As I wrote a few days ago, I received a press release by EastWest Communications about the launching of the first global nation branding index. Note the global remark, because other indexes such as Anholt’s do not count all countries, even though it’s always growing. EastWest covers all 192 countries of the United Nations and 8 major non-member territories, such as Hong-Kong or Taiwan.
The other remarkable thing in this brand new report is the method to build it up. EastWest uses algorithms developed by a text analysis company, Perception Metrics, to analyze mentions of countries in leading media around the world in their context, to guess whether the mention’s tone is positive or negative. According to EastWest, the algorithm not only uses a vast lexicon comprising 16,000 words and phrases, but also analyzes grammatical connections, not just word proximity.
It may be not all scientific, but it is objective and over time can be very useful to see the evolution of the country brands and how happenings, events and news of all kinds affect them.
By the way, here are the top-27results for Q2 2008:
More info, results and methodologies can be found here.
Whats the ranking for Trinidad and Tobago?