Blog Monitoring, an Emerging Business Service

My friend Brian Oberkirch over at WeblogsWork says that his firm is getting more and more requests for this sort of service and that this should be a given for any PR firm. Funny, I was just about to write about this as something PR services need to adopt.

As I've stated before, PR firms in this new Conversational Era need to focus their efforts from pushing messages out to facilitate conversations between clients and their constituencies. The hardest part for new business clients is understanding how the tools work, and how to use them to listen better to conversations they did not start themselves.

I'm still learning to master Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and Bloglines. I've abandoned a few others. For businesses just trying to get their arms around it all, these tools are as hard to master as they are important to understand. This is a place for a PR agency to jump in.  Use them to listen and learn for your clients. Serve as an early warning system for what is being said by both topic and company. Over time, these tools will get easier and an intermediary will not be used, but not in the near term.

Comments

[james governor]

johnnie moore and james cherkoff are already doing this in the UK. "open sauce live"...

picking up major corporate customers for buzz tracking. they are nice chaps too.

http://www.johnniemoore.com/blog/
http://www.collaboratemarketing.com/

[serge the concierge]

Shel
I agree with you that keeping up with all the tech tools and learning to use them is almost a job by itself.
I keep an eye on TechCrunch and look at the user friendly side of all these services.
Of things, I have tried recently, I like Squarespace (blogging), Flock (search engine), Swicki (tagging). I also use Newsvine (still in beta) where I post almost daily.
I ping technorati, pubsub, icerocket, bloglines and more when I post on 'serge the concierge' my blog but there is only so much time in a day.

take care

Serge
http://www.njconconcierge.com
Blog:
http://sergetheconcierge.typepad.com

[Brian Oberkirch]

Shel: so true. It's so early in this that many of the tools are just now getting there. We're running a survey through the end of the month on how people are actually tracking conversations. Weblogs Work will do a month of free monitoring for one of the folks who participates in the survey. Plus, we'll post up the results to let everyone know how others are tackling this.

[Steve Rubel]

Shel, we already have an offering here and we have two Fortune 500s we are working with in this capacity.

[Mordechai (Morty) Schiller]

True, but blogging is one more case where the tools threaten to take over instead of the artisan.

It's not just the medium becoming the message. RSS and other tools are so specialized and arcane that they overwhelm the message they are supposed to be carrying.

What do they call it? A high noise to signal ratio? That's why I put an option on my blog to get good old emails of the posts, instead of fooling with aggregators.

[Jeremy Pepper]

While some firms are going to separate this work out into a "special service" category, shouldn't this just be part of the overall monitoring that PR firms do for clients?

[Brian Oberkirch]

Jeremy: I think it should be part of a comprehensive approach any marketing firm would undertake to help clients understand their place in the bustle of conversation. But, my experience has been that most agencies just aren't up to speed on these types of media, including how to monitor and engage DIY media outlets. As Shel says, it's an in-between state that won't last forever, but I think it's where we are today.

[steven streight aka vaspers the grate]

I agree with both Jeremy Pepper and Brian Oberkirch.

Monitoring web and blogospheric mentions of a company, product, name is easy, sort of, but perhaps we need a blog guru to help us, make a comparison chart, showing side by side pros and cons of the algorithms used and the types of results to expect.

PubSub just gives me posts with my siglink embedded, my self-referencing, if they give me anything at all.

Maybe it's my fault. My blog VTG had a single letter that was not in the hyperlink in a sidebar text, a list of "Controversial Posts" and the post on "Blog Blindness" was not appearing in the list on my blog. This was also prohibiting BlogPulse to do accurate stats on Vaspers the Grate, according to my contact at BlogPulse.

BlogPulse Profiles are interesting. Then there's Alexa, Blogdex (many cyber attacks on this service from MIT), BlogStreet.

We need a good analysis of blog citation tracking, with recommendations.

[Amy Gahran]

Shel, the best tool I've found so far is the art of specifying a good collection of search feeds for any project or clients.

Now, what I'd really want is a good monitoring tool or strategy that works for ALL (or most) types of conversational media, not just blogs. And that also captures comment threads. And that gives me a mindmap-style representation of conversations as they develop and morph across various venues and through different types of conversational media channels.

Ah, maybe the tech fairy will pay me a visit ;-)

- Amy Gahran
Contentious.com
RightConversation.com

[John Wagner]

I currently monitor blogs and file reports weekly for a client ... to me, it's more about the analysis than the numbers, and that's where a real communicator is needed.

[Jeremy Pepper]

Oh, I agree Brian. My comment was more to respond to a certain person's self promotion of his so-far-and-advanced agency doing it for two Fortune 500 companies!!

My point is that a lot of PR firms are tracking blogs, but aren't tooting their own horns. I pushed a client to start paying attention to the blogosphere because I would include clips from blogs every day. They were dismissive at first, but I included the blog posts I found via Google News, Pubsub and Technorati, and they began to understand the importance. Did they say "hey, monitor blogs" - no, but I pushed them to accept those clips, and they saw the value of them.

And, that's where it comes in with John Wagner's comment - we got so much value from what the bloggers were saying more than the reporters. The bloggers were the enthusiasts that talked about what was good or bad about the product.

Sadly, the company's new firm doesn't get that.

[Kami Huyse]

I think Jeremy is right, it will be up to us to show the value of tracking blogs to most of our clients. I am moving along on this with some of my clients and one might even start blogging in the near future. We will see...

[Brian Oberkirch]

When we started asking folks how they handle this, my assumption initially was that the pain was visibility into the realtime info flow. Given the responses, I think the real need/opportunity (per John Wagner & others) is in workflow & analysis.

Mike Manuel has a good post on this now as well.

[John Wagner]

In my weekly reports, I do not list every blog post, just the ones that are representative of larger trends or that best illustrate a particular point of view. The goal is not to flood the client with links, nor to provide fancy cooked up numbers that really don't mean anything.

The goal is to help the client understand the tenor and tone of the conversation. And at the risk of being called a menace again, that's where I think PR measurement somtimes goes awry. It's often not about numbers but about the ebb and flow of the dialog.

The tricky part for some companies -- especially the larger, more visible ones -- is in deciding how to respond. I don't have a good answer for that yet, because it depends on each individual client.

[queen]

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[dalia]

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Have a great day

[Daniel]

The problem is there have a been a number of 'businesses' that have set up on the back of the blog monitoring - which have no idea what it is a marketing team would value. You have to provide a service that goes well beyond just providing simple online mentions, you have to provide the context.
www.mediasaints.co.uk

[Mcgill]

I think a concept of "blog concierge" will do here.

[Patricia]

Keeping your eye on modern tendencies is really good, especially if on PR services. I usually try to keep trace on new music tracks but I'm not always lucky. There appear so many of them that it's practically impossible.

[John Micheal]

It's so early in this that many of the tools are just now getting there. We're running a survey through the end of the month on how people are actually tracking conversations. Weblogs Work will do a month of free monitoring for one of the folks who participates in the survey. Plus, we'll post up the results to let everyone know how others are tackling this.

[Children Anxiety Disorder]

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