We all remember January 14, 2011 — one year ago. Back then started what is now known as the Arab Spring, when, following a month of violent protests against his regime, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia.

——————

After analyzing over 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study finds that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.
Conversations about revolution often preceded major events on the ground, and social media carried inspiring stories of protest across international borders.

Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political Websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on keywords, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals Tweeted from during the revolutions.
The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.

The contributors include Philip Howard, Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari, and Marwa Mazaid at the University of Washington, Deen Freelon at American University, and Aiden Duffy at Amazon Web Services.

Thank you for using eCairn to build this report.

——————

UPDATE

New location for this report here.

Let’s highlight some of the top 5 positive movers by influence from Oct ’10 – Present.

• Neil Perkin (+36)
• Dachisgroup (+29)
• Christopher Carfi (+30)
• Joe Pulizzi (+27)
• PR Guy’s Musings (+20)

#	Pic	Name	URL	Trend	u/d	Twitt
1		Seth’s Blog	sethgodin.typepad.com	UP	1
2		Chris Brogan	chrisbrogan.com	DOWN	-1
3		Jeremiah Owyang	web-strategist.com/blog	-	-
4		Brian Solis	briansolis.com	-	-
5		Jason Falls	socialmediaexplorer.com	UP	1
6		Logic+Emotion	darmano.typepad.com	DOWN	-1
7		Search Engine Land	searchengineland.com	-	-
8		Valeria Maltoni	conversationagent.com	UP	1
9		SocialMediaExaminer	socialmediaexaminer.com	DOWN	-1
10		Jason Baer	convinceandconvert.com	UP	1
11		MarketingProfs	marketingprofs.com	DOWN	-1
12		Internet Marketing	blog.hubspot.com	UP	4
13		Online Marketing	toprankblog.com	DOWN	-1
14		CopyBlogger	copyblogger.com	UP	1
15		MarketingProfs Daily Fix	mpdailyfix.com	DOWN	-1
16		PR-Squared	pr-squared.com	UP	2
17		Web Ink Now	webinknow.com	UP	3
18		Mitch Joel	twistimage.com/blog	DOWN	-5
19		BuzzMachine	buzzmachine.com	UP	4
20		Brand Builder	thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com	UP	2
21		Ducttape Marketing	ducttapemarketing.com	UP	4
22		Shel Holtz	blog.holtz.com	DOWN	-1
23		Search Engine Marketing	searchenginewatch.com	UP	14
24		Neville Hobson	nevillehobson.com	-	-
25		Jaffe Juice	jaffejuice.com	DOWN	-6
26		Scobleizer	scobleizer.com	DOWN	-9
27		ProBlogger	problogger.net	UP	6
28		The Viral Garden	moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com	DOWN	-1
29		Spin Sucks	spinsucks.com	DOWN	-1
30		SEO Blog	seomoz.org/blog	UP	1
31		Christopher S. Penn	christopherspenn.com	UP	14
32		PR Measurement	kdpaine.blogs.com	UP	2
33		SocialMediaMarketing	scottmonty.com	DOWN	-4
34		Internet Marketing News	marketingpilgrim.com	DOWN	-2
35		Peter Kim	beingpeterkim.com	DOWN	-5
36		Influential Marketing	rohitbhargava.typepad.com	UP	3
37		Drew McLellan	drewsmarketingminute.com	UP	3
38		Dachisgroup	dachisgroup.com	UP	29
39		Amber & Tamsen	brasstackthinking.com	DOWN	-4
40		Edelman Digital	edelmandigital.com	UP	17
41		Danny Brown	dannybrown.me	DOWN	-3
42		How to Change the World	blog.guykawasaki.com	DOWN	-6
43		Strategic Public Relations	prblog.typepad.com	UP	1
44		Geoff Livingston	geofflivingston.com	DOWN	-3
45		Liz Strauss	successful-blog.com	DOWN	-3
46		Servant of Chaos	servantofchaos.com	UP	8
47		B.L. Ochman	whatsnextblog.com	DOWN	-1
48		CK’s Blog	ck-blog.com	UP	11
49		Communication Overtones	overtonecomm.blogspot.com	UP	7
50		John Jantsch	ducttapemarketing.com/blog	UP	13
51		The Buzz Bin	livingstonbuzz.com	UP	4
52		Greg Verdino	gregverdino.typepad.com	DOWN	-3
53		Adverblog	adverblog.com	DOWN	-3
54		Search Engine Journal	searchenginejournal.com	UP	8
55		Peter Shankman	shankman.com	DOWN	-3
56		Arik C. Hanson	arikhanson.com	UP	8
57		Stowe Boyd	stoweboyd.com	DOWN	-10
58		Bad Pitch	badpitch.blogspot.com	UP	7
59		Toby Bloomberg	bloombergmarketing.blogs.com	UP	1
60		Hitwise Intelligence	weblogs.hitwise.com	UP	6
61		SmartBlog	smartblogs.com/socialmedia	DOWN	-3
