Social Bookmarking Sites: An Essential Online Marketing Tool

According to my e-mail service provider’s reports, a lot of subscribers to my newsletter skip my opening essay each week and going directly to a little item called “Just for Fun” that I include in every newsletter. Just For Fun is a link to a funny, offbeat or just plain bizarre item that I find on the Web.

It may look like I spend hours each week looking for source material, but my real secret is StumbleUpon, which is a popular example of the new breed of social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking is one of the hottest group activities on the Internet, and it’s capable of driving enormous amounts of traffic if your site is lucky enough to be selected. Over the next couple of issues of my newsletter, I’ll look at some of the more popular bookmarking sites and explain how they work. Although I caution against relying on raw traffic stats as an indicator of success, I recommend you make social bookmarking a staple of your promotion efforts.

Bookmarks have been around since the early stays of the Internet, having been included in the earliest browsers. Bookmarks are an easy way to keep track of information you’ve seen and want to return to, but as a standalone tool, they’re not very interesting.

Where they do get interesting is when you share your bookmarks with others. As I pointed out in an earlier newsletter, social bookmarking is kind of a human-powered search engine. As more and more people bookmark and comment upon the same content, a richer description of the content emerges. Also, web pages with a lot of votes can rise up the popularity stack, making them more prominent and more useful to interested people. Social bookmarking sites aren’t nearly as exhaustive as search engine indexes, but every single entry has been vetted by a person.

StumbleUpon is one of my favorite examples of this genre. Once you become a member, you can install the StumbleUpon toolbar and immediately begin flagging interesting sites. Your selections and descriptions go into a common area where others can see what you chose and why. As others vote for the same sites, those selections rise in the StumbleUpon hierarchy.

As a user, you can subscribe to stumbled sites by category. When you click the “Stumble!” button in the toolbar, you automatically go to a random site that has been selected by other members. Sites that have been favorably reviewed more often are more likely to turn up in your random “stumblings.”

It’s perfectly OK to stumble upon your own site. This isn’t gaming the system, because your selection only becomes important if other people vote for you as well. If nobody else finds your page interesting, nothing much will happen, but if you attract enough interest you can draw an astonishing amount of traffic.

I found this out myself recently when I stumbled upon an entry in a blog I maintain called Newspaper Death Watch. Apparently some other people liked my selection. That blog, which normally gets about 100 visitors a day, received more than 1,200 visitors in one day, nearly all of them from StumbleUpon.Not surprisingly, most of those visitors came and left in just a few seconds. But a few of them did stick around and the site’s average traffic levels increased about 20% after that one incident.

This was hardly a make-or-break event, but it’s one indication of how social bookmarking can quickly generate a lot of visibility for your website.

The Future Will Be Twittered

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Texas is a showcase for geeks and their new toys, but the event held earlier this month broke new ground in another way. Anyone who runs corporate events or works in a time-dependent business should be fascinated — and maybe a little scared — by what transpired there.

The highlight was the keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy. Evidently, a lot of people in the audience didn’t much care for Lacy’s rather interruptive questioning style or her cozy familiarity with the subject. They were also put off by her failure to involve the audience more directly in the line of questioning.

So they started Twittering about it. And as the interview went on, the comments passed between attendees took on a life of their own. By the 50-minute mark, the emboldened audience was actively heckling the moderator. Lacy was a bit flustered, but she finished the interview. When she walked out of the auditorium a short time later, bloggers armed with a video cameras were there to record her reaction to the audience’s behavior. Here’s a video of the entire interview, annotated with audience tweets.

Sarah Lacy is a professional, and she will be just fine. She posted a response on her BusinessWeek blog and noted that the incident was actually good for pre-sales of her forthcoming book. What struck me about this incident is how it portends change in the speed of customer feedback.

The Feedback Conundrum
Veteran conference organizers know that getting audience feedback is like pulling teeth. They’re lucky if 20% of the attendees at an event even fill out evaluation forms, and it can take months to tabulate those results. Events are intimidating to audience members; they don’t control the microphone and they can’t communicate with each other very well. Services like Twitter change that equation.

