Sceptical blogging

Posted Monday, December 4, 2006 at 8:14pm in Blogging, PR General  | 

The latest edition of PR Week has a pull out section on new media called Digital Essays. Forwarded by PR Week’s editor, Danny Rogers, the supplement contains six er, um, essays on digital media. It’s a very good read and contains some great insights from well respected PR pros, including, David King, APCO, Mark Mellor, Firefly, Jonathan Hughes, Golin Harris, Howard Kosky, markettiers4dc, Pat Pearson, Ruder Finn and the UK PR blogosphere’s very own, James Warren of Weber Shandwick.

What is interesting is Jonathan Hughes of Golin Harris’s sceptical view on blogging. Indeed, the contents page actually describes Harris’s piece with “Blogging is overrated, but don’t let that put you off.” In my opinion, this type of skeptical view is refreshing and sometimes what is needed among the over hyped evangelists including yours truly. However, there are a couple of points made which don’t make sense.

Hughes describes the blog Cute Overload being ranked by Technorati as ‘influential’ and at least 40 places higher than any corporate blog (excluding Google). No doubt this is the case but I don’t think he’s comparing like for like in this instance. A blog showing pictures of cute furry animals will probably hold more appeal globally than, say, a blog by a small sheet metal company. But read this.

Staying on the topic of influence, Hughes says that only 4,000 of the 57 million blogs are considered ‘influential’ (I’m guessing by Technorati). He says that blogs that have over 500 links to and from (to and from??) are only considered to be influential. However, and quite contradictory, he says: “Of course, a blog can be influential with just a dozen links depending on the audience”.

Where the notion of combining inbound and outbound links to determine ‘influence’ comes from I’m not sure but it’s flawed undoubtedly. If that was the case I could happily send out 500 links in this single blog post to make my blog ‘influential’. (Note how I’m putting influence in ” marks. Don’t want to go through that again.)

Another arguable point Hughes makes is that the majority of top blogs are written in Japanese and Cantonese. Well, looking at the Technorati top 100 tells a different story. But even if they are, this shouldn’t make a difference to companies who would surely want to track discussion regardless of language. Should it?

That said, there is some sound advice toward the end of the um, er, essay, like disclosing who you are, asking for feedback from the blogosphere and employee blogging: “Depending on your objectives, don’t assume that people will only want to hear from the CEO or senior exectutives. Using someone from the shop floor can be more engaging”.

Hear hear.

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