The Top 25 Public Relations Blogs
In response to my reference to Steve Rubel as “the leading PR authority among bloggers, according to Technorati and just about any other quantifiable measure,”Usher Lieberman has suggested that I have confused “leading” with “loudest.”
I realize that not everyone is a fan of Steve, but Usher’s comment does beg an interesting question: Is there really an objective way to determine blog leadership? Jeremy Zawodny has pointed out how difficult it is to follow online conversations at all — let alone to establish recognized authorities.
The measurement tools are just not that reliable at this stage. Personally, I use several tools to track my online footprint, all of which return fairly disparate results.
To give you an idea of what’s out there, here’s Technorati’s list of the top 25 blogs tagged “Public Relations,” sorted by authority. (I’ve eliminated duplicate mentions for blogs that were listed twice.)
1. Micro Persuasion
2. gapingvoid
3. Global PR Blog Week 2.0
4. Duct Tape Marketing Weblog
5. ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum
6. POP! PR Jots
7. hyku | blog commentary by blog consultant Josh Hallett
8. Media Guerilla
9. B2B Lead Generation Blog
10. AuburnMedia
11. Media Culpa
12. PR Meets the WWW
13. Marcom Blog
14. Marketing Begins At Home
15. A PR Guru’s Musings
16. Beyond PR
17. One By One
18. On Message from Wagner Communications
19. Across the Sound
20. Morgan McLintic on PR
21. Phenix Rising
22. Media Orchard, by the Idea Grove
23. Shotgun Marketing BLOG
24. Kinetic Ideas: A Marketing Blog
25. ZnetLady: Modern Media Modo
For anyone familiar with the PR blogging community, this list is problematic for a number of reasons. For example:
1. Some of these blogs aren’t really about public relations. Their authors simply tagged them “public relations” because they occasionally touch on PR issues.
2. If you search under a different term, such as “PR,” everything changes. My blog standing goes down a bit, while excellent blogs like Piaras Kelly PR, Phil’s Blogservations, and Niall Cook’s Marketing Technology jump into the fray. Piaras, Phil and Niall simply didn’t tag their blogs “Public Relations.”
3. Other top PR bloggers aren’t listed at all, because they’ve never signed up with Technorati.
4. Different tools, such as FeedMap, are required if you are interested in sorting U.S. from non-U.S. blogs or creating other categories. (I’m proud to say that John Wagner and Steven Phenix are fellow Texans, but I had to stumble upon that fact on my own.)
So we prove Jeremy Z.’s point: Trying to figure out where your blog, your company, or your clients stand in the blogosphere is hard work. It requires a lot of guesswork and triangulation. Let’s hope — with the infusions of cash we’re beginning to see in the Web 2.0 world — that this will change.
Technorati tags: Technorati, PR, Public Relations, Marketing
Agreed. My blog, #7 at this time, is not ‘about PR’ but I work quite a bit with PR professionals so I do ‘talk’ about PR issues quite a bit.
The Technorati blog rank can easily be gamed since it only bases the results on link counts. In addition, you can insert your own tags using their profile manager. Somebody that religiously tags each post with PR/Public Relations is lumped in with somebody who just happens to put the tag PR in their Technorati profile. The example I always use is:
http://technorati.com/blogs/tampa
My blog is #1, yet I never blog about Tampa. Once I did tag a post Tampa and since I have a higher link count that any of the other blogs it made me the ‘Most Authorative’.
Josh: So are the Bucs going all the way this year? (Hint — great topic for a blog post…)
I believe I should be No. 1
But seriously, there are a couple of other problems with Technorati links as a measurement.
One is that it can be tough to crack the “inner circle” of PR bloggers who have been doing this a long time, especially if you aren’t interested in the high-tech stuff they typically write about.
So that makes it hard to get links from the PR blogs with the highest visibility.
For example, I have a good following among PR bloggers who started either at the same time as me or after me. They see me as a peer.
The long-timers, not so much.
The other issue is that if you’re a Steve Rubel and you’re really writing about technology, you have a much greater universe of possible links than if you stay close to PR issues, since there are far fewer PR blogs out there.
The reality is that it shouldn’t matter who’s No. 1 or No. 25 in terms of links … what should matter is message and influence and conversation. But those are tough things to measure — if not impossible.
Just to be clear, I don’t like or dislike Steve Rubel. We’ve never met. Sometimes I like his blog, sometimes I don’t, sometimes it is irrelevant, but I think you got the broader point. I do think the job of analysis is going to get somewhat easier from a quantifiable standpoint (I certainly hope so), it is the qualitative stuff that will continue to be where the value add is, and as the quantifiable stuff becomes easier I think the qualitative will get harder based on pure volume (maybe we won’t all be waiting tables after all.)
Agree that the concept of authority is an odd one. Even within the relatively narrow field of PR, there are domain experts in each area. I wouldn’t class myself as an authority on VNRs for instance, but aspects such as global PR campaigns or agency management, I think I have direct experience and something to add.
That’s why the number of links as a reflection of authority is a bit of a misnomer. It often just reflects the popularity of a subject which is time-specific rather than the depth of thought, originality or authority of the author on the subject.
Still it’s always nice to the a Top Something, even if it’s just top PR blogger.
It’s easy to identify the most in important blogs, they are the ones your clients’ customers are reading.
Like Josh, I too (#17) merely discuss issues related to PR. In trying to determine what tags to put on my profile, I went through and looked at posts and categories and tried to get all of the tag type headings I could associate with, and came up with PR as a choice.
Josh: Griese’s out for the year so nevermind on the Bucs post.
Alice: I agree with you. The larger point of the post is that all measures of influence — including those undertaken on behalf of your clients — are difficult at the moment.
As Groucho once said… I refuse to be a member of any club that would have me for a member…
I’m sure some former employers and clients would be astonished to see my name listed as the 14th ‘most authoritative’ PR blogger. I know I am.