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Mobile phones, the internet and social media are letting more people find, share and evaluate information through multiple webs of contacts and interest groups.
InterMedia applies a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing network information flows to identify influential information "nodes," communities of shared interest and linkages between online and offline communities.
Offline Events and Online Impact
The Social Media Take on President Obama's Visit to Brazil - In an effort to test various social networking analysis tools, InterMedia conducted an in-depth study of how U.S. President Barak Obama's official visit to Brazil in March 2011 influenced online discussions about the U.S. among Brazilians. The study focused on the impact of online public diplomacy communications efforts of the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Brazil around the time of the visit. The study identified key information brokers in the Brazilian online sphere, which will help U.S. officials to better target their social media activities in the future. The study also highlighted the challenge of translating short-term interest in an event to a longer-term level of online engagement.
Mobile devices are also opening up a wide range of new applications that are helping people around the world to improve their quality of life. For example, the use of mobile-based financial services ("mobile money") originated in Kenya and the Philippines and is rapidly becoming a widespread tool for financial empowerment in developing regions. InterMedia is becoming a key player on the research end of the mobile money trend.
InterMedia's Supports the Growth of Mobile Money Applications
The Haiti Mobile Money Knowledge Project -The devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 left an already-poverty stricken nation in economic disarray. Amid the chaos and suffering, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation saw a great need to ensure that Haitians were able to access what financial resources they had quickly and easily and conduct financial transactions safely and affordably. Thus was born the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative with USAID - a $10 million incentive program for mobile operators and bank partners to quickly launch mobile money services in Haiti.
As m-money services rolled out in early 2011, the Gates Foundation selected InterMedia to launch the Haiti Mobile Money Knowledge Project: a series of national surveys that allow m-money stakeholders to track use of such services, identify barriers to use, and collect critical demographic and economic information for use by the Haiti-based development sector as a whole. The data and analysis from the Project is available on the AudienceScapes website.