The Basement

I just read WHAT BLOGS COST AMERICAN BUSINESS on AdAge.

According to the article...

About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

They go on to talk about "non-work" related blogs and wasted time and money, blah blah blah. I don't think it is that simple. I think blogging improves written communication skills; increases awareness, perspective and scope of knowledge; helps bring fresh ideas into an organization; and improves an employee's sense of value - to readers if not to the organization that employees them. Blogging can create opportunities for individual professional development that can be leveraged by the employer - wouldn't you like to have people perceived as "experts" working at your firm?

This article begs the question...

How much time are you wasting reading AdAge?

Hmmmm. Maybe all of it. Sounds like to me someone is feeling a little threatened?

Okay, okay, I don't know if the kids over at Intel were thinking about analytics, but their rumored new brand for their media PC platform sure will be easy to spot in a crowded blogoshere. If you haven't heard - it's Viiv (pronounced like 'five').

Simple and beautiful BlogPule Trend graph here.

[Via Dan Ackerman over at CNET]

I think of blog analytics as the science of mining blog data for comsumer insight or other deep meaning. In the last couple of days I've seen it used twice here and here to mean yet another blog search engine with some link metric and a fancy UI. This seems a little sad to me. It's like when everybody started calling every businees rule system on the planet "artificial intelligence" - it just diluted the meaning of the phrase to mush.

Don't get me wrong, I think they are cool to - I just don't think of them as blog analytic tools.

Oh well, there goes the neighborhood.

[Measure Map stuff via Heather Green @ BlogSpotting]

I've been meaning to weigh in on the new name of Microsoft's latest Windows – Vista. It's stupid. Everyone's said as much. I agree. But in addition to the fact that it's just a stupid name, it's stupid for another reason – it doesn't take web analytics into account.

I've spent a lot of time playing with BlogPulse and other tools and one think I've discovered is that it is way easier to trend stuff with certainty if the thing you're looking at has a unique and unambiguous name. Think back to my Brand Strength post – remember all the work I had to do just to tell whether we were talking about Apple computer or an apple a day? And even with then the results were suspect. As a brand name Apple is neither unique nor unambiguous. But Microsoft on the other hand is an easy thing to trend – only Mirosoft is Microsoft – unique without ambiguity.

Just as we learned to design for manufacture in the 80's and 90's, today we need to learn to brand for analytics. If you are a brand manager and are in the process of coming up with a name – make it unique and unambiguous in additional to all the other stuff it needs to be for other reasons.

Ironically, Apple has has some great product names in this regard - iPod, iMac, PowerBook, iBook where as Microsoft has the worst product names – Windows, Vista, Word, Excel, Access.

It's a lot easiser to find a needle in a haystack than it is to find the same needle in a stack of needles. The less time, effort, money you have to put into separating the Apples from the apples or the Windows from the view, the more time, effort, energy you can spend on trying to get information out.

As I continue reading and learning about word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, it has occurred to me there is a paradox facing those companies wanting to create WOM. What the kids over at WOMMA call amplified or managed WOM – as opposed to organic WOM which, as you can guess, happens entirely without the assistance of marketers.

The understand the paradox, you must first understand the motivation of the WOM marketing crowd – namely, consumers are no longer listening to traditional marketing. Why? Well, they talk about this less (understandably so) – but usually they say it's due to information overload, the influx of media options, Tivo, the internet's diffusion of attention, etc.

I would assert that the primary reason is credibility and trust. Through years of conditioning, we've all come to learn that - as Seth Godin tells us – all marketers are liars. Let's face it, if drinking a particular brand of beer really got us laid by a harem of super model, the marketing industry would have a lot more credibility – and WOM would not be on the rise.

To compound the dwindling credibility of traditional advertisement, the internet has provided us with access to multiple alternative sources of information (which we would never look at if the first message we got was credible to begin with). Generally speaking, humans are pretty resourceful – we tend to use some combined metric of credibility and convenience to select the voice to which we listen. Traditional advertising, it seems, is not particularly credible or convenient.

So the conversation probably went something like this...

Marketing Guy: No one is buying our beer. Our TV ad tells them that if they drink our beer, they'll get laid by a harem of super models. What gives?

Market Researcher: Hmm. According to our research, people aren't persuaded by TV ads. Today the most important factor is word-of-mouth, hearing about products from those they trust.

Marketing Guy: How can we get those trusted people to tell everyone else that buying our beer will get them laid?

And so the Word of Mouth Marketing movement began.

Marketing Guy is missing the point. Of course he is, he's marketing guy – he doesn't care about product – or the customer, he only cares about the sale. Think about it, how do we describe a good salesperson - “She's such a good salesperson she could sell ice to an Eskimo!” Brilliant. We praise our marketers for their ability to deceive our customers into buying products that will not meet their needs. By the way, the pitch for ice to Eskimo's usually involved getting someone laid.

WOMMA (which, by the way, I think gets it, if you are seriously interested in WOM and WOM marketing you should check them out) tell us that WOM is about the customer's voice – not the marketer's, WOM is about listening. WOM happens when a company produces a product or service that is extraordinary (extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad). WOM will happen regardless of what marketers do or do not do – and marketing can't change that.

So what can a company do? I think Hugh Macleod said it best in this cartoon from the Hughtrain. Hugh's cartoon says “Quality isn't job one. Being totally fucking amazing is Job One.” He goes on to write “It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage.” If you're a marketer and haven't read the Hughtrain do it now, it much more important that anything I could possibly write. WOM is not a new media awaiting your same droll misleading message – it's about understanding that people no longer buy your droll misleading message. If you want people to tell each other that your product is “totally amazing”, then make a product that is totally amazing. Simple. This is not about marketing in anyway that you've thought about marketing in the past. This is something different.

Second, make sure that all of your traditional marketing messages are aligned with what your product or service actually does. If not, WOM will skewer you – just ask Dan Rather.

Now, if you do these two things, very positive WOM will ensue. You can then, and only then, start a WOM Amplification Strategy in which you help your customers speak more loudly about you. What you think is good about your product is irrelevant. What your customer thinks about your product is everything.

So then, this is an effective WOM strategy:

STEP 1: Be totally amazing

STEP 2: Align your message with your actual product

STEP 3: Amplify your customer's voice

Hey Marketing Guy, please note, none of these steps include clever creative marketing crap designed to make us thing you can get us laid. I don't believe that a company can create WOM without doing or producing great things to talk about – not in any real and meaningful sense. WOM creates itself – companies can only help it along by changing the inputs or helping to amplify the voices. WOM doesn't start with a media plan, it starts with being totally amazing.

Which bring us to the WOM Marketing Paradox: you can't effectively use WOM to motivate customers unless you've already done something amazing enough for them to already be talking about you. Unless, of course, your product can actually get them laid.

