Social Profile in Blogs: How many?

June 26, 2008 — laurentpf

In the course of our (very long) days, we’ve built deep list of blogs on various topics ( > 100 blogs).
Now that we’re capable of detecting automatically if bloggers display their social network profile on their blogs, we got curious about the differences in the percentage of those who do and don’t across topics. By the way, the most frequent profiles are those of LinkedIn and Facebook.

The 7 lists we used for our empirical study are Personal finance (1501 blogs), Blogging (968 blogs), Social Media Marketing (698 blogs), Gaming (429 blogs), Cosmetology (400 blogs), Wireless (240 blogs) and Enterprise 2.0 (35 blogs). A quick note to state that we don’t pretend having found all the blogs in those categories ;-), we found a lot of them but we don’t know where the end is.

The differences are huge as you can see and point, most of the time, to a poor level of integration between people’s blogs and social profiles:

  • At the top is Social Media Marketing - No surprise, we were expecting it. Bloggers in this category stay on top of the social media wave. Our figures show at least a third of Social Media Marketing bloggers display their social network profile on their blog. Right now Conversation(tm) detects only badges on the home page; but in the future, we will detect them on the about page too.
  • 2nd is Enterprise 2.0 with a bit more than 20%
  • 3rd is Wireless with a litte more than 10%
  • 4th is Enterprise Security with a little less than 9%
  • Then we got blogging (~4%), Cosmetology (~3%), Gaming (~2%).
  • Last is personal finance (~1%)

Now let’s look a little deeper at what’s happening in our list of Social Media Marketing blogs.

Some blogs are group blogs where we typically don’t expect to find social network badges. If we take a swag at narrowing to only blogs from individuals, it would probably bump the percentage to the vicinity of 50%. Not bad!

But the story really gets interesting with this last experiment: On a small sample (10) of blogs from individual bloggers who didn’t have a social network badge in their blog, we found their profile in LinkedIn and, 8 times out of 10, the blog is listed on it. Honestly we don’t think its that way on purpose (i.e: bloggers don’t want readers to find their social network profiles). It’s more a data integration issue.

Conclusion: There’s a long way to go before we see a tight integration between blogs and profiles so you can go seamlessly from one to the other in order to have a complete picture of the bloggers you like. With the exception of blogs hosted on a social network (niche social network), the infrastructures are separate (blogs powered by wordpress, typepad and so on, profiles powered by social network platforms) thus the issue.

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?
The answer is quite straightforward. Nowadays, when we see a piece of content from someone, we go and google them or check if we find them in social networks because it gives us more information about the author as well as additional ways to build a relationship with them if we desire. We do that all the time and I’m sure you do too! The issue discussed in this post makes it harder than if one little click was all it takes to go from a blog to a profile.

Here, one of our job is to deal with fragmented infrastructure and bring them together in a seamless and meaningful user experience so we see a nice issue to solve. Let us know what you think!

Posted in Conversation App, figures. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

Food blogs: facts and figures

June 19, 2008 — domlah

Here is a short study to give an idea about the type of reach, volume and impact one can get focusing in a specific area of the blogosphere.

We’ve accumulated 4200+ blogs that specialized in Food & Restaurant. These are blogs dedicated to the topic, not blogs with sparse posts about recipies. We’ve done that looking at directories, carnivals and expanding and filtering using a mix of linguistic and link analysis.

On these 3800+ blogs, here follow facts & figures that you may find interesting. Let’s see how it translate for Buzz, Blogger outreach and Blog Advertising.

Buzz:

  • 2600 of these blogs have posted at least once during the last 3 months, for a total of 40 000 posts
  • 1300 have posted at least once last week, for a total of 7000 posts
  • 400 blogs have posted last day with a daily total of 800 posts

Based on our experience, scanning through the list adds up to 3-4 hours a day in “quick but efficient reading”. One should definitely spread workload between team mates or use extensive filtering !

Advertising:

  • 800 blogs accept Adwords, 200 accept Premium advertising from mainstream networks like OpenX (140 blogs), BlogAds (64), Adbrite(14), Chitika (9), Quigo (8), Federated Media (7)…

We didn’t look for specialized networks in this vertical, which (I think) would have raised the numbers considerably. Still 800 blogs that you can target with placement targeting make a decent audience. Moreover, these are mainly “middle magic” blogs where you can expect a higher return on your ad $.

Blogger Outreach thru social networks:

  • Only 15 of theses bloggers expose a Facebook profile, which is way lower than what we saw in some other verticals. A little surprise, but we know we’re missing a good chunk of MySpace blogs.

We then look at the quality of content.

We are syndicating 3-month-worth of these blogs RSS and we query this consolidated feed with four highly differentiated sub-topics: One ingredient Roquefort” , One city “Palo Alto” , One brand “Olive Garden” and a very special one “Birthday cake”+pink+girl. :-)

Here are the results (it’s dynamic so the numbers are different from when I wrote this post)

Result excerpts are worth reading, just click on the links above - it might be slow since the database is on our test server and the format as user friendly as an RSS can be; However, Content is highly relevant; Posts like The Fro-yo battle in Palo Alto is a wonderful review!

