beta.boston.com

[Updated 4/27 with another visualization]

The New York Times R&D lab announced its first commercial product today, and BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com are pleased to be offering it to brand advertisers.

Ricochet lets a brand choose an article from the Globe or Boston.com that will be  interesting to its followers and fans.  The brand then gets a unique URL which, when tweeted or posted on Facebook, sends readers to that article with the brand’s ads displayed next to it.

Here’s how business-software company SAP is using it with a New York Times article:

Brand advertisers also get access to the R&D lab’s Project Cascade, which will let them see the content spreading across the Internet.  Here’s a visualization of a Globe story from earlier today about overuse of exclamation points!

[larger version].

In these visualizations, pink dots are tweets and yellow dots are clicks on those tweets that pass through bit.ly; clicks that go only through t.co are untrackable.  Each circle is 90 minutes of elapsed time since the first tweet.

Here’s a cascade with a story about Sen. Scott Brown promising to release his tax returns, showing how @ChuckTodd’s tweet was hugely influential.

[larger version]

And just to be meta, here’s the Cascade this post generated:

[larger version]

You can read some more about Ricochet in AdAge.

If you’re interested in learning more about how your company can leverage Ricochet, please contact Michael Bentley, Director of Digital Product Management, @mikebentley or (617) 929-8709.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Notes