62		SocialTimes.com	socialtimes.com	UP	19
63		iMedia Connection	imediaconnection.com	UP	7
64		PR Guy’s Musings	stuartbruce.biz	UP	21
65		Social Media Informer	socialmediainformer.com	UP	3
66		Mack Collier	mackcollier.com	DOWN	-15
67		Amber Naslund	altitudebranding.com	UP	10
68		Steve Rubel Stream	steverubel.com	DOWN	-25
69		Ben McConnell	customerevangelists.typepad.com	UP	9
70		Sphinn / Hot Topics	sphinn.com	UP	9
71		Social Media Club	socialmediaclub.org	DOWN	-23
72		The Future Buzz	thefuturebuzz.com	UP	17
73		Brand Autopsy	brandautopsy.typepad.com /brandautopsy	DOWN	-1
74		Media Bistro	mediabistro.com/prnewser	UP	10
75		Joe Pulizzi	blog.junta42.com	UP	28
76		POP! PR Jots	pop-pr.blogspot.com	DOWN	-2
77		Church of the Customer	churchofthecustomer.com	UP	5
78		Simply Zesty	simplyzesty.com	UP	17
79		GlobalNeighbourhoods	redcouch.typepad.com	UP	9
80		Techipedia	techipedia.com	UP	20
81		John Bell	johnbell.typepad.com	DOWN	-10
82		Dave Fleet	davefleet.com	DOWN	-9
83		Dan Zarrella	danzarrella.com	UP	7
84		Ann Handley	annhandley.com	DOWN	-9
85		Outspoken Media	outspokenmedia.com	DOWN	-16
86		We Are Social	wearesocial.net	UP	11
87		Harte of Marketing	theharteofmarketing.com	DOWN	-34
88		Community Guy	communityguy.com	UP	11
89		Ogilvy	blog.ogilvypr.com	UP	2
90		Paul Mcenany	heehawmarketing.typepad.com	UP	14
91		Pro PR	propr.ca	UP	15
92		Andy Sernovitz	damniwish.com	UP	1
93		Marketing & Strategy	blog.futurelab.net	UP	1
94		Edward Boches	edwardboches.com	UP	2
95		Shonali Burke	waxingunlyrical.com	DOWN	-8
96		Becky Carroll	customersrock.net	UP	2
97		Internet Writings	shirky.com	DOWN	-17
98		Phil Fernandez	blog.marketo.com	DOWN	-15
99		Brains On Fire Blog	brainsonfire.com/blog	DOWN	-7
100		Neil Perkin	neilperkin.typepad.com	UP	37
101		Techno//Marketer	technomarketer.typepad.com	DOWN	-15
102		AdPulp	adpulp.com	UP	13
103		B2B Mkting Zone	b2bmarketingzone.com	UP	6
104		Josh Bernoff	forrester.typepad.com/groundswell	DOWN	-28
105		Socialmedia.biz	socialmedia.biz	UP	7
106		New Comm Biz	newcommbiz.com	UP	20
107		Michael Britopian	britopian.com	UP	6
108		Nick Burcher	nickburcher.com	DOWN	-7
109		Drew B	theblogconsultancy.typepad.com	DOWN	-7
110		Christopher Carfi	socialcustomer.com	UP	31
111		Charlene Li	charleneli.com	UP	5
112		David Reich	reichcomm.typepad.com	UP	5
113		Mark Schaefer	businessesgrow.com/blog	UP	7
114		Socialnomics	socialnomics.net	UP	9
115		Shannon Paul	veryofficialblog.com	UP	9
116		Radian6	radian6.com/blog	DOWN	-6
117		Citizen Marketer 2.1	blog.stroutmeister.com	DOWN	-6
118		Abraham Harrison	marketingconversation.com	DOWN	-4
119		Inside Marketers Studio	marketersstudio.com	DOWN	-14
120		Chaos Scenario	chaosscenario.com	DOWN	-2
121		PRBreakFastClub	prbreakfastclub.com	UP	22
122		Sysomos Blog	blog.sysomos.com	-	-
123		Jeffbullas’s Blog	jeffbullas.com	UP	10
124		Josh Hallett	hyku.com	UP	11
125		PR Conversations	prconversations.com	UP	2
126		Communications Consultant	prblogger.com	UP	2
127		Bill Green	makethelogobigger.blogspot.com	UP	12
128		Branding Strategy Insider	brandingstrategyinsider.com	DOWN	-21
129		Adliterate	adliterate.com	UP	11
130		ConverStations	converstations.com	DOWN	-22
131		Tara Hunt	horsepigcow.com	UP	15
132		FeverBee	feverbee.com	UP	15
133		Going Social Now	goingsocialnow.com	-	New
134		Brendan Cooper	brendancooper.com	UP	2
135		Noah Brier	noahbrier.com	-	New
136		Seroundtable	seroundtable.com	UP	6
137		Chuck Hemann	chuckhemann.com	DOWN	-8
138		Connie Bensen	conniebensen.com	-	New
139		Marshall Sponder	webmetricsguru.com	DOWN	-8
140		Webbiquity	webbiquity.com	DOWN	-8
141		Fresh Networks	freshnetworks.com/blog	UP	3
142		Personal Branding	personalbrandingblog.com	DOWN	-17
143		Katie Chatfield	katiechatfield.wordpress.com	-	New
144		Emergence Marketing	emergencemarketing.com	UP	5
145		Conversation Marketing	conversationmarketing.com	DOWN	-7
146		The Flack	theflack.blogspot.com	-	New
147		Start With a Lead	blog.startwithalead.com	-	New
148		Advertising Lab	adverlab.blogspot.com	-	New
149		Savvy Sisters	savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog	-	New
150		Julien Smith	inoveryourhead.net	DOWN	-20

The full Social Media Marketing tribe is 1000 influencers and is one of the 400+ available in the application.

