Buzzgain » BuzzGain

Who should you target as for PR efforts?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:26:29 +0000

If you are a Web 2.0 or a social software startup trying to either launch a product or your company, getting relevant Buzz or Press is absolutely important. Long known to be the most cost effective means to generate awareness among potential users, PR gives you the sense of “arrival”. Notice I said cost effective NOT least expensive.

If you have been in the market over the last 2-3 months you already know that the best Web 2.0 PR folks, like Jeremy Pepper or Brian Solis (Disclaimer: Brian’s a cofounder at BuzzGain) are either already taken, or they are very expensive (most charge $10,000 minimum per month, or freelancers who charge $5000 / month). So if you have read about Do It Yourself PR and think that might be the best way to save some cash, the question becomes who (all) do you target to get good coverage.

The usual answer I hear is TechCrunch. They are no doubt the best, but you cant put all your eggs in the TechCrunch basket. Make a good target list just like you would for potential investors or customers.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out these folks should be on your list (In no particular order).

1. ReadWriteWeb

2. Mashable

3. Chris Brogan

4. Scobleizer

5. Jake McKee

6. Jeremiah Owyang

7. Webware

8. Louis Gray (Disclaimer: Louis is associated with BuzzGain)

9. Giga Om

10. VentureBeat

The best case situation is to brief them all. But if you dont have time, (which is strange, but not out of the ordinary) then how would you select which ones to focus on? Also remember each of these folks likes exclusives, so it does not hurt to focus on a subset each time.

If you follow the simple rule of thumb that you shoud focus on the ones with the most traffic to their site, I contend you will not have achieved your purpose – which is to get the MOST number of people to effectively have a chance to learn about your offering.

So what metrics do we apply? As we talked about blog authority and influence before, there are a whole host of other criteria, but here are the 3 that I would consider the most important.

1. Sentiment: Of the lot, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Chris are the most positive. Their article sentiment ratio is around 50-65% – very high and even with things that are not great, they accentuate the positive.

2. Outlinks: The number of links back to your site will give you a chance to convert awareness from PR into “potential leads” or prospects. The best link to post ratio (# of links per post) come from Louis, VentureBeat and GigaOm.

3. Engagement: Thanks to tagging, bookmarking, sharing Google feeds, tweeting, etc. you have the potential to reach a larger audience than visitors to your blog. So this extended audience should be counted into the overall metric for an individual’s reach. For extended reach Scobleizer, Chris and Louis are the best. Not only do they have a great number of followers on Twitter, friendfeed, delicious, etc., but their users are more engaged, clicking on links sent by these three than others.

So, if you had to make a call on exclusives, no doubt, focus on Rafe Needleman, Om Malik, Michael Arrington. Your best bang for the buck (for actual users) might come from some of these others.

Social Media Stastics: The million users mark

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:26:19 +0000

Jeremiah talked about what’s on the mind of several startup Marketing VP’s and Venture Capitalists yesterday. We get requests daily from many of the same on another question that’s top of mind. The magic Million users number.

So using BuzzGain Analytics dashboard, we the “All Star Cast” of Web 2.0 companies – StumbleUpon, Upcoming, Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog and Twitter. The reason we chose them was 3 fold – the year the started, their relative success (either acquisition or tremendous traction) to date and our ability to discern and analyze quality data from that property.

The oldest company in the list is StumbleUpon (2001) and the youngest is Twitter (2006). The one with the most number of users is delicious (9.54 Million) and the least is Upcoming (230K).

In terms of fastest growth to a million users it has been another player in an adjacent space – Skype.

This is explained more clearly in the “network effects” and the “viral nature” of the product. Its useful for the individual (like Upcoming) but awesome in a network (Skype).

Of these 6 players the fastest growing has been Twitter.

Where should you really being spending your marketing dollars during a downturn

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:21:33 +0000

Having a limited or constrained marketing budget is a good thing. In fact I am not sure I have heard of any company having a “spend as much as you want” marketing initiative.

Broadly speaking I categorize marketing spend into 4 simple categories for the sake of discussion.

