Skip to main content
First, you’ll need to build a workspace and boolean query on your topic — let’s use grocery prices as an example. Building two separate workspaces for the same topic — one for news and one for social media — can help make your data outputs easier to understand. A sample workspace, monitoring news and blogs mentions of grocery prices, is seen below. Generating Insights In this workspace, you can immediately view a summary of mentions from news/blogs on grocery prices. Notably, a quote on the topic from a U.S. senator appears in the summary. In the next section, we’ll teach you to specifically detect comments from regulators on this topic. Examine the volume of mentions on this topic over time. Suggested questions to begin your analysis include:
  • When did mentions of this topic peak?
  • What mentions drove that increase?
  • Is the trend over the last week rising or falling?
  • Is the volume of mentions relatively steady or highly volatile?
For mentions of grocery prices in the news, we can see that mentions typically peak during the workweek and drop off over the weekends. We can see volume last peaked on May 14th, 2024. Since then, grocery prices appear to have more consistently been mentioned on news/blogs during the workweek — indicating the surge in coverage in mid-May subsequently prompted more consistent coverage. This data indicates grocery prices are becoming more frequently and regularly discussed in news and blogs. Let’s dig in to examine what specific stories drove that mid-May spike in mentions in news and blogs. Select ‘Mentions’ in the header and limit the date range to 5/13/2024 - 5/15/2024. Scrolling through the mentions, you can get a sense of the stories driving this spike in mentions, including: Key mentions included articles from MSN, CBS-Austin, and Fox 29 — discussing grocery price themes ranging from a report that inflation was cooling, Democratic lawmakers calling on the Biden administration to lower grocery costs, and a report that consumers were buying more chicken amid grocery costs inflation. Generating Narratives Turn on Narratives to begin identifying key narratives from the mentions you already reviewed. Narratives tend to cluster best on workspaces with at least 100 mentions, so your workspace on a broad topic — such as grocery costs — should be a great place to start your narrative analysis. The first Narrative includes mentions related to grocery and fast food retailers cutting prices to attract shoppers. Click on the title of the Narratives to dig in deeper. From the Narrative’s volume over time, we can see that it peaked in late May, about one week after the spike in overall mentions of grocery prices that we observed earlier in mid-May. This Narrative may have developed as a counter-narrative, in response to earlier Narratives blaming retailers for rising grocery and food costs. Among this Narrative’s top recent mentions, we can see headlines touting retailers moves to cut prices— including cheap steakhouses, Olive Garden, and stores’ private brands. Click the star icon to favorite this Narrative if you want to return to monitor its evolution in the future.
Feel free to reach out to your Account Representative or support@peakmetrics.com if you’d like some help understanding the power of Narrative Intelligence!