[I edited this post slightly - I removed the repetitive use of the explicative from Hugh's cartoon - instead using the edited "totally amazing". After reflecting on it today, I decided it wasn't essential to make my point, and in fact might detract from it. I'm still finding my way in this medium and discover more and more everyday that good writing is harder than it looks. At least for me. -Matt]

Jeff Jarvis Fills The Basement

Wow, it's amazing what a prominent mention from Jeff Jarvis will do for your blog stats! (Thanks again Mr. Jarvis!) I had record (for me) visits Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday and almost as many visits on Wednesday as I had on Tuesday. But it's finally settling down – alas, nearly no referrals from BuzzMachine today. I guess now comes the post 15-minutes-of-fame blog depression.

It's interesting though to see the difference in readership patterns between a critical niche-focused post like my News Flash from WOMMA – Industry 'Leaders' Are Clueless (July 27, 2005)post and a random general interest like post like Jeff Jarvis: Bell Cow or Bellwether? (July 30, 2005) when it gets pointed to by a prominent blogger like Mr. Jarvis. (I'll refrain from putting him on any list since that has seemed to be a soar spot as of late.)

Looky here at my Site Meter graph...

From the looks of it, I attracted folks who clicked around more by being critical of some member of WOMMA. Now, I don't know why exactly, but of course that won't stop me from speculating. There could be lots of reasons, but I'm guessing that the WOMMA stuff pulled in folks interested in my discussions about The Influentials, BlogPulse analysis, and the BlogAds survey. These are folks in the marketing, MR and PR space who were reading this blog for professional reasons or a reasonably high and informed level of intellectual curiosity. Or maybe they just wanted to learn more about this random blogger.

But the Jarvis crowd, those kids are different. They just clicked on the link next the pretty graph on Mr. Jarvis's post. I'm guessing most of them never read far enough to get to a another link on my blog much less click on it. Not that I'm ungrateful – I just find it interesting how different they are as an audience. Of course it didn't help that my most recent post during the height of my Jarvis endowed stardom was a niche-focused tome that academically tore apart The Influentials concept. For the general blogosphere public, it must have been riveting. Although, it did get a nice mention from local Tulsa political blogger Michael Bates of BateLine.

It's also worth noting what a hybrid of the two looks like. Steve Rubel, the prominent blogger of Micro Persuasion gave me nice mention on my Discovering the Blog Influentials post (July 18, 2005). On the 18^th and 19^th I got the casual onlooker crowd but shortly there after I got several mentions from professional PR and media folk – and they sent niche focused readers who clicked deeper than the first casual wave sent by Mr. Rubel.

Oh God, He's Reading Another Book

So what's here to learn? Hmmm. Well, I have been reading a new book (well, new to me anyway). I'm finally reading The Tipping Point and as such I now see everyone as a Connector, a Maven, a Salesman or a Schmuck. Oh, I've taken it upon myself to build on Mr. Gladwell's framework and expand it to include everyone who's not one of his three WOM epidemic players – I call these leftover folk Schmucks. So I don't offend anybody – I think I'm probably in this group, along with just about everybody according to Mr. Gladwell.

So as I stare at my declining stats – growing increasingly depressed – I think about Mr. Gladwell's framework – and I think about the things that I've written over the last few weeks – I think about finding Influentials by looking at other peoples blogs – and then I start wondering if there is information on the other side of the looking glass. Who are these people that are reading my blog? Might they be Influentials? Who cares – Influentials are so yesterday's blog. Might they be Connectors? Salesmen maybe? Hmmmmm. Can I tell from Site Meter data?

Maven Spotting

Well of course not... but, what if I had a site with lots and lots of pages – some with detailed specifications – some with pretty pictures – some that allowed to put things side by side to compare them. What if I was Amazon.com, or Google, or Buy.com or PCMall or Wikipedia? Well, then I would might have enough data to look for Mavens. As Gladwell points out, Mavens are data collectors, they're meticulous, they're thorough. Look again at my Site Meter graph – when the WOM crowd showed up [Mavens] to gather info from the critical random blogger they clicked a lot more that the casual Jarvis castoffs [Schmucks]. The WOM crowd was more interested (at least that's what I tell myself in the mirror). They were collecting data. Imagine if you were Double Click – forget about targeting car ads to people that have been to auto sites or cross selling to folks that are ignoring your ads anyway– think about finding Mavens. You know how many times they view specifications pages; you know when they're comparison shopping; you know when they read 14 different prospectuses before they buy stock – and you know what the bell curve look like so you can spot +2 standard deviations. (This is leading to my Santa Claus is Double Click theory, but that's another post.)

Influentials as Connectors... Still Not Bell Cows

As I read the Tipping Point, I can't help but notice how much Connectors sound like Roper Influentials. Hmmm, maybe I'm not quite done with the Influentials just yet. I mean, that's what the Influential questions measure – connections (not influence). And just like Paul Revere, Influentials might also be Mavens (or Salesmen) but they are definitely Connectors. A proof of concept test would be easy – post an online questionnaire with the 12 question Roper Influential battery and the 250 surname Gladwell Connector test. I might just do that – my first Citizen Market Research project. I predict that Roper Influentials are more likely to be Gladwell Connectors than non-Influentials are. I might then call people who pass both tests Galloway Bellwethers because they would always know what is about to happen – as Paul Revere did – and because it sidesteps the horribly misleading name 'Influentials'.

So if bloggers are likely Influentials (70%ish according to Blogads somewhat informal survey) and Influentials are more likely to be Connectors (yet to be even informally proved) then bloggers (and other online posters) are likely Connectors. We might be able to further narrow this down by measuring links from blogs (assume that maintaining lots of links to different sites means more people connections – which is pretty thin I must admit - but maybe we could measure reciprocal links...etc) or by using natural language processing (NLP) to count the number of people that bloggers mention having conversations with over time. The NLP approach is is pretty reasonable - BlogPulse is already mining for likely people names in posts. Alternatively, if I was Microsoft Hotmail or Google Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Cingular or Southwestern Bell then I might just look for those people that are on the far right in the distribution of unique connections (emails, phone calls, IM)/person. Maybe in the future, marketers will buy lists of Connectors from phone carriers and ISPs. I wonder what privacy laws apply here?

Because Marketing Guy Can't Stop Himself

If the goal is to effect WOM in some specific, deliberate way (which everyone says isn't the goal right before they try to do it) then identifying Mavens and Connectors is an important piece. Simply measuring conversations doesn't seem to be enough to do this. Think about Gladwell's example of Revere and Dawes. If one were only to measure their connections that night the two men might look identical – but, as Gladwell points out – only one was a Connector and a Maven, the other a Schmuck.

So now what? I don't know. I haven't finished the book.

The Jeff Jarvis thing yesterday was a convenient segue into a question I've been wanting to attack in detail for some time: Are Roper Influentials bell cows or bellwethers? Before I launch into my rant, I need to define a few terms and the scope in order to make sure everyone's on the same page.

Which Influentials?