1. Events: Seminars, webinars, conferences, etc. Industry events, trade shows, and your own companies events.

2. Web Marketing: Website, blogs, Search engine optimization, Search Marketing (or Pay Per Click).

3. Advertising & Brand: TV, Radio, Print media, etc.

4. Public Relations: Analyst relations, press, bloggers, social media, etc.

Lets make the assumption that during a downturn, you have less money but a little more time – meaning instead of 60 hours you are willing to work 70 hours a week

The number one thing that goes out the window during tough economic times is generic brand advertising. That’s the place I’d cut first. Not because its not useful or not easily accountable, but its the most expensive.

Events also tend to be a lot more expensive and since attendence during a bad economy is worse, I would recommend looking at cutting that next.

Within Web marketing I suggest a double down on search engine optimization and reduce your overall PPC (again since its expensive).

Public realations and communications is one of the better areas to spend money on. Why? Its not as expensive, the returns (if you have web based PR, even better since they generate leads not just brand awareness) are tangible. That’s apparently the same view of the folks at Sequoia who cautioned their entrepreneurs to buckle up for a protracted downturn.

In a downturn, aggressive PR and Communications strategy is key.

In fact, I’d suggest Do It Yourself PR, which will reduce your cost and keep organic traffic (hence prospective customers) coming to your website.

Retweet on Twitter: The ripple effect of the echo chamber

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:21:07 +0000

Retweet Want to really estimate the power of an influencer – good,bad and otherwise? Lets take a case study.

Our friend Jeremiah Owyang, digital media influencer and analyst at Forrester posted a blog entry on Retweet and the power of word of mouth. To summarize:

[Information within Microblogging communities like Twitter encourage rapid word of mouth –of both positive and negative content]

In the post he talked about how information spreads quickly with Retweets. Essentially on Twitter if you “RT” or “ReTweet” someone you repeat what they say presumably because you agree or disagree with them OR if you want it to be amplified to your audience of followers on twitter.

Using BuzzGain we tracked usage of the Retweet before and after Nov 23rd. About 16,500 twitter users follow Jeremiah and so his influence in twitter is relatively large.

After Nov 23rd usage of Retweet among the top 50,000 Twitter users has increased by ~7%.

Great you think, Jeremiah well done.

Not exactly. I will chalk this as a not so positive trend. Why?

If you drill down deeper, tweets with negative sentiment (we measure sentiment as positive, negative or undetermined) has 45% more retweets than positive or neutral ones.

This is consistent with the view that bad news travels faster than good. This may also be primarily because of the Mumbai blasts and it could be an anamoly I agree, but you cannot equate a Retweet to someone linking to your blog on a post. How is retweeting different then?

1. Immediacy: Given the real time nature of twitter versus the 3-5 min it takes to blog link to someone, the amount of time to think, process and react to what’s being said is a lot less. If you tweet information that’s not factual or plain incorrect the person retweeting has a lot less time to fact check.

2. Value add: In most blog posts that link back to a post (including ones that just provide a list of links with delicious tags for example) there is a sense of “aggregation” or value add to the post. In most posts with link back there’s a lot more value add in the form of a different opinion or counter example. With Retweets, there’s ZERO value add. Its a plain and simple echo. You can argue there’s value in an echo, but I think its useless for most parts.

3. Reinforces a heard mentality. Retweets are an inaccurate measure of ripple effect. On average less than 0.35% of the top 50,000 twitter users posts are retweets. So it should have a relatively small effect right? No. Unfortunately, even though the next 350,000 followers of the top 50,000 are smart, connected, and influential individuals in their own right, their retweets to posts is close to 0.7%. Think about it. Double the top 50,000. This is a herd mentality pure and simple.

Do I think retweeting is going away. No.

Do I think its a measure of Word of mouth influence. Maybe.

Do I think it complicates the measure of word of mouth online to a point of making it useless. Absoutely.

Image credit: Wikipedia

More PR bashing by Jason

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:17:12 +0000

Besides Jason who talks about “Do it yourself PR” there are several others who claim the best thing to do is to fire your PR firm, pitch yourself and never hire a PR firm in the first place.

