It's interesting to see this post on Edelman's blog (profile):
I met last week with Peter Hirshberg, president and right hand man for David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati. As most of you know, Technorati monitors 14 million blogs, which the company considers the leading edge of discussion on the Internet. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the blogosphere. Naturally I turned the conversation to the role of public relations in this evolving world.
I'm not surprised that Hirshberg is doing the rounds of major PR players right now - probably talking about Technorati's soon to appear entrance into the blog monitoring space. There are two important pieces of information here. Firstly, the above mentioned promotion of Technorati's up coming product. Secondly - and most interestingly - the fact that Technorati puts blog ahead of other forms of online personal media. There is no doubt that blogs are an important part of the equation, but the world of message boards is very compelling for two important reasons:
- The topical distribution is less skewed - in other words, there are more topics discussed in the world of message boards (it's not just politics and PDAs!).
- The volume of data is approximately two orders of magnitude more than in the blogosphere.
Anyone considering launching their brand management, or other PR and research related activities in the online personal media space really needs to look beyond the hype of blogs and consider all channels of communication. Certain brands will be reasonably well satisfied by blog coverage whereas others will find far more and better content in message boards.
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