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October 11, 2006

One Step Into The Blogosphere

We have released the Edelman Technorati study on the blogosphere in the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy. We are simultaneously releasing a study by Edelman's Strategy One research unit on consumer usage of blogs in the US, UK and France plus a review of mainstream media in the same three countries that demonstrates the increasing power of blogs as a source of credible information.

We are attempting to persuade the business community that it must recognize a new axis of communications, the horizontal peer to peer conversation. This must complement the traditional vertical model, which is premised on one way, top down, controlled messages, a world of elites and mass audience that depends on a pyramid of authority. The new horizontal axis relies on consumer co-creation, ideas from the bottom up, community sharing to constantly improve content, and democratization of media. The smart company will listen first, then speak, and listen again. It will speak from inside out, informing its employees, its consumers and yes, even its critics from non-governmental organizations before it speaks to investors, regulators and elite media. It recognizes the simple truth that in a world lacking trust in established institutions such as business, government and media, the most trusted source for information is a person like you.

We worked with Technorati to compile the list of the 100 most influential blogs in the US, France, Germany and Italy, based on number of inbound links. We also manually compiled a list of the 50 most influential bloggers in the UK (promise to get this to 100). In this first study, we've begun with the Top 100 because there are lessons to learn from them. They're not all a company needs to know about the blogosphere, they are just a start. After all, they're the top blogs because so many lateral conversations are sparked by what they say. This list omits any mainstream media blogs. We were able to classify these blogs as to area of interest (technology/politics/cooking), how often they post, the extent to which they cover business and specific corporations. Our most important finding is that bloggers generally do cover business and specific product categories but they generally do not report on nor quote representatives from specific companies. We also discovered that bloggers in the US and France tend to link to each other, while in Germany and Italy the bloggers tend to link to mainstream media. We learned that the top subject areas in the US are technology and politics, while in France, the UK, Italy and Germany there are more political personal blogs.

A report by our research unit, StrategyOne, indicates that 25% of people in the US, UK and France read blogs in an average week. These individuals tend to be younger and male. In each of the nations, about 30% of those reading a blog take action afterwards, most notably signing a petition, attending a public meeting or writing or calling a public official. We confirmed that there is a significant increase in the number of articles in top-tier political media in US that mention blogs. In the second quarter of 2006, there were at least 766 mentions of popular political blog sites by nine mainstream publications (The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Roll Call, National Journal, CQ Weekly, CQ Today, CQ HealthBeat and CQ Homeland Security ). There were about 100 mentions in the same period just two years earlier.

There are significant limitations to the studies. Most important of all, let's recognize that in selecting the top 100 blogs in each market, we might be giving the false impression that the blogosphere is to be categorized in the same way as the world of mainstream media, where ratings are the Holy Grail. For the record, Edelman does not recommend that companies simply identify and establish relationships with the "A-List" bloggers. We are not transposing to the blogosphere the traditional model of PR which calls for influencing the media elite, whose interpretation will then cascade to the mass media. We are not reliant on the economics of mass communications that relies on Cost Per Thousand (CPM) as a means of guaranteeing a cost effective outreach to a mass audience. Instead we posit that there is a new force at work, quantum influence, where information moving laterally gains momentum from thousands of individuals, each adding small bits of knowledge, whose aggregate power exceeds that of any institution and whose knowledge is greater than any expert.

The blogosphere poses a fundamentally different communications proposition for the corporation. There are hundreds of micro-niches, each with its own experts, who earn their position as leaders of the pack by demonstrating passion, expertise and a willingness to learn from the community. There is not a necessary correlation between Technorati ranking and influence in a specific category. In fact, Peter Hirshberg of Technorati reported today in London that since the first of the year, bloggers are increasingly linking to the "long tail" instead of the A-List "short head" of the blogosphere, a reinforcement of author Chris Anderson's prediction in his recent book The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling More. Best practice in corporate public relations is to accord each blogger respect and access to information.

What's next for us on the research front? We will release in early November a comparable study with Technorati on the blogosphere in China, Japan and Korea. We will also follow up with the top 100 bloggers in the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy to determine their satisfaction with information received from companies and PR firms. As part of our annual Edelman Trust Barometer, to be expanded this year to 18 countries, we will ask specific questions about word-of-mouth and the identity of the person like you. In short, you have our commitment to try to understand this new horizontal axis of communications and to share our findings immediately with the community.

Update:
One amendment to my previous post on the Edelman Technorati lists. These lists are in beta. We have more work to do in perfecting them and we understand and apologize for the confusion caused by releasing the full lists before they were scrubbed by technoati for public release. The good news is that you can help. If you visit the Technotati blog, you will find instructions on how to register, claim your blog and identify the language you blog in; this will go a long way to making sure the Top 100 lists are clean by the time they are formally launched on technorati in the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags:
Technorati, Edelman Technorati Study, Edelman

Posted by Edelman at October 11, 2006 12:31 PM

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Comments

Posted by: MaryKneeland at October 11, 2006 5:26 PM

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Posted by: Richard Edelman at October 12, 2006 11:18 AM

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Posted by: Nicola Mattina at October 16, 2006 2:35 PM

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Posted by: Richard Edelman at October 16, 2006 3:33 PM

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Posted by: David Vinjamuri at October 17, 2006 3:08 PM

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