To learn more on our application to target your outreach or segment your research, please sign up for a customized demo.

Please feel free to connect with us through Twitter: @ecairn, or email us at conversation@ecairn.com. The team here at eCairn always appreciates any feedback!

References:

• Post on Answering your questions on ‘Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs’.

Becky Carroll

We would love to go to all of them but it has become impossible as there are too many and we’re all too busy.

So we need to pick the right one. Social Media can provide an unbiased insight into the popularity and nature of each of them.

We ranked the following conferences by volume of conversations:

1. SXSW
2. Blogworld
3. Womma
4. LeWeb
5. Pivot

Our analytics are based on the last 6 months of conversations produced by the top 2000+ influencers in Social Media (english speaking). Therefore the bulk of conversations from SXSW show in March 2011 does not count in this analysis. SXSW is ranked number one by a long shot.

Here are the important dates:

• August 16^th, 2011: grand opening of SXSW PANELPICKER 2012 (the event is held in March)
• Sept 22^nd, 2011: WOMMA Talkable Brands Exchange
• October 17-18^th, 2011: Pivot 2011
• Nov 16-18^th, 2011: WOMMA Summit 2011
• Nov 3-5t^th, 2011: BlogWorld LA 2011
• Dec 7-9^th, 2011: LeWeb 2011

Below are the word clouds featuring the top 50 expressions used when one of the conference is mentioned. Click to zoom in:

The text version of those expression clouds is available below, where I highlighted a few expressions to see how the keywords are ranked. The ones on the top of the list have high occurrence.

A couple of interesting notes by looking at how expressions rank for each conference (one color per expression):

• ‘Social Media’ (obviously), ‘Marketing’ (obviously) and ‘Business’ appear at the top of everyone’s concerns.
• ‘Brands’ issues are a top priority for Pivot attendees.
• Platforms (i.e. Twitter, Facebook,…) are not a primary concern for Blogworld people but rank fairly high among LeWeb attendees.
• ‘Influence’ is only discussed by people mentioning Pivot.
• ‘ROI’ & ‘Measurement’ are only talked about at WOMMA.

Well, if you are interest in social media ROI or ROI Measurement discussions, WOMMA is probably your conference.

Contact us with your interest and we’ll look up which conference you should spend your time in: conversation+conference@ecairn.com

How will you pick a conference in 2012?

For those who just joined us, we’re looking at more than just the tech communities since the kindle fire is targeted to a much larger demographic. I’m looking at the volume of buzz that the kindle fire gets in the following blog communities: Wireless/Mobile, Music, Moms, Fashion, & Books. First up, the share of voice. Again this is how it’s calculated:Wireless/Mobile:
Music:Moms:Fashion:Books:No real surprise here. A continuation of the trends we saw just after the big press release held by Jeff Bezos shows how little effort Amazon put into generating buzz for the Kindle Fire. Even after the release of the tablet, the wireless/mobile computing and book lover communities (communities in which I was sure news about the tablet would trend) showed little deviation from the standard number of mentions before the release. Let’s look again at the word cloud of the wireless community:

I noticed that post-release, there seems to be an increase in the mentions of competitive products, no doubt from the many user reviews that have sprung up comparing the $200 tablet to the competitors like the Nook Color, Galaxy Tablet and iPad.

While the level of buzz has dwindled since the first announcement, it’s been rather consistent ever since then. No additional news (even after release) has prompted any additional mentions, and the share of mind (brand penetration) has stayed even. With this level of buzz, one would assume that sales would take a hit. But recent news has shown that the kindle fire’s performance on the sales charts hasn’t been so bad. In fact, I’d say sales have been downright great. But what’s brought this on?

As Roberto says in his post from Gizmodo, “Not surprisingly one of the main factors is trust. Amazon has a great history with consumers. We want stuff, Amazon drops it off. You want to read books without lugging around actual books, Amazon has us covered. This trust was hard-earned.” Amazon’s trust is the bond that they share with their consumers and their partners. It’s the aspect which brings them their influence, and as we mentioned in a recent post, trust is one of two “x-factors” that carry the ability to drive action. So maybe they didn’t need to generate buzz after all. Maybe it’s not about broadcasting your message and needing to constantly advertise and push your brand into the minds of others, but the inherent value that you bring to your audience that drives them to come back, time and again.

This was the final post on the kindle fire trend. If you want to see our previous posts on this subject, here’s part 1 and part 2.

We define an influencer as a person who, through writing and being read, affects the opinions of peers within a community around a certain topic. For example, Chris Brogan is an influencer of the Social Media Marketing community. He is influential because he writes and shares content that is widely disseminated throughout the community, and because that content largely affects or reflects the feelings of that community.

