Blog Marketing - Tracking Trends in the World of Blogs
January 11, 2008 – 12:01 pm
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Loading ...Eavesdropping on the Blogosphere may be the Best Thing your Business ever did
Seductive yet etherial, the voice of the “blogosphere” has been credited with swaying elections, driving success, or slaughtering careers. It is the foundation for Interactive PR, the branch of internet marketing that generates buzz through online media; and it is often the sole source for information on the latest cutting edge technological innovations (the SEO convention in mid-December, 2007, was a good example…see “Blogs are the New Trade Press”).
Assessing one’s reputation in the blogosphere, therefore is as vital as evaluating traditional PR. But, reading one or two blog posts, even 10 or 20, cannot begin to touch the scope and dimension of the information available in the global blogosphere (think 750 million and you’re on the right track).
One solution to the overwhelming volume of blog information available has been to follow the immensely successful path of top tier search engines by using algorithms and web crawlers to find data on a specific subject and organize it in such a way that it produces meaningful statistics and information. RelevantNoise, from interactive software company Zeta Interactive, is one such program. In the words of Zeta Interactive CEO Al DiGuido, “What Google does for content…RelevantNoise does…for the blogosphere. It lets you understand what people are saying based on keywords to denote a tone.”
Like Google, RelevantNoise relies on mathematical algorithms and programming to evaluate the information available in the blogosphere, providing more weight to more popular blogs and eliminating “splogs” (blog entries posted with the sole purpose of generating link-backs to specific sites with little original or even intelligible content). Unlike Google, RelevantNoise evaluates the overall tone of the blog entries it indexes and can provide meaningful information based on that data. For example, according to RelevantNoise, blog posts on GOP presidential hopeful Huckabee spiked during the week he partnered with Chuck Norris for the presidential run, but the overall positive tone of blog posts on Huckabee decreased from 82% to 77% after that week. Also, unlike Google, RelevantNoise makes its profit from liscencing fees rather than advertising, so it is a tool targeted towards large corporations, rather than small start-ups or mid-sized companies.
For companies with time, rather than money, to spend, Google’s blog searcher is a solid alternative tool. Searches can be limited to specific time periods, an RSS feed indexing all blog entries on a specific search topic can be added to a user’s iGoogle, or a user can sign up for automatic email alerts, which will send in any blog entries that pop up related to a specific topic or idea.
Whether you choose to use a free tool, like Google’s Blog Search, or liscenced software, from RelevantNoise, the vitality and influence of trends in the world of blogs cannot be ignored.
NOTE: An amusing aside – for all that RelevantNoise depends on the power of the blogosphere for its business, the company’s own blog is sadly outdated. Do not underestimate the power of a constantly updated, well designed blog, or, on the flip side, the potential damage that an outdated blog can cause.
Special thanks to the article, “Chuck Norris increases Mike Huckabee’s blog traffic: Zeta Interactive” from DMNews.
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