Social Media Marketing, Thoughts, Facts & Data

November 10, 2009

Nov 09: Top 150 Social Media Marketing Influencers

top blogs Here is our updated list of the top 150 social media marketing blogs.

As you’ll see, the ranking, computed with the last 6 months data is pretty   stable, with Chris Brogan moving back to the first position.

O Blanchard, J Baer and J Cass are  showing some impressive progressions over the period.

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If you want to know more on how we map communities and how to market to industry influencers,  we’re organizing a  FREE webinar next week and would be very happy to have you with us, click here to register:  Webinar

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Here is the new Top 150:

Rank Name Url Trend
1 C Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com UP 1
2 J Owyang http://www.web-strategist.com/blog DOWN -1
3 B Solis http://www.briansolis.com UP 2
4 D Armano http://darmano.typepad.com UP 0
5 S Rubel http://www.micropersuasion.com DOWN -2
6 V Maltoni http://www.conversationagent.com UP 0
7 T Defren http://www.pr-squared.com UP 0
8 S Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com UP 1
9 R Scobleizer http://www.scobleizer.com DOWN -1
10 Lee Odden http://www.toprankblog.com UP 3
11 J Falls http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com UP 1
12 http://www.mpdailyfix.com DOWN -1
13 http://www.marketingprofs.com
14 S Holtz http://blog.holtz.com UP 5
15 M Collier http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com DOWN -5
16 J Jarvis http://www.buzzmachine.com UP 8
17 http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC UP 16
18 J Juice http://www.jaffejuice.com UP 0
19 G Livingston http://www.livingstonbuzz.com DOWN -4
20 P Kim http://www.beingpeterkim.com DOWN -4
21 N Hobson http://www.nevillehobson.com UP 8
22 G Kawasaki http://blog.guykawasaki.com DOWN -8
23 D Meerman Scott http://www.webinknow.com DOWN -3
24 S Israel http://redcouch.typepad.com UP 3
25 S Monty http://www.scottmonty.com DOWN -8
26 http://www.searchengineland.com UP 4
27 J Jantsch http://www.ducttapemarketing.com DOWN -5
28 G Verdino http://gregverdino.typepad.com DOWN -3
29 http://www.marketingpilgrim.com DOWN -3
30 D McLellan http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com DOWN -2
31 B.L Ochman http://www.whatsnextblog.com UP 1
32 B Harte http://www.theharteofmarketing.com DOWN -1
33 D Rowse http://www.problogger.net DOWN -12
34 K Huyse http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com UP 6
35 http://www.socialmediaclub.org UP 6
36 J Pepper http://pop-pr.blogspot.com UP 13
37 O Blanchard http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com UP 63
38 D Fleet http://www.davefleet.com UP 7
39 http://blog.hubspot.com UP 5
40 A Servonitz http://www.damniwish.com DOWN -5
41 R Bhargava http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com DOWN -4
42 S Rubel http://www.steverubel.com
43 G Heaton http://www.servantofchaos.com DOWN -9
44 KD Paine http://kdpaine.blogs.com UP 12
45 Laermer Dugan http://badpitch.blogspot.com UP 1
46 M Dickman http://technomarketer.typepad.com DOWN -10
47 T Hunt http://www.horsepigcow.com UP 3
48 B Kanter http://beth.typepad.com DOWN -9
49 http://www.imediaconnection.com UP 11
List provided by eCairn: http://blog.ecairn.com/
50 J Moore http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy UP 2
51 http://www.brainsonfire.com/blog DOWN -3
52 T Andrlik http://www.toddand.com DOWN -5
53 http://www.adliterate.com UP 0
54 J Baer http://www.convinceandconvert.com UP 57
55 M Sansone http://www.converstations.com DOWN -1
56 http://www.searchenginejournal.com UP 21
57 S Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com DOWN -6
58 C Shirky http://www.shirky.com DOWN -20
59 http://www.everydotconnects.com DOWN -16
60 http://blog.ogilvypr.com UP 36
61 P Mcenany http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com UP 12
62 http://www.prblogger.com UP 5
63 McConnell Huba (*) http://www.churchofthecustomer.com UP 0
64 http://www.cc-chapman.com UP 5
65 C Kerley http://www.ck-blog.com DOWN -6
66 http://blog.futurelab.net DOWN -2
67 http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing UP 42
68 D Haslam http://www.doughaslam.com UP 3
69 http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications UP 101
70 CB Whittemore http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com UP 3
71 http://adverlab.blogspot.com UP 9
72 http://www.personalbrandingblog.com DOWN -4
73 http://theblogconsultancy.typepad.com UP 53
