Show Me the Top Ten Funeral Industry Blogs
As you may know, I’m a partner in a PR and marketing company. Part of our strategy for IT clients is to pitch to bloggers. Of course, we want to identify those bloggers who are ideal for our client’s stories.
Say we’ve got a client who makes software for funeral managers and morticians (we don’t). While it would be great to get mentioned on Dave Winer or Robert Scoble’s blog, we’d probably prefer to get referenced in the top ten blogs that funeral managers and morticians are reading. That is, the top ten funeral industry blogs. [more]
Here’s the problem–how do you identify those? It’s not easy:
- Technorati will show you the absolute popularity of a blog, if you already know its URL. It won’t tell you if what you’ve found is the first or twenty-first most popular funeral blog. It will also help you identify blogs using keywords, but that’s tricky and very time-intensive. For example, check out the useless results for ‘funeral blog’ or ‘funeral industry’
- Google will point you to some blogs (though it ain’t great), and can help you with popularity, but it’s far from ideal.
- Other tools like PubSub, del.icio.us or Blogpulse can be of limited assistance.
In short, there’s no easy way to find the top ten funeral industry blogs. The only way is to use these tools to identify a few possible blogs, and then through careful blogroll analysis and ongoing reading, make some educated guesses about who the movers and shakers are. That’s easy but time-consuming for somebody like me, who regularly steeps in the blogosphere. For an outsider, though, it involves a pretty steep learning curve.
It’s important, of course, to spend plenty of time examining your target blogs before you go sending them stories. But at the same time, we need a decent tool that rapidly gets us from ‘need 20 blogs about foo’ to ‘reading 20 blogs about foo’.
What’s the answer? I’m not sure. Maybe we need to do some fancy Technorati + Delicious magic. We identify all of the bookmarks which are blogs, then organize those by their tags, and encourage people to add more tags to the mix. Then we display the blogs associated with a given tag in descending order of popularity. That’d be a start, at least. The alternative, I fear, is some human-generated directory, which doesn’t seem very practical.
May 26th, 2005 at 12:40 am
It might also be useful to see which related posts (through tags at Technorati?) have the most citations (maybe using BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker). Or even which have been given the highest ratings from tools like NewsGator Online, which let readers “grade” a post.
Interesting problem though! I am pretty sure getting “from ‘need 20 blogs about foo’ to ‘reading 20 blogs about foo’” can be done via software…it’s only a matter of time.
Of course, eventually it would be good to know where those 20 blogs about foo are too, a problem that is yet to be solved as well.
May 26th, 2005 at 3:43 am
In the event you might be using a Mac, I HIGHLY recommend a software product called DevonAgent. It is a stand-alone search agent that runs atop an AI kernel.
I promise I don’t work for these people, I just know that this piece of software has been extraordinarily handy when I can’t find what I’m looking for otherwise.
Nice blog, btw :)
May 26th, 2005 at 7:38 am
It’s the age old problem of IT: how do you measure something? In this case, how do you measure the ‘top ten funeral industry blogs’?
Would that be the top ten blogs read by funeral directors? Or the top ten blogs by funeral directors? The second is easier to identify, but how on earth do you identify the first?
In the old days, you’d advertise in periodicals that stated their target audience up front. Things are less clear now.
Not only that, but a blogswarm or an instalanche can change things in a real hurry.
May 26th, 2005 at 8:01 am
I tried a Google uner ‘mortuary science’ that seemed to pull up some info:
Mortuary Science Web Sites
http://www.lib.siu.edu/hp/divisions/sci/health/mortuary.html
http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=mortuary+science&btnG=Google+Search
Using the Google Suggest beta, just type in ‘mortuary’ and you’ll see suggestions for all sorts of stuff.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
May 26th, 2005 at 8:10 am
http://dying.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=dying&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.funeralforum.com%2F
http://dying.about.com/od/funeralindustry/
All right. Back to work now for me now.
May 26th, 2005 at 11:10 am
I’m an old guy and don’t know beans about this stuff but I do know that trying to grab someone’s ideas of what is goo and what is not is silly. You have to look and decide (alas, calls for time and work) for yourself…popularity put a lot of wrong people in office.
May 26th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
If this were my task, I’d phone up some local funeral directors and ask them. And I’d ask what their trade magazines were and look in them for ads and pointers, then maybe call a few other people out of town based on that. Once they’d given me some URLs I could probably start sussing out who the key people are.
Now, in the funeral industry, blogs might not yet be a big deal, but if your example were different it might work better. I usually find that word-of-mouth (or -email) gives the quickest and most accurate results to start searching for authorities.
June 14th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
Or you could just call me.
-funeral director, embalmer, & blogger.
August 18th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Should we just track blogs? Should we not track the larger category of social commentary, which might include, for instance, the Funeral Forum at thememorialproject.com?
Essentially, the user is looking for easy access to information; blogs are just one part.
The Memorial Project
Personalized memorials and tributes
thememorialproject.com
March 20th, 2007 at 7:51 am
With enough google’ing, I am sure you will find the answer!
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:18 am
[…] while I’d write a post asking where all the blogs were on a particular subject. For example, where are all the funeral blogs? Or theatre […]
March 7th, 2008 at 5:42 am
I’ve also looked for blogs about funerals. They’re really hard to find!
May 21st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
We recently launched a blog that deals with funerals because there’s definitely a need.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:47 am
FOREST LAWN ANOTHER VIEW
Friends - Think you will have an interest in this site. I hope you are as repulsed by their bad behavior as I am.