In the 12 months since we surveyed bloggers in Asia Pacific, we’ve seen more PR people contacting bloggers, we’ve also seen more bloggers indicate they’re happy to be contacted. This is great news, but it does come with a warning. And that warning, put simply, is give us what we want. Corporate press releases are still spamming their way into the in-boxes of the world’s bloggers.  I don’t have to explain why this is approach is tragically flawed.

They also told us they liked social media news releases – and that they’d seen more of them used over the past 12 months. Encouragingly, the majority said they’d use content from this type of release in the coming year. If you take nothing else out of this post, take this point to heart if you’re looking to get cut-through via a mass communication.

What was also interesting is that many of these views were universal.  Bloggers were more similar than different in many areas. For example, they typically like emails, want photographs and, most importantly, want something unique for their community.

When it came to who they trusted for information, our global bloggers were also united.  “Other bloggers” were the number one source – and they also wanted data via RSS. Two lessons here – you’re more likely to be listened to if you’re part of the blogging community. And if you want blogger eyes on your content, deliver it through RSS.

But the differences were interesting. As we drilled down into each of the 21 countries, we found unique trends that will help our teams and their clients work better with their blogging communities. One point to note that will help shape tactics is the amount of time bloggers typically spend blogging each week. We found that most Asia Pacific bloggers spent less than nine hours each week blogging – while two thirds their North American counterparts exceeded this. So bloggers in Asia are typically part-timers – which means adapt your tactics (and expectations) accordingly.

So where do I think the next 12 months will take us?  Hopefully to a point where PR people realize that bloggers are influencers – not (typically) broadcasters. They create and attract communities around their content – and need to be treated as individuals. Only through the creation of a shared agenda – providing the right content in the right context – can our clients hope to play an effective role in these influential communities.

Jeremy Woolf

Global Social Media Practice Lead

In our continuing examination of the most influential blogs in the blogosphere, we’re looking at not just which blogs are cited most often, but why. When it comes to the gossip and culture blogs, the answer is fairly straightforward: juicy content and compelling multimedia.

KEY FINDINGS

Gossip blogs are relatively well-represented among the Power 50, making up 11% of the 50 sites. These types of blogs were actually cited more often than business blogs (11% of all citations vs. 2% for business blogs). The top five gossip blogs included: Gawker, Perez Hilton, Valleywag, Stereogum and Jezebel.

ANALYSIS

Traditional media generally reference culture blogs as primary sources for original news content, such as interviews or transcripts. In comparison, technology and lifestyle/entertainment blogs are more often cited for their opinions, providing commentary and expert insight into breaking news or industry trends. Typically, an interesting photo, video or exclusive interview would appear on a blog, which was written about by traditional media. We found that authors of culture blogs were rarely interviewed or quoted as experts in the field (although citing Gawker’s Top Ten Worst Media Moments of 2008 could be considered an exception).

CONCLUSION

For communications people, there are a couple of primary takeaways. Gossip blogs are clearly a great place to seed content about celebrity and entertainment related clients, especially if you have access to interesting video clips and images. But you’d better have the goods. Finding creative ways to intersect your content with timely trends already in the public eye is also a tried and true approach.

Gossip blogs can generate massive spikes in awareness or interest, but they can also be a short term and often unpredictable solution. Since gossip bloggers rely on popular culture to dictate their content, it’s very hard to predict whether your client will get the “right” kind of attention. For example, many companies shy away from gossip blogs because they’re concerned by the types of comments that gossip posts can elicit. Under the right circumstances though, the opportunity to leverage this channel as a means of driving residual mainstream media attention remains strong, as our study suggests.

This post is a part of a series on the Power 50, a study of the most influential blogs as cited by the top 100 mainstream media.

If it’s hard for him, it’s hard for anyone. And, of course, the still evolving media landscape bears witness to this fact. No need to rehash the lowlights of the last half decade in news, but the lack of a frontrunner for a sustainable business model for the news industry is evidence that more turmoil is still to come.

In thinking more about Scoble’s and others’ comments made during last week’s panel discussion on the future of communications (see initial post here), an underlying current throughout it all was the quest to add value for whatever audience you’re speaking with.

Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee acknowledged that what she was doing wasn’t much different from what newspaper columnists have traditionally done and Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News and the Next Newsroom Project acknowledged that the printed paper likely won’t be the core of what the Merc eventually becomes (he also made an interesting observation that the radio remains the place where Bay Area commuters consume most of their media yet radio is frequently omitted from these sorts of discussions).

On the hunt for value...

Remove the delivery vehicle (the paper, a blog, the radio, TV, etc) from the conversation and what remains of news is the information itself (which you could argue is as it should be). And with no barriers to entry and general information overload, the information needs to add value. Anything less and relevancy will wane, no matter who you write for.

Richard Brewer-Hay, principal blogger for eBay over at eBay Ink, said to me afterward he’s most intrigued how newer communications channels have enabled two-way dialogues (or even many-to-many) rather than the traditional one-to-many. That, he said, fundamentally changes the value proposition for journalists and audiences. This works great for Richard because he’s able to leverage his role into a true dialogue with eBay’s community. Letters to the editor just don’t cut it anymore. The letter to the editor presents a voice, but it’s a voice that isn’t replied back to and doesn’t spawn other conversations. It’s the tree falling in the forest and no one is quite sure if anyone else is around to hear it.