Some of our competitors have a different definition. They look at the popularity of certain sources across all industries, then try and correlate  that to their ability to drive “action”. But influence is relative. You can’t take the expert social media advice of Chris Brogan and say that his word will affect or reflect the car enthusiast community just because he happens to mention cars a lot.

Influence in eCairn Conversation™ is ranked by analyzing the connections and the level of networking between blogs over time. The primary variable which affects influence rank is the number of times other blogs within the community link back to posts from the target blog. eCairn Conversation’s algorithm then ranks the blogs and determines whether the blog’s connectivity is statistically significant enough to be considered a high, medium or low influencer or if they have no influence at all. There are a few other factors which help to determine influence level, but they don’t carry as much weight. Below you’ll see how the sources in a community tend to appear in an influence graph:

You’ll notice that the influencers found using eCairn’s method are the true nodes of communication between bloggers. These people act as the links in the community who both build and transmit a majority of the content that affects the community and drives action. It’s most apparent when you look at a map of the influencers and highlight the high influencers:

Above I’ve colored the high influencers blue in the video gaming blogger community. Notice how they act as the centralized nodes of conversations.

There are several benefits to this method:

1. It is less easy to “game” this system.
2. You’re going to be sure that the targets are both influential AND relevant.
3. There is little room for noise from irrelevant sources and bots.

Why Blogs?

Blogs provide their users the ability to broadcast original, in-depth and insightful content for their readers. When compared to the paltry character count of alternative social networks, we can see how blogging provides a better avenue for developing insight in the community. (Also, let’s face it, most of the best tweets link to a blog, right?)

But this doesn’t mean we can completely discount these other social media channels. In fact, it’s definitely a good idea to leverage these other channels to maintain your relationships in different circles. This is integral in any social media campaign, and it’s the reason why our application also supports aggregating the feeds from, and managing engagement with, these sources as well. Today, blogs are the core of the system. In the future, we’ll expand our algorithm to take inputs that also make sense of twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Why use eCairn’s method?

By not relying on factors which the blogger has control over, we make it more difficult for the blogger to game the system. Other existing methods of influence ranking use factors like follows/subscriptions which can be artificially increased through the use of bots, fake accounts and collusion with other users. Post count is another easy variable to skew as well. It’s easy to create a content bot which can constantly publish or re-publish content that can be relevant and interesting, but in no way original or worth following.

Building your influence rank by starting with the community ensures that you find influencers who are relevant. Say you’re trying to find the experts on movie production. You don’t want their interactions with the music recording community to affect your influence measurement of the movie developer community. You’re trying to find the most influential people on a specific topic, not the most influential people who happen to have an interest in that topic. Since you build the community, you control the level of noise that can come from irrelevant sources and can manage the objectivity of the ranking.

So, how do you rank influence?

Beauty/Cosmetics means big business. Here are some numbers that are self-explanatory:

• $59 bn industry revenue (US) – $250 (WW)
• 750 unique brands
• 250k business in the US only are qualified as beauty salons

Given that every large industry means lots of activity in social media, it’s no surprise to find thousands of beauty influencers (we have more than 7000 in eCairn’s database and are finding new ones every time we search). All together they aggregate an audience or shall we say a mega-community of millions.

Why is that important?

According to a survey performed earlier this year by blogher and DeVries Public Relations, blogs are 2 Times More Likely to Drive Beauty Product Purchases than Magazines (influencers have blogs).

How is the beauty influencers mega-tribe organized?

Let’s look at some interesting geo-centric findings on the beauty tribe.

For that purpose, we took the top 500 influencers from the following countries:  France, Italy, Spain, UK and USA, and a few hundreds from Australia and Canada.

Below is a map of the community that shows:

• Influencers from separate countries don’t mix across languages.
• Italy is the blue cluster on the left
• Spain is the big round cluster at the bottom
• France is the 3 clusters on the left from the bottom counter clock-wise (there’s a cluster of DIY cosmetics, another one on nails and a 3rd one on general cosmetics)
• UK, US, Australia and Canada are much more interconnected:
• UK is the purple & blue part of the center cluster, close to the top
• US is the yellow at the bottom
• Canada is on the edge of the main clusters in orange (left and right)
• Australia is spread on the edge (we have only 100 blogs in that list)

What are they talking about?

When we perform a customary brand analysis of the river of conversations, we see significant variations across geographies:
(for the purpose of this analysis, only blog posts have been analyzed)

• Brand mentions is the highest, percentage wise, in conversations from Australia and the US and the lowest in Italy
• The top brand (Chanel) has an average share of voice of 2.71% across all geographies
• Variations in brand mentions can change by up to a 10x factor from one country to another

More information is available from the following charts:

1. Top cosmetics brand by share of voice across geographies:
   
2. Cumulative cosmetics brands share of voice by country
   
3. Comparative share of voice for the top 7 brands across all countries
   
   
4. Top cosmetic brand (Chanel) share of voice per country
   
5. Top differences by country and brand

• 10x SoV difference for Clinique in Australia vs Italy
• 3-5x SoV difference for Maybelline between Europe vs North-America+Australia
• Chanel is the most consistent brand across geographies (2x difference maximum)

Topic-wise, the ranking based on the percentage of conversations is somewhat consistent across geographies but the percentage is much higher in the US than in France, almost by a factor of 2. (See the graph below comparing US, Spain and France only)

Note: The top 500 US influencers have collectively published 87k conversations as compared to, respectively, 32k for the French and 26k for the Spanish. They are clearly more talkative.