The reason events at SXSW unfolded as they did is because audience members were able to communicate with each other. That’s the scary part. No speaker likes to think of a scenario in which his or her performance is judged in real-time, although I can certainly think of times when I wished I could pull a speaker off the stage.

The potential upside of this trend, however, is enormous. Imagine if you could stage an event — whether a conference, media campaign, product demo or something else — and get real-time feedback from the people watching. Or what if you could tie promotions to timely responses: “Text this number now in order to receive a 20% discount.” The technology to enable this interaction is here right now. I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of the possibilities. What potential do you see?

Blogging, which started life as a rapid form of candid customer feedback, has now evolved into a near-real-time medium. When audience members feel they can comment directly to each other about a shared experience, their honesty is disarming. Marketers can learn to leverage tools like Twittervision, TwitterTroll.com and Tweet Scan to tap into these conversations or to initiate new conversations themselves. All it takes is familiarity and imagination. An excellent list of third-party Twitter applications is available at the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Don’t Let Tools Distract You

I was presenting a social media seminar to a public-relations agency recently when the talk turned to uses of blogs. The people in the room were excitedabout blogging’s potential and were eager to apply the technology to new tasks.

I cautioned them that they were asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t what tool to use, but what problem to solve. Tool selection is secondary.

There’s nothing unusual about their attitude. People often start by choosing tools and work backwards to solve problems. Maybe management has just issued an order to start blogging, or the tool is seen as a tactic to improve search performance or it just seems like the thing to do.

But that’s like starting with a hammer and then figuring out what to build with it. If your objective is to make a house, then you’re off to a pretty good start. But if you want to craft a pearl necklace, you’ve got the wrong tool for the job.

I recently consulted with a client who wanted to build a social network for a defined customer group. It was an ambitious idea, but as we talked through it, we both realized that the process of getting it through internal and regulatory approvals could take a year or more. We finally settled on a more modest idea: Launch a relevant blog, try to build customer interest quickly and then take the results to management in hopes of getting fast-track approval for the social network.

Choose tools wisely
The building blocks of social media are simply tools and they’re not well-suited for every task. For example, if your objective is to alert visitors to a new category of products and provide detailed information on the specifics, a catalog page would be more effective than any interactive tool.

But it’s human nature for people to use the technologies they understand and figure out the application after the fact. Unfortunately, that can waste a lot of time and effort. E-mail is terrible for communicating between groups of more than about five recipients, yet people routinely organize massive projects with dozens of participants by e-mail. Even if the tool is poorly suited for the task, they reason, at least people know how to use it.

A better approach is to define business objectives and then search for tools that support them. For customer feedback, for example, blogs and social networks are a good choice. However, podcasts and video won’t do the trick. So if your objective is to improve customer relations, a podcast may not be a good place to start.

Technology vendors encourage the tool focus. Many of those firms are run by engineers who love to create cool new stuff. They’d much rather talk about features and functions than how to solve business problems. You need to block that tactic. Any vendor that won’t give you references to customers who are solving problems that are similar to yours is blowing smoke.

Social media tools are cool, but they’re always irrelevant if they don’t solve problems. Don’t let technology distract you.

When to Let Employees Do the Talking

Two organizations that have a — shall we say — problematic public image have recently launched blogs using a tactic that I think more marketers should consider:They’re letting their employees do the talking for them.

The Transportation Security Administration launched Evolution of Security in January. Its purpose is to explain, in a calm and rational tone, the reasons why the TSA does what it does.The bloggers have methodically taken on the most common complaints about TSA practices and tried to make sense of them for a skeptical traveling public. In addition to explaining their tactics, they’ve highlighted incidents of bizarre passenger behavior that give a sense of how unpredictable their jobs can be.

