A PR person I met at a recent Social Media Club meeting has asked if I could help him find the bloggers are who are most authoritative relating to the product category and the specific brand of his client.
We agreed that I'd answer his email in public (thanks, Doc Searls for that metaphor) by blogging this discussion, and hopefully increasing the learning both for him and for the Social Media Club community as a whole. I know enough about this process to write a decent blog post, but there are people out there who do this kind of thing every day. To them, I say, the comment section is open, and operators are standing by. Please, Please, Please add your two cents to this discussion - that's why this is a blog post instead of a private email back to our PR person.
A few disclaimers: I'm not being paid by this PR firm. The product category and the brand names are in no way connected to the actual client for which he's trying to figure this out. I just decided that by taking a well-known product category with high brand recognition and loyalty, as well as multiple ways for people to refer to the product, I'd find a good example.
So let's pretend our PR person is working for an agency that wants to understand people blogging about Coke, as in the non-diet version of a brown-colored carbonated beverage. It can also be referred to as Coca-Cola. The competitor would be, of course, Pepsi, also known as Pepsi-cola.
How do we find, in this case, the soft-drink blogger community, and specifically, the bloggers who people turn to when they want to know the latest about Coke?
Let me note here that this kind of exercise is the full time job of people at companies like Buzz Logic (disclosure - I know a founder, don't have any financial interest, have not used the products or services), and on and on, there are lots of them.
These firms all have tools, algorithms, and analysts that you can hire to do some of the work I'm going to discuss here. However, even if you're hiring them, or using their tools, you should still be able to do some of your own searching and seeking on behalf of your company and your clients. Ready?
We go searching for our Brand and bloggers who pay attention to it.
Google Alerts
We could set up alerts that let us know when someone blogs about Coke, Coca Cola, Pepsi, or Pepsi Cola. For example, going to:
http://www.google.com/alerts?t=4&hl=en&q=coca+cola&ie=UTF-8
will set up a Google Alert and send an email to you everytime someone blogs about Coca-Cola. (This worked well for me as I was already logged into my Google Accounts. If you don't have a Google Gmail or personal home page account, it might make you create one.)
Google Blog Search
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=coke+and+pepsi&btnG=Search+Blogs
Would give us a bunch of results on blogs talking about Coke and Pepsi.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=coca+cola&btnG=Search+Blogs
shows us Coke. Etc.
These are helpful, but they don't tell us who or what is important. There are some Google Web tools that let you do analytics on sites and inbound/outbound links.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
But this is more for seeing how your own site is doing in google's eyes than analyzing someone else's. Which brings us to:
Technorati
Technorati can give you a list of "blogs about coke" with "any authority" in "English" that contain the phrase "Coca Cola."
A little chart comes up on the right side of the page:
One blog that comes up is "Barq's" and this page is one example of a post where he talks about why he blogs about the Coca-cola owned brand and disclaims being paid. Might be someone to pay attention to, have to look more at his site.
There are lots of ways to look at this data. I'm just getting started here, but hope the community will add techniques I haven't included.
IceRocket
Go over to Icerocket.com, type "pepsi" or "coke" into the search bar. A box below popped in for me saying "Who has more blog buzz - Pepsi or Coke?"
http://trend.icerocket.com/trend?days=14&query1=Pepsi&query2=Coke&label1=Pepsi&label2=Coke has the results.
What's the bottom line on this? There are lots of ways to find stuff out. There are people who are paid a lot to do this. And, many people consider this kind of stuff their "special sauce" and don't share it.
This post is an invite to the community to contribute techniques, so our friend from the SMC meeting I went to can learn more, and do the right thing in the blogosphere. Comments are open.
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