As I've started investigating Influentials, one thing became immediately clear – lot's of folks have no idea what I'm talking about and because of the unfortunate name of Influentials have quickly made some false assumptions. So, to be clear, when I talk about Influentials with a capital 'I,' I mean the group of folks identified and discussed in the book The Influentials by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. The book discusses 30 years of serious statistically valid quantitative research, conducted by Roper ASW (now Gfk NOP) that has revealed a methodology for identifying approximately 10% of the American population that tend to be leading indicators for certain trends – particularly technology and adoption and political decisions. Now this, in it of itself, is terribly interesting, but Berry and Keller don't stop there.

Ed Keller presented some of these ideas in a May 2004 article in Fast Company.

There are three key reasons why the influentials matter. They are leading indicators of consumer trends. They are consumer advocates. And perhaps most importantly, they are market multipliers.

Influentials also drive marketplace acceptance and rejection.

When your advertising effectively reaches the influentials, your message will go further.

My take on this is that the Roper data undeniably proves that the Influentials are "leading indicators of consumer trends" but beyond that I'm not so sure. There is certainly no quantitative data presented in the book that proved to me that these folks are consumer advocates or market multipliers. While there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this might be the case, for me, the book actually raised more questions than it provided answer on these points. But I digress... back to the definitions.

So, when I mentions capital "I" Influentials, I mean a group of folks that can be quantitatively identified who tend to be leading indicators of consumer trends and who may or may not actually influence others in any significant or interesting way. Please let that sink in before you comment on this – whether or not someone influences you or others has little to do with whether they are an Influential. Yes, I know, the name is terribly unfortunate.

Pro-Life or Pro-Adoption

Politics is sticky and emotionally charged and hard to measure without people attacking methodology if they don't like the results (Oh yeah, well my poll says your poll is wrong!). I find this fascinating but it presents some barriers to objectivity. While there is some wonderful work going on with Influentials and politics I'm going to focus here on the other undeniable and amazing Influentials characteristic – their uncanny ability to predict the adoption of new products and services.

To help with this analysis, I've enlisted Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm philosophy of product adoption. For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about and as a review for the rest of you, Moore proposes that products live and die in the space between the geeky early adopters (that are nice for early feedback but nearly worthless for market success) and the early majority (the first of the mass adopters necessary for product success.) He affectionately calls this gap – The Chasm. I say affectionately because he was so right about this idea that everyone of note has paid him dump-trucks full of money for coming up with the idea. In his book, Moore presented a graphic representation of The Chasm that lots of people have tacked up in their cubicle or at least should have. It looks something like this ...

(click image to enlarge)

The big question I want to ask is where in Moore's Adoption Life Cycle do Influentials live? Why? And what does this mean?

Bellwethers and Bell Cows

I'll use the labels bellwether and bell cow to distinguish those that are early indicators of a trend (the bellwethers) and those that actually lead other into the trend (the bell cows). (Thanks to Dan Nelson for injecting the phrase bell cow into my vocabulary.) Folks often talk about The Influentials with the presupposed notion that they are both bell cow and bellwether. I'm not convinced that this thinking is always valid – although I'll admit it is almost certainly sometimes valid.

Influentials are Bellwethers

As I mentions above, Berry and Keller make a strong case that Influentials are undoubtedly bellwethers. In their book, they show graph after graph where Influentials adopt new products just before mainstream America does. They show this for computers in the home, cell phones, accessing online services and the internet, investing in retirement plans and mutual funds, and online shopping. These trends are consistent for years and quite frankly, are a little spooky. There's no question here – the kids over at GfK NOP are really on to something here (even if they don't have blogs.)

Influentials as Early Majority

Influentials are bellwethers for successful product trends. They are characterized by Berry and Keller as pragmatic and connected. They place more weight on personal recommendation of products (i.e. WOM) than they do on traditional advertising. These facts place them in the Moore's Early Majority. Although they tend to adopt so early that they are some times mistaken for Early Adopters. So you might call them the Early Early Majority.

Why are they not Early Adopters? Well here's what Ed Keller said...

In terms of being market trendsetters, consistently, the influentials tend to be two, three, and five years ahead of the curve. But they are not the earliest adopters. They're the early majority. Early adopters don't necessarily have the broad social connectivity you need to throw an idea forward.

I think he's almost right. According to Moore, Early Adopters do have networks and tell people about the stuff they're trying – anyone who will listen in fact. The problem is that everyone knows that these geeks are early adopters and as such they often seek high risk solutions that are difficult and expensive – not because their good but because they're cool. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, no one listens. What separates Early Adopters from Early Majority is that the Early Majority must see other Early Majority adopting before they adopt whereas Early Adopters want to be first. The Early Majority avoids being first. They don't want the head aches of the bleeding edge.

It's this paradox – Early Majority have to see other Early Majority adopt before they adopt – that creates Moore's Chasm. This is what makes it hard to launch new products.

Unleash the Marketing Hubris Monster

I think the conversation probably went something like this...

MARKETER: We need to get the Early Majority to buy.

MARKET RESEARCHER: Well we know who's going to adopt first, we call them Influentials – but not because they influence necessarily.

MARKETER: Influentials! Great! Let's market to them and they'll influence everybody else!

MARKET RESEARCHER: I'm so misunderstood. I told him Influentials may not influence. I don't understand why everyone is so confused.

MARKETER: Oh don't be silly, of course they influence, they're called Influentials aren't they - just look at this fancy chart of my freakin' brilliant marketing plan.

which probably looked something like this...

(click image to enlarge)

Brilliant, right? Wrong. This type of thinking presupposed that if you hit Influentials with a good enough marketing message that they will adopt and spread the word – instant bell cow. The problem is that Berry and Keller tell us that Influentials are increasing skeptical of advertising and marketers (in fact it's another trend for which the Influentials are bellwethers). Influentials place more weight on personal recommendation, personal experience and investigation than they do on advertising – much more. And Moore tells us that unless the Early Majority – and Influentials by extension - sees adoption among their Early Majority peers they won't adopt anyway.

You can't get Influentials to be Early Adopters, even if you spend a biscillion dollars on marketing. In fact, the more you market to Influentials, the more incredulous they become and the more resistant they are to adopting – at least with your product.

Influentials as Mirror

So if marketing isn't effective with Influentials and they aren't (always) bell cows then why do they adopt first? This is an excellent question and I think Paul Leinberger, a senior VP at GfK NOP, hit on the answer in a quote found in Berry and Keller's book. Leinberger said:

[The Influentials tend to] mirror the behavior of the total public – just out ahead of it.

Remember what Keller said on this matter, that Influentials use "broad social connectivity... to throw an idea forward". I think this is the part that he has wrong and that Mr. Leinberger has right – Influentials mirror the future; they don't necessarily drive it. I agree with the evidence that Influentials have "broad social networks," but I think these networks are used to collect information about new products and services and not always the other way round. Moore tells us that successfully Crossing the Chasm involves creating the illusion that some Early Majority are adopting – this reassurance in necessary to convince other Early Majority that they are past the "bleeding edge" phase of the product life cycle. It's my assertion that these first of the Majority Adopters – the Early Early Majority – tend to be Influentials. Why? For the reasons Berry and Keller tell us they are Influentials in the first place– because of their social networks.