The branding is subtle: the TSA logo appears only at the bottom of the page. The slogan — “Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play a Part” — is meant to invite the public into a discussion about security. Initial reaction has been mixed. There were more than 700 comments on the welcome post, according to the blog. Only about half of them were published because of obscenities and other inappropriate comments.

Comments continue to trend toward the negative, so much so that the TSA has playfully posted a “Delete-O-Meter” to count the number of contributions that were filtered out. I don’t think any of this sentiment surprised TSA officials. Their early statements indicated that they expected a lot of hostility and their bloggers are remaining relentlessly cheerful in the face of it. I think they deserve a lot of credit for that.

I only recently became aware of Check Out, a Wal-Mart blog about gadgets. It was launched last August but has been seeing a lot more activity in the last couple of months. Wal-Mart, of course, has been a controversial player in the blogosphere.It famously sponsored a 2006 blog about cross-country travel that BusinessWeek outed as being written by paid freelancers. It has also funded an organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart that has been ridiculed for being a PR stunt to counter Wal-Mart’s controversial labor practices. (Note: In an ironic twist, that organization’s web site has been replaced by a placeholder page referencing Wal-MartFacts.com. It turns out that Wal-Mart never registered the domain workingfamiliesforwalmart.com, and it has been co-opted by a foe).

What interests me is that both the TSA and Wal-Mart have elected to use ordinary employees to tell their stories. The TSA blog is written by five people: four mid-level employees and a PR person. Given the volume of comments, I assume that these people were offered ample relief from the demands of their day jobs, but it’s still important that they represent the front-line TSA forces and not the executives in Washington.

Wal-Mart took the same approach, selecting nine people just like you and me to speak for the company about their passion for consumer electronics.No one is likely to get very worked up about this topic in the first place, so Check Out is a safe move by Wal-Mart. But I’m sure that the decision to let employees speak for the organization wasn’t an easy one.

None of this activity is meant to replace the communications that still emanate from these organizations. It’s important that companies and government agencies have the means to issue statements on behalf of the entire entity. But when it comes to personalizing the interaction –- as blogs do — the decision to use ordinary people is a smart one. Social media is personal, and corporate executives aren’t always able or willing to communicate in that fashion.

The use of individual employee voices is also a subtle reminder that institutions are made up of people and that those people have personalities and interests and motivations that deserve attention.There is no better way to humanize a faceless entity than to expose the people within it. That’s a difficult concept for many marketers to swallow, since marketing communications has historically been built around executive communications.But when you look at examples like these, as well as other successful corporate blogs like those from Southwest Airlines, Kodak and Google, you can see why this trend is gaining momentum.Trust your employees to do the right thing, give them some clear parameters and they will astonish you.

The Social Network Wars Are Over; Now it Gets Interesting.

If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to pick winners in the social network race, you can stand up now. Hitwise data for 2007 shows that MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 88% of all visits to social network sites. The next closest competitor, Bebo , got a little more than 1% of the traffic.

There simply is no more competition in the general-purpose social network market. Other social media winners include LinkedIn (which wasn’t included in the Hitwise data), YouTube and Flickr. If you’re a big brand pursuing a broad strategy, you can safely place your bets on these services. For the next year or two, the also-rans will be busy finding buyers and merger partners.

Now is when it really gets interesting, because now the action shifts to vertical market sites. For many marketers, this is where the more interesting opportunity lies. For example, in the area of health, there’s CarePages.com, Wellsphere, Patientslikeme, RevolutionHealth.com and iMedix. Seniors can choose from Elder Wisdom Circle, Grandparents.com, Eons, TeeBeeDee and Multiply. Mothers can sign up for Cafemom, MothersGroups.com, MomJunction and MothersClick, among others.

And the action isn’t limited to consumer markets. Sermo is a social network for physicians, which now boasts more than 50,000 members. Doctors exchange information about serious medical issues and review cases in real time. Pairup connects business travelers for peer advice, networking and assistance. There’s a list of more than 350 social networks here.

