How Many Blogs Should You Read Every Day?

For marketers with little time on their hands, there is a tendency to focus on either a small set of blogs to read every day or to rely on RSS aggregators or blog search engines to find important new stories. Each strategy has its attractions and its problems.

Most people can easily find a dozen or so blogs that focus on most of the topics of interest to their industry or customers. If they only review this small set of sites every day, they could limit their research time to several hours of reviewing posts and following links to other interesting sites. But this strategy is only successful if those sites focus on all of the topics, products and people related to your business, which is unrealistic. The downside is that you may miss some important discussions that were not picked up on these selected sites.

Another strategy is to use blog search engines and RSS aggregators daily to collect new posts. These services do some heavy lifting for you in terms of organizing posts so that you can quickly scan titles and abstracts. Search strings can be set up so that you can look for key terms across a broader array of blogs. The problem of course is that you end up scanning many more sites that contain posts with no relevance to your business. You also have to set up a long list of keyword searches to try to find stories about specific issues. Again, this strategy can work but it takes a lot of time and effort every day to peruse the many relevant posts and sift through those that aren’t meaningful. The upside of this approach is that it is currently free to get started with many of the good blog search and RSS Aggregator services available such as Technorati.

Business Week wrote about many different tools in their cover story on blogging this week. The authors, Stephen Baker and Heather Green, did a great job summarizing the rapid growth of the blogosphere and the tools used to build and search blog sites, but what they failed to mention were the new solutions like Cymfony’s Digital Consumer Insight (DCI), that use a very different approach to monitor and analyze millions of blogs, message boards and user groups every day. They had an awful lot of ground to cover so I hope this is an area that they can get to soon. One of their readers, Nombert DePlume already made that request in a comment on their new blog site Blogspotting.

So for his benefit and many others who have recently come to know Cymfony, let me describe our solution briefly. Cymfony's approach to reduce the review time for executives down to minutes is to look for new posts across a wide array of online content that are directly related to their company, brands or industry. The posts are automatically analyzed for contextual information that would provide clues to valid mentions of the company or brands. But DCI goes even further. It also identifies posts on sites that you probably wouldn’t have found using the first two strategies. With an automated analysis approach, you do not have to limit your scope to tens or even hundreds of sites. The software does the work to identify what’s important to focus on. It also finds stories that you weren’t looking for in sites that you never thought to look at.

As an example, we have a demo site focused on the technology industry. We often find posts about people’s favorite new laptops, operating systems and consumer electronics. People regularly express what they love, hate and desire. It makes sense that we find many comments on product review sites, usenet sites and technology oriented blogs. But we also find important comments on many other types of consumer sites such as automotive forums and blogs. A hot discussion on one BMW site is compatibility issues of Bluetooth enabled devices with the new BMW models. In a thread on www.bimmerfest.com a contributor shared a letter he received from BMW North America explaining that "Your Palm Treo 650 will probably not ever be able to pair with the Bluetooth system in your bmw ." Other people responded with similar integration troubles but they also described work-arounds.

If you were the brand or PR manager for either the Palm Treo 650 or the BMW X5, you would definitely want to know about both the problem and the solutions so you could share helpful information quickly to consumers, partners and your colleagues.

By looking outside of a narrowly defined sphere of 'top' blogs, you can discover great nuggets of information by people who are excited about new features and even marketing promotions. This insight provides you with an opportunity to get more compelling messages out to new audiences by co-marketing with other industry leaders. It also provides a new dimension to measure the effectiveness of your communications strategies.