We recently covered in our blog wherein we covered various publications declaring 2004/2005 as the year of the Blog.
Steve Broback writes about his analysis comparing Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft to the top PR firms in the world. The result may serve to surprise all.Excerpts:
Test 1: Pages that specifically mention the organization/author:
On typing the following names into google and noted the number of pages that were returned. List is sorted by most to fewest responses. In the case of complex names s few words were used as possible in order to benefit the PR organization.
• Robert Scoble: 199,000 mentions
• Burson-Marsteller : 108,000 mentions
• Porter Novelli : 83100 mentions
• Weber Shandwick Worldwide : 81,300 mentions
Test 2: Inbound links detected by Google:
• Robert Scoble: 13,900 inbound links
• Burson-Marsteller : 899 inbound links
• Edelman Public Relations Worldwide : 376 inbound links
• Hill & Knowlton, Inc. : 330 inbound links
Test 3: Site traffic as ranked by Alexa:
• Robert Scoble: 7,136 alexa ranking
• Edelman Public Relations Worldwide : 107,735 alexa ranking
• Burson-Marsteller : 108,025 alexa ranking
• Fleishman-Hillard Inc. : 127,165 alexa ranking
Steve concludes, despite issuing tens of thousands of lengthy press releases containing marketing copy, it would appear that Google has deemed Scoble’s short, conversational postings as more relevant. Notice that the only PR firm on the list with an RSS feed/blog is Edelman, and in site traffic they came in second place. More evidence that the “blog advantage” is real.
My Take:While this is indicative of the power of bloggers without doubt, this may not be an indication of bloggers superiority over PR firms all across- an experiment with bloggers from other companies - say Jeremy Zawodny(Yahoo) - only for illustration may definitely throw a slightly different result. May one or two years down the line, what is true for scoble's blog superiority in reach over PR firms may be true for other corporate bloggers as well. The real question though is how should PR firms better leverage the blogosphere? And does the blogosphere represent an opportunity for savvy PR pros to better reach out to their customers ? measuring the effectiveness at internet promotion simply by comparing Scoble's site vs. a PR firm's site is at best a unidimesnional approach and definitely not a scientific way to assess PR reach. In the businessworld the real test could be a comparison if Scoble were to promote a product on his blog vs. the results of a PR firm's promotion on the internet. Also curious to know even in this case has Microsoft done away with its PR firm or reduced dependency on PR firm. Enteprises may begin to look at blogosphere as an additional medium for PR and may not entirely do away with PR
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