Blog World Expo: Tracking Reputation In The Blogosphere

Franki and I are here in Las Vegas, attending the Blog Word Expo.  Our goals are to:
1)Meet other bloggers to build our network
2) Find possible employees to work in our social media marketing firm.
3) Find out if any companies are here that like our unique take on working with social media.

The first session is on Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere (more on this at brandstorming).  The session is run by online monitoring companies, Umbria, Collective Intellect, and filtrbox.  They are doing a decent job of explaining that.

Howard Kaushansky is talking about moving past monitoring, and into gaining insights from your customers.  That's a pretty powerful statement.  Rather than just looking at whether someone is talking about your brand, you can use the blogosphere as a giant focus group.  Your customers are telling you what they want.  Are you listening?

Update:  The question of influence comes up, and the panelists aren't that happy with internet rankings.  They specifically discuss Technorati and Alexa and Compete, but PageRank fits into this too.  A corporate type asks the question of engaging with these people.  Do you legitimize them?  They are clearly thinking of influence in a old style corporate sense.  Your online reputation is different than that of your offline reputation, and it's important to recognize that in an era of search engines.

I'm not a banking industry expert, but I do show up on the first page of Google for Wells Fargo Business Line of Credit as an unhappy customer.  That only happens because I've been fortunate enough to build up a high-ranked blog or two that is content-specific. How then would you rank my influence?

As Robin points, out influence is not static.  A blogger may have influence on a single topic and a single moment in time, which is what makes this so vague.

Good panel.  I'm going to go up and chat to these three.
Questions to ask them:
Are you getting blowback from people who don't like to be monitored (Howard says no, in fact most people who respond like that they are paying attention.)
Is there an algorithm to track influence?  No.  There are alogrithms they use internally, but they work in conjunction with eyeballing the site.  Robin says eyeballs, but they also have internal). Howard says they do have algorithm.

Comments

[Jonathan Schwartz]

I have developed a tool, much like digg, but instead of rating the content, I focus on the author. It's called repuRate. A great way to track online reputation. I think that the blogging community, along with many others, is a perfect use of the application. Check it out.

http://www.repurate.com

- Jonathan