If we were to draw an Influentials/Chasm diagram based on this interpretation, it might look something like this

(click image to enlarge)

The Influentials are aggressive data collectors – they collect from multiple sources and place a high value on the opinions of others (excluding marketers). Through their extensive social networks, Influentials instinctively know when everyone else in on the verge of adopting. It is this sense of eminent adoption that provides the reassurance that Influentials need to adopt themselves. A sense of eminent adoption, it seems, feels much like actual majority adoption to the Early Early Majority Influential. Social networks are absolutely essential in the adoption process but they work in exactly the opposite direction that conventional wisdom dictates. I think Berry and Keller have it right – Influentials tend to be at the center of these social networks – but the information flowing inward is more important in adoption decisions than the information flowing out.

The Influential Paradox

So Influentials adopt first. Then what? We turn to Moore again – the rest of the Early Majority adopters are standing around looking for their peers to adopt. Because their social networks are not as strong they miss the memo – EVERYONE IS ABOUT TO OWN CELL PHONES for example. They know they want a cell phone. They think cell phones are a good idea. They just aren't sure if cell phones are going to be mainstream enough to be safe – what if they don't keep building towers, what if the store I buy from goes out of business, etc. All they need is to see another Early Majority adopter with a cell phone – enter the Influential. And yes, in this small yet important way, the Influential is, well, influential with a lower case i. The Influentials are the quintessential Jones with whom the other Early Majority folk must keep up.

At this point the Marketing Guy usually jumps out of his chair and exclaims "So it IS the Influential I want to target!"

Uh, still no. They won't listen to you. They'll listen to those in their social networks and to other independent information sources that they consider credible. Haven't you been listening? Of course not, you're a marketing guy. Never mind. Stupid question. Forget I asked. Okay – last time through – non-Influentials won't buy until they see Influentials buy but you can't market directly to Influentials as they won't listen to you, so you need to market to everyone else so they tell the Influentials so the Influentials will adopt which then triggers everyone else's adopting. Got it? Good.

This is the Influential Paradox. Influentials don't adopt until most everyone in their social networks are about to adopt. Yet to reach the Influentials, marketers have to go through the social network because Influentials listen to people in their network – not marketing.

This is a little mind bending. Those who know me know that this can only lead to one thing – analogy.

Think of people as a bunch of dominoes. You set each dominoes up on end on a gymnasium floor so as to knock each other down in sequence. All of these dominoes lead to a few key dominoes that you set up very last in order to prevent a premature triggering. Of course, these key dominoes are your Influentials. If they were set up by themselves and knocked down (with no other dominoes behind them) the show would be a little underwhelming. All of the other dominoes have to be set up and ready to fall first before your Influentials do any good. And yes, the Influential dominoes do cause all the rest to fall but only after you've done all the work to set all of the rest of the dominoes up.

In the real world you can tell when you're about to cross The Chasm because the key dominoes are finally set up – your Influentials, your Early Early Majority begin to adopt.

If this is the case, why should marketers waste their time with Influentials? What good are they if you can't convince them to buy directly?

Marketing to Influentials After the Sale

Influentials aren't going to "throw an idea forward" that they don't know to be valid. Their reputation rides on their recommendations and they aren't going to risk that on a product or service they're not passionate about. This passion doesn't come until after they've used the product. A lot of the conversations about Influentials are focused on getting them to buy (which as I've outlined is somewhere between really really hard and impossible) instead of just after they've bought. It's after the point of purchase that Influentials become truly valuable to the marketer. Just like anyone, Influentials want to be right. Marketer's greatest opportunity with Influentials lies in giving them something positive to talk about right after adoption. Great out-of-the-box experience! Great customer support! A product that actually works! What? These don't sound like marketing functions? Well they are are now. For more on the transition from shouting at customers to having a conversation with them see WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz's State of The Industry presentation from the March WOMMA Summit.

The best way to turn Influentials into evangelists for your product or service is to let them make their purchase decision on their own and then make sure they have an I Rule experience after they buy. For more on creating I Rule experiences see Kathy Sierra's excellent Creating Passionate Users blog. I don't think marketers can make Influentials talk about their products – but I think if Influentials are going to talk that marketers can do a lot to help ensure that Influentials say a lot of good stuff.

Find What Influentials Want and Build That

I would assert that a lot of what the WOMMA folks are discussing comes in to play here. Influentials are more about listening than talking. Again, because of their connection with their social networks, Influentials are the most informed of both positive and negative trends; the wants, needs and desires of their networks; and what motivates those networks. It's hard to get an Influential to listen to a marketer but it's easy to get them to talk to a market researcher. Berry and Keller report that Influentials like to share their opinions with others. And as Gfk NOP's Paul Leinberger said – Influentials mirror the future. They are bellwethers. They're are the closest thing you have a to crystal ball. So talk with to them – not to sell to them – but to listen to them, to learn about the future. Once you know where people are going you can be there with a product that meets their needs.

And About That "One American in Ten..." Stuff

For the three of you that don't know, the subtitle of The Influentials is "One American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy." Hmmmm.

Before I rant a bit, I need to disclaim - the ideas presented here are ones that I just came up with. Mostly as I was writing them. I have no research to back me up. None. I'm not a professional market researcher, or marketer, or advertiser, or professor or student of marketing or related topics. I don't work for a consumer products company and I've never attended an AMA or WOMMA meeting. I'm a new breed, what some media guy is bound to call a citizen marketing industry analyst or some silliness. This is just a hobby. An elaborate, sick, hobby.

That said, I think that my hypothesis is more consistent with the quantitative evidence presented in Berry and Keller's book than their catchy subtitle is. I don't think that the Influentials are influential. I think they're influenced. I think nine in ten Americans tell the other one how to vote, where to eat and what to buy. If he or she has a good experience, then the other nine will learn from watching the guinea pig and start sticking their toes in the water. But that probably wouldn't have sold as many books.

This is not to say that I don't believe in the Influentials. I think their discovery is astounding and important – very important. But I think that banging them into the shape of a bell cow because it make marketing easy is flawed and dangerous and diminishes the credibility of the idea. To be fair, beyond their subtitle, Berry and Keller don't wander very far down the bell cow path – but the damage has been done. It's time for everyone to be deprogrammed. Repeat after me – Influentials may not be influencers. Influentials may not be influencers. Influentials may not be influencers. Amazing bellwether yes. Bell cow – maybe - at best but I don't think so – not in the way marketers want them to be.

And How Does This Relate to Blogs?

Of course I have to relate this back to blogs. Call it an obsession. According to Blogads, 70% of blog readers are Influentials. A good number of these maintain their own blogs. The rest probably write comments somewhere – probably about your company or service. If you want to know what the future is, read blogs. If you want to encourage discussions among Influentials then start a blog about your product or service or industry – one with comments. In a post on WOMMA's Womnibus blog, Jupiter Research's Gary Stein reports

the people who post online are your best customers and have an increased sense of brand loyalty. If your company is trying to find and communicate with the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service, look at the people who post about you.

