The blogosphere of influence

Category: online PR
Posted by Nicky on 9th November 2006

So, first things first: just what is the “blogosphere”? The blogosphere is the collective term for the vast, interconnected community of blogs out there in cyberspace. With over 60 million blogs currently in existence – being added to at the rate of a new blog every 10 seconds – the blogosphere can truly be said to be growing in size and influence daily.From “amateur” (independent and therefore largely unaccountable “citizen” bloggers) to “professional” (corporate or business bloggers), the global online community is delivering real-time commentary and journalism on an unprecedented scale.

The rise of blogging and personal publishing as a social phenomenon is fundamentally changing the game for marketers today. Today, monitoring media coverage and sentiment about your products and your brand means having to eavesdrop on this constantly updated, multi-threaded global conversation. Who is saying what? Where? Why? And does any of it matter?

The first step to engaging with the blogosphere is to listen. There is a wealth of quantitative and qualitative monitoring services that can help you keep track of what’s going on in Blogland, but setting up a simple RSS keyword search on Technorati or Google Blog Search will enable you to immediately pick up any relevant new content published, via your RSS reader (your keywords could include your company name, your products or category, or even the names of your competitors).

As more companies begin to evaluate their role in the online conversation, more sophisticated models of analysis have also emerged. As Oscar Wilde once said, there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. Steve Rubel coined the concept of measuring the “conversation gap” – the volume of online conversations about your category versus the total number of conversations about your brand and your category. This is a useful equation to contextualize your presence in the blogosphere in terms of mindshare and the evoked set. For the seriously switched-on, there are also monitoring tools that can help you to assess “sentiment” and “equity” according to qualitative metrics.

But what about the question of influence and whether any of these conversations really matter? The intrinsic attributes of the web – speed and longevity – mean that blog commentary can go global quickly and can stay for a long time. Great, if it’s good; not so great if it’s bad.

The definition of a “good” (that is, fit for purpose) blog is that it will have a community regularly reading it, and regularly contributing to it. Deeply attending to the thoughts of one person may not be an efficient approach if that one person’s blog is only read by his or her mum (most blogs are read by friends and family). Technorati measures the “authority” or influence of a blog according to the number of people that have linked to it over the past six months. The more influential the blogger (that is, the more well-connected and widely read), the more highly optimized the blog and the more visible the post.

So, it is important to identify who the influential bloggers are for your market in order to develop an effective online communications strategy. In some B2B markets, these are quite likely to include journalists, analysts and consultants taking advantage of this new influencer channel, as the blogosphere continues to integrate with the mainstream media.

Of course, we’ve only just started! Blogging is a vast (and fascinating) subject, and we haven’t even got onto devising online PR programmes and how to engage with bloggers…we’ll do more on online PR next time. If you have any questions in the meantime, please drop us a line.

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