Howard, these are all great tips. What I’d add is to suggest using one of the newer, smarter aggregators like netvibes and remember that you still have to do some work yourself.

Netvibes has widgets for blog search, podcast search, image search and video search. I would set up a page with each of these widgets looking for ‘coca cola’ as in your example and see what comes through.

Then, I think it’s also important to recognise that the search tools can’t do it all for you, you have to look for patterns, for people who, say, post blogs *and* video and subscribe to them - it’s an iterative process of searching, subscribing, aggregating, following links, subscribing, doing a bit more search, writing yourself, meeting up with people, weeding your subscriptions, commenting, etc.

Heh! and now I found out how easy it is to create and share a tab in netvibes so check out my simple Coke tab

A really effective way to gather subject-specific information, viewable through an RSS reader/aggregator, is to create a filter in a news service then use the RSS feed from that. You can do this with Google News and Yahoo News. Simply do a search - eg for ‘non-diet version of a brown-colored carbonated beverage’ - then in the results page you’ll see an RSS link (I think it says ‘XML’ in Yahoo News, confusingly). Copy that link and add it to your list of subscriptions in your reader/aggregator. From now on, that feed will update your reader with subject-specific results from that news service. Do it with both Yahoo News and Google News and you’re laughing. Ha ha.

Then, as Lloyd says, it’s a case of monitoring this to see which sources emerge.

This is great information and it’s good to know that I have already engage in some with the Google alerts. However, is there a directly correlation between how many blogs link to your blog and authority. For example, I have found, on Technorati, blogs that focus on religion where a post my have the term “Coke” (as in we were having a Bible study and I spilled my Coke). This blog may have many blogs linking to it that would make it an authority by Technorati standards, but not really by “Coke” or “Coca-Cola” standards. Is the best way to work around this to have RSS feeds and use multiple sites? Thanks in advance.

Ryan,

That’s the problem of popularity versus influence, and it points out a problem with Technorati for identifying influential bloggers. Measuring influence in the context of a specific topic gets into the proprietary tools (which I’m researching for my current project).

Our example for this exercise is one of the most visible brands in the world, so the non-relevant mentions make more noise in the results that most clients would expect. For a brand like Coke, the volume of mentions online would likely overwhelm the do-it-yourself approach. For a lower-profile client, search feeds are a good start (and see MonitorThis for a good shortcut to create the feeds, as well as more examples of what to monitor).

I would also echo Lloyd’s parting point, that the automated analysis is a starting point. It has to feed into a strategy for what you want to do with the information. Are you watching for adverse mentions to counter, are you looking for influencers to engage… ?

I know I am interested in this topic from both a research as well as a practitioner perspective. Two years ago two colleagues and I wrote about this in an online article–Blog RUBRIC: Designing your Business Blog http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Nov_05/article06.htm.

This has been a topic I have been wanting to explore more deeply now that I have become more serious about blogs and their relationship to / as social media, so am glad you started this thread.

Thanks for the thread Howard and taking off from Lloyd’s comment, I initially used Netvibes to do this kind of search as I’ve restarted my blogging [and joining the SMC was a first step] but found Pageflakes to load faster as my home page. Both sites will provide me with a direct link to ‘authorities’ they’ve decided to add on their suggested list (which to my mind would be paid companies) or the ones I’ve decided to be add on my fav tab (that I created). Other strategies would include pulling info from sites listing the ones with most hits like at Del.icio.us although there have been discussions on tagging standards (which may be a call for another thread on that one). So the clunky method of doing this can be a full time job (god knows it takes me hours just to post on my blog) and finding companies that do this may be a good investment. (ROI discussions would be another thread)

And like Jeffrey, whom I cowrote that article he shamelessly plugged above, we’re figuring this out from a research perspetive by working on a form of rubric of not just a blog’s effectiveness but also to determine who really are the authorities rising about the noise.

Howard,

The idea of authority is unrelated to the word as we use it in normal conversation. If you look for all the postings on the particular topic you want to find “authoritative” bloggers for, you would need to parse the results into several dimensions of data, including the actual number and frequency of postings on the topic, the number links to those postings (as compared to all the postings on the blog), and the way those postings shaped other sites’ discussion of the subject in order to approach “authority,” which is defined by the OED as: “the confidence resulting from personal expertise.”

At BuzzLogic, we use the word “influence,” because we think it better describes the role of the participant in a conversation. We look at all the features above, as well as traffic and other volumetric data, to determine which sites have short- and long-term influence on a conversation (by looking at only one day’s worth of data you will find something very different than looking over six months or years).

Authority is an easy way to aggregate postings about a topic, but it doesn’t take the PR or marketing professional very long to find that it is not helpful to really understanding who has shaped a conversation about the brand or topic they are monitoring.

Hi Howard,
I think the word, “authority,” is incorrectly used here. Mitch is right, that inbound link counts are not an indication of authority, which Ryan also questions. Inbound link counts are indications of popularity.

To go even further, those link counts don’t give any sense of how a blogger is either popular, or influencial, in a topic area.

The only person who can really determine the authority of a blog is you, based upon the needs and context of your situation. I would never give away my own ability to assess for who has authority to anyone else, and especially not a link count. Link counts do not understand my need, the context of the blogger’s position in a topic community, nor does it comprehend that blogger’s ability to influence.

The tools can tell us conversatinal recency, frequency, and maybe breadth, and maybe even topical influence, but we’d be lucky to get depth. It’s an AI issue that hasn’t yet been solved.

I worked on this problem for several years, and developed a front end for this kind of data at UC Berkeley, to try to achieve the results you appear to be asking for, and I can say it’s a really hard problem. I’ve offered all my research and UI and usability work to several companies and projects, but no one has really built a scalable and deep service to do what you are asking.

mary

mary

Mary, Mitch and Lloyd have helped me to see the missing part of my piece. I took this for granted. Yes, authority or relevance is ultimately up to the person looking/seeking the information.
I believe this will also help the PR person to learn more about this topic.
Keep the ideas coming. Thank you.

Howard

All,

Thank you so much for talking and offering suggestions. I have clearer understanding of the multi-faceted goals I am wanting to achieve.

About IceBucket…

where does it pick up feeds? The Blog I write gets picked up by Google Blog Search, technorati and is powered by Feedburner, but doesn’t appear in IceBucket.

Thank You