Tag Archives: Issue

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Citizens Urged to Take Precaution as Tropical Storm Alice Heads towards the Virtual World Whyville.com: The Consequences of Global Warming Demonstrated in the Virtual World to Encourage Kids to Learn More about This Important Issue

PASADENA, Calif. (PRWEB) June 26, 2007

    Tropical Storm Alice is intended to raise awareness of global climate issues and is associated with the opening of the new Whyville Climate Center, which is sponsored by Penguin Young Readers Group, the publisher of Al Gore’s young adult book, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming” (Viking Children’s Books/Rodale Books $ 16.00; 208 pages; Ages 11 up). The Climate Center will serve as the focal point for the discussion and further educational activities, while significant virtual rainfall continues for at least another 12-36 hours. This will result in widespread flooding and destruction throughout Whyville, with considerable rubbish and debris littering the virtual world. Whyville’s citizens will need to join together in a massive clean up effort to restore their environment over the next several days.

The arrival of the tropical storm coincides with a new effort to educate Whyville’s citizens about global climate issues. According to a survey conducted on the site in May 2007, 77 percent of responding citizens said that they were aware of the concept of global warming. However, only 50 percent felt they could be a part of the solution.

The Climate Center’s initial activities will focus on changes in the levels of greenhouse gases in the Whyville atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. In the center’s CO2 Lab, citizens will be able to document increases in carbon dioxide in the virtual atmosphere from the site’s creation in 1999 to today. Traveling back in time, Whyvillians will sample CO2 levels from each year and look for correlations with specific human activity. Information on historical events in Whyville, including the rate of population growth and introduction of new industries, will be obtained from the Whyville Times (the newspaper of Whyville, with articles written by kids). Citizens will also be able to propose hypotheses and debate consequences in bulletin boards within the Climate Center.

“The objective of this activity is not to prove any particular association between greenhouse gases and the climate, in general, or our first tropical storm in particular,” said Dr. James Bower, CEO of Whyville. “Instead, we want to help kids understand the complexity involved in the growing international debate on these issues and get them involved in that discussion, since we already know that they care.”

Activities in the Whyville Climate Center will also support citizen involvement in solving the problem of greenhouse gas emission. Each citizen will be assigned their own carbon footprint calculator in order to assess their individual contribution to rising CO2 levels in the virtual world. The size of their footprint will increase, or decrease, depending on the personal choices they make, such as the number of virtual accessories they produce in Whyville’s avatar factory, the number of trips taken around the world in the warp wagon, the number of times they teleport to the moon or mars, or even which types of foods they choose to eat. Whyvillians who substantially reduce their impact will be recognized with a distinctive green badge for their avatar and will even be able to trade their carbon credits to other Whyvillians for “clams,” Whyville’s virtual currency.

“We know from our surveys that Whyvillians are concerned about environmental issues, but don’t believe that they can do very much to have an impact themselves,” said Dr. Jen Sun, president of Whyville. “This activity is intended to address both the complexities of this issue, as well as provide examples of ways that our kids can get involved – not only in our virtual world but also in the real world.”

Over the coming months, this new climate education activity will continue to unfold, impacting Whyville and its citizens in parallel to developments on this important issue in the real world.

About Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) is the U.S. affiliate of the internationally renowned Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) is one of the leading U.S. adult and children’s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks including Berkley Books, Dutton, Frederick Warne, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Grosset & Dunlap, New American Library, Penguin, Philomel, Plume, Puffin Books, Riverhead Books and Viking, among others. The Penguin Group is part of Pearson (FTSE: PSON; NYSE: PSO). Pearson is an international media company with market leading businesses in education, business information and consumer publishing. For more information, visit http://www.pearson.com.

About Whyville

Whyville.com is the only learning-based virtual world for today’s digital kids. Whyville offers a seriously fun extension of 8 to 15-year-old kids’ real lives, giving them ownership of and participation in creating their own experiences. Named for the founding principle that asking why is the true basis of learning, Whyville citizens safely chat, earn currency, design avatars, play games, create projects, eat, govern and much more. Parents and teachers approve of Whyville because of its multiple levels of safety protection including proprietary technology and staff monitoring. For sponsors, Whyville integrates popular brands and institutions by following its learning-based principles of encouraging Whyville citizens to engage in experiential interactions relevant to today’s digital kids.







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The Issue of Customer Care Attracts the Highest Number of Negative Comments on the Internet, Reveals First Annual UK Banking Social Media Report by DigitalMR

London (PRWEB UK) 29 March 2012

social research specialist media DigitalMR publishes first ever annual report on the media in the UK Social Banking on what customers are saying about the UK major banks online. DigitalMR analyzed over 200,000 customer comments on banks high street in January-December 2011.

