities nationally search for the Virginia candidates.

I did a comparison of Bob McDonnell and McDonnell Thesis for the past 90 days both nationally and in Virginia. There was a spike at the end of August for the thesis search nationally that died out right after that. Results for that comparison in Virginia had negligible results on searches for the thesis.

Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:41:45 +0000

If you look at the graph below on the search traffic on Google in NY-23 for the past month you will see some interesting, but not necessarily unexpected trends. I found this data via Google Insights for Search. (Note: this search data is isolated to New York state only in the first chart below.)

Until October 14, Bill Owens was getting the most attention via Google searches in New York. About that date, searches for both Dede Scozzafava and Doug Hoffman started increasing. Later traffic proved that Hoffman was outpacing Scozzafava by a decent amount for the next few days.

Around October 18 and when Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman, his traffic started a rapid ascent that has continued since then with other endorsements and national attention on the race. Searches for Scozzafava have declined since then. She is now at or below the same level of searches as Owens, who has seen a slow but steady increase in searches on his name in New York.

The next chart is the same as above for all of the United State instead of just for New York. No other state even approaches New York in the amount of search traffic on the 3 candidates’ names. Both Virginia (possibly NoVa?) and Texas have seen a lot of searches on Hoffman’s name.

Bing’s stats show similar trends for these candidates.