Blog Monitoring: A New Role for PR

Previous years, as a PR professional, I simply had to track coverage in a handful of major magazines and trade journals to gauge a technology company’s reputation among its prospects and customers, as well as key industry advisors such as analysts. But today, as the importance of social media continues to rapidly rise, understanding what the public thinks, wants, and needs requires a more complex and sophisticated monitoring strategy. A strategy that involves comprehensive blog monitoring and response.

Blogs are a Media Force

Blogs, also known as Weblogs, represent a new, revolutionary form of journalism. These online communication vehicles provide an information-hungry consumer audience with a steady stream of timely and relevant news and resources about the topics they are most interested in.

As the popularity and number of print publications declines (there were over 31,000 magazines available in 1999, but less than 23,000 published in 2005, based on a study by the American Society of Magazine Editors), the number of blogs seems to be growing at an unstoppable pace.

As of June, 2007, Technorati was tracking more than 85.2 million blogs, and claims that another 175,000 new blogs are added each day.

Blogs Help Shape Public Opinion

When targeted and monitored effectively, these blogs – as well as message boards, wikis, and product review sites – can offer a wealth of accurate and timely intelligence about consumer opinions, behaviors, and preferences.

By tracking these social media channels, PR agencies can gain the valuable insight they need to create more relevant and impactful messages, and develop more successful high-tech public relations, branding, and marketing plans. Additionally, because opinions, comments, and ideas that are both positive and negative can spread like wildfire in the expansive blogosphere, this information can help firms implement high-tech PR strategies that enable them to effectively leverage online media to control their clients’ reputations and images.

Blog Monitoring Objectives

The objective of blog monitoring is two-fold.

The first major goal is to find the Weblogs that cover topics and issues related to a client’s products and services, and determine what the link density of each one is. Those blogs with the highest link density are usually the ones with the widest-reaching Web networks, the greatest “mindshare” among the Internet audience, and the most influence over consumer opinion. Once the most important blogs have been identified, the PR agency can then begin building relationships with the bloggers, to help ensure that their clients’ messages, images, and value propositions are accurately and consistently relayed in any blog entries.

The second purpose of blog monitoring is to track references specific to the client. For example, blog monitoring can enable PR professionals to find and evaluate mentions of the company, product and brand names, or the names of top executives. This will help them continuously assess the company’s reputation, and the market’s perception of their products and services, so they instantly uncover any problems, and take appropriate action when needed.

How to Monitor the Blogosphere

Many PR agencies outsource blog monitoring activities, much in the same way they use third-party service providers to track clippings and print coverage.

For those firms that choose to handle their own blog monitoring, there are plenty of tools available. Any RSS reader can be used to subscribe to up-to-the-minute news and Web content based on common industry key words and phrases (these can be the same key words and phrases used in press monitoring). There are also a variety of quantitative blog monitoring solutions, such as Feedster, PubSub, and Technorati that provide key statistics such as the number of blogs and the frequency of posts or updates. Or, qualitative tools like Blogdex, BlogPulse, Daypop, and Blabble can help PR agencies track the context of blog entries and other online discussions.

Benefit of Social Media

As the prevalence of social media continues to rise, organizations of all types and sizes are recognizing the ways in which social media can help them better understand, respond to, and attract the attention of their target audience.

As a result, businesses are now jumping on the social media bandwagon at a rapid pace, embracing blogs, social networks, wikis, and other vehicles to achieve their marketing and public relations goals.

What types of benefits can corporations achieve with an effective social media strategy?

Get the Message Out Faster – and to More People

Social media enables more rapid sharing of information. It may take hours, or even days, for a new announcement to reach the end consumer through traditional channels. Why?

Because when a press release is issued, a journalist or writer must first wade through all the sales and marketing lingo to find the key points. Then, the content must be re-purposed in article format, and sent to an editor or proofreader before it is published.

