Blog Business Summit: Staying on Top of the Buzz

All companies need to stay on top of what's being said about them and their products. Even if you're not blogging, you need to monitor and respond to what's happening on the Web.

First presentation is from Evelyn Rodriguez whose central focus is on why a company should be listening to the conversation. (Slides of her presentation are here in .pdf form.) Recent experiences of Dell and Kryptonite show the importance of listenting to what customers are saying about your company and its products. Evelyn stressed that it's crucial to go from monitoring to listening. Much of the attitude of the blogosphere comes from the Cluetrain Manifesto and the declaration that "markets are conversations."

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Evelyn says that blogs harken back to era of town squares and locations where "everyone knows your name," and:

"There is a difference between a public marketplace and a shopping mall — a difference in how the marketplace functions as a social setting meeting the human need to be with others."?? — Pike Place Market Heritage Center

There is a difference between monitoring and listening. Monitoring is only an apt metaphor if your mantra is that business is war. But listenning connotes the more human side of interaction. This distinction is important. A mention of your company on a blog is a direct communication between that person and you. It's important to respond when people address you directly. Many businesses assume that a blog-spurred controversy will blow over, but Dell and Kryptonite have shown this attitude to be perilous.

So how does a company measure influence in the blogosphere? It goes beyond Technorati and PubSub. It's important to make a map of your core marketplace and notice what people are saying about the ideas behind yuor company. They may not be addressing you directly, but pay attention to the conversations around and about your general area. Respond to those issues on a company blog to engage the conversation.

Social dynamics take a 14mm marketplace and reduce it to a very small world. The blogosphere centers around gossip and one-off comments. The upshot is that you really do need to listen to "one measily blogger." When people take the time to write a public letter to Michael Dell is going to be heard.

Companies need to be proactive listening to what's being said about them, rather than focus on being reactive listening. Even if you try to separate yourself from the marketplace and stand outside it, people int he marketplace may still talk about you, and entering the marketplace once in a while to make a pronouncement and then leave is going to leave you in a bad position.

The blogosphere isn't anti-business; it's against the depersonalizatoin of commerce. The role of the evangelist is to make a connection with a human being.

Jay Stockwell of Intelliseek was up next. You can see the slides (.pdf warning) of his presentation here. Most of the presentation was cut off as the moderator made a request that he get into some how-to and shoe us how one could actually use BlogPulse for their company. Jay had trouble accessing the web from his laptop so convesation momentarily moved to Bob Wyman.

Bob Wyman notes Dell and Land Rover both had difficult experiences with the blogosphere and that it's essential to monitor and listen in order to respond to crises as they come up. There are different kinds of monitoring, and you should be doing both.

What PubSub is doing is different in that Blogpulse and Technorati are focused on the past. It's retrospective analysis and allows you to see how the conversatoin evolved over the past few weeks. PubSub is a prospective system. They don't store information and search back. They take your requests and look forward to see what's happening now. However, it's vitally important to use Blogpulse, etc. because you have to know how the situation lies at present.

It's not really Krypto's fault that they were blindsided since the ability to see and respond to these controversies has never existed before, but now everyone is on notice, and companies need to monitor and shape the conversation about their products.

PubSub now has a link ranking service. It's a new tool, but in introducing it he had a problem. Jason Calacanis has of late been clammoring for a new tool to see who the true A-list of bloggers are, and Wyman didn't want Calacanis to think that he was entering into Jason's contest to produce a new tool. By commenting on Jason's blog, Wyman was able to shape the conversation about the product before Calacanis reacted:

Jason, At PubSub, we've updated the statistics we report and they now, once again, display the LinkRanks that we compute in order to permit filtering of PubSub results. While I would appreciate your comments on what we've done, I want to make sure you understand that the data we currently publish should *not* be considered an "entry" in your contest. What we're showing at this moment is simply more of the raw data that we use in our calculations and that will, in the future, be the input to an actual "entry."

The LinkRank numbers we report are *daily* numbers. They are the result of running an algorithm that takes into account the InLinks to and OutLinks from over 14 million blogs over the last couple weeks. The value of individual links is "decayed" over time. A link today is worth more than a link yesterday, etc. Also, the value of individual links is discounted according to the number of links from any one source. If a link is the only link from a source, it has more value than if it is one of many links... Additionally, the value of a link is influenced by the rank of the site that does the linking. A link from a highly ranked site is more valuable than a link from a low ranked site. The algorithm includes a variety of other metrics that we prefer not to discuss at length in order to prevent spammers from too easily understanding the system.

Something that you'll note in our LinkRank numbers is what we call "jumpers." These are sites that jump from a very low rank to a high rank suddenly. This is an intentional aspect of our system. It is our intent to ensure that sites that may be recently recognized as having interesting content are able to rapidly make their way to the higher ranks. Frankly, most jumpers rapidly decay back to the low ranks that one would expect. But some do manage to maintain their high rank over time. Given that jumpers typically represent a small percentage of the high ranked sites, we're generally pleased with the way the system works. You don't have to be publishing for months to get into the top ranks -- you simply need to get large numbers of people linking to you and you'll be there. Alternatively, a small number of high ranked people can lift you (temporarily) to a high rank.

Unlike most other sites, we provide access in tabular, graphical, feed, and XML form to virtually all of the raw data that we use in ranking these 14+ million blogs. For each site, you'll see Daily InLink, OutLink, and LinkRank stats as well as the number of new entries. Additionally, you can get the raw data in the form of an RSS/Atom feed for any site and each "Site Stats" page that we display has a structured blogging element that presents the data in XML for machine processing.

Have a look and let us know what you think. But, understand that it will still be some time before we present a system that is actually responsive to your recent requests.

You can find our updated pages at:
https://www.pubsub.com/stats

bob wyman
CTO, PubSub.com

This ranking service allows a company to use statistical metrics to see what kind of posts help to achieve his business purposes. To help him see what he should write about and how frequently. Answers to these questions had previously been questions of art. Now we are finally able to look at objective measures. We need to measure our specific actions and see how people are responding to those actions.

Lastly, there is more to life than blogging. Once you can measure blogs, you can't simply forego other forums. PubSub will help you with message boards, newsgroups, forums, etc. and these other communities can't be left out of a company's strategy.

Overall this was a good session. All three presenters were stong (Stockwell's presentation was derailed, but Intelliseek has some good tools for companies to track what's happening) and this info is important for a company whether it sets up a blog or not. Wyman's distinction between how Blogpulse and PubSub work is important. PubSub is a great tool, but it won't tell you what's happening right now, for that you use Blogpulse and Technorati, rather PubSub is for tracking what's happening immediately as it happens.

Also take some time to look at the slides at the end of Evelyn's presentation as her notes have some additional insights about the blogosphere and the concept of the blogosphere as old world marketplace.

tags: blogbusinesssummit