Here is our updated list of the top 150 social media marketing blogs.

As you’ll see, the ranking, computed with the last 6 months data is pretty   stable, with Chris Brogan moving back to the first position.

O Blanchard, J Baer and J Cass are  showing some impressive progressions over the period.

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If you want to know more on how we map communities and how to market to industry influencers,  we’re organizing a  FREE webinar next week and would be very happy to have you with us, click here to register:  Webinar

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Here is the new Top 150:

Here is our updated ranking of the top Social Media Marketing blogs.

It looks like the ranking is very stable and there isn’t much learning into it .

So, we are also publishing an extra post with interesting data on our top 5. We hope you’ll like it !

Here is the list:

Here is an updated list of the Top150 blogs for SEO.

Lists are always  subjective,  even when created automatically.  In our case the use of machine learning carry this  subjectivity.

Just that this subjectivity is systematic. We could use a similar wording to define strategy: subjectivity made systematic hence actionable … and definitions are always subjective too.

Anyway, one interesting thing about this list is that, in contrast with the Top 150 for social marketing, the top blogs are not written by individuals or when they are, these individuals are not strongly “branded” personally.

Here is a list with previous ranking on the right, enjoy !

Here is the new ranking as of April 20th.

Few observations on the trends:

• The top of the list is very stable with J Owyang still leading the pack.
• Clay Shirky made the most significant gain (+99), mainly thanks to his brilliant post on the future of newspapers (888 comments and counting !). It’s amazing that this article does not comply to best practices in blogging etc:  it’s too long, has no images nor video… but it’s a such a great article with deep content. Clay only posts once a month but it’s always brillant !
• “Search” blogs seem to be on the rise in the social media landscape (see lines 51, 66, 96).

Any feedback on the relevance of this list is warmly welcome as an opportunity to progress:  eCairn team.

And should you need to develop social media marketing services (branding,  intelligence, research, outreach, advertising, social media optimization) where relevance is key, we’re always happy to do an 1/2 hour free  demo !

After the Top150 Social Media Marketing Blogs & the Top150 SEO/SEM blog, we bring your another top 150: The Top150 blogging blogs (i.e: blogs that offer tips on how to blog: write, build traffic, make money…)

For those who are wondering how the ranking is decided, go here. It’s not rocket science.

Ok, now here’s the list:

People who fear approaching people sometimes turn to photography. Similar fears are to me driving many marketers to an overload of graphs, reports and  monitoring solutions.

This is great but at this end of the day:

• there is nothing social in you reading a graph
• the sentiment towards a brand goes way beyond number of mention of your brand name.

Social media is scary and here are some tested tips on how to fight this fear:

- Education

This is step one. Companies  should just “give it a try”, create content, blogs, Facebook groups.  Select a few people in their marketing department and give them the time and tools to do it right.

There will be mistakes down the road but the learning is worth the trial.

You should also study best in class in your area and learn from people who have done it before. There are tons of success stories, and tons of good blogs on the topic ,  books, so ample opportunities to learn.

- Affirmation & Preparation

This is a critical piece.  You need to know who you want to engage with, for what purpose, for what expected results and you should  have a reasonable understanding about what you can contribute.

Let’s take  us (our company)  as an example, here is how we proceed:

1. PURPOSE: Our objective is to raise our influence in the social media marketing community
2. WHO: We have collected 1000+ relevant blogs along with tweets, diggs, youtube , Q&As… relevant for social media marketing and have organized the blogs by influence. That’s our target
3. WHAT: We have identified a few topics where we believe we have something to say that’s of interest for our target community. As an example “Measuring Influence”, “Strategy and Positioning”, “Segmenting communities”. While reading we also identify other interesting topics to consider and even features for our own product.
4. HOW: We, as a team, read – almost- everything written by the top influencers and we filter the conversations on other blogs about our key topics. We engage in these conversations, with a preference for engaging on “medium influential” blogs. We develop content in our blog about these topics.
5. MEASURE: Our key metrics are the influence of our blog and the number of social media marketing bloggers with whom we have build a  relation ( exchanged emails, direct link in LinkedIn or Facebook – for the one that don’t do automatic acceptance). OK we can’t call them at 3 in the morning.
6. SENTIMENT: we also track mentions of our company name in these blogs and twitter .. and do manual sentiment rating.
7. TIME / INVESTMENT:  each member of the team contribute up to 1, 1 and 1/2 hour a day to this initiative.

Structuring this as a project ensures that this under control and that we stay focus on the objective.

So far our blog has moved up quite a bit ( from rank 700 to 190) and we do connect with influential bloggers, following up with demos, getting feedback and often good leads.