Social media vehicles, on the other hand, allow for instantaneous dissemination of not just news, but images, audio, video, and other multimedia content as well. And because releases geared toward social media outlets contain only key highlights, pertinent facts, and hyperlinks to related statistics and quotes, the information they contain can be immediately picked up and posted by bloggers and other online journalists.

Social media also provides more widespread coverage, enabling breaking news to reach a much larger and broader reader base than standard media outlets alone.

While magazine readership and the number of available print publications continue to decline, the number of consumers using the Internet to access and share information continues to rise sharply. For example, one recent study showed that almost one out of every four Internet users – over 41 million people total in 2006 – visits MySpace on a regular basis.

Improve Branding

Social media, and blogs in particular, can be a highly useful tool for enhancing both awareness and image. Blogging can help “spread the word” about a company, its products, and its services to more people, dramatically increasing brand recognition and awareness.

Additionally, social media can enable executives to gather input and feedback directly from their target audience, and use that intelligence for more effective reputation management. Insight into why people like – or hate – a brand is needed to help change and control audience perceptions and preferences.

Boost the Impact of Direct Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key component of today’s direct marketing and lead generation strategies, and social media has proven its ability to significantly complement SEO initiatives.

Many social media techniques – such as frequent use of common jargon and key phrases, title tags, ticker symbols, and links to blogs and other relevant Web content – can dramatically improve search engine rankings.

Additionally, while SEO relies on just a handful of popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo to drive target prospects to a site, social media expands the potential audience by creating alternate channels.

For example, when content is published to a site, and that content is then linked to from del.icio.us or reddit, it can generate a tremendous boost in Web traffic. Many companies also find it much easier to generate compelling content that is likely to be picked up by bloggers, than it is to keep up with the “rules” required to rank high in today’s popular search engines.

The New Social Media News Release

The social media news release is designed to facilitate rapid and widespread sharing of news, information, images, audio, video, and other content. Unlike traditional press releases that are notoriously packed with hype and marketing-speak, the social media news release is far more functional, focusing on just the most relevant and pertinent facts, and relaying them in a simple, concise, hyperlinked format that appeals to bloggers and other online journalists.

The typical social media news release includes a summary of key highlights, a few expert quotes, links to background information embedded throughout the text, and tags that identify related coverage and other similar topics of interest – all written in a style that reflects the way people speak about the subject at hand.

As a result, it is much easier for bloggers to post the information, and for online journalists to conduct their research, and find the quotes, references, statistics, and other data they need to write thorough and accurate stories. Many social media news releases also include images, video, and other visually-oriented content, tying together various multimedia elements in a way that makes them easily adaptable and re-usable.

Fast and Wide Distribution

Social media news releases provide faster distribution and wider broadcast coverage than old-school public relations channels can.

A recent Pew Research report shows that the public is more Web savvy than ever before, and that Internet use has become a part of the typical consumer’s daily routine. In fact, more than 50 percent of consumers polled indicated that they create and share content online. With the social media news release, companies are empowered to take their message directly to these consumers via the most popular and preferred formats, making it readily available and instantly accessible not just to reporters, but to anyone who is interested.

Social media news releases can also act as direct marketing and search engine optimization vehicles. News headlines can be delivered via RSS ads, so they are dynamically pushed directly to those who subscribe to similar topics. And, the inclusion of popular key words and phrases (particularly those that potential customers are likely to utilize when searching for the company’s products or services), as well as commonly-used jargon and acronyms, title tags, ticker symbols, and links to other Web content such as blogs and related articles, can give a boost to a company’s ranking in Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines.

Social Media is Here to Stay

Most of the major wire services have recognized the importance of social media in today’s PR strategies, and have begun to expand their offerings accordingly.

PRWeb and Pheedo provide RSS ads, track-back functionality, and the ability to tag and send out press releases via del.icio.us. Additionally, PR Newswire and Business Wire have launched new social media features such as RSS Feeds. These services also now allow bloggers to access capabilities and functions within their sites that were previously only available to credentialed journalists.