Share of Discussion, is the “quantity and quality of your firm’s unpaid media compared to that of its competitors.” Net positive story counts, audience impressions and media values. Stories with an overall negative tone are subtracted from positive and neutral stories to obtain net positive scores. These “output” measures were then correlated to “outcome” results of Preference Surveys.  Calculating Share of Discussion 1.      Capture media coverage about your company and its competitors. Determine the amount of coverage in each article attributable to you or your competitors based on column inches, word counts or broadcast time. 2.      Obtain Media Values or Audience Impressions for each source and apply to the coverage amounts for you and your competitors.  3.      Measure the tonality of each mention; subtract negative stories from neutral/positive stories to obtain net favorable value or impressions. 4.      Divide each company’s net favorable value or impressions by the total of all competitors to obtain Share of Discussion.  5.      Plot Share of Discussion at monthly, quarterly or annual intervals on a spreadsheet, or in a statistical program. Plot an outcome measure at the same time intervals. The two should trend together with some adjustment for time-lag.