With the emergence of new solutions and metrics for online influence, a question essential to marketing has taken center stage:

“Who are the good influencers, and how to identify them?”

We have given this issue a lot of thought and experiment. Over the years, this has inspired a unique vision of online influence, addressing what defines it, how to describe its characteristics, and how to analyze it. Here’s the gist of it.

There are several types of influencers (5 or 6, depending on who you ask, it is not really clear yet). In this post, we will not be covering the influence mechanisms at work among closed circles such as friends and family, or the influence mechanisms of celebrities (sports celebrities, politicians, and others). We are also well aware that geographical, cultural, or demographic factors have their role to play. As far as influence in the virtual world of social media is concerned, however, we believe this is only a minor one.

Let me start with these two short yet meaningful statements:

- You influence someone about something.
- Someone becomes influential as soon as they are trusted by a sufficient number of good people.

For eCairn, this translates into the following:

1. Influence is, at its core, a matter of context and trust.
2. Consequently, influencers must have both:
   - a deep expertise in the domain in which their influence is going to spread;
   - a broad network with whose members they have frequent and long-term reciprocal interactions in the context of their domain of expertise.
3. Deep expertise requires a substantial investment in terms of time, and is developed over a long period of time (cf. Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule).
   A network consists of links between “close” members, “connected” members, and the rest. The domain’s experts are the ones who indirectly determine each member’s influence through cross-references.
4. As a consequence, influence should be evaluated based on meaningful markers (of a certain expertise), over a long period of time (10,000 hour rule), while taking into account references within the community.

What do we need to produce a good analysis of influence (in social media)?

Expertise being the first important factor, we need to have a catalog of experts.

Networks being the second important factor, we need to have a map of the networks formed by the experts within their communities.

The good news is that social media is actually a gigantic network of networks of people with common interests (communities or tribes), in which content is exchanged, often as links, and where people interact with each other. It’s the ideal environment for spreading influence by hear-say.

Influencers make up the center of gravity of these networks.

It is worth noting that social media have allowed for the emergence of a new category of influencers, which is often called the “magic middle”. It is not a rare thing to find several thousand influencers in a given domain (such as in data, or running, just to take two examples far removed from each other). These new influencers act as middle-men in the cascade-like diffusion process of influence (ref:cs.stanford.edu/~jure/pubs/lim-icdm10.pdf).

Keep in mind that influencers need to publicize their expertise through a quasi-continuous stream of content (influencers are media), and through repeated interactions with their peers (influencers are social).

Expertise:

The world has become one of specialists. Gone are the days when an individual could have a thorough grasp of several domains at a time.

Here are important characteristics of an influencer’s expertise:

- a significant, long-term investment: An influencer needs to listen, learn, understand, and solve problems every day for several years.
- a limited number of domains of expertise: An influencer’s expertise cannot span more than one domain, occasionally two or three, most of the time on related topics.
- a dynamic approach to knowledge: Experts constantly need to update their knowledge to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of each domain of expertise. Experts are often “early adopters”.

Network:

Information sharing has now become second nature to us. It is no longer viable to try to acquire knowledge in a domain by yourself. It is much easier to do it with others. You need to share, read, write and converse with others in order to reach this goal. This collaboration is organized at first around the experts of a given domain. It constitutes the first layer of the network.

The second layer in the network is made up of the people looking to be influenced. “Influencees” are looking for influencers. They need them to gain more expertise. Conversely, influencers relish their own influence. They see it as a reward, be they moved by self-interest, or simply by a desire to share or to help further a cause they believe in. Popular bloggers in a given domain are not looking for subscribers. It works the other way around. A great deal of their worth, however, in terms of influence, is in their subscribers.

Here are important characteristics of an influencer’s network:

- topology: A measure of someone’s influence can largely be derived from the nature and the strength of their bi-directional links with other influencers. Another factor is the size of the influencer’s network and the number of times they are referenced by those they directly influence.
- investment: A relationship that is not attended to will always die. Relationships are time-consuming. In this day and age when everything seems to be just one click away, it’s easy to believe that we can maintain a relationship by simply clicking on a “follow”, “like”, or “invite” button here or there. Is it really the case, however? The easy-click strategy indeed overcomes certain real-world constraints. But a click is worth close to nothing. Value lies behind, within the relationship itself and its need for time, intellect, and even emotion.

At this point, I’d like to refer you to a post by David Armano, The six pillars of influence. I think it articulates the same concepts, in a different and possibly better way. The funny thing is that I picked the title of this post before reading his (yes, I’ve been at it for 3 weeks, devoting a mere 1% of my time to it). They are so much alike!

But let’s not forget this: “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”

In practical terms, how does that work?