74 A Wolk http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com DOWN -10
75 F Gossieaux http://www.emergencemarketing.com DOWN -16
76 S Howard http://www.craphammer.ca DOWN -21
77 http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com DOWN -17
78 D Berkowitz http://www.marketersstudio.com DOWN -22
79 http://www.wearesocial.net UP 59
80 http://prblog.typepad.com UP 64
81 http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing UP 19
82 J Burg http://jburg.typepad.com/future DOWN -5
83 http://www.bryanperson.com UP 18
84 http://www.stuartbruce.biz UP 10
85 J Thornley http://www.propr.ca DOWN -13
86 http://www.adpulp.com UP 46
87 http://www.searchenginewatch.com UP 45
88 http://www.adverblog.com UP 1
89 http://www.outspokenmedia.com
90 http://www.hyku.com DOWN -16
91 http://www.socialmedia.biz UP 48
92 http://www.christopherspenn.com UP 28
93 http://www.communityguy.com DOWN -9
94 http://www.brendancooper.com UP 7
95 http://www.nickburcher.com UP 7
96 L Green http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu DOWN -8
97 http://blog.basturea.com UP 18
98 http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com UP 50
99 http://weblogs.hitwise.com DOWN -35
100 http://www.seomoz.org/blog DOWN -21
101 http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com UP 34
102 B Carroll http://www.customersrock.net UP 16
103 http://herd.typepad.com/herd_the_hidden_truth_abo UP 6
104 http://www.sphinn.com UP 39
105 http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com UP 6
106 http://www.chrisheuer.com DOWN -39
107 http://www.thefuturebuzz.com DOWN -22
108 http://www.tpemurphy.com/blog UP 37
109 N Perkins http://neilperkin.typepad.com UP 4
110 http://youngie.prblogs.org DOWN -6
111 http://www.crackunit.com UP 16
112 http://theflack.blogspot.com UP 4
113 http://www.smartblogs.com/socialmedia UP 61
114 http://t4w.blogs.com/spinningaround DOWN -6
115 http://nextup.wordpress.com UP 4
116 http://blog.stroutmeister.com UP 25
117 http://www.no-mans-blog.com UP 23
118 P Chaney http://www.conversationalmediamarketing.com DOWN -33
119 http://www.noahbrier.com DOWN -26
120 http://www.searchengineguide.com DOWN -60
121 http://www.veryofficialblog.com DOWN -42
122 http://www.kylelacy.com DOWN -33
123 http://www.marketingtechblog.com UP 29
124 http://www.thisisherd.com UP 13
125 http://www.doshdosh.com DOWN -45
126 http://www.acidlabs.org DOWN -29
127 http://www.techipedia.com UP 30
128 http://www.socialmediabreakfast.com DOWN -9
129 http://johnbell.typepad.com UP 51
130 S Woodruff http://www.stickyfigure.com DOWN -29
131 http://bloggingmebloggingyou.wordpress.com UP 14
132 http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr UP 34
133 http://www.brandflakesforbreakfast.com DOWN -7
134 http://www.collaboratemarketing.com UP 14
135 http://www.seroundtable.com UP 14
136 Groundswell http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli DOWN -6
137 http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com DOWN -23
138 http://threeminds.organic.com UP 51
139 http://www.thesocialorganization.com UP 33
140 http://www.dannybrown.me UP 33
141 http://www.directmarketingobservations.com UP 33
142 http://brandimpact.wordpress.com DOWN -48
143 http://pulverblog.pulver.com DOWN -36
144 http://www.freshpeel.com UP 9
145 http://www.paulgillin.com DOWN -65
146 http://www.engageinpr.com DOWN -37
147 K Trgovac http://www.mynameiskate.ca DOWN -38
148 http://makethelogobigger.blogspot.com UP 18
149 http://customersrock.wordpress.com UP 36
150 http://www.socialnomics.net
151 http://www.laurelpapworth.com UP 23

November 9, 2009

New Features: Topical Targeting & Community Mapping

Filed under: Conversation App — ecairn @ 11:47 pm

We’re pleased to announce our November release with the following new features:

  • Topical targeting: To help you research who has been talking about you, your competitors or your favorite topics within the scope of your projects communities.
    (i.e: I have aggregated a community of 500 beauty bloggers and I want to find out who has been talking the most about my brand or about “aging”).
  • Community mapping: To visualize how the various bloggers in your community network with eachother, and, group them according to your preferences.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

October 28, 2009

4 reasons why negative comments drive sales

Thbenettonere is more and more evidence that feedback, even negative ones drive sales:

This may be counter intuitive but actually should come at no surprise to marketing savvy people.

