Letters between Taylor and Montebourg: world-wide coverage
© image: DO-ZONE PARODY
A panel of 1,700 diverse online journals.
First note: the direct confrontation between a CEO and a French Minister in a Socialist Government found listeners above and beyond the financial and economic press.
More than 1,700 very diverse sources took up the information, from the traditional Financial Times or the Herald Tribune, to specialised journals dealing with cars or people press like Gala.fr.
A considerable potential viewership, but a much smaller real audience.
The potential viewership 0f the “Taylor-Montebourg Buzz” came close to a billion views.
Of course, everything is relative; the number of potential views is not the number of real views and even less the number of actual readers. For example, by applying a readership rate of 1%, we arrive at 70 million readers of all the articles published.
Note that the total of unique visitors on the sources that took up the information came close to 990 million.
Negative or positive buzz? French stereotypes were most likely reinforced.
Without completing a more thorough qualitative analysis, it is not possible to evaluate the impact of this buzz on perceptions of France as tourist or investment destination.
The expression “French excel in wine and women, but not in business” was broadcast by much more by the French than international press, where it was taken up by British, Australian and American media for the most part.
The expression “3 hours a day labour” was, however, taken up more by the international media at the start of the crisis. If the image of France as a tourist destination was not tarnished, the image of France in the business community was damaged in a way that it will be reinforced by the sedimentation effects of search engines.
