What does the data mean?

Strategy Explorer analyses data over a longer time period to ensure that we can “smooth out” unwanted signals such as very short term viral moments which do not contribute to audience preference in a long term and meaningful way.

This has given us a more accurate understanding of audience sentiment than would be possible by looking at short term media activity.

Strategy Explorer can break this down into a month by month view and track the progression of topics over time. We still ensure that short term “blips” are filtered from the data, whist at the same time giving an up to date picture of a topic’s relevance in the current time period.

The visualization now shows you:

• Any movement in topics from month to month
• Topics that are “trending” - meaning that we are seeing significant and sudden interest
• The core and fundamental attachment that a topic has to an audience or objective (we call this the Foundation value), and the more medium term importance of a topic (which we call the Signal value)
• We also provide a trend score to show the short term popularity of each topic

Understanding the Data

Distance Chart

Here is an example Distance Chart, including trending topics.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

For even more information you might want to look at Distance Scores & Conversational Graph

Distance to Objective

How close is the topic to the stated objective, measured by the level of connectedness between topic and objective as observed in the global conversation

Distance to Audience

How close is the topic to the selected audience, measured by the level of connectedness between topic and audience flagged content as observed in the global conversation

Detailed Scores

The distance scores used in the Distance Chart (above) are calculated by taking a blend of the following factors:

Trend value

Based on the current volume of coverage, noise and interest as relates to the topic

Signal value

Based on the distance of the topic to the objective or audience over the past three months, weighted towards today