Here are 4 main reasons:

1- Trust

When all comments are positive, people start to wonder whether the business owner had his wife, friends and his dog writing all the reviews or whether the system can be gamed for a few dollars more.

2- Positioning

Not all consumers are the same and what’s negative for  someone may be positive for somebody else.

As an example, if an airline gets negative reviews because everything has to be purchased, from peanuts to drinks to access to the toilets (yes, Ryanair was said to be thinking about it). Well, it you’re a budget traveler and you want to pay only for what you need, it’s actually a plus. You know this airline is the right one for you.  (better to cut this than security).

3- Purple cows

I remember Pr Larreche at Insead presenting a case study on Benetton and its very offensive advertising messages. The truth is that in fashion, 5% market share is huge and it’s OK to “piss off” 95% of the people if the other 5% are really moved and engaged by your message.

You may argue that the negative comments are then not an issue with the product or service but a targeting issue for the messaging.

4- Community re-inforcement.

If you’ve raised or are raising teens , you know that they love it when you loose your temper and make negative comments on how they behave … or dress.

gothic

Many communities are built “against” majorities and  strengthen in adversity.

Isn’t that the very driver of Mac versus PC’s, Linux versus Windows … and many others.

Contrast is what makes something visible and known.

October 23, 2009

Targeting Community and Influencer

Filed under: buzz, figures, targeting — laurentpf @ 4:19 pm

All good fishermen know that you’ve got to fish where the fish are.fishing
All waters aren’t equal.

In the world of social media marketing, it translates into : “They’re conversations about your brands potentially everywhere, but they’re places that are more important than others”.

Marketers need to identify the right pond for them.

Let’s pick an example.

You’re a marketer of a beauty brand and you plan a blogger outreach for a new line of skincare products designed to fight aging.

The first question to answer is “where do you fish”?
All other factors equals, you may want to find the most relevant bloggers and perform a compelling, relevant and timely outreach to them.

An obvious pond to go to is the mommy bloggers community. Every single consumer brand on earth go after them those days, they’re a thriring community, they love to do reviews and will probably be very open to your outreach. Bingo.

But wait,  is this a good pond to fish in?

Let’s look at some numbers: In our db, we track 1100 ‘mommy blogger’ blogs which account for 117k posts over the last 6 months. A quick simple search on skincare, makeup and aging shows respectively 329, 957 and 135 results.
Good? Bad?
To get an idea about the answer, let’s compare with the beauty/cosmetic blogger community.
In our db, we track 550 blogs of that type, 60k conversations.
And the jury is out: Skincare gets 3200 results, makeup 12000 and aging 3100.
That’s respectively a x20, x20 and x50 factor compared with the mommy blogger community.
To add to it, here’s the # of mentions of some well-known cosmetic brands in those 2 communities:

  • Lancome: 1179 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 22 in Mommy blogger
  • Estee Lauder: 874 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 29 in Mommy blogger
  • Clinique: 974 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 42 in Mommy blogger

Conclusion: By targeting the beauty/cosmetic community which is more relevant, such a brand can earn more media, which translate in better WOM, potentially benefit their SEM effort and also create relationships with a key community (i.e: They may get them and their audience to subscribe to the brand’s blog, twitter or FB fan page) .

October 14, 2009

Brand under attack

Filed under: strategy — ecairn @ 10:16 pm

Brands are loosing control on the net. Not new.
It started in social media where people can freely have conversations to share experiences, thoughts and ideas about them (though, to be honest, a tiny fraction of the overall conversations do talk about brands in reality).
So far, Brand’s website were left intact.

By now, all of you have heard of Google Sidewiki and Squidoo brands in public.

Both news hit the wire at about the same time (last week of September) and, as shown in the picture below, have generated quite a lof of buzz and polemics in the social media marketing community (#1200 blogs, 800 conversations per day).