I think this is great advice. Of course, Mr. Stein doesn't have comments or trackbacks on his blog so I'm not really sure how he plans to communicate. For example if I wanted to say that I think that Jupiter Research produces sloppy shoddy products or that they don't practice what they preach, he might not even know about it. If he does find out about it, he then needs to come and comment here – or else folks might not see his response. Or he can post a response on his own blog with a link for his readers to follow here – where they will learn what I've said. Hmmm. Good thing I don't know anything about the quality of Jupiter's products and have no such opinions or else they might be in a sticky situation. – but that's beside the point. The point being, if you care what Influentials think then you should blog and, according to Mr. Stein's philosophy, enable comments - no matter what example he sets.

[UPDATE: Mr. Stein was gracious enough to stop by and offer some insightful comments. Very classy, very professional and quite funny. He's clearly tuned in and listening. I appologize for even suggesting otherwise.]

Niall Cook of Hill & Knowlton has some more good thoughts on this here.

Great. I'm glad we cleared that all up. Thanks for reading. And if you're an Influential, please leave comments – I've got them enabled.

On June 21^st Jeff Jarvis posted the first of his now infamous Dell bashing articles titled Dell Lies. Dell Sucks. Yesterday, Jeff posted a link to this postscript. Today it was also mentioned by Hugh Macleod – whom I recently exploited a bit and am feeling a little guilty about. At the time of the original post, I wondered if we would be able to measure the influence of Jeff Jarvis by using a tool like BlogPulse. Shortly after my post, BlogPulse has a few weeks of indexing problems which prevented me from really following up. But those problems have since been fixed thanks to the hard work of Natalie Glance and the gang at Intelliseek.

So today, I revisited my original idea, what can we learn from Jarvis v. Dell by looking at the blogosphere? In my original post, I graphed the trends for the following three queries:

dell

dell and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

(hp or "hewlett-packard" or compaq) and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

I lifted the list of negative word from Jeff Jarvis's original post. Well, my original trend graph had a few problems. First, I tried to include negative mentions of HP for reference. What I did not think about was that 'HP' also stands for Harry Potter. I have since written a lot about taking care when writing queries to prevent this sort of thing. For this post, I started to try to remove Harry Potter mentions but it was getting a little silly and I gave up. As an interesting aside, you'd be surprised how many folks discuss the famous children's series by frequently using the word "fuck" and it's derivatives. I particularly enjoyed this wholesome, eloquent and insightful review. But I digress...

The second problem with my original trend graph was the magnitude of all Dell mentions compared to negative Dell mentions. This scale really makes it difficult to see change in the negative mentions.

So, today I modified it a bit. I removed total Dell mentions and the HP negative mentions and added in "Dell and Jarvis" mentions. I removed the word "fucking" from my list of negative words because I say too many uses of it in the positive, i.e. "fucking awesome laptop" or some such. I also added a negative Dell comments trends that explicitly contain no mention of Jarvis. Here's what it looks like:

Click here to run for yourself.

Now, the dip between June 20 and June 30 is a little misleading – this is some of the remnants of the technical problems BlogPulse had during this period. The interesting thing here is that once Jeff started attacking Dell – and others started talking about Jeff attacking Dell – the number of people that wrote post about Dell including at least one of Jeff's negative words increased. Furthermore, these are generally not posts that are talking about Jarvis!

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of The Influentials. I think Jeff Jarvis is an Influential by the Roper definition (which I'd argue may not mean influencer). As you can see from the BlogPulse trend, mentions of Dell and negative words were edging up already – although this looks to be exaggerated slightly once Jeff started his attacks. So now for the mind bender – Did Jeff Jarvis cause this trend of Dell negativity or due to his network was he more sensitive to it and simply act (perhaps subconsciously) as an early indicator? In other words, bell cow or bellwether? Influentials tend to be pragmatic, majority adopters – not early adopters – so why did Jeff Jarvis switch to Apple and not HP or some other Windows PC vendor? I would argue that, due to his social/professional network that he inherently knows somethings the the rest of us don't quite realize yet – perhaps that Dell is suffering from growing pains and is starting to show it in the form of service failings at an increasing rate, or that the world has changed to a point that the conventional wisdom that you need MS Office on Windows to conduct business is flawed and that as long as you have a reasonable web browser you can pick which ever computer give you an I rule experience – or whatever.

As a side note, Dell has said that it's policy towards blogs and other online forums is "look, don't touch". This reminds me of my discussions about corporate blogs with the WOMMA crowd. In the Jarvis case, Dell's policy prevented them from being able to respond, defend, and investigate the source of the problem. By the time changes are made at Dell (assuming we know changes are afoot - which we don't) and those changes are seen by consumers and the consumers start to talk about it – will it be too late?

So is Jeff Jarvis bell cow or bellwether? Either way, I think Dell would be better off doing more that just listening.

I was recently pointed to results of a wonderful blog readers survey conducted by Blogads. From what I can gather, the survey was announced on March 2, 2005 here and was open for about a week on SurveyMonkey. There were 30,079 respondents. The survey measured blog reader – not just bloggers – but 20.7% were also bloggers. From a strict market research perspective, the sampling methodology might be somewhat less than scientific, but my feeling is that the results are probably pretty representative of active, adult, professional blogs, i.e. I don't think there are a lot of teen-aged girls journal blogs in there. Here's what Blogads has to say about they're, um, methodology...

How much credence should you give this survey? The survey was designed as much to provoke as to prove. I'll paraphrase what I wrote last year: the survey's responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. Last week I e-mailed roughly 100 of them -- some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads -- suggesting they link to they survey. Some of the bloggers I wrote to (and some I didn't) linked to the survey; some of their readers clicked; some were offended by questions written mostly for Americans; some aspiring respondents were unable to complete Surveymonkey's sometimes buggy forms. So wield a salt shaker as you munch on this data.

The interesting thing to me is that Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, had the foresight to ask the 12 question Influentials battery outlined in the Berry & Keller's book, The Influentials. Later, in this post, he claims that "70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%". I suspect that bloggers are even more influential than the aggregated blog readers. Mr. Copeland also published the results spilt out by political party affiliation here. There was a fair amount of discussion about this study back in March but I haven't seen any that really dug into the numbers. I think there is some significant untapped value here. I'm hoping I can get the dataset from the Blogads folks to further dissect these numbers.

I did come up with this tidbit though...based on the straight tabs Mr. Copeland posted here, and the 2001 Roper data reported in The Influentials, I constructed this chart to evaluate how a Blog Influential might be different than your standard garden variety Roper American Influential.

(Click image to get a better view.)

I'm not sure if Berry & Keller included non-responders in their base (I'm guessing yes, but it's unclear from the books footnotes.) There were 3,881 Blogads respondentns that did not mark any of the 11 Influential indicator questions. So to be thorough, I've included Blogads Blog Readers (All) which includes the non-responders in the base as well as Blogads Blog Readers (Responders) which throws the non-responders out of the base.

