What's a Blog Really Worth?
It’s been a good long while since I posted (breaking all the rules I set for my clients), but in the last three months things have changed. Instead of my PR clients wanting to talk about writing blogs, now everyone wants to talk about monitoring and searching blogs. This tectonic plate shift seems to have occurred some time in late May or early June. That’s got to be a good thing – it seems like the entire blogosphere wants corporations to LISTEN to them, and now corporations are trying to figure out how to do just that.
The thing is, if a company wants to penetrate a market or build relationships in the blogosphere the single most important thing is listening. But how? While all of the blog search companies are now fast at work creating tools that do spiffy charts and graphs, (as ever, the wonderful engineers at the blog search companies are doing what engineers do – thinking about numbers, algorithms, ways to automatically generate data) my clients want qualitative analysis. What are the verbatim quotes? What do they mean in a larger sense? What are the big themes? What should we do with this data? No matter what anyone says, semantic analysis and sentiment analysis are a long way away from being truly accurate or truly useful.
For now, manual labor is the only way to REALLY understand what’s being said. We just had five interns spend about eight business days (yes, that’s 40 total business days) doing a blogosphere search and analysis on behalf of a consumer products client. But the results we got were dramatically different than what’s available via any of the blog search technology companies now. On the other hand, search technologies are evolving weekly. Mary Hodder did the best overview of what’s possible that I’ve seen. I expect a lot of change here in the next three months – a little less manual labor is always good!
When I’m not having conversations about blog monitoring, I’m having conversations about RSS. We have a long way to go before RSS penetration delivers on the promises that RSS technology makes, as this recent Nielsen study of blog readers makes clear. Where we are with RSS today reminds me of where we were with the Web in 1995 – I remember a national network news crew that came out to interview Sun executives about “the Internet.” Someone mentioned that Bank of America had a URL on a billboard on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. This was such a major development that the news crew (who flew out from New York) asked us where the billboard was so they could shoot it. So if RSS is now where the Web was in 1995, there’s no way we can accurately or completely predict how RSS will change business, change media, change communication, and indeed change our day-to-day lives. All we know is that it will. That’s going to be even more interesting to watch!
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Posted by Lisa Poulson at August 23, 2005 08:15 AM
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