December 28th, 2004

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PR and Marketing
4 Comments »

Bacon’s Doesn’t Get It

Bacon’s Information is a quizzically-named but very large media monitoring agency. Companies and government agencies (such as National Geographic and 7-11) pay them to monitor the media for stories that pertain to them, their competition and their industry.

Today, via Jeremy Pepper, I read about how Bacon’s “will now monitor the most reputable online news blogs”:

The company will introduce new blog content in MediaSource’s Premium Research module and track blog coverage in the Monitoring module to help clients determine the possible impact on business decisions and company reputations. Blogs have played an increasingly important role in influencing opinion of select audiences, including opinion about candidates in last November’s local, state and presidential elections.

Right now Bacon’s is going to monitor “250 blogs of quality”. A whole 250? Gosh, where are they going to find the personnel to do that?

Bacon’s is applying old media thinking to the new media. There’s so many things
wrong with their approach, I don’t even know where to begin:

  • First, how did they choose their 250 blogs of quality? Apparently they’re
    starting with "good, respectable blogs written by journalists or pundits".
    Which ones are those? What criteria did you apply? More to the point, why
    choose blogs by journalists? When was the last time a journalist broke an
    important story in their blog? Isn’t that why they work for publications?
  • Do their clients really understand how trivial a number like 250 blogs actually
    is? There are more than 5 million blogs out there now. Bacon’s is monitoring
    0.005% of the blogosphere. Look out, Technorati
    and PubSub.
  • Speaking of Technorati and PubSub, intelligent use of those kinds of free
    services will destroy any kind of tip-of-the-iceberg blog monitoring Bacon’s
    can do. I’m part of a couple
    of companies
    that does blogosphere monitoring. Those are the sort of tools we use, and
    you can rest assured we’re a heck of a lot cheaper than Bacon’s.
  • Do their clients understand how useless such a service will be? Let me try
    an example. Let’s say that some kid in Ottumwa, Iowa finds a family of cockroaches
    in his Slurpee. He takes some photos and posts them on his blog. A meme starts,
    and word of the Slurproaches spreads over the Internet. How many blogs will
    discuss them before (and if) word reaches one of the blogs Bacon’s is monitoring?
    Hundreds? Thousands? Bacon’s ought to have a good, hard look at the epidemiology
    of the
    EA Games spouse     or the
    Kryptonite lock fiasco    . This
    article     says it’ll cost Kryptonite $10 million. When would Bacon’s have
    caught onto that story?

Bacon’s Information’s emphasis on quality over quantity is foolhardy. The influencers
in the blogosphere can change in a day. A nobody becomes a somebody on the back
of a great story. If Bacon’s is only paying attention to 250 (or 500 or 5000)
blogs, they’re failing (not to mention shafting) their clients. If they are
monitoring the whole blogosphere, then their
press release is all spin and bullocks.

Bacon’s also ought to be monitoring the blogosphere for themselves. They should
start with searches like this
and this
and this.
If they’re doing that, they should find this post sooner or later. When they
do, I hope they’ll leave a comment.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

kk+
December 28th, 2004
11:02 pm

Scathing Darren. Good example.

[Reply]

B.L. Ochman
December 29th, 2004
4:41 pm

Yup, you are absolutely right. And so well said. I thought their story so ridiculous that I just reported it and let its inanity speak for itself.

[Reply]

Jeremy
December 30th, 2004
9:24 am

Well, once again I’m in a minority. As we had discussed via email, most PR and publicity professionals are less than tech savvy.

Now, I use PubSub to track a client. I like PubSub, they’re good folks, and I’m talking to them for my session at the NewComm Forum. But, does my client really need to read about a 14 year old girl that “hearts” their product? Is that going to affect things down the line? No, not at all, and I don’t forward such clips because they’re inane.

Bacon’s has the right idea. Tracking 250 of the leading blogs, as decided on traffic and influence, is better than having to go through all the garbage blogs that are out there.

You point out the Kryptonite lock as an example - that one was picked up pretty quickly by mainstream blogs, such as Business 2.0’s blog. And, it wasn’t that Kryptonite was not aware of the issue, but that legal got involved and it was mishandled. If they had caught the postings earlier, would that have changed? I doubt it.

250 is a starting point. That database will grow, as noted by Bacon’s when I interviewed them. When I was in-house, I wanted my agency to get the most salient points to me, not all the drivel that was out there. The value-add for a large corporation is cheaper than hiring a person to scan the blogosphere, or outsourcing it to another company.

[Reply]

eric
January 5th, 2005
9:22 am

Bacon is obviously basing their strategy on the evidence of research in social networking. And they’re right to do so: Most of the action in the blogosphere is driven through a small number of high-throughput nodes. Tracking the mass movements of the blogosphere is a waste of time. And in any case, ephemeral phenomena are poor fodder for a marketing campaign.

Whether they’ve selected properly, or have a good mechanism to change or add blogs to their index, remains to be seen.

Now, the smartest thing to do, if you can afford to pay someone to do more or less just this thing, is to set up your own monitoring system. But that stops getting cost effective below a certain revenue threshold.

[Reply]

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