The Value of Blogging Is Realized With Frequency
Co-written by Claude G. Théoret, President, Nexalogy and Natalie Clark Barratt, Senior Relationship Manager, Piehead
Bloggers and related channels are wary of being marketed to, and of being ‘bought’ by corporate interests. Their value lies in their integrity. This makes them a particularly hard group to communicate with, as each outreach must be customized to fit that particular blog. This group is communication labor-intensive – indeed, more so than PR communications, as a blanket press release will at best gain little traction, and at worst, offend the blogger.
An additional issue is that there is no one list for sourcing blogs and channels. Before any brand can speak to the top 100 ‘foodie’ bloggers, for example, they must first be identified. This is both a quantitative task (which are the blogs that deal with this topic?) and a qualitative task (are these blogs now the ones we wish to speak to?). A Google search is often the first method of investigation but is quickly revealed to be very limited.
Luckily, math can help us determine who the leading bloggers are on any topic. As far back as 2003, Clay Shirky in a seminal blog remarked, as many physicists and mathematicians had before him, that influence on any topic is distributed in a power law distribution and that this influence scales directly with the frequency of publishing on said topic.
In order to resolve which social media factors have the most influence on any topic, we can start with who writes the most about said topics. It is critical to analyze who the real influencers are in order to determine where and how to place the content.
The issue of reporting is complex. With few metrics that track across all Internet entries, defining the success of any blogger outreach is complicated. Despite claims to the contrary (such as?), it is essential to use tools with the finesse and expertise to address these complexities. Trying to adapt standard marketing research metrics to the networked complexity of social media is like using a ball peen hammer to modify a spider web.
