A conversation about Bacon’s Media Source‘s monitoring of blogs indicates disagreement in the PR community about Bacon’s decision to monitor what it describes as “the 250 most reputable blogs.”
But who is Bacon’s to make the decision about who the influencers are in the blogosphere? What is their decision-making process? How are they measuring reputation and influence? Are they using a tracking service like Technorati, Cyberalert of PubSub to follow blogs?
Why doesn’t Bacon’s hire an influential blogger, or two, to track what’s influential and hot in the blogosphere? THAT would make sense.
I know from my own experience that mere readership numbers have little to do with blog influence. I don’t have 80 million readers a month (far from it) and yet, within days, my challenge to PRSA to include blogging in their 2004 Conference resulted in my being invited to speak at the conference.
Bacon’s: What do you say? Don’t you at least want input from bloggers about what you should track?
A Challenge to Bacon’s MediaSource: Engage Bloggers in Blog Monitoring Plans
BL Ochman | January 6, 2005 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) | TrackBack (
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Categories: Blogging and Moblogging, Business Communications, Commentary, Cross Media, Media Relations
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BL,
Good point you’re making. I wonder what their criteria is for this and if they will make that information available.
I sort of agree with Bob Bly that Bacon’s can do what it wants. But, it is really a matter of being credible in their selection. How familiar are they with the blogosphere anyway?
“Most influential” is a relative term. I heartily agree with your assessment that numbers don’t tell the full story. A blog’s influence has less to do with the quantity of the readers (assuming that may be part of their criteria) than it does with the “quality” of the readers. In other words, who your readers are is more important than how many.
Paul Chaney
Radiant Marketing Group
I think Bacon’s has a perfect right to do this.
Publishing and writing is not a democracy. Part of the value of me buying information is that the source has a point of view, an authority I can rely on — and Bacon’s does.
Good point, BL: I wonder how they are making those selections.
From my perspective as a business commentator outside the US, what would make this extremely interesting is knowing what proportion of those 250 blogs are in Europe. In reading the news story, the list is clearly only blogs in the US. Are there any elsewhere? If so, where and how many? 10%? 5%? Less? (Not questions for you to answer, of course!)
You have to look at it from a non-tech PR perspective. Tech PR is a small segment of the PR business, and we tend to be more tech savvy than the average bear.
But, the average bear doesn’t want to go through a big list of blogs – they want the work done for them. For that alone, Bacon’s is doing a good job/has the right idea.
I’m hoping that we have this type of dialogue at the NewComm Forum, as it will make it a more interesting session.