Post into any story and you’ve now contributed to a “live” conversation, and impacted the rest of what’s to come and can see how it all plays out. Likewise, fully formed conversations can get built up through many voices all riffing on whatever original content gets posted to the Internet.

But this doesn’t necessarily equate to value. Wading through a hundred comments on a story is rarely fruitful. I would rather have Seymour Hersh writing his stories for the print New Yorker in a 1-to-many conversation as there is absolutely no value I can add to his content. I am in listen-only mode when he’s talking.

Indeed, the construct of news doesn’t need to change. Journalists still need to be able do what they’ve always done best: Find the facts, find the viewpoints, and distill them down for the audience in a compelling manner. But a journalist who can’t add value beyond a press release essentially becomes commoditized by the press release itself.

Journalism today can be as biting as any time in the past, but the amount of information currently accessible and the number of viewpoints being thrown at us from experts and non-experts alike has had the effect of shortening our collective attention spans and reducing our tolerance for status-quo deliveries. The voices who have the greatest impact and can cut through the noise with impactful analysis – no matter whom they write for – will be the ones we seek out. Everyone else will just fade into the background as white noise.

Somewhat unfortunately, the tolerance for any slippage in this area will be minimal. If Robert Scoble is not adding value to the conversation, the collective public will banish him immediately and without remorse. Someone else will be ready and waiting to take his place, and we’ll be ready too. It’s a vicious turn, but it’s the world we live in currently. Here’s hoping that the people who deserve to be heard find their audiences and financially-viable platforms to support them.

Photo credit: Paul Keleher

VentureBeat and TechCrunch topped our study of most frequently cited blogs in mainstream media for the Business and Technology categories respectively.

That’s the gist of a new study by Context Analytics, the research arm of Text 100, which we’ll be rolling out in a series of posts this month. We’d actually planned to announce the findings later this month but the blogosphere’s neither neat nor orderly. It’s only fitting that a related conversation happening over on TechCrunch (Survey Says: PR People Love Our No-Embargo Policy) would create a timely opening to share a relevant piece of our study.

The survey referenced on TechCrunch points to the most popular blogs as ranked by 246 tech PR pros. We took a different approach by analyzing which blogs were most frequently cited by mainstream media* and ranking the top 50 blogs across five categories: Business, Technology, Lifestyle/Entertainment, Gossip and Politics.

For the Technology category, we found that references to blogs in traditional media are concentrated on a few names, particularly TechCrunch, Engadget, and Gizmodo, which received 56% of all technology blog citations among the Power 50. References to the remaining tech blogs in the study were less frequent and more evenly distributed.

It’s interesting that most references to top technology blogs in traditional media featured bloggers’ opinions on an event or topic used in an article. Put another way, the findings tell us that tech bloggers are often treated as expert analysts in their field, something we found to be less common in other categories.

And while business blogs are less frequently cited in traditional media than technology blogs, the findings seem to embody the core of the study. Winning credibility and expertise in this category of blogs is a different and much tougher ball game for a few reasons.

1. Compared to many topics, traditional media tends to have relatively strong coverage of business and finance. The volume, quality, diversity of opinion, and real-time nature of business reporting is unparalleled in traditional media (e.g., does any other industry have anything close to Bloomberg Terminals?), so there may be less of an unmet need for greater amounts of information, delivered faster to consumers of business press.

2. Consumers of blogs and other forms of social media typically consists of a younger demographic than those that typically read the business sections of daily newspapers. Journalists may feel that the inclusion of blog content in their stories could alienate their audience.

3. Prominent business and financial media outlets generally operate under stricter editorial constraints than some publications in other categories due to the nature of the content. Tight parameters around information sourcing narrows the potential universe of citable blogs.

VentureBeat was the most frequently mentioned business blog in traditional media, and its author, Matt Marshall, has written occasional columns for The San Jose Mercury News (those columns were not included in the rankings). [Update: Matt Marshall comments on our study on Venturebeat.] When VentureBeat is mentioned in traditional media, it has usually been used as a source for facts and figures about VC funding of technology startups in San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. The second most often cited business blog, Seeking Alpha (actually an aggregator of blog content) was typically sourced for transcripts of earnings calls and investor meetings by traditional media; its bloggers were rarely quoted in traditional media stories.

While traditional journalists have begun to rely on blogs as sources of news, they’re still warming up to the idea. But still, we’ve come an incredibly long way since bloggers were dismissed as a fringe element or “basement jockeys.”

So what does all of this add up to? Influence can be sliced and diced in several ways, and measuring media prominence is just one angle for approaching the topic. In other cases, intimacy and personal connections via blogs mean more than media references ever could. Since there’s no magic formula, we wanted to kick off a conversation and learn what you think as we roll out the rest of the findings from the study.

Are your favorite technology or business blogs on this list? What do you think the rankings mean and what are the implications (and causes) in each category? Looking forward to your thoughts as we dig further into this discussion in the coming weeks.

Joseph Kingsbury

Text 100

josephk@text100.com

Nils Mork-Ulnes

Context Analytics

nmork-ulnes@context-analytics.com

*100 most circulated U.S. newspapers during a two year cycle between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2008