Following Politico's arrival to Brussels (Part I)

Politico is a political journalism organisation based in the US who this April launched in Brussels. I've been following the early days by monitoring the social media buzz. This is obviously not the only way to judge their success but it's an interesting way to measure conversation levels and market involvement. 

Daily buzz is frequently over 1,000 mentions. This is for mentions of Politico with European Union or European connection. The three noticeable spikes are 1. the announcement of their plans to launch 2. then the launch day itself and 3. "A Jew in Bradford" story. 

The three largest stories by retweets are an interesting bunch.I like retweets as a metric as it involves some kind of clear "vote" that the story is interesting or at least worth sharing. 

One, mentioned above, is about the physical assault of one of their journalists by a "Respect" supporter (Over 3x bigger than the next biggest story).The other two are about the British Press, and Putin propaganda. 

http://www.politico.eu/article/galloway-bradford-elections-uk-ge2015/ (George Galloway story, 2,200 retweets)

http://www.politico.eu/article/the-british-press-has-lost-it/ (British Press "losing it" during election campaign, 645 retweets)

http://www.politico.eu/article/putin-propaganda-ukraine-ceasefire/ (Putin propaganda, 449 retweets)

Stories slightly further down the ranks are regarding the launch of the magazine and Google's attempts to preserve access to their "special sauce". 

In order to see the impact of the journalists I have compared a sample set of Politico staff with Brussels based journalists from other publications. Peter Spiegel (Financial Times, orange line) has very significant online buzz, he is also very active on Twitter. Ryan Heath (Politico Senior Correspondent, green line) is comparing favourably to him on most days, this will be an interesting to monitor as they are active most days.

The others such as Carrie Budoff-Brown (Managing Editor) and Pierre Briancon compare closely to other Brussels based journalists Jennifer Baker (@BrusselsGeek) and New York Times correspondent James Kanter. 

In the next chapter I'll be looking at what influential social media people are saying about the publication and evaluating the overall sentiment of the audience. I'll also be looking at the journalists that get the best online sharing compared to a relatively small twitter presence. 

@simonmc