What's fascinating the Ad Age Power 150 marketing bloggers?
Seth Godin had a wonderful lament this week about Pulitzer’s edict that only commentary from sites that are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting” is eligible for its journalism prize. Bloggers need not apply; such a shame. Blogs fascinate us; they tap into our innate desire to express our opinions, hopes, and contentions. Blogs are the present and a vista into the future, and few in the generations to come will mourn the passing of print megaliths built around the primacy of the local paper. Much to the chagrin of a certain teacher in China, it will be impossible to shake the internet addiction.
We just finished off an ambitious project to hold a mirror up to the marketing blogosphere. Using our proprietary text mining technology and natural language algorithms, we undertook a systematic analysis of the dominant concepts being discussed, dissected, and analyzed on the top blogs in advertising, marketing, and media, as compiled by Ad Age in its Power 150 blogging list.
We fed the RSS feeds for all the constituent blogs into our application, which spat out a thorough semantic analysis of the top concepts being discussed and the concordance or collinearity between the top concepts. So, for example, we can tell how frequently bloggers were discussing “twitter” in the context of “branding.”
Like Google’s year-end Zeitgeist 2008 project, consider this a mirror on the web’s consensus, though perceived from a different vantage point, a different angle.
It’s been a crazy year, a historic and unprecedented year. A year of massive financial upheaval that has shaken the very foundations of American capitalism and gutted many former titans of American finance and industry.
Below are charts detailing three of the top concepts in this slice of the blogosphere in the last four months: Marketing, Media, and Brand. Within each of the tables are the concordance items, which illustrate how often terms are mentioned in conjunction with one another. So, for instance, when bloggers were talking about the concept “Marketing” in November, they were doing so in reference to the concept “blog” in 51% of the cases.
There are four themes to bear in mind when considering these charts: 1) the unprecedented economic situation and its impact on ad spending; 2) failures and cutbacks among traditional media powers, coupled with an election season where the bloggers played a game-changing role; 3) Facebook, MySpace, and Google trying to one-up each other in the game of data portability, with much bloviating also on the viability of social networks as ad platforms; 4) oscillating fascination with Twitter in some blogging circles, though this report unfortunately doesn’t take into account the blog buzz surrounding the real-time coverage of the Yahoo layoffs.
Please feel free to jump in and share your thoughts!