I have to say there are great PR folks and there are awful PR folks, and then the useless middle. If you can get a great PR person (note I did not say firm) to partner with, do it. If not, Do it yourself PR.

What we can tell you about BlogWorldExpo without attending it!

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:17:08 +0000

Blog World Expo recently concluded their Las Vegas Confab with over 2000 participants (includes bloggers, speakers, exhibitors, event staff, etc). There were 256 speakers and panelists. We did some quick analysis of BWE08 using our solution to give you some interesting metrics and some questions to consider.

1. Approximately 43% of BlogWorldExpo attendees are users of Twitter. This includes people that tweeted about it during the days of event. (we took only folks that had more than 3 tweets and included the offical tag (BWE08), and unoffocial tag BlogWord and Blog Expo). About 6% of BWE attendees took photos and either uploaded them to Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug and Zooomr. If other photographers took photos but did not upload it, we could not track them.

2. The top 3 most active sessionsduring BWE were 1. The keynote (with State of Blogosphere by Richard Jalichandra), 2. The TectSet Party and 3. Evening of the last day – after the event & sessions completed. So, its obvious people made a lot of friends, and said their good-byes and were still trying to keep in touch with the folks they met during the conference.

3. The sentiment of the users got better with the days. Clearly 80%+ of the folks loved the show at the end of day 3, compared to 56% on Day 1. The negative sentiment was the most on day 2 – I am still trying to figure out what session it was that contributed to it.

4. AlthoughTechnorati claims over 70% of bloggers are male, on twitter that’s not the case. Based on our numbers, full 43% of twitter users who attended BWE were women, compared to 57% men. We arenot the only ones to question Technorati’s survey information.

5. Finally photos. Collectively over 2848 photos (as of last night) were shared on Flickr, Facebook, Zooomr and SmugMug. (If you did share elsewhere, we can tell you uploaded photos, but cannot tell it was a part of BWE unless its been tagged appropriately). Flickr got the lion’s share of BWE photos followed by Facebook.

Some questions:

1. What happened on Day 2? Why did sentiment get worse?

2. Is there a better participation of women on Twitter? Or are Technorati’s numbers flawed?

3. I was surprised by the number of Twitter users who were are BWE. I thought it would be higher. So, if you did attend, did you not tweet during BWE?

If you attended BWE, please enlighten us.

List of 21 blogging objectives and how to measure them with examples

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:11:17 +0000

My friend Jeremiah sent a tweet about a discussion he had with his friend, about goals for their corporate blog. I did some research and found some list of goals without measurable objectives. So I thought it would be best to create a list.

As I started to write this list, I found it to be more of a why blog list than a list of goals for your blogs. Also since there are personal and corporate blogs, I put a P against goals that are personal in nature and C against those that are more corporate.

Feel free to add / change etc. The best post on blog metrics actually comes from another friend Avinash Kaushik.

1. (P,C) Be a thought leader: E.g. Charlene Li.

Measure: # of comments, incoming links to your blog, Google Pagerank

2. (C or P) Generate more leads: E.g.HubSpot

Measure: # of unique readers, # of Pageviews and conversion

3. (C,P) Generate awareness in the market of your products / services / your personal brand: E.g. Chris Brogan

Measure: # of unique readers

4. (C, P) Get to know other thought leaders in the space: E.g.Don Dodge

Measure: # of incoming and outgoing links, # of comments / post

5. (C) Humanize your company or Give a personal face to your corporation:Lionel Menchaca

E.g. Measure: # of comments per post, post frequency

6. (C,P) Get to network with other like-minded individuals: E.g. Paul Dunay

Measure: # of conversation “ripples” – How many people digg you, bookmark you on delicious, etc.

disclaimer: Paul is an advisor to BuzzGain

7. (C) Communicate frequently to your audience – (customers, partners, employees, recruits, etc.): E.g. GM Fast lane

Measure: # of RSS subscribers, # of RSS subscribers that read your post (audience reach), audience growth