Don’t let small membership numbers fool you. Many of these sites may be attractive marketing venues. Scan the groups, discussion topics and participants and look for content profiles that match your market. Prices are generally lower than those of the big social networks and the audience is far more targeted.

Marketing to vertical communities is very different from mass marketing, of course. If you’re interested in building a campaign on Facebook, have a look at what Southwest Airlines and Victoria’s Secret are doing, or the group started by Starbucks fans that has over 60,000 members. There’s nothing particularly high tech about their presence. They mainly provide a place where customers can keep in touch with the brand and have access to special offers and downloads.

When marketing to vertical communities, you need to dig deeply into the expertise in your organization. Members of a health-oriented network, for example, want to speak to people who have lots of expertise in nutrition and treatment. Discounts and promotions won’t work nearly as well in narrow markets as they do in broad ones. If you have articulate, interesting domain experts in your organization, now’s the time to pull them out of the shadows and engage them with knowledgeable communities. Live chats, webcasts and Q&A forums are particularly effective.

Much of the media attention in the last year has focused on the battle for social network supremacy. With that competition now over, the market will subdivide itself in interesting ways. This process will continue for years, presenting an ever-shifting landscape of new marketing opportunities.

Courting Online Influencers

In the previous articles in this series, we talked about how our hypothetical Quebec resort can find online influencers. We’ve seen that the process involves more than just a Google search. Now that you’ve identified people to engage with, you need to craft an approach and an incentive that’s right for them.

Influencers aren’t reporters. First, make an effort to understand the influencer. In a case of a blogger, scanning a few recent posts, reading a biography and noting the categories or tags that the person uses can give you a quick idea of what motivates him. For someone who contributes to a group blog or recommendation site such as TripAdvisor.com, consult her profile and list of recent posts to learn this information.

Make your initial contact meaningful and positive. If the e-mail address isn’t on the site, use Zoominfo.com, Spock.com or LinkedIn.com to find it. Even if you don’t like what the writer is saying, find something you do like and post a positive comment on her blog or Flickr portfolio. Bloggers love comments and links.

Offer something of value. This doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be a discount, free sample, trial offer or just a link from your web site.

Follow through. Drop a writer an e-mail or make a comment on his site every so often to show that you’re engaged.

Treat influencers the same way you would the media.Some companies worry that this is a slippery slope: if they legitimize bloggers by treating them like journalists then there is no going back.

You don’t have to treat all influencers the same. Decide what criteria a person needs to meet in order to merit special treatment and be prepared to explain those criteria to people who object.

Create an incentive. New influencers appreciate being taken seriously, so think of how you can get the people on your short list involved with your business. This doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does have to be special. Here are some ideas:

Photo weekend. Your research has shown that photo and video enthusiasts are an important constituency, so consider hosting a weekend gathering of top photo bloggers. Invite 10 key people to bring their cameras for a weekend, with accommodations on the house. Don’t require them to publish their photos online, but ask them to tag any images they publish with your resort name and ask to feature the best work on your site.

Contest. Raise the stakes a little and sponsor a photo contest. Winners will have their work featured on your home page and win a weekend trip for two. Or offer to feature the winning photo on your brochure. You can even have the community vote on entries. The cost is negligible and the payoff in prestige is substantial.

License content. Sponsor a ski weekend and invite key ski bloggers and videographers to attend. Offer to incorporate their best work into your collateral for a small licensing fee. Offer to introduce them to some of your travel industry colleagues in the area, too.

Free trials. Contact a few influencers and offer them 50% off the price of a weekend stay. Make it clear that you chose them because you admire their work. Flatter them. It’ll get you everywhere.

Finding Influencers On Social Bookmark And Network Sites

In the first five parts of this series on finding online influencers , we focused on individuals. But our search isn’t complete until we’ve visited the sites where people share opinions about and vote on the best Web content. These are called social bookmarking and social news sites, and they can give you a glimpse into crowd psychology that no other online service can. As in our previous examples, we’ll pretend that our business is a resort in Quebec, Canada.

