April 22, 2007 in Public Relations, Social Media Marketing by sbaradell@ideagrove.com
The Web 2.0 Buzzword Abuse Index

Since we’re back on the horse now (as in, back in the saddle, not back on heroin), Media Orchard realized we had a bit of catching up to do on all the marketing and PR blogs out there. And what better way to catch up with marketing blogs than to track their relative levels of Web 2.0 buzzword use and/or abuse.

So we decided to take a list of Web 2.0 buzzwords and enter them in the search engines of 40-or-so marketing bloggers to determine the number of instances each blog used one of the buzzwords. To level the playing field a bit between older and newer blogs, we counted only the period from January 2006 to the present.

We’ll present the results of our research one buzzword at a time over a series of posts — building up to a deafening crescendo with a comprehensive Web 2.0 Buzzword Abuse Index, incorporating all results to determine which marketing blogger uses or abuses buzzwords the most.

For our first report, we’ll disclose the results for — what else? — the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

We found that the selected blogs used this buzzword a median of 14 times during the period (about once per month), so we set that as “1″ in the index and gave everyone else a score based on that average. The higher the score, the greater the use/abuse of the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

The results:

Steve Rubel is the biggest user/abuser of “Web 2.0″ by a wide margin — using the term an average of three times per week, more than twice as often as the nearest challenger. In Steve’s defense, he does post more frequently, and has more of a tech focus, than most other marketing bloggers.

The full rundown:

Micro Persuasion: 13.9
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: 5.7
Online Marketing Blog: 3.8
PR 2.0: 3.3
Seth’s Blog: 2.6
a shel of my former self: 2.6
Marketing Pilgrim: 2.4
NevilleHobson.com: 2.4
Media Orchard: 2.4
Pronet Advertising: 2.1
Diva Marketing Blog: 1.8
BlogWrite for CEOs: 1.4
The Flack: 1.4
Adrants: 1.3
Communication Overtones: 1.3
POP! PR Jots: 1.2
Emergence Marketing: 1.2
What’s Next Blog: 1.1
Duct Tape Marketing: 1.1
Open the Dialogue: 1.1
Strive Notes: 1.1
Church of the Customer: 1.0
jaffe juice: 1.0
PR Squared: 1.0
Chaos Scenario: 0.9
Copyblogger: 0.8
Beyond Madison Avenue: 0.7
Todd And – The Power to Connect: 0.7
Bad Language: 0.7
Blogging Me Blogging You: 0.6
Brand Autopsy: 0.6
MIT Advertising Lab: 0.5
Brand Sizzle: 0.5
Make the Logo Bigger: 0.4
Copywrite, Ink.: 0.4
The Copywriting Maven: 0.3
Marketing Begins at Home: 0.3
Into PR: 0.2
Presto Vivace Blog: 0.2
Brand Noise: 0.2
On Message from Wagner Communications: 0.2
adgoodness: 0.1
The Buzz Bin: 0.1
Common Sense PR: 0.1
Marketing Whore: 0.1
Occam’s RazR: 0.1

If you’re not on this list, we’re sorry — our fingers got sore. But please feel free to put your own blog’s results in comments.

Overall, we were surprised how seldom many marketing bloggers use the term. Of course, a number of you may have gotten off easy because your search engines didn’t return all the results they should have.

Running the same query on different blogs really makes you appreciate blogs with good search. We were particularly impressed by the ExpressionEngine-powered search used by Shel Holtz and a few others. We also noticed that some slackers who shall remain nameless don’t even have a search engine on their blogs.

Next up: “Mashup”.

 
May 4, 2006 in Media Orchard, Public Relations, Web Design by sbaradell@ideagrove.com
A Random Stroll Through PR Blog Mug Shots

We changed our Media Orchard mug after returning from our honeymoon. Two reasons:

1. The old picture was taken four years ago — and we’ve aged a lot since then (as Jeremy has kindly pointed out)…

2. We wanted to post something that wasn’t quite so senior-class photo.

So we picked one of the shots from the trip. We’re sitting in a Rome cafe, recovering from food poisoning with our eyes half closed and a weary grin.

Seemed right to us.

But it made us think a bit about the mugs of other PR bloggers. We decided to check a few out to see if we could find a pattern:

Hand on chin, smiling.

Hand on head, thinking.

Hand in air, gesturing.

Catch Chris — he’s tipping over!

Cathy says she’s leaving the Idea Grove to go to Canada and work for the Thornley Fallis Group. (“They just seem so … happy.”)

This one’s a little sketchy.

Scary! But then, Robert mostly reps death-metal bands.

How’s it goin’, eh? Let’s have a brew.

Dude…button the sleeves. For the last time. (Well, at least this time you appear to have shaved.)

Nope. No pattern.

Technorati tags: , ,

 
8
April 20, 2006 in Media Orchard by sbaradell@ideagrove.com
Pick of the Orchard 4.20.06

Technorati tags: , , , , , , ,

 
0
April 6, 2006 in Media Orchard, Public Relations by sbaradell@ideagrove.com
The Decline and Fall of the Strumpette Empire

It all seemed so promising once.

An embittered curmudgeon who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else pretends to be a sexually promiscuous PR “strumpette” who hates Steve Rubel and all things Edelman.

Well, actually, we’re not sure why anyone would think that was a promising blog premise … but it did work like a charm on Day 1, when the initial post by “Amanda Chapel” netted 49 comments and 12 trackbacks.

Unfortunately, as this chart by crack researcher (as opposed to “researcher on crack”) Gregory Kohs demonstrates, things have not gone so well for Amanda since then:

Concludes Mr. Kohs:

I think intelligent readers want objective commentary from real-life people who aren’t hiding behind a fake persona.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there for Strumpette.

If anyone thought that Amanda’s commentary in O’Dwyer’s on Wednesday may have represented the character’s elevation to legitimacy, think again. Like the Strumpette concept itself, the commentary was a one-shot deal.

We e-mailed O’Dwyer’s to ask them about the decision to publish the article. Editor Kevin McCauley sent us this response:

I am responsible for what goes on the O’Dwyer site and in the newsletter and magazine so it was my decision to post the commentary.

O’Dwyer’s has never posted an anonymous commentary in the past, and quite frankly is unlikely to do so again. An anonymous commentary is usually a cheap shot to settle a score.

An exception was made for the Chapel piece because it tied in with the high-profile Dowie trial that has just opened in Los Angeles. No PR agency executive is willing to go “on the record” about overbilling. That would be a career killer. PR people, however, are more than willing to say they would never dream about bilking a client. How do we know?

I decided it was okay to use the anonymous commentary because Chapel did not write about any specific case in which he or she overbilled a client. The piece dealt with generalities.

We asked ourselves today why we feel compelled to continue posting about Strumpette. We decided it was because it represents the perfect storm of things we dislike in blogs:

1. It is pompous and condescending.
2. It is dishonest.
3. It is purposely hurtful to others.

We don’t like the Strumpette blog or what it stands for. So we’re going to keep writing about it until it goes away.

We don’t think it will take that long — but we’re patient. We’ll be here when the URL has been bought up by some porn site, where it belongs.

Technorati tags: , ,

 
March 31, 2006 in Media Orchard by sbaradell@ideagrove.com
Last Strumpette Post

Based on our most recent e-mail exchange with “A-MAN-duh,” we’ve decided it’s pointless to engage with Strumpette any further — or rather, Furthermore.

For those of you who wish to engage in sex talk with a dude, go for it.

The jig’s up. It’s all over but the humiliating conclusion. Guess cranky B.L. was right all along.

Happy early April Fool’s.

Technorati tags: , ,

 
2