8. (P) Generate a source of income from your writing: E.g. Darren Rowse

Measure: # pageviews, CPM, Monthly revenue

9. (P) Obtain feedback from your audience (readers, customers etc.) on new products / services: E.g.Guy Kawasaki

Measure: # Comments, Audience participation on polls

10. (C, P) Make sure you appear blog appears for specific terms on organic search (Search Engine Optimization): E.g. Aaron Wall

Measure: Google pagerank, # of search terms your blog appears in the top 10 organic search results

11. (C, P) Find and share new information / content with your audience: E.g. Scobleizer

Measure: # of RSS subscribers, # of conversation “ripples” – How many people digg you, bookmark you on delicious, etc.

12. (P) Give an avenue to your creative writing (hidden talent: E.g. Dooce

Measure: # of conversation “ripples” – How many people digg you, bookmark you on delicious, etc.

13. (C, P) Be recognized as a source of breaking and exclusive news and information: E.g.TechCrunch

Measure: # pageviews, Audience reach in target (of your potential readership, how many are actually reading your posts)

14. (P) Keep in touch with friends, family and acquaintances: E.g.Balancing Motherhood blog

Measure: Email responses to posts, Discussion at family gatherings

15. (C, P) Win awards / recognition for your writing : E.g.Mashable

Measure: # of pageviews, audience growth

16. (C) Make sure you let your customers and partners know what’s going on in a quicker fashion than press releases: E.g. Jonathan Schwartz

Measure: # of RSS subscribers, # of incoming links to your blog

17. (C,P) Increase engagement with your readers: E.g. A VC (Fred Wilson)

Measure: # of incoming links, # of conversation “ripples” – How many people digg you, bookmark you on delicious, etc.

18. (C, P) To get your point of view on topical trends, out to your audience: E.g. Mathew Ingram

Measure: # of incoming links, # pageviews

19. (C, P) To encourage ideas, conversation and dialog: E.g. Paul Graham

Measure:# of comments / post, source of your incoming audience, incoming search term links

20. (P) To offer an alternative source of information for niche topics that get ignored by main stream media: E.g. Shai Agassi

Measure: audience growth, target audience reach

21. (C) To offer a means for customer support, and proactive issue resolution for known support problems. E.g: Webshots Customer Support Blog

Measure: Audience repeat visits, Time to resolve queries, # of support calls avoided due to proactive communication

Understanding the Media Map

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:07:08 +0000

I could sense that my 7 year old’s curiosity quotient was increasing by the day. Before she could broach the question, I said, “I know you heard me mention the word media map and you are keen to know about this new jargon, you have stumbled upon”. Her wide smile was taken as a big Yes

In Public Relations, It’s useful to have all the information in a media map in a tidy format. But Media Map should be the beginning of the pitch research process, not the end. After you discover what types of media your stakeholders are listening to, it’s time to determine who the key influencers are within those media segments. In other words, find those particular journalists, bloggers, analysts, consultants, etc. who write about or comment on your industry and whom your prospects and customers trust. There are two simple ways to do this.

One: read, read, read. Read a variety of publications and learn as much as you can about the publications relevant to your business. Pay attention to the bylines and take note of the people writing about your industry.

Two: Locate the journalists covering your beat. An excellent resource for finding journalists is through Twitter. This is a very Web 2.0 method and one that is updated often. The two Twitter pages to try are Media on Twitter and Twittering Journalists.

In today’s media landscape the professional blogger is gaining relevance within the news making community. In fact, some blogs are better read than many traditional newspapers and magazines. Make sure that both traditional media and social media is an integral part of your media map. You can check out Buzzgain’s Do it Yourself PR to learn in detail about understanding the media map.

How to define “authority” on the web – 21 metrics from BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:55:02 +0000

Chris had a very interesting post on how does the web define authority.

In that he questions “It would be easy to bog ourselves down in definitions of the word “authority” itself. In this case, let’s agree that the working definition as it pertains to this topic is: a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web. Is this close enough? How would you change this?”

How do we define authority though? BuzzGain does it with 21 metrics.