Del.icio.us isn’t the most functional social bookmarking site, but it’s the most popular. Here’s where people save links to web sites that they want to remember and also apply tags to describe them. Tags are a little-understood but very powerful method of describing information. A tag can be any combination of letters and numbers; the choice is up to the user. Many search engines give tags special treatment, meaning that content that has been labeled with a certain tag ranks higher in the results. Tags are very popular with photo sharing sites, but they can be applied to any kind of information.

Social bookmarking sites are kind of like search engines, only the results are selected by the members. The more people who’ve applied a certain tag to a bookmarked page, the more likely it is that that page is relevant to that term. If you search on tag:quebec tag:travel on del.icio.us, for example, you get more than 450 results. Some are obvious, like the official government tourism site. But others may be new, like Montrealfood.com, a blog about Quebec restaurants, or 1000 Islands, a beautiful photo blog. Del.icio.us makes it possible for you to see that 1000 Islands has been bookmarked by more than 350 people, which is a good indicator of influence. The person who runs this site is someone you might want to invite for a photo weekend. Also note that these sites didn’t come up in our search results.

Your trip wouldn’t be complete without a stop at Facebook, the hottest social network of 2007. Facebook’s adult, professional membership has made it a favorite of marketers and it boasts thousands of groups of all sizes. One group called “Coups de Coeur pour découvrir le Québec” appears to focus on Quebec exclusively. Its membership is small, but it may be worth joining just to keep an eye on discussion topics. You might also want to submit a friend request to the group’s organizer and ask how you can become involved. If you don’t want to jump right in, lurk for a while and see what the members are talking about. When you do enter the conversation, be sure to fully disclose your affiliation. Social network users don’t mind engaging in discussions with marketers, but they don’t like to be deceived.

What’s Next
At this point, you may have spent an afternoon or even entire day navigating social media and accumulated a list of maybe 30 to 40 potential influencers. And you’ve barely scratched the surface. Travel sites like BootsnAll.com, Gusto.com, RealTraveler, TripAdvisor.com, VirtualTourist.com, Where Are You Now? and LonelyPlanet.com all provide gathering places for travelers to share ideas and experiences.

You also haven’t tapped the emerging class of people search engines such as Zoominfo.com and Spock.com. These tools can build remarkably rich profiles of people based solely on publicly available information. Professional networks like LinkedIn.com, VisiblePath.com and Plaxo.com also make it possible to learn people’s professional affiliations and even personal contacts.

If you feel like your head is about to explode, don’t despair. The social media landscape is seemingly endless, and new sites launch all the time. No one can keep up with it, and no one should try. If you make it a goal to explore one new network or search engine every day and to identify a couple of new influencers that way, you will make steady progress. You can also give much of this work to junior staff, if you have any, once you learn the ropes. However, I recommend against outsourcing this task entirely. Marketers need to learn the ways and means of social networks if they are going to interact with them. Younger staff members actually may be more adapt at using the tools, but they are less able to think strategically about them.

Now that you’ve got a list in place, initiate the process of reaching out to these critical people. That will be the subject of our seventh and final article in this series next week.

How to Find Influencers on Photo and Video Sites

In the first four parts of this series on finding online influencers, we focused principally on blog search. However, a variety of other social media outlets can point us to people whose preferred medium is photos, video and the spoken word. These people can also be important influencers. It’s just that their chosen media isn’t text.

As in our previous examples, we’ll pretend we’re a mythical resort in Quebec, Canada that’s looking to promote itself through influencer marketing.

Start by heading over to Yahoo’s Flickr, which is one of the largest photo-sharing sites. Type Quebec resort into the search box and select “Tags only.” This returns 272 results. Scroll to the list of photos and look for the photographers whose names come up most often.

One of them is “ash2276,” who’s submitted more than 1,100 photos and who belongs to more than 100 groups. Look at a sample of ash2276’s photos and note the large number of comments. This is someone with a following. Look at the photos tagged “Quebec” (there are 98 of them) and click on some of them. Note the enthusiastic comments. Ash2276 is an accomplished photographer, the kind of person you might want to invite to your resort for a photo weekend.

