As we stressed in our article on how critical words are to measurement, a reliable, accurate, and useful measurement program must start with well defined objectives and clear definitions of all the vague terminology we tend to use. If you’re having trouble with nailing down definitions of important terms, this 27-term sample measurement project dictionary will help. It was developed to communicate with media analysis coders, but it will serve as a template or starting point for a measurement project dictionary for most any program:
Sample Measurement Project Dictionary
| Agreed Upon Values | Field Description | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Message | Messages are those key ideas, concepts, and positioning statements that the company desires to communicate to its target audiences. | - Most innovative - Strong commitment to CSR - Best place to work | |
| Author | The person or persons who wrote the article or news story. If many, then make the list comma separated. | Maggie Haberman, New York Times | Record last name first, e.g., Haberman, Maggie. Record the media outlet in a separate column. |
| Company | The organization and/or its peers or competitors. | - Apple Microsoft - Corporation for National Community Service - NBC | |
| Business Group or Division | A specific line of business or division that has a name separate from the company. | - iPhone - Xbox - Americorps - MSNBC | |
| Business Segments | Defined vertical market segments | - Government - Healthcare - Manufacturing | |
| Product | A specific product name being tracked. | - IphoneX - Rachel Maddow Show | |
| itemID | Each record must have an unique number. Start with 100 so that each item in the batch is assigned a number, even if it is not coded. If there are several coders each should be given a range of numbers to represent their batch. | - 1001 - 1002 - 1003 | Always check for duplicate numbers before analyzing any data. |
| Headline | The title of the article | - Apple closes WWDC 2017 lottery, begins notifying winning developers | |
| Topics | A specific news topic, event, or moment in time that may drive coverage. | - Apple Developers Conference - 2018 elections | This is useful to understand what is driving coverage. |
| Program | A campaign, initiative, or other internal effort to generate exposure or engagement around an cause, message, or product. | - Southwest launches new "Transfarency" initiative | This is used to track the specific contribution of the campaign to the overall goals. |
| Positive Tone | Item leaves a reader more likely to purchase, support, invest in, work for, or recommend the brand/product/company. | - Apple iPhone XR Review: A Cheaper Phone Suited to Most of Us | |
| Negative Tone | Item leaves a reader less likely to purchase, support, invest in, work for, or recommend the brand/product/company. | - Origins of an Epidemic, Purdue Pharma knew its Opioids were widely abused. | |
| Neutral Tone | If an item does not influence the reader either way and/or contains no sentiment. | - In 2013 ESPN ended its collaboration with PBS Frontline | |
| Balanced Tone | If an item contains both positive and negative sentiment in equal weights. | - Sesame Street moving to HBO, but PBS will still air reruns | |
| Prominence | The degree to which a particular company or product is mentioned in an article, e.g., is it mentioned many times, or in the headline? | - High - Medium - Low | |
| Media Outlet | The name of the outlet that published the article. | - Tech Radar | |
| Publication Category | If appropriate, you may want to group various outlets into categories . | - Tech, - Business - Consumer - Gaming | |
| Publication Rank (High/Medium/Low) | A ranking of importance of specific media outlets based on how influential they are to your target audiences. | - Low - Medium - High | |
| Published Date (Format: DD-MM-YY) | The date the Article ID was posted online or in print. | - 04-11-17 | |
| Issue | Generic initiative or industry topic messages predefined by the client. | - Innovation - Privacy - AI - Big data - Security | |
| Summary | A summary of the article. | - Microsoft manages to cram artificial intelligence on the Raspberry Pi 3 PC board | |
| URL | The specific URL associated with an article. | - https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/31/all-of-googles-jokes-for-april-fools-day-2017/ | |
| STANDARDS TEST: Does the item meet the criteria for a 'media hit': | All items must at least meet the core criteria of "earned" media and be about one of the brands and occur in the date range of xxx to xxx. Is the item an original piece of content, not created or owned by the company? Is the comment or tweet generated from outside the company? If yes, move forward with coding. If no, do not include in the study. When reading tweets, if clarification is needed please follow link provided in tweet but only code tweet for the content in the actual tweet. Coding social media posts also involves looking at pictures in the post to determine sentiment and messaging. | ||
| Media Type | Item can be either a tweet, a comment, or a post. | - 0=Not sure - 1=Tweet - 2=Facebook comment - 3=Facebook post | Check for consistency and omissions. |
| Outlet Title | Title of media outlet (use sentence case: upper and lower case letters. | - Twitter - The New York Times | Check for blank fields and inconsistency in title entry. |
| Author | The author of the post or comment. | ||
| Visual | Inclusion of any chart, graph, logo, photo, or other image that conveys a company 'presence' in the item is coded. Visuals can be desirable, e.g., neutral, balanced, or positive; or they can be undesirable, i.e., leaves the reader less likely to support, work for, or do business with the organization. | - 0=No visual - 1=Desirable visual - 2=UndesIrable Visual |
Good luck with your measurement project dictionary, we hope this sample helps. ∞
