Chapter 4 Notes

Chapter 4: Monitoring the Blogosphere

• Organizations care about what the media says about them
• Monitoring media is important, and today that means monitoring blog
• Often bloggers are the first to right about new information
  o Monitoring blogs allows you to know what others are saying about you
  o Monitoring blogs can assess buzz around an organization
  o Monitoring blogs allows an organization to know when it should contact someone directly

Respond to negative statements, inaccuracies, misinformation, and attacks

• Honesty is a must on a blog…if not, you will be corrected
• Blog swarm – many blogs, start posting negative material on a subject and feed off of each other’s energy
• In response to negative comments, it is important to choose the right form of response
• If your company has a blog, use it to address an attack
• If the initial attack is malicious in nature, you always have legal to turn to

Other will monitor your blogs

• Most blogs are extremely public
• It is possible to have a private blog (firewall or other limited access)
• Sometimes, when it comes to blogs, slips are made:
  Inappropriate company information is released
  Inappropriate personal topics are discussed
• Company specific mistake – a blogger releases information that is not supposed to be public information
• Many bloggers have been fired for releasing inappropriate personal information on a blog
  Because of the nature of blogs, many bloggers feel more comfortable behaving inappropriately on a blog

Search engines

• Search engines are very popular for monitoring blogs, several types exist like general purpose search engines, blog specific search engines, and RSS search engines.
• General purpose search engines – for example Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These engines to show Blog results but are not optimized to search blogs. It’s important to know the difference in paid placement and organic results. Paid placements – usually show at the top of a results list or on the far right of the results screen. Organic – natural results driven by search. Two specialized search engines for checking on the blogosphere are Technorati and Daypop. Along with the two listed above, other general purpose search engines are described as examples.
• RSS search engines – search for information in RSS feeds. Examples are Google Blog Search, Feedster, 2RSS.com, and Blogdigger. Most blogs implement feeds.

Monitoring specific blogs

• Sometimes bloggers don’t want to search but rather read specific periodicals, newspapers, and books.
• There are many differences in traditional print media and blogs:
  There are a lot more blogs compared to other media types, this problem is often solved by bloggers using “feedreaders” or “newsreaders”

Summary

• Because competitors are doing it, it is very important to be blog monitoring

Ideas from this chapter for our presentation

• I liked his many examples of companies and how they have passed / failed in their use of blogsSometimes what he is saying seems very common sense to me, like “it is important to monitor blogs to understand what people are saying about your company”.