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:

It looks like the ranking is very stable and there isn’t much learning into it .

So, we are also publishing an extra post with interesting data on our top 5. We hope you’ll like it !

Here is the list:

Lists are always  subjective,  even when created automatically.  In our case the use of machine learning carry this  subjectivity.

Just that this subjectivity is systematic. We could use a similar wording to define strategy: subjectivity made systematic hence actionable … and definitions are always subjective too.

Anyway, one interesting thing about this list is that, in contrast with the Top 150 for social marketing, the top blogs are not written by individuals or when they are, these individuals are not strongly “branded” personally.

Here is a list with previous ranking on the right, enjoy !

Here is the new ranking as of April 20th.

Few observations on the trends:

• The top of the list is very stable with J Owyang still leading the pack.
• Clay Shirky made the most significant gain (+99), mainly thanks to his brilliant post on the future of newspapers (888 comments and counting !). It’s amazing that this article does not comply to best practices in blogging etc:  it’s too long, has no images nor video… but it’s a such a great article with deep content. Clay only posts once a month but it’s always brillant !
• “Search” blogs seem to be on the rise in the social media landscape (see lines 51, 66, 96).

Any feedback on the relevance of this list is warmly welcome as an opportunity to progress:  eCairn team.

And should you need to develop social media marketing services (branding,  intelligence, research, outreach, advertising, social media optimization) where relevance is key, we’re always happy to do an 1/2 hour free  demo !

For those who are wondering how the ranking is decided, go here. It’s not rocket science.

Ok, now here’s the list:

As promised (yes, we’re late ), Here below is the updated list as of February 2nd along with info on trends.

You can also find this list along with a few gadgets at http://tops.ecairn.com

A quick warning:  some of the top variations up/down come from people moving their blog from one url to another.  ( we’ll try to fix that in the coming months).

Last week’s post dubbed ‘Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs’ generated several thousands visits in the last 2 days and a slew of comments.

This short post is attempting to answer most of your questions, starting with two words of advertising

eCairn and Social Relevance

eCairn is a software startup with a differentiated approach and technology around social relevance. We help marketing teams and agencies to focus and cut their relevant slice of the blogosphere, build and execute engagement strategies (learning, buzz, outreach, and advertising) and measure progress towards their social engagement goals.

Mapping a community is not an easy thing and, if you’ve looked at lists and catalogs that pop up all over the web, you know what we’re talking about. That’s where our Conversation(tm) solution comes in and let you rank your own list. If your interest is to get a similar list on a different community or vertical, contact us from this blog via the “Contact us” page.

Measuring influence – Algorithm, Approach

Our list is built from our own definition of the social media marketing community and our technology to identify and aggregate relevant bloggers within that community – which we will not disclose.

The influence algorithm we use is purely link based and pretty straight forward. Its uniqueness is that we’re only counting the links within the dataset of 1000 relevant blogs, both blogroll and direct links. We have tried a few algorithms playing with

• differentiating blogroll versus direct links,
• weighting the links based on the influence of the «source»,
• weighting more reciprocical links,
• counting links at blog or post level.

We did not find major differences on the top of the list whether using one algorithm or the other. The list is very dynamic however and watching it for a couple of weeks, we have even seen changes within the top 4 (these top 4 tend to be really stable).

The list is subjective and brought few questions and surprises – btw influence is subjective. It’s actually the list of influential bloggers in the social media marketing community more than a list of social media marketing blogs.

Agreed that R Scoble or Search Engine Land as an example, do not talk much about social media marketing. But, these bloggers are heavily referenced by people that are influential in social media marketing and hence make it to this list.

We welcome suggestions and feedback and will incorporate them for a future release.

Do we read the blogs ? (twitter question)

The short answer is yes. We read our « star » blogs (top influencers plus a few others) on a daily basis and we also look for conversations on all the 1000 blogs that discuss our favourite topics.

Next steps

We plan to deliver some additional value; as an example we are seeing that the social media interest that started with PR and SEO is now expanding to product marketing and strategic marketing. We will look into measuring this.

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/11/answering-your-questions-on-top-150-social-marketing-blogs/feed/ 6 Dominique http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:51:19 +0000 ecairn http://ecairn.wordpress.com/?p=225 ]]> =================================================================

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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We just implemented our “influence ranking algorithm“.

So we ran it against the ~1000 ‘social media marketing’ blogs we monitor on an ongoing basis (along with tweets, forums, Q&As…).

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

Below is the top 150 list, you can also find it at http://tops.ecairn.com/ along with other top 150 lists covering other areas of marketing.
( When compared to the Adage Power 150 reference, remember we zoomed particularly on social media marketing. Plus the list contains only blogs written in English).

Here is an OPML Link, from Matt Shaulis, to the list if you want to import in your reader.