Flickr has over a half million groups, and while some are small or inactive, others are very large. Search for groups about Quebec and you get about 1,800 results. Most aren’t about Quebec specifically, but if you sort by group size and scroll down, you come across a group called “Canadian Beauty” with nearly 1,800 members, another called “Photo Quebec” with 144 members and a group titled simply “Quebec” with 483 members. Wade into the discussion forums and photo galleries for these groups and look for user names that appear frequently. These are also potential influencers.

Of course, there are plenty of other photo sharing sites on the Web, including Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Kodak Gallery. They all have different features and nuances, but they all do basically enable people to categorize and share their photos.

Video and Audio Connections

We’re not done yet. Go to YouTube, the premier video-sharing site, and type Quebec resort into the search box. You’ll get 29 results. Looking at the user names, you note that “zenwaiter” has posted several videos. Click through to his profile and you read, “In the winter I travel all over Quebec…and I shoot video clips.” He even has a link to his website, zenwaiter.com.

Remembering our earlier search techniques, we look up that URL on Technorati and find 131 posts linking to it. Some of these bloggers might be good targets for you. The activity certainly indicates that zenwaiter is a promising influencer.

While we’re looking at multimedia, let’s check out whether there are any good podcasts in this area. Podcasts are Internet audio and video programs that you can download and play on computers or portable media players.

The Who’s Who of podcasting is Apple’s iTunes. Searching on Canada travel podcast, we come up with 150 results, which iTunes lets you sort by popularity. The service will also tell you which programs are explicit or clean, which is something you want to know.

The trick with podcasts is to identify programs that are still active. Many series go dormant after just a few episodes but they aren’t removed from the iTunes directory. The only way to tell, unfortunately, is to click through to descriptions or websites and see when it was last updated.

Podcast Alley lists 200 results for the same query, but they’re in no particular order. You need to look for promising titles and click through to the details page, where Podcast Alley provides a nice summary of popularity and recent episodes.Beware: many podcasts are produced by businesses – even your competitors – and probably aren’t good targets for you. We do quickly find a couple of good candidates, though, including Travelrific and The Travel Advice Show. Most podcasts have accompanying websites, so it’s pretty easy to find contact information.

We’re almost through the process of identifying influencers. Next week, we’ll look at social networks and social bookmarking sites.

Putting Specialized Search Into Action

In my last issue , I introduced two useful blog search engines. Now let’s put them to use on our test case: a Quebec resort. You’ll find that these resources do a pretty good job of scoping out possible influencers, but they also demonstrate that the search engines alone aren’t enough.

We start at Technorati, where we go to advanced search and type Canada resort into the search bar. We then specify that we only want blogs that the authors have identified as being about travel. We get a list of “44 results for canada AND resort in blogs tagged travel.”

We see that the top results are all from a site called TravelPod, which describes itself as “The Web’s Original Travel Blog.” Going to the home page of this rich site, we type Quebec into the search box. Our top result is a traveler named “Cobi” who has posted more than 100 entries and whom the site identifies as a “Top pick.” We also see that 39 of those entries are about a Canadian trip. Even though Cobi lives in Great Britain, she could be a good candidate for a repeat visit. We bookmark her profile page, where we can send her a message later.

Our search yields another top pick named “kevandsian” who has traveled to over 21% of the world and logged over 190,000 views from visitors. We also bookmark this traveler’s profile.

Returning to Technorati, we see that the second page of search results lists Jaunted, The Pop Culture Travel Guide. Technorati assigns it an authority of 670, which is very high. This site has many contributors and there are quite a few articles about Québec, so we hunt for people who have written a lot about the topic. One of them is Alex Robertson, who describes himself as “Senior Features Editor at EuroCheapo.com, as well as a freelance travel writer.” There’s a link to EuroCheapo.com. A Google search on alex robertson site:eurocheapo.com takes us directly to a staff listing and an e-mail address for Alex.