Sidewiki

They have something in common:

  1. Aggregation of fairly exploded information: They aggregate  in a centralized way social information about a brand.
  2. Loss of control for Brands. Sidewiki truely increases the power shift to consumers as they are now able to share what they think of a brand right on a brand’s prime real estate. It’s not clear if you can opt-out…at least you can claim your sidewiki. Brand in public does it in a more subtle way: Nowadays, we always go to social media to find more about a brand. Brands in Public puts it all in one place…making it possible that we go there first to find more about a brand, as we’ve grown tired of websites that tell the same story after you remove brand’s specific content.
  3. They’re public

Let’s stop the comparison here. Sidewiki and Brands in Public aren’t the same kind of beast.

For squidoo, which plans to charge brands $5k/year.. it’s  about making revenue.  But stitching together information that can be found easily using free tools may not cut it.
For google, the agenda has to be more strategic. After all it’s Google, the company that aims to organize the world of information.
Considering that 1) information is more and more consumed/accessed through ‘conversations’ and 2) Google has been so far absent of that battle from which emerged Facebook, Twitter to name the most popular, they surely must be trying to catch-up.  Sidewiki makes any page on the internet social. Add that Google Wave brings together many social networking paradigms and you start to see an agenda:

When you control the world of keywords, you control information consumption -web1.0

When you control the world of people’s interaction, you control conversation consumption -web2.0

And markets are conversations.

Google has won the first battle and is now pushing its pawns in order to win the next chess game. Not by building another social network where we have to go to, but by making social the places where we have traditionally gone for our information/knowledge need (search, websites, email).

September 24, 2009

Attention engines, Engines for the Attention Economy?

Filed under: strategy, vision — domlah @ 7:16 pm
Tags: , , ,

attentionFor a change, let’ have a conversation about the future… no facts, no data.

I just read the excellent article (IEEE computer Nov 08) from Bernardo Huberman (HP) on the attention economy.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry along with an excerpt.  It’s eyes opening:  Attention Economy

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

The social web is making the issue worst and quickly moves the challenge from information to attention.

We are indeed moving from the “Information Age” to the “Attention Age”:

Information Age Attention Age
People write to … be viewed, heard be noticed, differentiated
People write for.. the impersonal WWW, everyone their friends, their tribes, their communities
Side effect Over information
No attention
The right information
Huge attention
Pivotal tools Search Engine & SEO’s Social Networks & Attention Engines

If the “Search engine” with the eco-system that comes with it  is/was THE critical element in the Information age, it’s less the appropriate response to the “Attention Age”.

Real time search is the immediate challenge  but is still a marginal threat.  Attention on Twitter is barely better than on Google and spams, bots and old school marketers are already making their way into it.

So how would we define “Attention Engine”? :

Search Engine Attention Engine
Passive Active
Top Down Bottom up
Quantitative Qualitative
Keyword based People & Context based
Producing Information Producing Attention

For those who follow this blog regularly, you probably see a huge overlap with the right column and what eCairn is all about.

We’re the first Attention Engine out there.

September 18, 2009

Arsenal wins the Social Media League

Filed under: figures, soccer — ecairn @ 3:58 am
Tags: , , , , ,
arenal

Arsenal

We’re using our application to monitor the world of soccer and doing so, we’ve accumulated  hundreds of blogs around premiere league.  And as we have introduced  mapping capabilities… I could not help giving it a shot.

Voila: Here is the map of the Premiere League Blogosphere and it’s quite amazing.

soccermap

  1. The cluster in red is Arsenal  and the gunners seem to be the only team with a huge and strongly connected community. They clearly win Social media league. My friends from footbalistic.com are telling me this is the same on Twitter . On Facebook, ManU seems to do better.
  2. The cluster in green is “all other Premiere League Blogs” and this cluster is lead by the top influential blog overall.
  3. The small cluster in purple is the “Official cluster”, most of the team’s official blogs are in this cluster.

By the way, here is our top 10 (over 400) and as you can see, a lot of them at gonners.

