Category: Blogging

Micro Persuasion most influential PR blog

Welcome to the first, highly non-scientific PR blog World Championships. The number of PR blogs are increasing and some of them are becoming real institutions in PR blogland. I decided to have a look at which PR blog is the most influential (I know wich ones I like to read but what about every body else?) by simply counting the links via Technorati. Yes, I know it is not a very good research method, but it’s fun. File it under blog PR stunts. I thought this was equally as interesting as MarketingSherpa Blog Awards which only lists 6 PR blogs.

And the winner is – [drums please] – Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, of course. There are a total of 286 links from 61 sources to his blog, and admit it, you read it too. Runner up is Tom Murphy at PR Opinions with 112 links from 78 sources.

The 28 most influential PR blogs (apologies if I have missed some):

1. Micro Persuasion 286

2. PR Opinions 112

3. Corporate Engagement 101

4. Corporate PR 51

5. PR meets WWW 35

6. PR Fuel 33

7. Pop! PR 31

8. PR Machine 29

9. Strategic Public Relations 29

10. Engage 25

11. PR Communications 24

12. PR Studies 22

13. Minnesota PR 22

14. Canuckflack 21

15. Marc Snyder 20

16. B.L. Ochman 20

17. Media Culpa 19

18. A PR guru’s musings 18

19. JKL blog 15

20. Media Guerilla 12

21. Ravabete Omoomi 11

22. Technoflak 9

23. Mark My Words 8

24. Hoi Polloi 7

25. Kitablog 6

26. Mediations 6

27. Media Map blog 3

28. CommLog 2

15 minutes of fame

I was almost Slashdotted (or in my case “Scripted”) the other day. When checking the stats for my blog I noticed three times as many visitors on May 11 (about 180 page visits) than on a normal day, which I found odd, especially since I hadn’t posted anything that day. When going through the referring links I found a post from Scripting News which I later realized is an established blog, even ranked #17 on Technorati Top 100. It’s really silly, but seeing that your blog actually has an audience is quite an ego booster.

Resistance to RSS if futile

More and more news sites are offering RSS feeds. Reuters now offers RSS feeds for at least 12 different channels. Here in Sweden the adoption rate is slow. The news sites I know have started RSS feeds so far are:


Dagens Nyheter (daily)

Expressen (tabloid)

Ny Teknik (technology trade publication)

Svenska Dagbladet (daily)

Sydvenska Dagbladet (daily)

Yelah.net (“radical digital news”)

I don’t know the reasons behind the small number of Swedish sites that offer RSS, but one thing for sure is that resistance is futile. With the help of myRSS anyone can build an RSS feed for any site, for free. I’ve tried to create a few channels of my own, and it actually works. Not on all sites, but on some. I’m not technologically savvy enough to determine what the trouble is, but it’s a little like when you create your own channels with Avantgo for your PDA. You have to pick a page that contains frequently updated items, like the press room if you want to monitor a competitor’s site.

One disturbing factor is the delay between clicking on a headline (I use Bloglines) and the actual news item or post (see graphic). But you can get around that by sponsoring the specific channel (more details on their home page). So if you are really eager to get an RSS feed for a specific site, now you can.

Depth is out. Speed is in. I’m late for yoga, hurry!

The launch of free newspaper Metro’s New York edition yesterday was commented on some places, for example here. It might seem as a tough task for a Swedish newspaper to establish itself in New York, and it probably will be. But I wouldn’t underestimate these people, they have proved that they are able to challenge monopolistic and oligopolistic markets before. Metro was born with the help of Jan Stenbeck, a man (sadly passed away last year) who among other things introduced commercial TV in Sweden via its channel TV3 in the 80’s.

B.L Ochman comments: “It’ll be harder to get the target audience to actually read the paper. Young people don’t ignore newspapers because they cost 50 cents or a dollar. They ignore them because they prefer to get their news online or on TV. They want to skip the ads and they only want to follow news topics that affect them personally.” I respectfully disagree.

Having seen the development of Metro live, I moved to Stockholm in 1995 when it was launched, I admit I was skeptical at first. The short summaries of news agency material are not news, was a common reaction. But Metro found a niche that it exploited successfully. The “metrofication” of news has just accelerated since then and a lot of people who previously didn’t read papers, now read Metro. Since the birth of internet, people are more and more getting used to not paying for information which has paved the way for free newspapers. And since it is handed out in the subway, you might as well take one. It’s designed to last as long as your subway ride and why not grab a paper instead of trying not to look at the guy in the seat in front of you?

Another trend is what Trendsetters call “time compression”. People get more and more stressed and try to fit in more things in their lives. No one has time to watch TV movies or follow long TV series anymore, they’re too busy. Speed dating is just another example. The quote from Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m late for yoga, hurry” brilliantly illustrates how our lives are metroficated, cut up in small shallow pieces.

Depth is out. Speed is in. Metro fits right into that picture. Whether New Yorkers agree is yet to be seen, but I can’t see why it should be any different from London, Paris or HongKong.