Onalytica in BBC piece on blogging

BBC has a story about blogging today. They use the Dell Hell case as an example.

Onalytica is mentioned along with other fine companies from the industry.

Is Edelman winning the PR battle for Walmart?

It looks like Edelman is winning the PR War for Walmart.

Figure 1 (below) shows the number of blog posts about Walmart in the previous 30 days along with the accumulated sentiment (Net Promoters Index).

Some 2 weeks ago something interesting happened: The number of daily posts went up and the majority of the posts became positive.

I wonder what Edelman’s magic formula is because it sure is working.

“Statistically Improbable Links” or “Who has got the attention of bloggers?”

Most of our clients are interested in understanding what has the attention of bloggers who blog about a particular issue.

One way of looking at this is to analyse where bloggers, who blog about a particular issue, link to; and then identify the most popular destinations.

One problem with that approach is that lots of bloggers link to the same places; no mater the topic.

Link destinations popular with bloggers as a whole include FeedBurner, Blooger.com, WordPress, Technorati, etc, etc – as well as general stuff making news and waves.

One way we approach this problem is consistently providing valuable results to our clients. We call it “Statistically Improbable Links” or SILs.

SILs work in the following ways: By identifying where bloggers, who blog about a particular issue, link to – and use the rest of the blogsphere as a base line – you arrive at a list of links who are exclusively popular with bloggers who blog about the issue in focus.

Let me give a few examples:

Topic blogged about: Vodafone
Blog filtering: English language only
Geography: Worldwide
Period: Feb-Mar 2006

The 2 top links are links to Technorati (the tag link for Vodafone) and Vodafone’s corporate website, followed by

RIM's 3G Blackberry launch imminent
Astraware (a site that produces games for mobile phones and PDAs)
Open Letter to Vodafone (a disgruntled customer voicing his grievances)

By keeping an eye on the SILs of a topic one can effectively keep an eye on what has the attention of the bloggers who blog about this topic as well as the stories gaining traction with the group.

Occasionally the top SILs can be bring out a smile.

The top (tied with a few others) SIL for the period Feb-Mar/06 for blog posts containing the name of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is this article.

Personal Video Recorders in the UK - Influential Authorities

In the previous case studies in this blog we have mostly analysed influence on issues of a political nature or of general public interest.

As part of a project to demonstrate how influence measurements can be used in relation to consumer goods we decided to analyse who are influential authorities on Personal Video Recorders (aka. PVR) in the United Kingdom.

Figure 1 (below) shows the list of influencers and their relative influence. (For an in-depth description of our methodology please read this previous analysis)


If you wanted to spread the gospel about products or services in the PVR space you could try to go directly to Guardian, Business Week or other well known media brands who write about the PVR topic. But knowing how these publications gets flooded with similar pitches the chance of getting noticed could be small.

A more effective strategy may be to turn your attention to some of the smaller more specialised publications like C-Net, Silcon or Wireless Digest Blog who carry a substantial influence on the topic in the UK – not at least because they are quoted by large media like Guardian.