There is a very cool conversation going on locally about the effectiveness of getting a write up from some of the bigger blogs, Life hacker, Techcrunch and others floating in the Seattle area this morning. While the link love is great, rarely do we get to see the actual numbers coming in from getting a write up on the major blog or blog networks. This is one Seattle Startups experience with getting a write up on the major blog networks, by the stats and by the numbers. Teach Street has posted the following numbers post launch and write up by a number of very popular blogs.
Now comes the disclaimers, this is one sites experience with being blogged about, so the numbers are of interest but not statistically meaningful. One companies experience is not the entire effect, realistically to make these numbers statistically significant; you would need at least 30 companies sending in information. And it would have to be from the same set of blogs as shown above, that way you are comparing apples to apples. If you threw in a number of smaller blogs, it really wouldn’t work unless you used the same number of smaller blogs. Seattle has a dearth of technical bloggers, there are not many, and most of them are unknown. If you want to add your experience to this list, drop me a note, support (AT) Techwag.com or rmorrill (AT) gmail.com and I’ll add these to the list.
Bloggers wonder how effective they can be in supporting the companies that they love or those companies that they see on the internet. We might not spend all day writing the perfect blog entry, but we would like to see a positive influence based on what we write about. Much of this is also going to be tied to readership at the blogs that send traffic, the higher the readership the more effective those blogs are going to be in sending traffic to the companies that they write about. Having information like this would also help companies plan out their spend on PR and Marketing.
With all the hoopla over embargoes, the real effect of those blog entries that we right is very important for companies to know, and to work out how to blend blogs into their overall marketing and social networking framework. Companies want to go for high yield blogs, but they also want to work out the link love on top of it, both work together to help raise the returns in Google, and help generate buzz for the company. In the end though, it might just be the link love that is the most important thing that smaller and mid tier bloggers can do for the companies that they write about.
Tags: bloggers, effectiveness, numbers, statistics, damn liars, link love, raw data
This matches what other CEOs are telling me, except that Twitter and FriendFeed are missing (they usually are in the top five, with Twitter usually being at the top, which demonstrates that bloggers could be losing some of their influence and decentralized social networks are gaining them).
Great summary, Dan. It would be awesome if more companies that got this breadth of coverage would post similar summaries. It would also be fun to see how well individual blogs do (like Scoble, me or others), if anybody tracks that data.
Louis: CEOs tell me my videos help them more than my blogs do. Why? Well, seeing a demo done in a video is much nicer than seeing a blog post, which probably is about the same, or not as detailed as TechCrunch anyway.
Hey Robert,
I’ll make you a proposition — let’s do a TeachStreet video and blog post, and I promise to share the data
Serioiusly, the data is all over the place — the Techcrunch posts from early on drove a lot more traffic (around our original launch), but they’ve been very good to us and covered our subsequent launches, so my hunch is that being covered repeatedly leads to less click-thrus.
Also, since we’re only officially live (with great teacher/school/class coverage) in Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area, we’re not as broadly relevant as sites like Mint.com — but, we’re working on it.
Dave
Nothing seems to be easier than seeing someone whom you can help but not helping.
I suggest we start giving it a try. Give love to the ones that need it.
God will appreciate it.