We will be going from theory to practice in a new series of posts, complete with examples. The implementation of our model is in constant evolution, as we take more and more markers into consideration.

“Too many blogrolls are filled with outdated, broken links…”

How often do you click on a link to end up on a blog that hasn’t shown any sign of life for years?
It happens to me all the time when I surf blogs. I call them ghosts.

The blogosphere is a living organism where birth and death happen all the time. For long, I’ve been wondering about the life expectancy and death rate of blogs.

So much about life expectancy; but, thanks to the on-going maintenance of eCairn’s directory of influencers, on Halloween day, I have numbers to share with you on the latter:

  ~24% yearly death rate

Out of 43955 blogs processed over a period of 3 months, we found 2600 dead blogs. By “dead blogs”, we mean blogs that have stopped posting at least 6 months back.

Not surprisingly, the death rate depends on the category; looking at our 330 categories, we found:

• The Best (lower death rate):
• Beauty-nails: 8% (off topic, as seen in a previous post, the nails tribe is healthy)
• Wedding: 9%
• Travel: 10%
• The Worst:
  • Books: 48%
  • Music: 40%
  • Food: 32%

Will those blogs rise from the dead?

Join us at Blogworld L.A. from Nov 3-5 at the L.A. Convention Center!

Dominique will be giving a presentation on how to get more impact from your content by leveraging influencers and tribes. Click here for more info on his session.

Make sure to stop by our booth #533 in the Exhibit Hall and check your influence, we’ll be more than happy to see you!

Here is a list of the top SMM Blogs as of Oct 25th.  In the spirit of Blogworld, we’ve also marked who will be speaking at the event. Click the Blogworld icon and you will be directed to their presentation page.

