New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With last Wednesdays’s announcement that Pope Francis would be succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, the internet went into a frenzy. Pope Benedict XVI will forever have the distinction of being the first Pope to join Twitter. Soon after he stepped down, Benedict’s tweets from 

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

An interesting part about the Insights product is that it “will be used during CNN broadcasts, including regular segments on CNN’s ‘The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer’ as well as in CNN.com and CNN Mobile campaign coverage,” the cable network explains. Back in 2008, the big Facebook election activation was the communal “like” to say that you voted — which has been updated with a new “I’m Voting” app on Facebook. It’s all part of CNN’s across-the-board Facebook partnership this year.

For Mass Relevance, “Election Insights” is a great example to show the social TV world how they are more than Twitter. Also, if you had any doubt that the company is invested in visualizations as much as they are data streams, look no further as Decker speaks to this as well.

Lost Remote: How is MR working with Facebook/CNN on this?

Sam Decker: CNN & Facebook tapped Mass Relevance to design and develop Election Insights. Our platform transforms aggregated FB data into a social experience that allows people to view trends about how many people are talking about each of the candidates across the United States and understand distinctions between who is talking about which candidates in those states – male vs. female, and by age group.

LR: Is Mass Relevance moving away from visualizations, except for special cases like this? Is your main business the streams?

Decker: No, visualizations are the heart of our business. Our platform enables our clients to present social data in a variety of ways that are most engaging to their users. In fact, you should expect some news from us in this area in the next couple months. Another example of our powerful visualizations was the work we recently did for NBC Sports around the Olympics.

LR: How did you design a visualization for this?

Decker: We took a number of requirements from CNN on how they would like to use this information and also looked at the data Facebook was able to send us. We then worked together to determine the top 4 components that we thought users would ultimately want to filter data by – Geography, Gender, Age, and Time. The visualization would need to pull double duty, both on the web and via broadcast on a “magic wall” – which created interesting challenges in terms of color usage and aspect ratio / screen real estate. We wanted to ensure that the data was also presented in a clear way that both a TV viewer – who would have the benefit of a CNN anchor to explain it to them – as well as a web visitor who would need to “figure things out for themselves.” In essence, we wanted to present a lot of interesting information with as little cognitive load as possible.

LR: Anything else?

Decker: We were able to work closely with Facebook to get access to the data needed to power such a unique experience. The ability to slice and dice the data leads to fascinating results for the end consumer.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The major headline of the new announcement is that Ryan has knocked Obama off as the most talked about player in the election. While this isn’t completely surprising, seeing as the big announcement just happened last week, it’s great to see the Facebook data back it up. It’s also interesting that Biden is number three after Obama, but before Romney. In the report, which can be accessed on CNN.com, they also look at the candidates Facebook growth. Obama’s in a strong lead with 27.8 million likes, but Ryan already has over 100,000 more likes than Biden. You can also see how the candidates likes breakdown by gender.

Lost Remote: How is CNN approaching publishing content from this partnership?

Michelle Jaconi: The partnership is truly cross-platform, taking advantage of one area in which both CNN and Facebook dominate: Reach. The partnership has a robust mobile app, editorial content and interactives online, and on television, as well as CNN’s Political Gut Check daily newsletter.

The Paul Ryan announcement was a great example of using technology to help tell a story instead of the reverse. We surveyed our Facebook users and integrated their live comments and feedback into our on air broadcast, while noting the political region most active surrounding the announcement.

LR: How is it a new social kind of reporting?

Jaconi: It is new mainly because there is no way we could do this in 2008 with the same penetration rate. There are 160 million monthly active users on Facebook in the United States. In 2008, there were 35 million monthly active users in America.

In layman’s terms: Facebook has now half of the US population in its networks. If that isn’t interesting politically, I don’t know what is? Especially when you take into account that people are most often influenced to vote by opinion leaders in their social circle, it makes this partnership intellectual candy.

Furthermore, this has been accurately called the first mobile election, and in politics that is what makes this interesting. It is always my goal to get out of Washington and learn from the American voter; and this allows us to engage and listen to American voters wherever we are.

LR: How many more of these stories will there be?

Jaconi: Facebook will be integrated into all our big convention, debate and election broadcasts and will be a consistent part of the digital story from here thru the election. As for the sweeping analytical pieces, we will write about the data every time it helps us tell a story.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s not surprising that Facebook and CNN have inked such a big deal. The social network’s TV guy Kay Madati is a former CNN-er, although he’s not mentioned in the release. “Each campaign cycle brings new technologies that enhance the way that important connections between citizens and their elected representatives are made,” says Facebook’s Vice President of U.S. Public Policy Joel Kaplan. “Innovations like Facebook can help transform this informational experience into a social one for the American people,” he added. Kaplan once served as the Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration.

Details of the partnership:

-”I’m Voting” Facebook App – “The app will enable people who use Facebook to commit to voting and endorse specific candidates and issues.” In 2008 there was also a giant “I voted” button when you logged into Facebook, this seems to be taking it to the next level. The app, which will be available in English and Spanish, will be the biggest on-air component. “Via on-air, online and mobile segments, CNN personalities will use the app to ask Facebook users the most important questions driving the national dialogue and report on their answers,” CNN said, adding that it will serve as “second screen” for CNN election coverage.

-Measuring Facebook Buzz - While there are tons of Twitter analytics available, Facebook is often more difficult to gain value from as most of the content is private. “Facebook will report the aggregate amount of discussion surrounding each candidate and CNN will drill down on specific state-by-state analysis” — truly a compelling partnership that could change election coverage as much as TV did at one point.

-Facebook Surveys – This is where Facebook and CNN will try to tap into the polling business. For both of the conventions coming up and other important dates on the political calendar, “CNN’s editorial department will work with Facebook’s research team to write the questions and publish the results on CNN, CNN.com, and on the U.S. Politics on Facebook page, Facebook’s hub for campaign 2012 information.”

Does this mean CNN will probably use Twitter a lot less during the election? Probably not, as CNN knows how valuable Twitter is as a real-time platform. It does probably mean that CNN and Twitter won’t be working on big partnerships like Twitter previously has with Fox. This is going to a be a partnership worth watching closely as CNN helps Facebook take a big stab at the real-time social TV world.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We recently wrote about how TV brands are honoring fans with social awards. CNN’s now in their second year of honoring their top iReporters and this year even 15-year-old twins won for their coverage of Occupy Wall Street. We spoke to CNN iReport’s Senior Producer Katie Hawkins-Gaar about why it’s important for the network to honor their best iReporters.

“The Awards are just one small way for us to acknowledge the value and importance of iReporters’ contributions to CNN,” Hawkins-Gaar told Lost Remote. “By sharing their unique stories, being first on the scene of breaking news, and connecting news events to their own lives, iReporters are shaping the future of journalism,” she added.

We also asked her to share a few examples of how iReporters have been using social to contribute to the news. “One of the questions we ask iReporters when we vet and approve stories is how they found out about a particular news event and, not surprisingly, many community members say social media played a big role,” Hawkins-Gaar explained. “Fifteen-year-old twins Anna and Rachel Otto, for example, who won the iReport Award for compelling imagery, convinced their parents to take them to check out the Occupy Wall Street protests after hearing so much about it on Twitter and Facebook.” she added

We’re excited to see how iReport will continue to evolve as social platforms become the number one way to share news. It would be interesting to see CNN find ways to offer better reporting technology (like Looxcies) and integrating with Zite, which they acquired nearly a year ago.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.