7 Media Metrics, Analytics and Impact Projects to Present at Collab/Space Austin

PBS MediaShift’s Collab/Space events have been a huge hit. Previous Collab/Space events have taken place in New York City, Chicago and Washington D.C.. We’re continuing this trend by bringing together another diverse group of participants, including entrepreneurs, journalists, technologists, designers, marketers and investors to collaborate in Austin.

PBS MediaShift is joining forces with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the Media Impact Project at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center to produce an innovative all-day workshop on April 16 at the Belo Center for New Media at the University of Texas at Austin. This hands-on workshop will focus on media metrics, analytics and measuring impact. The workshop will take place from 9 am to 5 pm followed by a nighttime mixer, the day before the 16th International Symposium on Online Journalism.

Below are the 7 projects and startups that will present at Collab/Space Austin. In the afternoon, we’ll do collaborative exercises — using improv comedy techniques — to learn how to work better together, and break out into groups to help each others’ projects get past business challenges.

There are still a few spots available at the workshop, so please register today! And whether you join us for the workshop or not, you’re invited to our free #ISOJ kick-off mixer on the same evening.

Today, we’re excited to announce Collab/Space Austin’s featured projects, listed below in alphabetical order.

COLLAB/SPACE IMPACT PROJECTS

Chute Insights

Project description: Chute gives brands mastery over the world’s visual media — from discovering audiences and influencers, to the ideation, production, and amplification of compelling visual material through its visual marketing automation platform — Chute Insights and Chute Workspace. Chute Insights, launched in February 2015, allows companies to tap into a real-time visual stream of consumer photos and videos shared on Twitter and Instagram to uncover insights about their customers, brand, industry and competitors for an informed, robust marketing strategy. To extract more value, marketers and consumer analysts can filter the view to examine sentiment, purchase intent, geography and emerging trends. Chute Insights not only enables searches by keywords, but also by people, allowing brands to access and uncover affinities from an always-on focus group of customers, brand ambassadors or industry influencers.

Presenter bio: Gregarious Narain, Co-Founder and CTO of Chute, is responsible for architecting and scaling the Chute platform. Previously, Gregarious was the VP of Product at Klout where he helped establish the Klout Score as the standard for online influence through product development and developer outreach. Follow him on Twitter @gregarious.

CIR’s Impact Tracker

Project description: The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Impact Tracker helps you turn your organization’s impact anecdotes into qualitative datasets. Fill out a web form (quicker than writing an email!) and send your impact into a database that can be sorted, filtered, tagged and exported.

Presenter bio: Lindsay Green-Barber is the media impact analyst for the Center for Investigative Reporting. Prior to working at CIR, she was a Chancellor’s Fellow teaching at Hunter College in New York. During graduate school, she carried out primary research in Ecuador about indigenous organizations’ use of new information and communication technologies for social mobilization, while also working as a program director at an environmental nonprofit in Ecuador. Green-Barber earned her Ph.D. in political science from The Graduate Center at City University of New York in 2012. She is based in CIR’s Emeryville, California, office.

Grist’s Engagement Analytics Tool

Project description: Grist is a national green news and humor site with a monthly audience of 2 million users. The organization has been experimenting with measuring engaged time (also known as attention minutes), which gauges user activity more accurately than the flawed metric time on site. Over the past six months, with support from the Knight Foundation, Grist has taken initial steps toward building an open-source engagement analytics tool to track this metric. The goal is for this project to become a community-driven effort that offers an affordable complement to standard analytics tools and a simple way for outlets to gain a fuller understanding of—and potentially more support for—their work.

Presenter bios: Nathan Letsinger is the product lead at Grist, where he is responsible for the design and development of Grist’s digital products. He’s been obsessed with web design, user experience, and metrics since 1996, when he built his first website. Over the course of his career he has served as a consultant, educator, marketing manager, editor-in-chief, and product manager.

Brice Gosnell, president of Grist, arrived at the company in 2014, having spent the greater part of his career managing high-profile global travel brands. From 2005-2013, Brice worked at Lonely Planet, where he managed global product-growth strategies including digital content, product marketing, and product development initiatives, increasing Lonely Planet’s market-share position from No. 4 to No. 1. He also was responsible for managing Lonely Planet’s global digital initiatives and brand activity for business development. Prior to Lonely Planet, Brice was product and brand director at Frommer’s/John Wiley and Sons and was an editor at Pearson.