Rank	Name	URL	Trend	Move	Twitt	BWELA speaker
1	Chris Brogan	http://www.chrisbrogan.com	UP	1
2	Seth’s Blog	http://sethgodin.typepad.com	UP	1
3	Jeremiah Owyang	http://www.web-strategist.com/blog	DOWN	-2
4	Brian Solis	http://www.briansolis.com	-	-
5	Logic+Emotion	http://darmano.typepad.com	-	-
6	Social Media Explorer	http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com	-	-
7	Search Engine Land	http://www.searchengineland.com	-	-
8	SocialMediaExaminer	http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com	UP	3
9	Conversation Agent	http://www.conversationagent.com	-	-
10	MarketingProfs	http://www.marketingprofs.com	-	-
11	Social Media Strategy	http://www.convinceandconvert.com	DOWN	-3
12	Online Marketing	http://www.toprankblog.com	UP	1
13	Six Degrees of Separation	http://www.twistimage.com/blog	UP	5
14	MarketingProfs Daily Fix	http://www.mpdailyfix.com	UP	3
15	CopyBlogger	http://www.copyblogger.com	DOWN	-3
16	Internet Marketing	http://blog.hubspot.com	DOWN	-2
17	Scobleizer	http://www.scobleizer.com	DOWN	-1
18	PR-Squared	http://www.pr-squared.com	UP	1
19	Jaffe Juice	http://www.jaffejuice.com	UP	1
20	Web Ink Now	http://www.webinknow.com	UP	1
21	Shel Holtz	http://blog.holtz.com	DOWN	-6
22	Brand Builder	http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com	UP	12
23	BuzzMachine	http://www.buzzmachine.com	UP	2
24	Neville Hobson	http://www.nevillehobson.com	UP	2
25	Ducttape Marketing	http://www.ducttapemarketing.com	UP	3
26	Steve Rubel	http://www.steverubel.me	DOWN	-3
27	The Viral Garden	http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com	DOWN	-3
28	Spin Sucks	http://www.spinsucks.com	UP	9
29	SocialMediaMarketing	http://www.scottmonty.com	UP	1
30	Peter Kim	http://www.beingpeterkim.com	UP	5
31	SEO Blog	http://www.seomoz.org/blog	UP	21
32	Internet Marketing News	http://www.marketingpilgrim.com	UP	4
33	ProBlogger	http://www.problogger.net	DOWN	-1
34	PR Measurement	http://kdpaine.blogs.com	UP	12
35	Amber & Tamsen	http://www.brasstackthinking.com	DOWN	-13
36	How to Change the World	http://blog.guykawasaki.com	UP	5
37	Search Engine Marketing	http://www.searchenginewatch.com	UP	32
38	Danny Brown	http://www.dannybrown.me	DOWN	-5
39	Influential Marketing	http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com	DOWN	-1
40	Drew McLellan	http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com	DOWN	-9
41	Geoff Livingston	http://www.geofflivingston.com	DOWN	-1
42	Liz Strauss	http://www.successful-blog.com	UP	2
43	Steve Rubel Stream	http://www.steverubel.com	DOWN	-16
44	Strategic Public Relations	http://prblog.typepad.com	UP	5
45	Christopher S. Penn	http://www.christopherspenn.com	UP	10
46	B.L. Ochman	http://www.whatsnextblog.com	UP	1
47	Stowe Boyd	http://www.stoweboyd.com	UP	7
48	Social Media Club	http://www.socialmediaclub.org	DOWN	-6
49	Greg Verdino	http://gregverdino.typepad.com	DOWN	-6
50	Adverblog	http://www.adverblog.com	UP	28
51	Mack Collier	http://www.mackcollier.com	DOWN	-12
52	Peter Shankman	http://www.shankman.com	UP	11
53	Harte of Marketing	http://www.theharteofmarketing.com	DOWN	-24
54	Servant of Chaos	http://www.servantofchaos.com	UP	5
55	The Buzz Bin	http://www.livingstonbuzz.com	DOWN	-10
56	Communication Overtones	http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com	UP	12
57	Edelman Digital	http://www.edelmandigital.com	UP	1
58	SmartBlog	http://www.smartblogs.com/socialmedia	DOWN	-7
59	CK’s Blog	http://www.ck-blog.com	DOWN	-3
60	Toby Bloomberg	http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com	UP	1
61	Edelman	http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog	DOWN	-4
62	Search Engine Journal	http://www.searchenginejournal.com	-	-
63	John Jantsch	http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog	UP	22
64	Arik C. Hanson	http://www.arikhanson.com	DOWN	-11
65	Bad Pitch	http://badpitch.blogspot.com	UP	2
66	Hitwise Intelligence	http://weblogs.hitwise.com	UP	28
67	Dachisgroup	http://www.dachisgroup.com	-	New
68	Social Media Informer	http://www.socialmediainformer.com	UP	6
69	Outspoken Media	http://www.outspokenmedia.com	UP	1
70	iMedia Connection	http://www.imediaconnection.com	DOWN	-20
71	John Bell	http://johnbell.typepad.com	DOWN	-7
72	Brand Autopsy	http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy	DOWN	-7
73	Dave Fleet	http://www.davefleet.com	DOWN	-25
74	POP! PR Jots	http://pop-pr.blogspot.com	UP	3
75	Ann Handley	http://www.annhandley.com	UP	9
76	Josh Bernoff	http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell	UP	3
77	Altitude Branding	http://www.altitudebranding.com	UP	3
78	Ben McConnell	http://customerevangelists.typepad.com	DOWN	-6
79	Sphinn / Hot Topics	http://www.sphinn.com	DOWN	-6
80	Internet Writings	http://www.shirky.com	UP	18
81	SocialTimes.com	http://www.socialtimes.com	DOWN	-21
82	Church of the Customer	http://www.churchofthecustomer.com	UP	1
83	Phil Fernandez	http://blog.marketo.com	UP	5
84	Media Bistro	http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser	DOWN	-9
85	PR Guy’s Musings	http://www.stuartbruce.biz	UP	6
86	Techno//Marketer	http://technomarketer.typepad.com	UP	6
87	Shonali Burke	http://www.waxingunlyrical.com	UP	17
88	GlobalNeighbourhoods	http://redcouch.typepad.com	DOWN	-7
89	The Future Buzz	http://www.thefuturebuzz.com	DOWN	-2
90	Dan Zarrella	http://www.danzarrella.com	DOWN	-8
91	Ogilvy	http://blog.ogilvypr.com	UP	18
92	Brains On Fire Blog	http://www.brainsonfire.com/blog	DOWN	-26
93	Andy Sernovitz	http://www.damniwish.com	UP	21
94	Marketing & Strategy	http://blog.futurelab.net	UP	8
95	Simply Zesty	http://www.simplyzesty.com	-	New
96	Edward Boches	http://www.edwardboches.com	-	-
97	We Are Social	http://www.wearesocial.net	-	-
98	Customers Rock	http://www.customersrock.net	UP	9
99	Community Guy	http://www.communityguy.com	UP	9
100	Techipedia	http://www.techipedia.com	UP	25
101	Nick Burcher	http://www.nickburcher.com	DOWN	-2
102	Drew B	http://theblogconsultancy.typepad.com	DOWN	-13
103	Joe Pulizzi	http://blog.junta42.com	DOWN	-27
104	Paul Mcenany	http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com	DOWN	-14
105	Inside Marketers Studio	http://www.marketersstudio.com	UP	7
106	Pro PR	http://www.propr.ca	UP	7
107	Branding Strategy Insider	http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com	DOWN	-6
108	ConverStations	http://www.converstations.com	DOWN	-15
109	B2B Mkting Zone	http://www.b2bmarketingzone.com	UP	37
110	Radian6	http://www.radian6.com/blog	DOWN	-4
111	Citizen Marketer 2.1	http://blog.stroutmeister.com	DOWN	-40
112	Socialmedia.biz	http://www.socialmedia.biz	UP	10
113	Michael Britopian	http://www.britopian.com	-	New
114	Abraham Harrison	http://www.marketingconversation.com	UP	13
115	AdPulp	http://www.adpulp.com	UP	1
116	Charlene Li	http://www.charleneli.com	DOWN	-21
117	David Reich	http://reichcomm.typepad.com	UP	30
118	Chaos Scenario	http://www.chaosscenario.com	UP	14
119	Tom Webster	http://www.brandsavant.com	UP	14
120	Mark Schaefer	http://www.businessesgrow.com/blog	UP	14
121	Global Neighbourhood	http://www.globalneighbourhoods.net	DOWN	-18
122	Sysomos Blog	http://blog.sysomos.com	DOWN	-17
123	Socialnomics	http://www.socialnomics.net	UP	15
124	Shannon Paul	http://www.veryofficialblog.com	DOWN	-38
125	Personal Branding	http://www.personalbrandingblog.com	UP	16
126	New Comm Biz	http://www.newcommbiz.com	-	New
127	PR Conversations	http://www.prconversations.com	DOWN	-1
128	Communications Consultant	http://www.prblogger.com	-	-
129	Chuck Hemann	http://www.chuckhemann.com	UP	16
130	In Over Your Head	http://www.inoveryourhead.net	DOWN	-12
131	Marshall Sponder	http://www.webmetricsguru.com	UP	5
132	Webbiquity	http://www.webbiquity.com	-	New
133	Jeffbullas’s Blog	http://www.jeffbullas.com	UP	6
134	Social Organization	http://www.thesocialorganization.com	UP	6
135	Josh Hallett	http://www.hyku.com	UP	15
136	Brendan Cooper	http://www.brendancooper.com	DOWN	-19
137	Neil Perkin	http://neilperkin.typepad.com	DOWN	-27
138	Conversation Marketing	http://www.conversationmarketing.com	DOWN	-38
139	Bill Green	http://makethelogobigger.blogspot.com	UP	4
140	Adliterate	http://www.adliterate.com	UP	4
141	Christopher Carfi	http://www.socialcustomer.com	DOWN	-26
142	Seroundtable	http://www.seroundtable.com	DOWN	-12
143	PRBreakFastClub	http://www.prbreakfastclub.com	DOWN	-24
144	Fresh Networks	http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog	DOWN	-24
145	StickyFigure	http://brandimpact.wordpress.com	-	New
146	HPC | Marketing Uncommon	http://www.horsepigcow.com	DOWN	-23
147	FeverBee	http://www.feverbee.com	-	New
148	Jacob Morgan	http://www.jmorganmarketing.com	DOWN	-24
149	Emergence Marketing	http://www.emergencemarketing.com	DOWN	-7
150	Customer Experience Matters	http://experiencematters.wordpress.com	-	New

