Austin’s latest piece described news as a commodity.  Does it matter that you got breaking news from a Snooki tweet instead of from the New York Times?  The answer is no. (A better question: are you seriously following Snooki?)

Let’s assume that the news is a commodity and the atomic unit of the news is an article.  An article therefore has the following two characteristics:

1. Each article has the same value.
2. Their values are additive.

So, if there are 15 articles about the new Karate Kid movie and each has a value of X, the value of the Karate Kid story is 15X.

But what is the value of X?

Comparing opening weekend box office gross to the number of article mentions leading up to the film, you could ostensibly calculate the value 1 article mention has on box office reveneue.

For fun, I thought I’d put some of this data together to see the correlation between article mentions and box office numbers (see the following chart here).  Although this test is riddled with inaccuracies* and thus the data holds no weight, I hope you can see the value of this methodology if done correctly (which I plan on doing for a particular industry when the time is right).

Imagine you are an exec at Hewlett Packard in charge of marketing the Tablet and you know the Tablet’s value of X.  To meet your bottom line, you can assume that you’ll need 500 article write-ups in the next 3 weeks to meet your bottom line.  With this knowledge, you could allocate resources for marketing more intelligently (and, more likely, start getting on the horn with every Joe Blogger out there).

There has got to be some industries where something like this would be useful.  Any ideas out there?

* Inaccuracies include but are not limited to:
1) assumption that a high-powered critic’s opinion is the same as a no-namer
2) lack of consideration how long the movie has been in theaters

Tags: Data, Pintelligence

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Product, Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.