Business Blogging

A question that’s come up time and time again since I got involved in social media PR is how to measure the influence of a blog. Mainstream media has well established metrics for measuring influence but things aren’t quite so straight forward for blogs, so if you’re putting together a target list for a PR campaign and you need to know which bloggers you should prioritise, how do you figure out which ones have the most clout?

I recommend using a combination of the following factors to get a feel for how influential a blog is – there’s no magic bullet for this problem just yet, but with a bit of research you can build a fairly clear picture of which bloggers are worth focusing your efforts on.

Technorati

In this situation, most PR people will head straight over to Technorati to get ‘Authority’ rankings for the blogs they’re interested in working with. If you don’t already know, Technorati is the leading blog directory on the web and ranks blogs’ importance by giving them a rating which it calls ‘Authority’.

This is based on a fairly simple calculation of how many other blogs have linked to a particular blog over the past six months. Authority can (and often is) as little as zero, while the most popular blog listed on Technorati has an Authority of almost 29,000.

Although Technorati Authority is a useful guide for comparing the relative popularity of different blogs, it does have a few limitations and you shouldn’t rely on it as the sole metric for measuring blogs influence.

Google

Google assigns every website in its index with a rating of between zero and ten, which it calls PageRank (often referred to as PR, just to confuse things) and has a major effect on how highly that site is listed in Google search results. A site with a PageRank of 10 is extremely important and will get a lot of traffic, while a site with zero PageRank will have practically no visitors at all.

Google uses a highly sophisticated algorithm to calculate PageRank, and it’s always being tweaked in order to achieve the best results and prevent spammers from abusing the system to try and drive more traffic to their splogs (spam-blogs). For this reason, I think PageRank is a very useful and trustworthy metric to use for measuring a blog’s influence level.

Google does not list PageRank in its search results – if you want to view a site’s PageRank the best thing to do is install the Google Toolbar on your browser. Alternatively, there are plenty of free PageRank checker sites you could use.

Alexa

Under normal circumstances the only person who has access to a website’s traffic statistics is the webmaster, because he’s the only person who can accurately measure that data by running stats tracking software on his web-server. But Alexa attempts to provide similar data by monitoring the web-viewing habits of ‘millions’ of web users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.

It provides a few different metrics, but the most useful is what it calls Reach – this is simply the percentage of web users who visit a particular site over a given period. For example, Google’s Reach over the past three months is 28.9% – which means that 28.9% of internet users visited Google during that period.

A lot of people trust Alexa figures when they’re researching blogs and other websites, but I think these figures are pretty flaky, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody using the Alexa toolbar in real life and I can’t imagine why many people would want to use it. If millions of people are using it, I’m not sure they accurately represent the browsing habits of all internet users.

Common Sense

I think the best way to assess a blog’s influence is to take a good look at it. Browse through the archives and look at things like:

• How regularly is it updated? Some great blogs are infrequently updated, but generally speaking the more regularly a blog updates, the more likely it is to be influential.  
• How old is the blog? Blogs which have been around longer have more opportunity to build up a larger audience.
• How active is the community? Do lots of people comment on the posts?
• Does the blog have many regular commenters? Popular blogs tend to draw in a community of regular commenters, so this is a good sign.

All of these things should help you to form a better idea of a blog’s influence. No single metric can really give you the full story, but when used in conjunction with each other all of these factors will give you a much clearer picture of which bloggers you should focus your efforts on.

Since quitting journalism to join the murky world of public relations, I’ve been amazed to see just how badly the PR industry is tying itself up in knots trying to figure out how to deal with bloggers. Even today a lot of PR people seem to be completely baffled by what I thought would be relatively straightforward issues:

• What exactly is a blog, how is it different from any other content based website?
• What’s the difference between bloggers and journalists?
• How are we supposed to engage with bloggers?

These can be very complex questions, but they don’t need to be. For a start the word ‘blog’ is incredibly broad, and can be used to describe literally any site that runs on a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, etc. But to lump millions of different websites together simply because they happen to use a similar type of content management software, as some PRs have a tendency to do, is painfully stupid.

You wouldn’t put The Times and the local school newsletter on the same media list just because they both happen to be printed on paper. But because of this tendency to think of all blogs as equal, a lot of PRs still have a clichéd mental image of bloggers as greasy loners posting bitter tirades which nobody reads, which is a pretty moronic outlook when you consider the Technorati Top 100 blog list is littered with highly influential and professional blogs.

This brings me onto my next point – while some journalists, and possibly even bloggers, may not agree with this sentiment, from the perspective of the PR industry there is no real difference between the two. Somebody who writes for a professional, high quality blog is essentially doing the same kind of job as somebody who writes for a print newspaper or magazine. They are both influencers, they both have an audience, and ultimately that’s what really matters as far as PR is concerned.

As blogs and conventional publishers both branch out into areas like web based video and podcasts, it’s getting increasingly difficult to clearly delineate them. It’s no longer about whether you’re a blog, a newspaper or even a TV network, it’s about creating media brands and delivering strong content through a range of channels.

This is why I think it’s pointless to try and differentiate between bloggers and journalists at all. Instead, PRs should simply focus on identifying the influencers which are most relevant to their clients’ objectives, regardless of which channels those influencers choose to deliver their content.

However, there are likely to be obstacles to this approach for many organisations:

• PRs like to have nice clear metrics to measure influence, those metrics are well established in convention media but measuring the influence of blogs is much more difficult
• There can be political issues when different individuals/departments/agencies disagree over who should take ownership of relationships with bloggers, which invariably boil down to arguments about how blogs should be classified

These aren’t unsolvable problems, but they’re the kind of things that can really throw a spanner in the works if the will or creativity required to overcome them is in short supply. But there’s significant competitive advantage to be gained here – so either you figure out how to do it, or sit around and wait for your competitors to get there first.

(Er… I know I kind of skipped out on the ‘how do we engage with bloggers’ question, but I noticed this post was dragging on a bit, so I’ll leave that for another article.)