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Updates from April, 2009

  • Blog Monitoring As PR Service

    mike manuel 7:28 am on January 30, 2006 | 3 Permalink

    Sparked by a survey that Brian Oberkirch at WeblogsWork is getting underway, an interesting conversation has been taking shape on the Naked Conversations Blog (see comments thread) about blog monitoring as an emerging service/business opportunity among PR and marketing firms:

    “I’m still learning to master Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and Bloglines. I’ve abandoned a few others. For businesses just trying to get their arms around it all, these tools are as hard to master as they are important to understand. This is a place for a PR agency to jump in. Use them to listen and learn for your clients. Serve as an early warning system for what is being said by both topic and company.”

    I have to admit, at first pass, my reaction to this was a little like “well, yeah!?” I think most PR folks are pretty damn good when it comes to traditional news scouring and analysis, and serving as the eyes and ears for their corporate clients, so it seems only natural that PR teams would carry the responsibility for monitoring the blogosphere too. In fact, I think this function of keeping a pulse on industry chatter, be it traditional media or otherwise, is hands-down, just critical to a program’s overall health and strategic direction.

    Some firms are already outsourcing this function of a program to third-party measurement and analysis companies in very much the same way they have outsourced traditional news monitoring. Others are taking the DIY approach, using a combination of lightweight tools like internal reporting blogs, team wikis and specialized search engines to get the job done. I think with both approaches there’s a fair and formal up sell for a value-added service, it just comes down to the unique needs of the client.

    Each has its own challenges too, btw: the outsourcing option remains problematic given the fast-moving nature of blogosphere discussion and the limitations that come with real-time tracking, while the DIY approach relies primarily on human tracking and analysis, and typically the hourly billing rates ($$$) that come with that.

    Finally, I’ll just add that when it comes to tracking and analyzing online discussions, it’s my experience that marketing folks tend to see this as a function of taking a macro-level snapshot of the company’s overall brand perception and health, whereas PR teams are much more engaged at the micro level, focusing on issues and responses.

    I touched on this subject a few months ago with more thought/detail (see “Mining and Monitoring the Conversation Gap“).

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  • BuzzMetrics, Intelliseek Merge

    mike manuel 6:15 am on January 17, 2006 | 0 Permalink

    In a note that BuzzMetrics President and CEO Jonathan Carson sent out this morning, he shares the news that starting today, the company will be merging with Intelliseek to create a “new global standard in the measurement of consumer-generated media.” Carson explains the deal:

    “This truly is the joining of two leaders who’ve led our industry from the beginning, and our combined team will create a new global standard in the measurement of consumer-generated media. This exciting deal is backed by VNU, owner of such renowned research names as ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research, and originally a minority shareholder in Trendum and BuzzMetrics. VNU will become a majority shareholder in our new company, BuzzMetrics, Inc., and we’ll market our services under the “Nielsen BuzzMetrics” brand.”

    More details are available on the new Nielsen Buzzmetrics site, including the press release and a pointer to a joint webcast scheduled for later this afternoon. I’ll need some time to grok this, but it’s certainly an interesting move — one that will have broader implications for companies seeking to monitor and mine the blogosphere.

    Related Posts:

    Mining and Monitoring the Conversation Gap

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  • Why Blog Search Sucks

    mike manuel 4:58 pm on November 15, 2005 | 4 Permalink

    Randy Charles Morin at The RSS Blog explains the State of Blogosphere Search or put another way, Why Blog Search Sucks:

    “It’s been awhile since I reported on blogosophere search. This is mostly because it’s not getting any better, with a few exceptions. The problems mainly arise from the broken blogosphere ping infrastructure and the unyielding supply of splogs.”

    Like a lot of folks I have a chip in the game, both personally through this blog but also professionally through my day job consulting clients on their online programs.  The current state of blogosphere search is *painful* to say the least.  We need better tools and services to find and track online conversations.  Enough said.

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  • Mining and Monitoring the Conversation Gap

    mike manuel 12:50 pm on November 15, 2005 | 4 Permalink

    If a “Conversation Gap” exists for your brand (be it a real gap or a perceived one) the next logical question for most PR and marketing folks is to ask “what are people saying?” — and herein lies a burgeoning, multi-million dollar industry, chalk-full of companies each promising tools and services that mine and monitor online conversations to help you answer this single question.

    If you’re thinking about this right now, here’s my advice: be very careful and clear about what your goals are at this point in the game before you start entertaining proposals and signing contracts.  There’s a difference between mining the conversation gap and monitoring it.

    Mining the Conversation Gap

    Mining typically involves looking at a large volume of discussion (usually over a span of time) and from that extracting patterns and themes that lend themselves to some fairly decent insights and analysis of discussion trends.  The companies that do mining really well basically look and act a lot like search engines with huge indexes of data (e.g., from blogs, forums, groups, etc.) that are regularly queried based on a pre-defined set of terms or keywords that you, the client, want to track.  Mining is great for keeping tabs on big picture trends and sentiment shifts, but it’s lousy at capturing real-time issues as they typically bubble up online — which is critical for communicators trying to stay in front of things.

