OTTAWA – When on Aug. 15, 2011 Althia Raj broke the story of the re-branding of Canada’s navy and air force to include the ‘Royal’ moniker, she most likely knew it would stir a hornets’ nest of debate.
But it would have been difficult for even the Huffington Post Canada’s Ottawa bureau chief to realize just how passionate the arguments would fly from either side. Some – notably, many with past or current links to Canada’s military – embraced it as a return to tradition.
Others, such as preeminent Canadian historian Jack Granatstein, soundly rejected it as “abject colonialism.”
Whatever your opinions on what’s now the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Canadian Navy, you’ll no doubt be intrigued by MediaMiser’s latest report: “A royal debate: The rebranding of Canada’s military.”
For instance, how well did the rebranding go over with print and online media? Pretty darn well, all told – out of the hundreds of media stories evaluated in the report, 91.7 per cent were either positive or neutral towards the rebranding (just 8.1 per cent of stories were negative).
Opinions of the name change were favourable on Twitter, as well, with just a bit more than 91 per cent of tweets either positive or neutral (eight per cent of tweets were negative).
Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) was the most positive Twitter user in the debate, with 76.9 per cent of his 13 related tweets appearing to favour the name change. He also had one of the highest volumes of related tweets, as well as one of the highest retweet ratios of any user.
MediaMiser, a leading social and traditional media monitoring company, was founded in Ottawa in 2003. It offers clients a range of media services including in-depth print, broadcast, online and social media monitoring, media contact management, competitive analysis, brand awareness analysis, mobile applications and more.
For more information:
Jim Donnelly
Director of content
613.232.7797 x 117
jdonnelly@mediamiser.com