PR Week Taking Q's for Nick Denton

PR Week is taking questions for Nick Denton, whose company publishes popular blogs like Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, Kinja and Fleshbot. They are taking questions via email. PRWeek.com will post the full interview on Thursday May 20th. When it hits I will blog it.

Next week this blog will feature a Bloggerside Chat Q&A with Denton's arch rival, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc.

Wired Looks at How Word Gets Around

Wired News has a story called How the Word Gets Around.

"The blogosphere has a strange ability to push a seemingly obscure idea into the forefront of people's minds in a heartbeat. How this happens is a bit of a mystery. Sam Arbesman wanted to know how it works, so he created a meme and set it loose.

The Brandeis University senior had been reading various studies that looked at historical data on the way information works its way across the Internet. But he was more interested in seeing if he could figure out, in real time, the trajectory of a meme once it hits the blogosphere. So he came up with a plan to find out. He called it the Memespread Project.

The initial analysis of Arbesman's Memespread Project is posted online (PDF).

Academic Tracks How Weblogs Influence Media Coverage

When thinking about the concept of Micro Persuasion, it's only natural to wonder if all of this is really important in a PR person's day-to-day job or just something that's merely conceptual right now. After all, we still need to get back to pitching reporters or writing press releases once we finish reading this post. We have internal or external clients to please and bills to pay.

You already know my opinion here, so instead I thought I would share two new academic papers that shed light on the topic. One explores the blogosphere's influence on mass media, while the other gives us a bit of demographic insight into where bloggers live.

First, Kathy E. Gill, a member of the faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington has published a fascinating paper entitled "How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?" (PDF). She is presenting this research at the 13th Annual World Wide Web Conference in New York in a day-long workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem on May 18.

UW's Gill reviews ways to measure the influence of the blogosphere on public opinion and mass media. She covers anecdotes of stories becoming big in the blogosphere and then being (re)introduced into mass media and reports on the traffic blogs receive and their integration into political and news sites.

On a related note, Jia Lin & Alexander Halavais, students at the SUNY Buffalo School of Informatics, are developing a method of mapping the blogosphere. They have published a short paper (PDF) that lists the 50 area codes that have the highest concentration of bloggers who use either Livejournal and Diaryland, two popular blog hosting services. Halavais has posted more information on his Weblog as well.

Taken in tandem these papers point to bloggers' powerful influence on the press and where PR pros can find them in the wild.

All About Wikis

“Wikis” are Web sites that can be collaboratively edited by a group of collaborators. Common Craft describes wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English.

MediaPost Meets "The Influentials"

MediaPost today takes a look at how marketers are increasingly using the online medium to reach Influentials.

Tobi Elkin writes:

The term influentials was coined in Jon Berry and Ed Keller's: "The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy." Research by NOP World, RoperASW, the Online Publishers Association, and its members including New York Times Digital and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, has outlined the behaviors and web media habits of influentials. The research also suggests how marketers might best reach them.

But this is the best little nugget from Tobi's piece:

"In 1977, 67 percent of people polled in a research study said they were moved to take some sort of action by word-of-mouth influence. That's compared to 2003, when the number skyrocketed to 92 percent. Talk about the viral nature of word-of-mouth via the web. Think blogging, email, chat rooms."

Personal journalists, Webloggers and professional journalists all have a big impact on Influentials.