For the first time, British banks will be able to assess customer perceptions of their performance against that of their competitors across a range of criteria for all of 2011,

DigitalMR Group Managing Director, Michalis Michael commented: “This report provides a national reference point for how banking brands are perceived by customers online. Banks attracting criticism will be able to use the analysis to see how they can improve their competitive position. ”

Report Highlights

The top 5 most discussed topics online in 2011:

first loans
Credit cards
2nd

3 Customer Service
4th />
5th discovered

loans attracted about 15,000 entries on the Internet. However, banks are likely to turn their attention to subjects who received the highest number of negative comments. Top of the list was the issue of “Customer Care” with nearly 3,000 negative comments attributed to him in 2011 Customer service will be a major concern for 2012 that banks continue to close branches and reduce the number personnel. Other key topics to attract negative comments were: Loans, Bank employees and credit cards. These subjects each attracted more than 2,000 negative comments online customers.


Legal whole – Top 5 UK banks that receive the largest share of online mentions:

1) HSBC (14.4%)

2) Lloyds TSB (13.5%)

3) Halifax (10%)

4) RBS (9.6%)

5) Santander UK (9%)

There is a large difference in the positive and negative mentions that some banks attract. HSBC (9.5%), Halifax (9.5%) and Lloyds TSB (7.8%) received the largest share positive messages.

However, both HSBC (12.1%) and Lloyds TSB (10.8%) received a relatively higher proportion of negative comments. Conversely Halifax represented only 6.2% of negative comments over a much larger proportion (9.5%) of those positives.

Top 5 net sentiment score

DigitalMR not only the number of comments posted by consumers on the internet, but also sentiment – whether these posts are positive or negative. The difference in the number of positive messages to each bank attracts negative, giving it a score of net sentiment (NSS). NSS is an overall percentage of net positive posts. Top 10 banks measured in 2011, the five best results in terms of achieving the highest NSS were:

1) ING Direct 57.5%

2) Halifax 43.3%

3) Clydesdale Bank 41.7%

4) Barclays 37.4%

5) Santander 26.4%

The Royal Bank of Scotland was the only bank in the Top 10, which achieved a NSS with negative (-2.1%). The next lowest was Bank of Ireland with a NSS of 0.5%.

The full report includes:

Share of votes for all banks.
The monthly trend of the top 10 banks.
Top 10 Topics by number of mentions.
The disruptive forces that users of social networks have on banks.
Individual focusing of the 10 largest banks.
Social media presence.
Strategy Recommendations for the use of media for social research.

The report DigitalMR (powered by SociaNuggets ) analyzed thousands Guest comments posted via a range of relevant finance related and open access platforms of social media websites. It measures not only the number of comments posted by consumers on the Internet, but also the feeling – these posts are positive or negative.

Results are based on comments posted by consumers on the major UK banks, including Lloyds TSB, HSBC, Halifax, NatWest, Bank of Ireland, Santander, Barclays, RBS, ING Direct, Clydesdale Bank, Saxo Bank, American Express, First Direct, Bank of Scotland, Abbey, Northern Rock, Northern Bank and Alliance and Leicester.

For more information on the full report, content and other data click here

Contact

For further information on the UK Banking Social Media Report.

Michalis A. Michael

mmichael (at) digital-mr (dot) com

Tel: +44 751 571 0370

http://www.digital-mr.com

About DigitalMR

DigitalMR understands what people think and feel when they share views online. He is a specialist agency which provides a holistic approach to market research based on the Web. He specializes in the use of social media research, especially active web-listening, and online communities to enhance its business consulting approach. The agency has developed new methods in online focus groups as well as tools such as video diaries, bulletin boards and online ethnography. DigitalMR is headed by founder and Group MD, Michalis Michael and has offices in London UK, Nicosia Cyprus, and Columbus Ohio, in the United States.


About SocialNuggets

SocialNuggets technology provides real-time market intelligence for fast moving industries by analyzing data from various social media sources with a mission to liberate social media data and sentiment analysis for use in real-time research of brands, products and features. SocialNuggets delivered ready to use market intelligence for various industry sectors, including consumer electronics and banking. SocialNuggets data is delivered in bite size, ready-to-consume, infographics and is also available as full access to our data warehouse for analysis and integration with customer data . SocialNuggets, a company Serendio, was founded in 2011 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California For more information, please visit http://www.SociaNuggets.net

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