Not all our searches are as successful. Ask.com points us to AndrewLog, a blog written by a Canadian which has several posts about travel. But how influential is Andrew? If we enter the blog’s URL into Technorati, we find no links and the link: weblog.andrewcorp.com command in Google turns up just five. This blogger probably isn’t a good target for us.

Back at Ask, though, we stumble across SmartCanucks.ca, a Canadian site that features deals and discounts for Canadian consumers, including travelers. There’s a page of editor profiles here, too. A Google link: search turns up 113 citations. That isn’t bad. It’s probably worth offering some kind of coupon or other incentive.

As you can see, there’s nothing fast or easy about identifying influencers. Even though a clutch of services has emerged to handle some of the dirty work, it’s still up to human beings to assess whether an influencer deserves attention.

Our task doesn’t begin and end with search, though. There are elements on each site that may lead us to other influencers. Blogrolls, for example, are links to sites that bloggers find useful. This can be a quick way to discover new resources. You should also look at the profiles of the authors themselves. Frequently they list other sites to which they contribute, and you can often find other enthusiasts there.

That takes care of blog search, but there’s a whole new world of social networks that still need to be mined. Next week, we’ll continue the hunt through a few of those.

Use Specialized Search to Find Influencers that Other Engines Miss

Search engines do an excellent job of mining the Web as a whole, but if you want to focus on social media, you need to tap into one of the specialized search engines mentioned in the first issue of this newsletter series. You can find all the back issues here.

For blogs, the two most popular engines are Technorati and BlogPulse.You can perform searches with these sites the same way you would with Google or Yahoo, but the results will look very different.For one thing, both sites make an effort to index only social media sources, which they do with reasonable success. Both also take a stab at assessing the authority level of the blogs that they index.

Authority figures

Technorati does this with an authority ranking based upon the number of blogs linking to a web site in the last six months.There’s also a ranking metric that assesses the relative authority of a blog relative to all of the two million-plus blogs in Technorati’s database.

BlogPulse links to a profile page that lists a blogger’s recent activity, links from other blogs, posting activity and other bloggers that have similar interests.You can also track conversation threads for posts that generate a lot of activity.BlogPulse’s “Neighborhood” feature is one of its most interesting services.It attempts to identify authors who have similar interests based upon the words they use and where they link.Click the “Tools Overview” link to learn about these distinctive features.

Technorati indexes many more blogs then BlogPulse and includes photo and video results.Many bloggers also register themselves on Technorati and provide profiles and photos (BlogPulse doesn’t have this capability).This makes it easier to put a name with a face, which is useful information to have at hand when making contact with an influencer.

Technorati also offers the option of viewing search results by authority level. Use this option to screen out spam and occasionally updated blogs. This can save you time. Going back to our example of the Quebec resort looking for travel-related influencers, we search on Quebec travel and find over 10,000 mentions on sites that Technorati says have “any authority.” However, there are less than 4,000 results on sites that are classified as having “a lot of authority.” Both services also offer the option of tracking mentions over time, which is useful in identifying topics that generate swirls of activity.

Tags add human element

Many blog search engines also track tags, which are keywords that authors associate with their content. Tags are useful to marketers because they are a sort of human-powered description engine. This can greatly narrow the list of results. For example, searching on Québec travel in Technorati delivers nearly 4,000 results. However, searching on Québec travel in blogs that describe themselves as being about travel turns up just 111 results. We’ll take a closer look at tags in a future issue.

As noted in the first article in this series, Technorati and BlogPulse aren’t your only options. There are dozens of blog-specific search engines that each have unique features. Subscriber Ed Vielmetti just introduced a new one to me this week, in fact. BoardReader indexes only message boards and discussion groups, which other search engines sometimes miss. Using Boardreader, I actually found a review of my book that I had never seen before!
Why not make it a goal to learn one new search engine every week? It won’t be a big time investment, and you’ll be amazed at the capabilities you’ll unlock.