1. Blog content and tags for a vertical – in this case social media. Its an exhaustive list of about 25 to tags ranging from facebook to personal branding and from social news to blogging & blogs. The more you write about these topics the more likely you are an authority on some or all of them. You are more likely passionate about them, which is a start for being an authority.

2. Location of posts on SERP (Search engine results page) related to tags on Google Search. The higher you appear, (i.e. if you come on the first page of the SERP, you are higher than on the second page and so on) the more authority you have.

3. Frequency of posting. More frequent the better obviously.

4. Traffic & Visitors: Both website visitors and # of RSS subscribers define traffic for a blog. We track them both to assign a metric number between 1 and 5. More traffic = higher the authority.

5. Engagement of readers: How many comments do you have per article. How many overall? What is the time to comment – i.e. How quickly does someone comment as soon as you post an article? More engaging readers define a more social experience and a higher authority.

7. Quality of posts: Thanks to our partnership with AideRSS, we can tell which posts of yours are of high quality. This usually means which ones got “Dugg” or “Bookmarked” and how many comments exist on that post. Posts that have the highest quality are the ones we consider towards your authority.

7. Twitter: Of the 126 “socially aware” applications, this is the King Kong of social connections. We track # of followers, your “tweet frequency”, and the # of @ replies to your tweets. The assigned number for your Twitter authority comes as a combination of these characteristics.

8. Social Bookmarking: Currently we support Stumbleupon and delicious although we have been looking at diigo, Magnolia and Furl. More bookmarks and more followers indicate a sense of higher authority.

9. Social News: How many followers you have on Digg and the velocity of your digg posts to their overall appearance on the top of the digg homepage.

10. Social Network presence: This is obvious but the more “in the field” links to other folks you have on LinkedIn and Facebook the higher you rank in our authority list. We are looking to support other social networks, but these are the primary ones in our belief.

There are 11 other metrics that define authority, which I will mention briefly since this post is very long already. They include presence in blog directories, blog search engines (IceRocket, for e.g.), # of your incoming links, Google Pagerank, presence on photo sites and other microblogs, frequency of sharing items on Google reader, whether you podcast and videocast, # of times you guest blog on other “authority blog” and frequency of your interviews on other relevant / related blogs in your field.

image credit: Allposters

Top 3 things we have to fix in BuzzGain: Feedback from 153 early adopters

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:20:16 +0000

BuzzGain Thanks You

We had a terrific launch with some good coverage at Mashable(Thanks Jennifer), TechCrunch, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan, Nate Ritter, Belinda Ang, Scott Schnaars and a host of others.

We had over 6583 tweets covering BuzzGain during the two days of our constant press coverage.
We had an 892% increase in registered users, and a 17% conversion rate to customers willing to pay for the service.
Over 35 blogs, news sites and social media influencers covered our story in 27 unique websites

So what are the top 3 things to fix in our product:

1. More intuitive and easier to setup campaigns: Over 28% of people had problems with setting up a campaign (shame on us). Since many folks were not able to view the video, they used quotes as in “Keyword”, or ‘Keywords’. Yet others used to many keywords (over 7 makes the system slow) and others would use generic keywords such as video or games etc. to get too many unrelated results. To setup a campaign in BuzzGain, you need just a Campaign name and a set of keywords separated by comma. As in SocialText, Wiki, Ross Mayfield . This will look for results with any one of these keywords. For excluding some keywords we go to point #2.

2. Support for boolean operators such as AND, NOT and OR in our campaign management. It was important for most folks to be able to have some support for keywords to supress or to have a more sophisticated campaign keyword list. Essentially to ask for SocialText and Wiki but NOT Ross Mayfield.

3. More intuitive user experience overall: This was split down the middle. Either users LOVED the UI or hated it. There are several things we can do to make the overall experience more intuitive which we will roll out in the next few weeks. This includes a guided wizard like experience and easy to understand icons.

Thank you for all the feedback and the requests. Brian and I truly appreciate all the feedback, please keep them coming either via email (mukund at buzzgain dot com) or via the support pages.