The Limitations of Tracking Blog Buzz
I was vaguely interested in how much online buzz was being generated about Microsoft’s Origami Project, so I spent a few minutes on IceRocket.com using their blog trends tool. Here’s what the trend line for mentions of the word “origami” looks like over the last month:
The chart tells me what I already knew – that bloggers are talking about the Origami Project. Tools like Icerocket’s blog trends graph interest me, but ultimately the insights these tools provide are superficial and anecdotal.
Say I was charged with tracking blog coverage for a company like DuPont (which is not a client of ours). I might see a spike in mentions on blogs when DuPont releases an earnings report. But I might also see a spike when DuPont’s Nascar team runs well. Or when someone with the last name “DuPont” posts some gossip about Lindsay Lohan. Or when someone uses the word DuPont as an example in a post about blog tracking.
Tracking the volume of conversation alone isn’t sufficient. You’ve got to understand the context of the conversation. You’ve got to block out the background noise and find the two nuggets that might be posted on a given day that truly impact your company/organization.
Clarification: Mark Cuban, the owner of Icerocket, wrote in to point out that I could exclude Nascar results by typing in the phrase “dupont -nascar”.
Technorati Tags: Ice Rocket Search Blogs Tracking
A Look Under the Hood
I’ve spent some time this week micromanaging the relaunch of The Bivings Report (TBR) and as part of the process I’ve been taking a fresh look at various blogging tools and add ons. I figured I’d provide a rundown of what tools we’re using on the off chance its of interest to someone in the process of setting up a blog.
The original version of TBR was custom built in late 2001 by our in-house developers. There were a few blog tools around at the time, but they were pretty primitive so we just built something ourselves. In redoing it, we decided to switch to WordPress after investigating all the usual suspects. We chose WordPress because it has almost all the functionality we wanted built in, has a robust set of accompanying plugins, is highly customizeable and utilizes our preferred programming language/platform. Its also free.
We used this plugin to create the weighted display of categories we are using to classify posts. We decided to run our RSS feed through feedburner to make it easier for people to subscribe. And we ended up using BlogBeat to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that will surely start flocking to revamped The Bivings Report. In the future we may add a listing of Digg stories and/or maintain a list interesting bookmarks on del.icio.us.
Anyway, let us know if you’ve heard of anything cool.