Disclaimer: Links to the BlogWorld Expo speaker profiles are only available for those who put the info in their profile.

As a reminder, I’m looking at the volume of buzz that the kindle fire gets in the following blog communities:

• Wireless/Mobile
• Music
• Moms
• Fashion
• Books

Again, we’re looking at more than just the tech communities, as the kindle fire is targeted to a much larger demographic than just gadget lovers.

Let’s first look at the share of voice of the kindle fire compared to the iPad since Sept 21. Bear in mind that the official announcement came on the Sept 28.

Wireless/Mobile:Music:Moms:Fashion:Books:Looks like he buzz about the kindle fire peaked on September 28^th for all of these communities over the past few weeks. On that day, Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle fire in an official press conference hosted by Amazon. As many of you predicted, the buzz surrounding the Fire dwindled over the past few weeks. With no new official announcements or promotions, there has been nothing for bloggers to create buzz about. Posts that mentioned the Kindle Fire in the past few weeks have been using the same information from the initial release.

We can quickly take a look at a recent expression cloud from the wireless/mobile computing community and see the following:

Notice that there have been many mentions of competing devices in the same category, as well as mentions of the overall product category. In the past few weeks, posts concerning the Kindle Fire have consisted of speculation and comparisons to existing and upcoming products. More specifically, tech blogs like Gizmodo have spent more time focusing on the device specifications and manufacturing, while outside communities have been focusing on the entertainment value the device offers.

It’s no real surprise that there has been little buzz. Amazon has spent little to no effort with releasing new information and little time engaging influencers to help promote their product. Perhaps they could have taken a few pointers from Gini on how to create conversations. Amazon didn’t let attendees to the press conference touch the device; a poor decision when coupled with the lack of hands on previews from any source. This has led to low levels of buzz, with information based on leaks and speculative blog posts that are not necessarily helping to broaden awareness and excitement about their new device.

While we understand that the volume of conversations about the Kindle Fire have been low, we haven’t focused on the level of market penetration that the announcement has made. To do so, we’ll look at the share of mind of the five communities we are examining. Share of mind being the number of influencers in the community who mentioned the topic at least once in the past 3 weeks:

Wireless/Mobile:Music:Moms:Fashion:Books:

The one tech community we included has a predictably high level of market penetration. The share of mind that the Kindle Fire holds in this community is quite high. This is particularly true within the high and medium influencers; in which, nearly ALL bloggers in the tech community have in some way mentioned the device in the past 3 weeks. In the other communities, share of mind has been relatively low for the medium and long tail influencers, and presence in the high influencers is zero with the exception of mommy bloggers.

This post was mainly to bring us up to date on the data collection we started last time. With over 3 weeks between now and the launch of the Kindle Fire, Amazon has ample time to release more news, promotions, and test units to journalists for previews.

But why has Amazon been so passive about buzzing the kindle fire? What could they be doing to build more excitement? Let us hear it in the comments!