1- http://www.theoffside.com The Offside
2- http://www.epltalk.com Premier League News from EPL Talk
3- http://www.soccerlens.com Football Blog | Football News – Soccerlens.com
4- http://www.fourfourtwo.com Latest Football news, Blogs & Forums | FourFourTwo
5- http://aculturedleftfoot.wordpress.com A Cultured Left Foot
6- http://youngguns.wordpress.com [» Young Guns «]
7- http://www.whoateallthepies.tv Who Ate All The Pies: Filled with meaty football goodness
8- http://www.gunnerblog.com Gunnerblog
9- http://www.goodplaya.com GOODPLAYA
10 – http://www.the-cannon.com The Cannon

These blogs are worth a visit !

PS: Tickets for the Emirates Stadium are warmly welcome ;-) .

PS2: We don’t invest a lot in the ongoing management of this specific list, so we may have missed a few. Just make suggestions in the comments and we’ll take a look.

August 31, 2009

Cats, Dogs and Social Media

Filed under: Conversation App, figures, social media community — laurentpf @ 6:55 pm

Cats and Dogs aren’t  the best friends on earth. They’re exceptions but, as a dog owner myself, I can testify of the profound animosity between the two species.

Let’s put it that way, they’re not socially inclined to each other.

Does this translate to this new planet that we call social media?

Look at this picture:

Pet 400

Forgive me the fuzziness, after all we’re talking furry things here.

This picture* represents the mapping of a network of pet bloggers (a sample of 400 amongst 1500 pet bloggers). The purple ones are the dog’s bloggers while the red ones are the cat’s bloggers. We also have a handful of pug’s bloggers and they’re in blue.

A picture speaks 1000 words as usual. Even in social media, dogs and cats don’t socialize with each other. Can’t change mother nature.

* The picture above was created using our newly released ‘community network mapping’ feature.

August 27, 2009

Oxymorons & Social Media

Filed under: PR, social media community — ecairn @ 7:06 pm
Tags: , , , ,

oxymoronIt’s amazing to look at words and expressions and to infer the history behind them.  So this is just a quick post with observations on oxymorons in the online world.

Online newspaper is an oxymoron. It the news is online, then there is no paper.  The words online newspaper tells us that newspaper industry resisted the change. Maybe when they all die, we just call that online news.

Social Media Public Relations is also an oxymoron. But more subtle. TV’s and Newspapers have public, Social Networks have communities. There is no such a thing as the Facebook public. So, the expression makes no sense and should be replaced by Community Relations, or Tribes Relations to make it more ” according to Seth”.

Any other you may think about ?

August 25, 2009

Social Media Revolution: What’s next for Brands ?

Filed under: social marketing — domlah @ 10:24 pm
Tags: , ,

maginotI recommend watching the excellent video at the end of this post.  It contains plenty of mind-boggling facts and data.

On one end it clearly shows that social media is a disruptive event /revolution while on the other end it reduces the  challenge  to “do you know what they are saying about your brand“, which is a very mmm, conventional and web1.0 question.

It’s like asking the yesterday’s question in the world of today.

If this is really the revolution we believe it is (just look at how social media has changed politics  i.e Obama),  the issue at stake is way larger than “you should be monitoring your brand“.

Let’s compare Brands and Newspapers.

  • Brands as Newspapers are used to simplify our access to information (kind of a proxy): We know it’s the Wall Street Journal so it’s true, We know it’s from Apple so it’s cool.
  • Brands as Newspapers create some cultural and social glue (The readers of the New Yorker, The Coke generation, The Mercedes versus the Bimmers)
  • Brands and Newspapers are tied very closely from a business standpoint.

With the rise of the social web,  millions of people have become writers,  publishers, enabling information channels to organize bottom up: bloggers, communities, influencers, aggregators  hence putting Newspapers at risk.

By the same token, the buzz of the year in Social Media is “Personal Branding”. In the Social Media community -which is by design a few months ahead on the social media adoption curve – “brands” like Charlene Li and Jeremy Owyang are almost as powerful as Forrester, their former or future ex employer. ( see Web Inc Now)

The challenge for brands is in the same order of magnitude as the one Newspapers are facing today: survival and reinvention.

Communities represent an alternative proxy to information. If I want to know about the quality of a product, who should I trust, the logo or the hundreds of consumer reviews ?

As for the glue part, isn’t this the core promise of social media?

Many say newspapers will die. Some brands may well die and, although we have no clue on what will come out of this revolution (Black swans ?), it’s clear it will take more than “monitoring what is said about us“.  The later may well be another “Ligne Maginot” in the making.

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