Sometimes the problem with blogs is that they create a lot of noise, and as a result you can’t tell what’s relevant. It’s a bit like trying to find someone you know at a major rock concert everyone’s yelling, and the fact that you are one of the few not yelling doesn’t help you find what you’re looking for; you still get lost in a cacophony of voices. As your company gets into blogging, instead of being lost in the crowd, you need to know not only what the blogging voices are saying, but what individuals within the crowd are saying. In this article, we cover how to keep track of “the conversation” as well as how to track individual bloggers, how to monitor and establish metrics for your blog, and how to respond to events that happen in the world of blogs.

KNOW OR DIE

One of the challenges with blogging isn’t finding blogs, finding posts, or even finding posts about your company. A massive amount of information is available around blogging, so the challenge isn’t in finding that information. Instead, the challenge is to find the right information and apply it in a meaningful way. Thankfully, bloggers have found a noble reason to start sifting through the information: ego surfing. Ego surfing is an incredibly precise art form that involves surfing the Web, specifically using Google or other search engines, to find out who is talking about you and what they are saying.

Early bloggers decided that searching Google on a nearly daily basis was not only inefficient, but slow. After all, it could take more than three days for new links to your site to show up in Google, and that was simply unacceptable. In fact, Dave Sifry, one of the earliest bloggers, got so fed up with using Google for ego surfing that he created his own website called Technorati (www.technorati .com) to begin tracking how blogs linked to each other.

In the summer of 2005, Technorati began tracking its tenmillionth blog, which caused Sifry to reflect by writing the following (at www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000312.html): The reason why I created Technorati in the first place I wanted to know who was talking about me and the things I cared about hasn’t changed.… It provides me with a drop of joy and a lot of wonder that we’ve been able to contribute our small part to the greater good, and to help people make sense out of all of this remarkable creativity in the blogosphere.

Technorati started out small, tracking only a few thousand blogs. As the blogosphere grew, so did Technorati’s database. Over the years, other services have come online such as BlogPulse, IceRocket, and PubSub, each of which is discussed in detail later in this article. As this article and the blogging community matures, these sites will undoubtedly add new features and new sites will surely come online. I believe that only two things will remain true in this life: People won’t agree on God, politics, or sports; and bloggers will never stop perfecting the art of ego surfing! Thankfully, your company gets to benefit from at least one of these truisms.

FINDING VALUE IN A CACOPHONY OF DATA

As we’ll see later in this article, services such as Technorati, coupled with smart web analytics, can provide you with a veritable treasure trove of data. But what do you do with all of that data? We’ll look at specific uses for data that each system generates; however, you’ll see that you are usually looking for three main pieces of data as you begin to baseline and do trending:

• Where, why, and how you are growing

• Trends you are starting or of which you are a part

• What people are saying about you and how you should best respond

Most companies even those using low-cost shared website environments will have some kind of blogging and reporting package installed, commonly known as web stats. If you don’t have such a package installed, you can use free or paid stats trackers, which are available at a variety of websites in a variety of configurations. None of these will be as accurate as the statistics provided by your server or hosting company, but they will provide you with the three main pieces of data.

The reality of web analytics, and with blogging in particular, is that the actual numbers matter very little. What is important is the growth of those numbers and what that growth means. Starting out with 10 readers and progressing to 100,000 is incredibly impressive and should be studied and acknowledged. Starting with 80,000 and growing to 100,000 is also important to note, but the growth isn’t nearly as impressive. What matters is what the numbers represent: growth, links, trends of which you are a part, growing customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and other such important issues. “Tripping over the Long Tail” looks a bit more at why numbers themselves matter but in a different way than most people think. TRIPPING OVER THE LONG TAIL

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, first coined the term Long Tail in a now-famous article published in the fall of 2004 (www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html). Chris’s basic premise, as it applies to blogs, is that while mega blogs are certainly out there with audiences rivaling major news organizations, the influence and size of those blogs is about the same as all of the small blogs.

Practically speaking, this graph shows that a handful of super large blogs exist, but also a long tail of millions of other blogs are out there and just as, if not more, important than the largest blogs. In fact, much of the power of blogging is found in this long tail conversation happens in the long tail, and your customers are in the long tail. And, most likely, you will be in the long tail. While knowing your numbers is important in that they allow you to graph your growth they are also less important than you might think, because ultimately what matters is how the rest of the long tail responds. Don’t look only at your stats make sure you also look at how well you are speaking to, or pitching into, the long tail.

Check out Anderson’s blog, which details how companies are interacting with the long tail: http://longtail.typepad.com/.

Your web stats will provide the first points of importance for you: if, where, why, and how your blog is growing (or shrinking). The answer to the why may be fairly vague, such as “Google is sending us more traffic.” This is where trend analysis and link patterns start to come into play. Of the three main blog tracking engines (Technorati, BlogPulse, and PubSub), BlogPulse is the best at offering a historical analysis and is often able to spot the trends of which you may be a part. Finally, services such as Technorati and PubSub are great at finding out what people are saying about you (and who those people are).

Taken together, web stats, trend analyses, and link tracking provide not only a valuable amount of information, but also clues as to how to use that information. At the end of the day, though, your blog’s success is rarely measured by these numbers. They are merely indicators of overall health, visibility, and the relative passion of your blogging and blog-reading audience. As such, while important, they should be measured against your overall strategic goals and specifically your blogging goals.