I encourage you performing similar queries in your favorite blog search or on your favorite food portal.

Bottom line:

Cutting your slice of the Blogosphere and dedicating some valuable time to listen, learn, engage, build relationship and influence is clearly something that deliver different results from an “alert” or “keyword monitoring” strategy.

It doesn’t come for free and takes time (even so we’ve added great productivity in the process). It can be managed, optimized and measured (more to come on this topic). It all boils down to how valuable is social influence in your particular business.

Posted in figures. No Comments »

Conversation™ Updated - Ad Network, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.

June 11, 2008 — laurentpf

Our baby is growing! No kidding, we’ve added several cool features to Conversation™, eCairn’s web application for social media marketers.
So here it goes:

Social Network Integration

People’s profiles on social networks typically tell you a lot about who they are, what they like and who they know. Profiles are also a great tool to connect with them. We’ve run into people who prefer not to receive email but are ok if someone contacts them through their social networks. With our recent release, Conversation™ detects Facebook and LinkedIn badges when they’re present on blogs.
Users of the application get a summary view of:

  • the presence of social network profiles
  • the social networks available

In addition, they can access individual profiles in one click from the application.

Blog Card

The blog card contains a wealth of information to help you analyze a blog and determine if it fits your criteria for your buzz, outreach, viral or advertising activities. With this feature we’re introducing our new paradigm dubbed Place/People/Conversation -> If you’re a marketer, you want to know where your target market (prospects, customers, influencers…) socialize online; you want to understand who they are and what they’re talking about. Indeed, you may elect to advertise on relevant sites, do an outreach to relevant people, and buzz in relevant conversations. It’s now easier, thanks to the blog card. We think this new paradigm fits better with marketers’ usage of social media. Over time, expect the whole application to move toward this new user experience.

Here’s an example of the kind of information you will find in a blog card:

Media tab - Summary

We’ve some interesting data on how the presence of advertising or social profiles vary amongst verticals and we’ll share them with you very soon. So stay tuned.

By the way, remember those features come on top of those we added in May, like ad network detection and more….

If you’re interested in trying Conversation(tm), we offer a one month free trial for an unlimited number of users.

Posted in Conversation App. Tags: , . No Comments »

Actionable influence ™

June 11, 2008 — domlah

There is an evergrowing attempt to identify the most influencial people on a given topic and, although I find this an interesting study, I don’t really see how actionable this is, for a social marketer.

OK, you just figured out that the most influencial people on Microsoft strategies are: Steve Balmer and Bill Gates. So what… the chances that you’re able to send these people a Facebook invitation are still very small.

That’s why I ‘d like to suggest a more hands on approach:

  • Listen, Listen … I love the sentence ” anybody with a match can start a forest fire” (from this CMA Blog). I’ll add, unless you’ve got heavy rain or a snow storm or just happen to be in the desert. So listen and spot when it’s dry enough and ready to burn.
  • Not all matches are equal, Not all fire are the same: use the customers words, immerse in his conversation of the day, provide information and knowledge that he/she can benefit now. Don’t risk getting doused with a bucket of water by the first blogger you anger.
  • Take influence as a verb (influence somebody) not as a noon ( influencers) . Figure out who YOU, or YOUR TEAM can influence, spot 40 trustable people with decent influence on your favorite topic. People that you can reach and that will read your prose, people in your LinkedIn or Facebook first circle. Here is a reference article from Steve Rubel on Trust
  • Seed as you test - test is still a core function of marketing insn’t it - then seed big. Use buzz, outreach to “test, adjust, ignite” and advertising to refuel…. until you get critical mass and find your road to tipping point. (See Dan Zarella on social influence)
  • Set reasonable expectations, most of the time, it’s not gonna be viral but you’ll have learned a great deal down the road.

You’ve probably noticed you’re on a “solution provider blog” and as you guess, our solution makes it possible to execute these steps with high productivity and quality.

Posted in viral. No Comments »

Glimpse on what’s hot by listening to many relevant voices

June 2, 2008 — laurentpf

At eCairn, we listen to 660+ blogs on social media marketing; I scan, filter and click hundred of posts every day. One of the interesting benefit is that in the flow, we get a glimpse on what the current hot topics are. Usually they are discussed heavily during a few days and thus, get our attention more than anything else, then gone.  A little while ago, ’social media measurement’ generated quite a lot of activity, ‘PR spamming’; right now, it seems like a very good video called ’social media in plain english’ from commoncraft is raising to the top with 19 posts with the following pattern over the past 4 days:

  • 1 post on 5/29
  • 3 posts on 5/30
  • 3 posts on 5/31
  • 6 posts on 6/1
  • 6 posts on 6/2

More posts may be coming…as I’ve observed in the case of ’social media measurement’ that the 100+ posts I was able to find on the subject during a recent burst started on May 6 and ended on May 26, with peak posting between May 18th and 22nd.

Listening to a wide variety of relevant voices really gives you a glimpse on what’s hot for them.

Posted in Conversation App, buzz. 1 Comment »