When quality should overcome quantity

January 4, 2009 | 5 comments | Tweet This

Like any other blogger who likes having conversations, I have Google alerts set up for my blog name so I can see who is saying what and take the opportunity to engage with them.  I received an alert last week which initially confused me somewhat.  It led me to a spread sheet containing the URL’s of 62 likeminded blogs similar to mine.  Now, i’m guessing this probably wasn’t meant for public use however, it was good to see that I was in good company (Helen Jaz and James).  The list was categorised by ID, blog URL, date of most recent post, date of first post and number of posts in December.  Given that this appears to be a blogger hitlist, I assume it was probably compiled by a PR agency.

As you all know I like to see bloggers being engaged by brands as it encourages a two-way conversation so I think it’s great that more and more PR companies are approaching bloggers and involving them in product launches so I don’t have any problem at all from this list.  What I would ask from reading this list however, is what the profile of the blogger they are looking for is.  As you will see from my previous post, I am blogging less and less because I am finding that I am now using a variety of outlets to post my thoughts as opposed to just my blog, that combined with actually having more in-depth real life conversations, an observation that I know a lot of you share.  So bearing this in mind, maybe the focus of selecting bloggers shouldn’t actually be “number of posts in December” or “Date of most recent post” but rather trying to look at the potential influence a blog has, an outcome neither of these fields will provide.  I could write 50 posts in one month but if no one reads my blog then it’s pointless in wanting me to write about a brand launch.  How about looking at how many people read the blog, then look at how many people leave comments to posts to see how engaged the readers are with the author.  Looking at other online spaces where the author posts, would also enable you to get a better understanding of they talk to.

The company who can measure influence enabling targeting messages to a handful of people and avoid spamming the masses  will be one of the big success stories of 2009.  After talking to many companies who “offer” this I am yet to find one that fills me with confidence, but will be keeping fingers crossed.

Posted by Jamie Coomber | Filed Under Blog, Community, Marketing  | 5 comments | Tweet This

Comments

5 Responses to “When quality should overcome quantity”

  1. mediaczar on January 4th, 2009 10:53

    That's my mistake right there. It's not actually a blogger hitlist, but rather the list of people who (very kindly) volunteered to answer a survey I pulled together before Christmas. It's untargeted on purpose, as it happens — I need a very broad sample set to help me pull together a "blogger typology" so the more randomized the sample the better. It's actually rather worrying how many people on this list are new media marketing people; I hope that we can correct for that later on.

    In fact, the whole point of this exercise is to help the large public relations firm for whom I work to categorize bloggers better so that they can engage with more sensitivity. You'll see too (from my post on how this fits with our approach to met…) that the recency/frequency/tenure scores are ju… that we'd like to look at for blogs. And here's what we've been looking at for overall web KPIs. You'll see that things like Boyd's "conversation index" are never far from my mind!

    Metrics like audience and comments are "non-trivial" btw. For various reasons (including but not limited to systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate) it's very hard to pull comment feeds. And audience data is hard enough to get adequate at large volumes; at low volumes we're left with what - Alexa data? It's for that very reason that I've been looking into various means of assessing influence (qual and quant stuff - the quant stuff is all v. public on my blog.)

    But. And this is a big but…

    This list was never supposed to get out there. A combination of Google being excellent and me being somewhat less so has led to me exposing my sample respondents. Both the respondent ID and the blog are listed on that spreadsheet, making it easy to work out "who said what."

    Now, as you know yourself, nothing revealed on that survey is likely to upset anyone, and I didn't make extravagant claims about privacy (although I did say that the data would be "suitably anonymised.") No-one's email addresses were included on that spreadsheet, so no-one's going to get spammed.

    Just because it's "safe data" doesn't make it better. This is a serious failure in my process, and knowing that it could easily have been avoided ("don't send respondent IDs to the freelance") doesn't make me feel anything other than careless.

    Thanks for bringing it to my attention. It'll be fixed in later releases.

    I've asked the people who are hosting that particular file to scrub it from their servers, but I don't know if/when that's going to work. Let's h

  2. Charles Frith on January 4th, 2009 11:05

    The only way I know what is going on is via here or direct contact with you. Speaking of which i wanted to call but right now my telco is clobbering me just to get halfway through explaining my problem. In any case I really think quantiattiuve measurement doesn't give me what I want. OK for sure there are uses but I really think there's a gap for online media to talk about the depth of engagement. I'm a bit fascinated by the cords of attachment. So if I'm reading a good article. The world can wait. If it's a video and the phone goes well there's a pause button. This probably seems half baked but there are so many hyper links in the usage pattern that I'm really interested in the meaningful engagement. One is staying long enough to have a viewpoint. There are more. Lots more but I just wanted to drop by, say hi and chip in. You know I love to chip in :)

    You'll have a strong year whatever. Common sense isn't that common Jamie.

  3. James Whatley on January 5th, 2009 11:10

    Dude,

    I must've missed this (I thought my Google Alerts were sorted!) can you link?

    Happy New Year,

    J x

  4. mediaczar on January 5th, 2009 12:09

    I've just had confirmation that the file has been removed (although I suppose that it could still be in Google's cache.)

    Jamie — I rather like your point about "other online spaces" - and indeed we're trying to get our people and our clients to understand the concept of "web footprints" - that is the multiple linked, semi-linked and unlinked spaces where an individual exists online. The reality though is that I don't understand it very well myself yet, and am not sure that any of us can keep up!

  5. Robin Grant on January 6th, 2009 12:36

    You mean we don't fill you with confidence, let alone joy? We'll aim to change that. in 2009.

    N.B. Mat - ouch! Perhaps all of your transparency has a downside after all? ;)

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