Benchmarking the influence of a blog

Another interesting example of how influence has developed over time comes from looking at the blog of Iain Dale. Mr. Dale is a prominent political commentator whose blog has gained quite a following.

The graph below shows the influence of Mr. Dale’s blog when the topic is “David Cameron”. The baseline is again the influence of the BBC (same context).

We can see that the Influence of Mr. Dale’s blog in February was roughly 8% of that of the BBC.Since then his relative influence (compared with the BBC’s) has grown steadily – until the end of June. Here it took a bit of drop.

However, it is likely that the drop was attributable to a surge in the general influence of the BBC on the topic of David Cameron.

Using the contextual influence of The Guardian as a baseline for Mr. Dale’s blog reveals that he is still doing well. (See below).Benchmarking influence aside it is actually interesting to see how much influence a blog can carry on a major topic. Mr. Dale’s influence on the debate on David Cameron currently stands at about 15% of that of the BBC and just under 60% of that of The Guardian.

Benchmarking Influence

Measuring how the influence of a stakeholder develops over time is a topic of great interest to many of our clients.

Some clients are interested in understanding the effects of a marketing/PR effort. Others may be interested in identifying new rising stars among the influencers.

However, benchmarking influence over time can sometimes be a bit tricky. Because influence is relative we have to benchmark the influence of a stakeholder relative to one or more other stakeholders.

Using InfluenceMonitor I took a look at how the BBC’s influence on the topic of climate change has developed.

As a baseline I used the influence of IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Figure 1 (below) shows the relative influence of the BBC as a percentage of that of the IPPC since March 1st this year.

The BBC used to be more influential than IPCC on this issue, but around the end of April its influence dropped below that of IPCC. We can see this as the relative influence drops below 100%. Notice, however, the spike in BBC’s influence at the very end of the graph. The increase in BBC’s influence is a good illustration of how a heavily discussed article can dramatically increase influence.

On the 10th of July BBC published an article about a new study that (apparently) concludes that there is no link between the cosmic rays from the sun and global warming. (See partial screen shot below).

As can be seen from the graph below, this article caused a spike in the number of references and inbound links to the BBC, in the context of climate change, over the following days.