Pulse Insights

Looking to revamp your social media habits in 2013?

Take some cues for what not to do from 2012’s biggest blunders. Head over to Good Enough Mother for a guest post by Pulse Community Manager Katie Carroll to read about the best ways to avoid social media faux pas:

“Social media highs ruled 2012—President Obama’s record-breaking tweet, PSY’s billion-plus views, Pinterest’s astonishing growth, and more. But not surprisingly, along with these peaks came the inevitable valleys, everything from good old-fashioned faux pas to outright blunders. Katie Carroll, Community Manager for Pulse, looks at where social media went wrong, and what you can do to stay a social media winner in 2013.” 

Read the full post here and tell us: how do you stay social media savvy?

Hear from members of the team and enjoy a guided gin and absinthe tasting from Raff Distillerie. RSVP here. 

What were the biggest stories in 2012?

We gathered some of last year’s most read stories and topics across news, business, and entertainment. Check out the articles below, and tell us on Twitter and Facebook: what do you consider 2012’s top stories?

Whitney Houston dies at 48 (Salon)
Sandy leaves death, damp and darkness in wake (AP)
The Disconcerting Brilliance of the iPhone 5 (Slate)
Microsoft unveils ‘Surface’ tablet computer (AP)
Who’s Afraid of Sandy? Meteorologists, And Here’s Why (The Atlantic)
The Massacre in Aurora: Can You Blame the Movies? (The New Yorker)

Who’s Devouring AT&T’s Data Capacity? (Bloomberg Businessweek)

When we launched our Hurricane Sandy feed, we hoped that it would help people stay safe, keep track of loved ones, and stay informed. The graph above shows the percentage of people who added the feed, with the darkest areas representing the highest concentration of adds. The regions affected by the hurricane feature some of the highest concentrations, and we hope that the information from the feed was able to make a positive difference for people both in the area and across the country. 

In the wake of Election 2012, we’re taking a look back: what events shaped the race to the presidency? What issues dominated the news? Our first Pulse Insights post delves into media coverage of game-changing topics, from foreign policy to climate change.

The charts below map media coverage of key issues over the course of this year, as well as articles with headlines featuring Governor Romney or President Obama. We mapped some of the most popular topics throughout the campaign: jobs and the economy, climate and energy, foreign policy, tax and budget, healthcare, and sexual/religious rights.

What do voters consider the most important issues of 2012? According to a Pew Research poll from late September, the economy and jobs still trump other topics when making decisions in the voting booth. See how media coverage reflects those priorities below. 

Our Findings:

• Despite the economy and jobs being the most important issues for voters, media coverage of those topics never really rose to significant levels.
• However, several issues did spike over the course of the campaign. Every few weeks, one topic would come to the fore before moving back to moderate levels of coverage. According to a Gallup poll of registered voters, though, these press peaks only had temporary effects on voter attitude.
• One of these issues was climate, which didn’t play a significant role in the campaign until Hurricane Sandy; during and after the storm, however, it dominated political press. 

A staggering four billion stories have now been read on the Pulse platform since we launched in May 2010. It took us about 100 days to reach our first 10 million stories; today we see more than 10 million stories read every day. These numbers are more than just impressions, views, or swipes—they mean that Pulse users are expanding their worlds, through compelling news articles, insightful blog posts, and engaging videos.

Not only have Pulse users logged billions of stories, the number of stories read per person, per day, is increasing. These statistics contrast the gloomy outlook we hear so often about the news industry: we see that people are indeed reading news, and more of it, in more diverse ways than we could have ever anticipated. It’s clear that today’s world is a global village—people are weaving media into their lives in unpredictable ways, and getting their news from a dazzling variety of sources. Staying relevant is suddenly a question of where people read, not just what people write.

We at Pulse have ridden the wave of this rapid change in the way people read and access news, and now we’re looking to the future. We have a wealth of knowledge about how our own community engages with the news, and we can use this data to help uncover different and important information about this evolving industry.

This wellspring of information has inspired us to launch Pulse Insights, a data and design initiative that will report on shifts in the world of publishing and reading from the perspective of our community. We hope that this project will benefit the entire ecosystem of news publishing, and will help it thrive in this era of immense technological and social change.

In the coming months, look forward to us covering topics such as:

• Is there a difference between what iOS and Android users read?
• How are Americans informing themselves (or not) for the upcoming U.S. election?
• What is the average lifecycle of a news story?
• How do reading patterns differ between mobile and web, tablets and phones, Macs and PCs?
• Send us your suggestions - you can email us at feedback@pulse.me

By sharing insights inferred from collective reading across the Pulse community, we hope to help expand the conversation around news and information. We hope to spur the worldwide communities of readers, publishers, authors, journalists, technologists to even greater innovation.

Cheers,

Akshay, Ankit & the Pulse team