    Monitoring the Conversation Gap

    Monitoring involves being on the front line of online discussion — as it’s happening.  Monitoring is hard work and more often than not, the companies that do it well are relying less on machines and automation, and more on human analysis and teams of researchers.  These services typically cull all sorts of online content (every day) and flag discussions, links, etc. that fit within a pre-defined scope of work.  While monitoring services are great for staying on top of online chatter and keeping the pulse of communities, monitoring doesn’t scale very easily and aside from front line observations and anecdotal knowledge, it’s really tough to gauge what sort of impact these discussions are having on overall brand perception (and whether or not you’re actually closing the conversation gap).

    All this having been said, the perfect answer to this situation is that you need a combination of both mining and monitoring to really understand what people are saying.  And the sad reality is that a service that meets these unique needs doesn’t exist — today.

    So for now, if you’re thinking about listening to the online conversation, you’ll need to come to terms on what strategy works best for your company — mining or monitoring?  You’ll also need to think about whether you really need an outside service, or if you’re okay pooling internal resources and stringing together some homegrown solutions until something better comes along.

    Once you have this part figured out (i.e., what are people saying?), then it gets real interesting (i.e., what can you do about it?).  But I’ll save that for another day…

    Related Posts:

    Mind The Conversation Gap (Steve Rubel)

    Following On-Line Conversations is Hard Work! (Jeremy Zawodny)

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  • State of the Blogosphere: October 2005

    mike manuel 3:41 am on October 17, 2005 | 0 Permalink

    Slide00021tmJust a quick pointer to Dave Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere update (October).  Part One is focused on Blogosphere Growth.  Following are some summary stats, but take a second to read the entire thing, it’s *very* interesting, particularly the rate of blogs created per day:

    • As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs

    • The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
    • The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
    • About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
    • About a new weblog is created each second
      2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
    • Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
    • About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
    • An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
     

  • KD Paine: Don’t Bother Measuring Blogs

    mike manuel 9:59 pm on August 29, 2005 | 2 Permalink

    Good advice in KD Paine’s recent column.  For some companies, blogs just don’t matter.  Anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something.

    So where do blogs fit into all of this? If you know that your customers are generating buzz in blogs or chat rooms or newsgroups, then okay, pay attention. But if what happens in the blogosphere is irrelevant to the behavior of the people you are trying to reach, don’t waste resources trying to measure it.

    Don’t get me wrong. I think the blogosphere is a great tool for research, and a very cheap and easy way to get customer feedback. And, yes, it can be a big threat if consumers start to seriously diss you. But unless you have unlimited budget and unlimited resources, think long and hard because, maybe, it just doesn’t matter.

    [source: Constantin]

     

  • The Blog 500 Challenge

    mike manuel 9:14 pm on August 2, 2005 | 0 Permalink

    Jason Calacanis is taking Technorati to task on the methodology it uses to create the Technorati 100.  In fact, he’s willing to put cold hard cash on the table for anyone willing to create a better list/ranking system.  Check out his post, it’s a good read and he makes some valid points, the best is this one:

    [The Technorati 100] is based on the number of links for all time. This means if you have not been around for two or three years you’re not gonna make the list. It protects the old school folks and makes the list self-perpetuating. The “all time” setting is what causes the Technorati 100 to never change. I’d much rather see it be a trailing 90 days, or trailing six months. Heck, I’d settle for over the past year! Anything is better then just saying the Top 100 is based on who’s been around the longest.

    I think the bigger problem with most ranking systems, whether it’s Technorati’s, Intelliseek’s or anyone elses is that they tend to treat link metrics as the supreme indicator of popularity and authority and thus, influence — but it’s not a very comprehensive way to measure the tail.  I think link metrics should have a place in any ranking system, especially one that’s geared toward blogs, but I’d like to see *someone* come out with a system that includes trust and relevancy metrics too.

     

  • What if Carma Bought Intelliseek?

    mike manuel 11:18 pm on April 4, 2005 | 0 Permalink

    Jeremy Zawodny recently posed the question: What if Intelliseek bought Technorati?  It’s an interesting scenario, but then I started thinking about this from a PR perspective and got to asking:  Hell, what if a company like Carma bought Intelliseek?  Carma is arguably one of the best media measurement firms out there and it’s interesting to think what these companies could do together if they combined Carma’s media analytics with Intelliseek’s Web metrics….

     

  • Measuring Blog Marketing

    mike manuel 10:29 am on January 19, 2005 | 1 Permalink

    Zachary Rodgers with ClickZ just published the second part of his two part series on measuring blog marketing.

    Big brands are quickly adopting either official or C-level
    blogs. Google and Yahoo! maintain company blogs. Microsoft supports both
    official blogs and individual employee blogs. Executives at General Motors, Sun
    Microsystems and Jupitermedia all write blogs of their own. And smaller
    companies are using the medium to raise their profile; some even hope to
    generate sales. But are they working? How can one tell?

    Uber PR blogger Steve Rubel is quoted throughout.  An interesting read and something I’ll be blogging more about in the days to come.

     

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