Onalytica has produced a report,"Who are the most influential authorities on ‘Business Blogging’?" and it produces some interesting results.
The top 25 list published in the report cites mainstream media (MSM) news sources such as CNN and the BBC, and is led by Corante, Blog Business Summit and BusinessWeek.
Surprising to the reports authors was PR consultant and co-host of top PR podcast For Immediate Release, Nevill Hobson, in at number six (just under CNN) with Seth Godin at 13 and Micropersuasion at 15.
Nevill Hobson is probably the most influential PR blogger in Europe at this point, it seems, certainly when it comes to the subject of blogs in business. But you wouldn’tnecessarily have seen that by looking at the PubSub list or Technorati’s PR list.
I spoke to Flemming Madsen, MD of Onalytica, last week, and he was
quite clear that these services measure popularity rather than
authority and influence. To my mind, while they are a helpful guide to bloggers
standing within the blogging community, we need to be careful to retain
perspective.
Perhaps the fact that there is this skew gives us an insight into the echo-chamber / claque effect I touched on yesterday when it comes to looking at influence via the prism of Technorati or PubSub.
The post by Flemming on the Onalytica blog and his report are well worth a read. I was convinced by his rigorous methodology and approach to analysing influence, and it is this kind of approach that communications professionals will need to employ to start to explain the real significance of bloggers and social media communities to clients.
We need to beware being dazzled by the new, by big numbers and link-ranks, and find meaningful ways of explaining the blogosphere’s influence in the wider world, models of analysis that will stand up to close scrutiny.
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