Story by Brian Solis, Photo credit: Marlette

In the last article, Reaching the Blogosphere Part Duex – working with enthusiasts to attract customers, we discussed the background, supporting info, and helpful tools to help you - with what’s available today.
To pick up where we left off:

1. Reach out to appropriate bloggers as part of your day-to-day PR program and
2. Do your homework to figure out which sites, blogs, etc. matter to your company and to your clients.

Blogger relations is a necessary addition to a PR program because citizen journalists, enthusiast bloggers, and accredited journalists with blogs, within a given community/market, can strongly influence consumer behavior. It is a perfect example of true peer-to-peer marketing, as well as channel for citizen and industry experts to reach anyone who’ll read their commentary – usually highly qualified consumers seeking insight and advice.

The truth is, whether you’re in corporate, agency or independent PR, the traditional media tracking tools, such as MediaMap, Vocus, and ListLogix are almost completely inefficient in tracking the blogosphere. Although they’re trying to evolve, up and coming players such as Weblogwire (there’s more to them than a simple press release distribution service) are springing up to help PR pros track the landscape.

In the meantime, however, the question remains, how do you identify and track important bloggers? And, how do you measure your success rate in reaching them?

Here are a few examples of the MANY different ways to help you succeed.

Let’s start with Technorati. It is probably one of the most comprehensive places to search, learn, track, and measure. And according to the site, it is currently tracking more than 51.5 million blogs.

Let me digress for a bit, for those unfamiliar with Technorati. According to the company site, “Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.”

Technorati tracks the number of links and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. The company automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, tracks the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations. According to Technorati data, there are about 75,000 new blogs a day with roughly 1.2 million posts daily, which breaks down to about 50,000 blog updates an hour.

What’s important for you to know about Technorati and the other sites we’ll discuss, is that you can search by “tags” or keywords in “blog posts” to help you identify who’s talking about your areas of interest.

Most bloggers tag their posts with keywords, tags, and links to help increase their visibility within a given segment. For example, this article will carry many keywords, tags, and links, with “PR” and “blogosphere” are among them. Behind the words, the following tag will be hyperlinked, http://technorati.com/tag/PR and http://technorati.com/tag/blogosphere and updated at Technorati. So for example, if someone searches “PR” as a tag or as a keyword in blog posts, this article will hopefully appear in the list. From there, you can click on the links to get more idea about the blog and its ranking in the blogosphere.

Continuing with the example, let’s say that Forward popped up in your search. If you wanted to see if it was a high-traffic, qualified blog in Technorati, you could simple click the link and you will see:
FORWARD :: Forward thinking. Forward moving.
Rank: 17,372 (798 links from 142 blogs)
URL: http://www.forward-moving.com

That’s a pretty impressive ranking!

What this means for you, is that you can search tags and keywords in Technorati (through direct tags) or what’s written in the body of the post. So if you’re looking for bloggers that cover cell phones and accessories, search with a variety of terms and strings to generate a list of recent coverage, such as “cellphone,” “cellular,” and “cell+phone.” Then, build your list accordingly to relevance, influence, and ranking. Remember, it’s not about quantity, but about quality.

Technorati isn’t the only place that can help…there are several other places to help build and refine your list that work much in the same way.

Google offers a great blog search tool, which doesn’t pop up as a resource on the Google home page. Bookmark blogsearch.google.com and search for key words/strings. Once you start, you can fine tune your search by hour, day, week, month, dates, or simply everything that’s out there.

Similar to Google’s blogsearch tool, Sphere, is also a very solid, simple-to-use blog search engine. Sphere helps you discover high-quality, relevant, and timely blog posts that match what you’re looking for. Here you can also sort by day, week, month, and also by relevance.

Another popular, and often referenced tool, is Blogpulse, a division of Nielsen Buzz Metrics. BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. It applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends. BlogPulse also tracks trends, top blogs, top stories, etc.

If you’re interested in analyzing the ranking of a particular site, head on over to Alexa and click on the “traffic rankings” tab. This gives you a solid idea of where blogs stand in the grand scheme of things by giving you numbers for reach, rank, and pageviews.

For example, if you search for the ranking of “www.forward-moving.com,” you will see the following:
Traffic Rank for forward-moving.com: 390,984
Again, extraordinary stats.

After you’ve compiled a solid list, the work then shifts into making outreach and cultivating relationships.

Next up: Effectively reaching out to bloggers.
If you have any questions, observations, or new ideas about blogger relations, please feel free to contact me at PR2point0@gmail.com.

Tags: google, blogsearch, sphere, search, blogpulse, Nielsen, buzzmetrics, forwardmoving, blogs, blogosphere, pr, publicrelations, technorati, bloggers, mediamap, vocus, listlogix

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