Trying To Understand CASIS Press and Social Media Impact
Let’s look at the media reach CASIS claims to have achieved in FY 2014.
Page 32 of their FY 2014 Annual Report gives a summary. This report represents what CASIS was capable of doing after being in operation for more than 3 years – after having received more than $42 million from NASA. Prior to this CASIS did not include these metrics in their reports. So this is the only snapshot we have.
In this summary CASIS claims to have issued 30 news releases. That’s one release issued a bit more often than once every 2 weeks. They also claim to have had 30 media events in FY 2014 but do not explain what constitutes an “event”. This could be a telecon or a full blown press conference. Hard to tell. They also claim to have had 3,891 “news mentions – clips, blogs”. This is not very revealing. There are lots of news services that have automated systems that grab and repost press releases without any thought given to what the releases say. But the word “CASIS” gets counted none the less. 30 press releases automatically (and mindlessly) posted by several dozen of these automated systems each time one of these releases is issued could easily explain a large portion of these “news mentions”.