First off, it's very obvious that Blogads Blog Readers (BBRs) are much closer to Influentials than they are to the rest of us plain folk.

Second, there are three categories that BBRs lag Roper's Influentials: Attended a public meeting on town or school affairs; Served on a committee for some local organization; and Served as an officer for some club or organization. What's the common thread? Yes, that's right – blog readers are NOT as active locally in the real world. Their activism is likely focused on larger geographies and administered virtually. Tom Friedman would be proud – the Blog Influential's Spiral of Influence is flat.

As I read The Influentials, I began to question the validity of their battery in the modern context. Shouldn't blogging, podcasting or actively maintaining a webpage count just as much as "Written a letter to the Editor of a newspaper or magazine or called a live radio or TV show to express an opinion" ? Why does group participation have to be "local"? For me, the Blogads Survey puts exclamation marks after those questions marks.

For these research geeks among you who are foaming at the mouth about statistical validity consider this – in one week, by sending out about 100 emails, Henry Copeland surveyed 30,079 consumers, found 21,000 Roperish Influentials and collected their demographics and opinions. Last year he surveyed 17,159 in a similar week. By this time next year, he'll have a tracking study. Oh, and he's been giving away the data for free.

Wow, there's been a lot of great discussion about my recent post Discovering Blog Influentials. It's been discussed by Hether Green at BusinessWeek Online's Blogspotting, Rex Hammock at RexBlog, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dina Metha at Conversations with Dina, Mitch Ratcliffe at RatcliffeBlog, TSMI's Trade Show Marketing Report, Melanie Isaac, Fritz at Curch SEO, Jason Timmermans at Echo Generation and, of course, by Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion.

I'm anxious to explore this idea further and start discussing exactly how we might go about identifying Influentials. In reading the comments and discussions around this topic, I think it might be equally important to better define Blog Influentials. I see a lot of confusion and false assumptions here - even on my part. But alas, I'm traveling and probably won't have time until next week to really delve.

But in the mean time, I would like to point everyone to a recent post about Influentials on BuzzMetrics' blog. They ask the tough question - "Roper's Influentials are still alive and well - but do they matter?" This is a really interesting question.

Another point I want to explore - Berry & Keller's Influentials are clearly early indicators for coming trends (30 years of research shows this). Is our assumption that Influentials catalyze the trend that follows their early adoption a false one - they might simply be an early indicator because they find new stuff and discover the benefits before the rest of us - but they may not actually influence our adoption. If this is the case "Influentials" might be a misnomer that skews all of our discussions in the wrong direction. More to come on this when I get home.

Intro to The Influentials

I've been reading the book The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. This book is based on 30+ years of market research and presents the concept of The American Influential. The basic idea is that there are a simple set of survey questions that serve as a litmus test for identifying Influentials – a group of about 10% of the American population. These Influentials act as stunningly accurate bellwethers for all kinds of stuff like technology adoption and value trends. It's very interesting and compelling stuff.

Bloggers and Influentials

While the idea of some people being “influential” is not terribly unique – this is what Seth Godin calls sneezers and Malcolm Gladwell subdivides into connectors, mavens and salesmen – Berry and Keller go beyond simply musing about the idea. They prove that these Influentials are quantifiable and identifiable, and demonstrate how.

As I read Berry and Keller's description of the Influential, I can't help but notice the similarities to bloggers (or at least the ones that I read – primarily professionally focused and/or motivated who provide editorial insights in addition to links, etc.) In fact, by virtue of blogging, bloggers exhibit several influential characteristics like being connected with many people, being technologically literate, having active minds, trendsetting, and belief in growth and change. There are other characteristics that I also see in the bloggers that I read. For example, Influentials are focused on family. In the last week we've heard stories from Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra (followed up here), Jeff Jarvis and Robert Scoble (mp3 podcast with his son Patrick) that illustrate their family focus.

I constantly have to remind myself that this book was written in 2002 – before blogs had any significant public awareness or momentum – it is not about bloggers and doesn't even mention the word “blog” (or “web log”) - yet, without every using the word, it screams BLOGGERS.

I was particularly struck by this quote...

Getting through to the Influentials is not easy. They're hard to reach. They are among the most critical citizens and consumers in the society. They hold business to higher standards, are harder to persuade, see through hype more easily, and drive a harder bargain than the average American.

Hmmm. This easily could've been written by someone at Dell about Jeff Jarvis. Sure it's easy to email Jeff Jarvis and he will probably even respond, but try to change his mind. Can you imagine this conversation, “Hi Mr. Jarvis, this is Dell and we're listening now...” Dell would just be setting themselves up for another 3 or 4 weeks of ridiculing posts.

Certainly Jeff's not the only critical one. Steve Rubel has started to spot Vigilante Marketing blogs. Speaking of Steve Rubel, he's jointed Mr. Jarvis and switched from Microsoft to an Apple and has mentioned it prominently, if politely, on his blog. Each of these guys have thousands of people reading their posts everyday. This brings comfort to Geoffrey Moore's early majority and speeds chasm crossing. This, in part, is what makes them Influentials.

Then there is this gem...

Knowing what [Influentials are] talking about and where they influence opinions in the society doesn't mean an advertising copywriter will be able to speak persuasively. In fact, without a broader understanding of Influentials, such as their expectations of business, the copywriter will likely have a very difficult time.

This is important. Bloggers, at least those that are indeed Influentials, are difficult to reach through advertising! This is why I think RSS Ad Sense, cookies in RSS feeds and similar nonsense is, well, nonsense. Blogs are a customer driven conversation. If a blogger allows commercial interest to unnaturally interfere she loses credibility. If companies think blogs are important, then they should respect the bloggers and listen, optionally engage intelligently and individually – but they shouldn't try to persuade through advertising, as the old joke goes, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Okay, Some Bloggers Might Be Influentials, So What?

In my experimentation with BlogPulse, and my recent discussion of the base, I've begun imagining a new blog trending tool (or the evolution of an existing one, hint, hint), one designed to listen to bloggers that are also Influentials, or what I'm going to start calling Blog Influentials.

So what would a Blog Influential trend tool like? It would have to have a way to set the base to be known Influentials within the area of interest – instead of a doomed to fail attempt at the whole blogosphere.

Let's outline a hypothetical example.

A report published early last year by the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, together with RoperASW (employer of Berry and Keller) and Nielsen//NetRatings titled Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign concludes that “Online Political Citizens Are Influentials.” Knowing this, a political campaign might use blog trend data from blogs identified as “Online Political Citizens” aka Blog Influentials to glean insights and spot trends earlier.

Do blogs contain this type of political trend data? Can it be mined from blogs? Natalie Glance over at Intelliseek and Lada Adamic of HP Labs wrote a paper titled The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog that make a strong case indicating yes – on both counts. This report was looking retrospectively at the presidential campaign to validate the idea – but there is no reason the same techniques couldn't be used to look forward.