- Worst Case Scenario

Sometimes, looking at the worst case scenario can help fighting the fear. Well, the good news is that the worst case scenario already happened so there is nothing  more to fear.

While companies engage in sophisticated “monitoring”, “sentiment analysis” , 10’s , 100’s to 1000’s of their employees blog, tweet,  build social networks and engage in conversations that often are work related/expertise related.

I just worked for a major brand and  spotted posts like: ” I should not say that as I worked for their competitor but this  product rocks”  or  “this does not represent the view of my employer”… Sometimes it takes a few more clicks to get to someone Facebook profile and get similar information.

Times of top down controlled communications will not come back. The way out of chaos is for companies to organize the participation while keeping the personal touch. That in itself is a major challenge.

So,  “feel the fear and do it anyway”.  That’s what courage is all about !

Last November, we (ecairn) published a list of Top150 Social Media Marketing Blogs.

As promised (yes, we’re late ), Here below is the updated list as of February 2nd along with info on trends.

You can also find this list along with a few gadgets at http://tops.ecairn.com

A quick warning:  some of the top variations up/down come from people moving their blog from one url to another.  ( we’ll try to fix that in the coming months).

Last November, we published the list of our Top 150 social marketing blogs.

Using the same approach and algorithm, we have just published a similar list for SEO/SEM: Top 150 SEO /SEM Blogs

We have also added some useful features:

- you can search within this pool of  blogs only using our custom search engine

- you can download our widget that expose the combined feeds of these wonderful blogs and add it to your pages.

We will improve our lists over time and are open to any suggestion you may have.

Enjoy !

Last week’s post dubbed ‘Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs’ generated several thousands visits in the last 2 days and a slew of comments.

This short post is attempting to answer most of your questions, starting with two words of advertising

eCairn and Social Relevance

eCairn is a software startup with a differentiated approach and technology around social relevance. We help marketing teams and agencies to focus and cut their relevant slice of the blogosphere, build and execute engagement strategies (learning, buzz, outreach, and advertising) and measure progress towards their social engagement goals.

Mapping a community is not an easy thing and, if you’ve looked at lists and catalogs that pop up all over the web, you know what we’re talking about. That’s where our Conversation(tm) solution comes in and let you rank your own list. If your interest is to get a similar list on a different community or vertical, contact us from this blog via the “Contact us” page.

Measuring influence – Algorithm, Approach

Our list is built from our own definition of the social media marketing community and our technology to identify and aggregate relevant bloggers within that community – which we will not disclose.

The influence algorithm we use is purely link based and pretty straight forward. Its uniqueness is that we’re only counting the links within the dataset of 1000 relevant blogs, both blogroll and direct links. We have tried a few algorithms playing with

• differentiating blogroll versus direct links,
• weighting the links based on the influence of the «source»,
• weighting more reciprocical links,
• counting links at blog or post level.

We did not find major differences on the top of the list whether using one algorithm or the other. The list is very dynamic however and watching it for a couple of weeks, we have even seen changes within the top 4 (these top 4 tend to be really stable).

The list is subjective and brought few questions and surprises – btw influence is subjective. It’s actually the list of influential bloggers in the social media marketing community more than a list of social media marketing blogs.

Agreed that R Scoble or Search Engine Land as an example, do not talk much about social media marketing. But, these bloggers are heavily referenced by people that are influential in social media marketing and hence make it to this list.

We welcome suggestions and feedback and will incorporate them for a future release.

Do we read the blogs ? (twitter question)

The short answer is yes. We read our « star » blogs (top influencers plus a few others) on a daily basis and we also look for conversations on all the 1000 blogs that discuss our favourite topics.

Next steps

We plan to deliver some additional value; as an example we are seeing that the social media interest that started with PR and SEO is now expanding to product marketing and strategic marketing. We will look into measuring this.

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/ Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:51:19 +0000 ecairn http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/11/06/top-150-social-marketing-blogs/

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If you want to know more on how we map communities and how to market to industry influencers,  we’re organizing a  FREE webinar next week and would be very happy to have you with us, click here to register:  Webinar

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We just implemented our “influence ranking algorithm“.

So we ran it against the ~1000 ’social media marketing’ blogs we monitor on an ongoing basis (along with tweets, forums, Q&As…).

We will publish the list every other month (please follow our Twitter account : ecairn for early notice).

Below is the top 150 list, you can also find it at http://tops.ecairn.com/ along with other top 150 lists covering other areas of marketing.
( When compared to the Adage Power 150 reference, remember we zoomed particularly on social media marketing. Plus the list contains only blogs written in English).

Here is an OPML Link, from Matt Shaulis, to the list if you want to import in your reader.