The Guardian’s Ophan

Project description: Ophan is a real-time analytics dashboard which allows editorial staff to monitor how audiences come to the Guardian, their behavior on-site and engagement around our content both on and off-site. It allows editors and reporters to see the effects of their actions on reader behavior as well as on overall site performance and provide actionable intelligence on deepening engagement with readers, creating new content and building audience.

Presenter bio: Ian Saleh is an audience development editor at Guardian US. Previously he worked on the search, social and audience team at the Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter at @iansaleh

StoryPilot

Project description: StoryPilot is a free interactive web application that helps filmmakers and change-makers explore the social impact of documentary films. StoryPilot provides a holistic view of social issue documentaries through innovative data analysis and visualization. With StoryPilot, users gain a nuanced understanding of industry trends, effective impact strategies, and where to find opportunities for innovation.  It exposes in-depth analysis into the conversations around 19 social issues, including the environment, education, health, and human rights. It also places the films and their campaigns in the context of these conversations, and shows what types of narratives make the biggest impact. In the future, Harmony Institute plans to expand StoryPilot to examine other types of media as well, including journalism and fictional film.

Presenter bio: Linnea Hartsuyker has a background in both product management and web development. She has held positions at a variety of internet startups, digital agencies, media companies, and consultancies, including RecycleBank, DraftFCB, ESPN.com, and Accenture. Working with the entire staff, her role is to coordinate and drive all aspects of bringing products and projects to market, from strategy and roadmapping, to user research and UX design, marketing and business development, and testing and releasing new features. She holds an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in fiction from New York University, and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering with a concentration in semiconductor physics from Cornell University. She may be the only person in the world who has been published both in The Journal of Applied Physics and the literary magazine The Golden Handcuffs Review. Linnea is currently the product manager for the Harmony Institute.

Texas Tribune’s All-Audience Metric

Project Description: Like many digital newsrooms, the Texas Tribune is promiscuous in its content distribution. From its own websites to republishing on others’ sites, social media to YouTube, live events to our reporters speaking on radio and TV, its content takes many forms. The challenge is measuring reach across analog and digital channels. The goal with the All-Audience Metric is to capture analytics across these channels and distill them down to a simple dashboard -– perhaps even a single metric –- that’s easily understood by the entire company.

Presenter bio: Rodney Gibbs is the chief innovation officer at the Texas Tribune. Rodney founded and sold two tech companies: Qrank, a social-mobile platform for location-based engagement, and Fizz Factor, a handheld game developer.

Verifeed

Project description: What’s the cost of not knowing? Verifieed strategic social intelligence gives brands, businesses and media a competitive advantage. There’s a wealth of insight and information in a valuable and growing dataset: billions of social conversations. Verifeed filters, patterns and parses conversations to predict trends, understand consumer tastes, needs, interests, experiences, opinions and demographics, and leverage our learning, listening and measurement to shape and secure profitable outcomes for our clients – whether traffic, conversions, thought leadership, brand building, or new customers and revenue. Verifeed social intelligence is proactive: We gather market and competitive intelligence, down to the individual customer or target customer, and can be used variously to improve products and services or shape targeted and personalized marketing campaigns across all platforms. It is also a powerful and accurate way to measure, analyze and contextualize the performance of a campaign in real time and over time, whether the goal is to increase engagement, influencer ‘word of mouth’ or conversions among other ROI metrics.

Presenter Bio: Melinda Wittstock, is a serial entrepreneur, award-winning journalist and social media and big data expert. She is the CEO and founder of Verifeed, the “social intelligence” company, where she is replicating with algorithms and proprietary processes what she used to do with “shoe leather” to be first, right and predictive, whether as a correspondent on the Times of London or later to get “the right content to the right people at the right time” and assure ratings, traffic and revenue growth as a creator of newsmagazines, a digital media executive and mobile app maker. Her career spans Financial Times Television, CNBC, the BBC, ABC News, and her startups Capitol News Connection, NewsiT and Verifeed. She has two wonderful children aged 11 and 8, a golden retriever, and an insatiable appetite for innovation, supporting female entrepreneurs and technologists, and constant learning.