CASE STUDY
How CrossCheck uses NewsWhip prediction
Sam Dubberley,
Project Manager
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Industry
News and Reporting initiative
Company Size
25-50 employees
“Spike is an inspiration for us – an engine for our content production.”
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NewsWhip technology tracks the spread of stories across multiple social networks, giving us the ability to map and understand the spread of information and engagement. Cross Check and French media outlets used our tech to understand how ideas and fake news catch fire — and how to debunk “disinfo” around the French election.
After the impact of fake news in the US Election, publishers are more vigilant than ever to stop misinformation around campaigns and candidates.
First Draft, a non profit organization, emerged as a leader in verifying news through UGC experts. Their flagship initiative is CrossCheck — which combated the spread of fake news on social media during the French presidential election by involving newsrooms and technology partners, including NewsWhip.
NewsWhip provided CrossCheck with free access to our Spike product, which predicts the spread and velocity of stories across multiple social networks. With Spike, the CrossCheck team was able to pinpoint the stories catching fire specifically in France, and understand their spread across social.
“
Spike was probably the most useful tool to help us out in what we were doing.
We always had this tension between ‘putting fuel on the fire’ or the question of ‘are we too late,’ and the story has travelled halfway around the world already. That was really where Spike came into its own.”
Spike’s real-time tracking and patented velocity metric helped CrossCheck jump on stories as soon as they were published, and closely monitor them to decide whether to take action.
Not only does Spike monitor the spread of pre-viral stories in real time, it predicts just how much engagement a story will reach over the course of the day — an invaluable metric for the CrossCheck team to have when it came to decision making.
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The accuracy of the predictive feature was terrifying. When something was predicted to get a lot of engagement, it actually did. Those metrics were really valuable.”
Spike’s patented predictive algorithm forecasts the exact number of engagements a story will reach across Twitter and Facebook, by analyzing how much engagement it has collected over a short time period. By predicting a story’s total performance, CrossCheck was able to make quick calls on what to address and what to let go.
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Spike allowed us to say ‘Okay, we should cover this, because we can see in Spike that it’s going to get 8,000 shares in the next 24 hours, even though it only has 100 shares now. To have that early warning mechanism was hugely useful.”
NewsWhip Spike helped CrossCheck use concrete data to understand how audiences are engaging with divisive stories. This is just one example of how NewsWhip technology is helping clients understand the science of story performance and engagement. Our newsroom customers start their days by logging into Spike to see what is spreading, how it is spreading, and how they should react.
Learn more about how we’re mapping the spread of stories, and how our products can help you create an informed content strategy that will resonate.
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