Measuring up blogs
Saw an article on Andrew Lark’s blog about how monitoring and measurement are becoming a nice little growth industry for blogs. With the number of blogs growing at a rate of well over a million a week, (35.2 million monitored on Technorati as of today), it will be increasingly important to have accurate numbers not just on who said what and where, but who else is saying the same things.
It will be very important to consider this overlapping content, considering many of us cross-link to a lot of the same material. 20 blogs all saying the same thing doesn’t do anyone any good. Especially if all we end up doing is cannibalizing our own content without adding anything new to the discussion.
Another point of note:
The BBC reports today that more and more firms are paying greater attention to what blogs are saying about them
This is critical to brands finally starting to understand consumers. If you haven’t yet read this, check out the consumer manifesto at cluetrain. It addresses this very scenario. The number one rule being Markets are conversations. Brands need to realize this, because it’s a two-way street as far as the consumer is concerned, and simply monitoring consumer forums, blogs and chat rooms for ‘insights’ is not enough.
Technorati tags: Web 2.0, PR, Blogs, Websites, Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising, Media, cluetrain
Yes, organizations are increasingly concerned about their reputation in the blogosphere, but what astounds me is that most blog “measurement” doesn’t even take into account the comments that are made. Technology hasn’t arrived yet to harvest both the postings and the comments. So, unless you open the posting and read the comments the way we do, you’re missing the whole conversation.
Agree Katie. I commented on this over at Jeremy’s blog earlier today actually. Unless you have a team of interns scouring blogs, many consumer insights that are ripe for the picking will be missed.