So imaging a blog aggregator sucking feeds from say 1,000 political blogs written by folks identified as “likely Blog Influentials”. Now, we trend – no spam, no new blogs added (unless prequalified). Voila, instant-up-to-the-minute Influential insights focused on our topic of interest.

Market Research of the Future

The interesting thing here is that the IPDI at George Washington U conducted 1,392 online surveys and 1,029 RDD sampled national telephone surveys to confirm their findings. This is expensive market research as is only a snapshot of the respondents views. Comparitively speaking, blog aggregation can be very inexpensive – especially if companies like BlogPule and IceRocket continue to improve their trending tools and/or provide access to low cost aggregated data sets. Perhaps more importantly, monitoring Blog Influentials can provide continuous data.

In the future market researchers may call Intelliseek, Technoratti, IceRocket or BlogLines to buy six months worth of political Blog Influential posts, or Female 18-25 Blog Influential posts, or Blog Influentials who have mentioned iPods at least once in the last six months, etc. in much the same way they buy targeted sample lists today. Another product might be just the list of feed addresses (in OPML or some such) for a particular demographic. The researcher could then create their own aggregator, indexes, searchers and trend data. This would eliminate the bias introduced by indexing techniques selected by the blog data vendor – like the removal of English noise words.

Conclusions

It's worth noting that this is example where the size of the whole blogosphere doesn't matter. All that matters is whether there are enough Blog Influentials within our topic of interest. Without looking, I know that we have enough for politics, technology, teens, business, blogging and marketing. According to the MIT Weblog Survey, female bloggers outnumber their male counterparts 7 to 4 so maybe blogs are a good source of female Influentials.

So to summarize:

(good) bloggers = Influentials

To stay ahead of the curve:

1. Find your Blog Influentials.

2. Listen.

3. Repeat step 2.

So how exactly do we identify Blog Influentials, well, that's another post. And to those of you who still think that no one reads blogs I have two points: 1) You're reading this and it's a blog and 2) even people that have never heard of blogs read blogs.

Yesterday in Stop the Blog Statistic Madness! I touched on something I've been meaning to blog about for a while now – your base. I'm not talking about the base of the classic game Zero Wing, I'm talking about the base in the market research sense. For those not privy to the secret vocabulary of market researchers, base is a not-so-fancy word for denominator when calculating percentages of the occurrence of a particular characteristic or response in a sampling of people.

To help illustrate this let's look at an example. Let's say you conduct a political survey by telephone by calling 1,000 registered voters in a particular county and ask them who they are going to vote for in an upcoming election, Mr. Berry or Mr. Kush. Let's say the results of the survey are as follows:

313 Respondents say they are voting for Mr. Berry
397 Respondents say that are voting for Mr. Kush
290 Respondents say that they are undecided

Now, if the election were held on the day that the survey was conducted, who would you say has the advantage? The right answer is whose ever campaign is paying for the survey and the reason is the base.

If the Berry campaign commissioned the survey, they might issue a press release stating “Kush carries less than 40% of voters”. This obviously misleads the reader into the false assumption that Berry is carrying over 60% of voters. In this case the Berry campaign uses all of the survey respondents in the base.

(397 Kush voters / 1000 respondents in the base = 39.7%).

The Kush campaign on the other hand, might report “over 55% of voters support Kush”. In this case, the Kush campaign wants to underplay the magnitude of the undecided vote so they remove the undecided voters from the base.

(397 Kush voters / (1000 respondents – 290 undecideds) = 55.9%)

For marketers, advertisers and market researchers, base definition is equal parts art and science. While the above example is a jab at the questionable practices of modern political campaigns, limiting the base to a particular subgroup of respondents is often valid or even essential to produce meaningful results. If our survey was commissioned by a non-partisan organization, the reported results might look like this:

55.9% of decided registered voters say they will vote for Kush
44.1% of decided registered voters say they will vote for Berry
29% of registered voters say they are undecided

Here we see the base clearly defined for the reader (i.e. “of decided registered voters”). Sometimes, as in this case, it is useful to change the base depending on what question you are trying to answer. Once this idea seeps into your brain, you should start confronting every percentage statistic with the magic base question: “Of what?”

Okay, quiz time. According to BlogPulse, on July 13, the word “mortgage” was included in one half of one percent of blog posts.

Did you ask “of what?” Good. You passed. So what's the answer? Here the base contains every blog post that BlogPulse collected and indexed on July 13 including all of the blog spam, all non-English blogs, all link blogs, all the garbage that somebody stuffed into an RSS feed that day and shoveled into BlogPulse. For searching this is okay – not optimal – but okay. For market research it is abysmal. In our political survey example we called only registered voters in the geography of interest. What would the results had been if we called 1,000 people from all over the world regardless of age or voting status? Certainly less meaningful. Yet this is what we tend to do with the blogosphere.

Other than vanity or novelty why would anyone what to measure the percent mention of a particular term of EVERYTHING collected by BlogPulse (or any other search engine)? I can't think of any.

What is valuable is what the casual user thinks they get from BlogPulse, namely, a base that includes only legitimate blogs in their native language. What we need from BlogPulse (or anyone else who implements trending) is the ability to define the base in addition to our search term. There are lots of base definitions that I'd like to used given the opportunity. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Language – of all English blogs

• Age of Blog – of all blogs that are at least six months old and have posted within in the last 30 days

• Blog Host – of all Blogger blogs, of all Live Journal blogs

• Geography – of all blogs in Oklahoma, of all blogs in the UK

• Demographics – of all blogs written by women between the ages of 25 and 45

• Blog Status – of the Technorati 100, of all TTLB Crawly Amphibians

• Blog Type – of all personal blogs, of all commercial blogs

• Blog Focus – of all political blogs, of all technology blogs

In reality, you'd almost always want to combine one or more of these but the point is that you should never want to measure all of the blog post on the planet – at least not for the purpose of market research. Think back to my “decline of god” discussions. If we were to use English language non-spam blogs as a base, I don't think we would see a decline in “god” – or at least one substantially less dramatic. For almost everything, it is meaningless at best and misleading at worst to use the whole blogosphere are your base. Unfortunately, this is all that BlogPulse – or anyone else I know of - currently offers (at least for free). BlogPulse is saying “All your base are belong to us.” ...er, so to speak.

[DISCLAIMER: I don't want to beat up BlogPulse here, as I've said before, their service is remarkable and generous and they are way ahead of anyone else with their Trend feature. Internally they perform these types of base adjusted analysis for paying customers (I gather but not from direct experience). ]

With all of the hoopla about Google Ad Sense for RSS and the jockeying for the right to proclaim “we index more worthless RSS fed SPAM than anyone else” I think we're missing the point. The value of the blogosphere to commercial interests is not finding a new way to be heard but discovering a new way to listen.

