Comments on: How do you measure the authority of a blog?

By: David Phillips

David Phillips — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:57:56 +0000

Typical of the PR industry, come up with black art reaction and ignore the research – soooo professional.

The research work presented by Bruno Amaral this July (bledcom.com) is based on blog discourse. It shows the proof of concept in analysis of (blog) discourse for the creation and development of relationships (oh, and for those who want to know buying and selling is part of a relationship for lots of people as well).

What, it seems, this debate might be about is the extent to which there are common tokens identified and expressed with mutual understanding as to the values that are attributed to them by actors which will ensure relationships are created, re-enforced and extended.

One way of doing this is to use semantic analysis to identify commonly held and agreed values (which is what Bruno did).

This may provide the same answer as a mash up of inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations, number of readers/subscribers, words published per day, number of comments etc.

The one thing we do know is that one approach is definitely built of sound science and three years of solid, peer reviewed, research and the other may not be.

If one was betting the survival growth and profitability of your company on the methods used, there might be a reason for choosing one methodology over another.

But, hell, I am an academic most of the time and only a part time practitioner.

By: Andrew Bruce Smith

Andrew Bruce Smith — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:28:24 +0000

I’d argue there is a difference between relative and absolute authority (or influence). And that’s why this whole area is full of challenges. Example: Google PageRank attempts to rate pages in an absolute way. But that assumes that there is a general league table of influence, The world isn’t like that. One person may have huge influence in one area and not in another. How do you work out how and what they may influence?

In trad B-to-B PR terms, the FT has general “authority” – but relative to the specific aims and goals of a client? It might – it might not – or rather the level of “authority” it might command relative to a particular set of circumstances will clearly vary.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:50:08 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by speedcomms: How do you measure the authority of a blog? http://bit.ly/2EuTQk
– @wadds #pr…

By: Robin Grant, We Are Social

Robin Grant, We Are Social — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:02:48 +0000

Rest assured some of us have developed quite robust ways of doing this…

By: Steve Earl

Steve Earl — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:23:36 +0000

Why does the authority of a blog matter, unless it generates financial gains or other commercial/personal objectives? That’s what needs to be measured. Authority only matters if people act upon it, not if they just gas on about it.

Has anyone tried to measure the authority of a newspaper, beyond The Sun self-professing its electoral pull of course?

By: katie moffat

katie moffat — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:23:03 +0000

I’ve just been involved in setting up a Top 25 blog list so spent a lot of time looking at different metrics including inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations and number of readers/subscribers. A combination of these plus consideration of engagement (comments etc) can give you a good indication of authority.