If you are thinking about measuring impressions of RSS feeds – you're looking in the wrong end of the telescope. Blogs are a feedback mechanism. Bloggers are bellwethers. By monitoring the blogosphere, you can measure the effectiveness of marketing but blogs themselves are not good marketing channels in the traditional sense – if it looks like advertising no one will subscribe.

So how do we listen? We listen by finding and measuring the blogs that represent our customers or our potential customers. The other 13.98 million blogs that BlogPulse and Technorati are tracking don't matter – they just muck up the base. Sure, companies need to blog – but the focus should be on catalyzing the conversation, not dictating it. It has been said recently that the blogosphere is a focus group – when's that last time you'd tried to advertise in a focus group?

There are people blogging about your company right now. Find them and listen. And forget the other 13.something million.

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion blogged today that post/day being the stat to watch to measure the growth of the blogosphere. I'm not so sure that it's that simple. As Steve mentioned, and as we've explored here, blog spam is on the rise. You add to this fact that the major blog search engines are all in somewhat of an arms race at the moment – all trying to become the next Google or Yahoo! In this regard, it is in the search engines' best interest to collect the most posts from the most blogs – no matter the quality. Another problem with this perspective is that we all agree that one post wonders shouldn't really count as “blogs” but we are still prepared to count their posts.

The reason we are all trying to estimate the size of the blogosphere is to should credibility or viable as a new media. We try to show sustained growth to prove to traditional media that this is a trend and not a fad. I for one think it is time to simply accept that blogs are real and significant – like we've done with the traditional web and turn our focus to trying to measure the impact, the effect or the influence of the blogosphere. How many six month old, 1 year old, 2 year and 3 year old live blogs are out there. These numbers would be unaffected by one post wonders and spam blogs that tend to be in operation for a very short time.

If we all think blogs are real and significant, let's measure them accordingly instead of trying to sensationalize the statistics.

In Blog spam is responsible for the decline of god, I discusses the affect of blog spam on trending data. I also hypothesized that an influx of non-English language blogs may also be impacting trend data in similar way. In this post, I'll further explore this hypothesis.

Non-English Noise Words

In previous articles we've discussed English noise words or words that are thrown out of the index process. In order for this process to work, the index has to be dependent on a specific language or set of languages. We've proved that BlogPulse applies an English noise word filter by searching for words like the, of, and a, to – searches for these words yield no results. However, when we search for noise words from languages such as German, Italian, French and Spanish we find that similar filters are not applied to these non-English posts as can be seen here:

This approach actually has a negative impact on performance (one of the primary reasons for using noise word filtering) and gives slightly preferential treatment to non-English posts in the index. A search on BlogPulse for "la OR le OR the" for example will yield primarily non-English results since "the" is thrown out altogether.

For the purpose of identifying non-English posts, however, the inclusion of non-English noise words in the index is somewhat beneficial. We have to be careful to choose words that are reasonably unique to the language we are trying to identify. For example, the word "uno" is valid for both Spanish and Italian and as such cannot be used to uniquely identify either. After some playing around, I settled on the following word sets for each language I wanted to identify:

German: einer, eines, einen, dass, wie, und, sein, dich, durch, wegen, meines, und, ein, zwei
French: avoir, avez, vous, tout, alors, deux, pourquoi, votre, tous
Spanish: esta, como, tenga, tiene, usted, entonces, quiero, porque
Italian: avere, lei, tutto, poi, mio, avevano, buono, persone, quello

[DISCLAIMER: I'm not a linguist and I only speak English so these lists are based on translation websites like this and lists of noise words like this. Also, I'm not trying to capture everything, I'm just trying to identify trends and illustrate techniques – the queries I'm using are far from comprehensive.]

I tried to pick words for each language that are both unique to that language and occur with high frequency in the conversational writings in that language. I'm particularly interested in blog posts that are entirely non-English and not simply English posts that contain mentions of foreign words or phrases. To accomplish this I employ the same "a AND NOT b" pattern that we used as a basic spam filter. In this case a is the occurrence of at least one of word from our language of interest and b is our cut down version of our common English word list. I have further removed "I" and "my" from the common English word list because I felt that they might match something in one of our four non-English languages. So our final query for German blog posts looks like this:

(einer OR eines OR einen OR dass OR wie OR und OR sein OR dich OR 
durch OR wegen OR meines OR und OR ein OR zwei ) AND NOT (have OR you
OR all OR then)

And the BlogPulse Trend for all four language look like this:

As you can see, there was some pretty huge growth early in the year but it has begun to flatten out. We also see that German and Spanish are significantly more popular that French and Italian which makes sense (although this could have as much to do with the words I picked as anything).

As to our original hypothesis, this data indicates that growth of these non-English blogs might be responsible for diversifying the blogosphere early in the year but are quickly approaching stasis. So what about other non-European language like Russian, Japanese and Chinese? Well this is a great questions and one that reveals a serious limitation of BlogPulse. While BlogPulse definitely index these Russian and Asian blogs, there is no way (that I've been able to figure out) to build queries with their unicode character set through the BlogPulse interface. This means that we can build the same noise word lists that we did with European languages because we can't even represent their letters in BlogPulse queries. [Natalie: Any suggestions here?]

Language Diversification's Affect on Brand Trends

So how does this affect brand trends? Let's look at the "Coca-cola" brand. This brand hasn't been attacked by spammers and is internationally recognized so it should be a good test case. We'll use our a AND NOT b pattern to yeild this BlogPulse Trend:

At first blush, mentions of "coca-cola" seem to be constant over the last six months, but closer inspection reveals that there is a decrease in proportion of English mentions while there is an equal increase in proportions of non-English mentions. This is an indicator that English and non-English speaking bloggers tend to mention Coca-cola about the same amount. In market research terms, this measure might be a suitable substitute for awareness.

Language Segmentation

So how about using language to segment brand awareness? By ANDing each of our languages' common word list with our brand of interest we can create a sort of language segmented buzz index. Let's look at German and Spanish for example. Here's a graph showing German Coca-Cola mentions versus Spanish Coca-Cola mentions.

To create an index, these values should be normalized against the total Spanish and German blog posts – which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader – but if you recall, German and Spanish posts were pretty even so based on quick inspection, I'd guess Coca-Cola is more popular among Spanish speakers that it is among Germans.

Bringing It All Back To God

So, just for fun, let's put mentions of "god", our spam words query and our European post all on the same BlogPulse Trend:

Hmmm. The steep decline in proportionate mentions of "god" in the early months of the year were (partially) due to an influx of European blogosphere imperialists. No one every expects the Spanish inquisition. It's also interesting to see how the European posts are a near mirror image of "god" mentions and they seem to have hit some magic flipping point in early May. I have no clue what this is, but I think it's worthy of some mulling.

Natalie Glance from Intelliseek set word that BlogPulse data from July 1 forward should be good. The index process should be working for new blog posts as it is collected. They are still working on the data from June 20 through June 30. This is taking longer than they had anticipated but they still expect full retro-indexing of all posts collected during this period. Thanks Natalie for the update and to everyone else at Intelliseek working on this issue.