Stephen Davies has just taught me soemthign interesting about what he calls blogger outreach. Like me, he had received an Xda Orbit phone, and like me he was wondering exactly why... In the grand scheme of things we attract relatively small volumes of traffic (and PR Blogger is a lot more popular than Mediations); even if every single Mediations reader bought an Orbit 2 for themselves, their friends and family, it wouldn't chnage the world. And few if any of the people I meet are going to covet an Orbit 2 just because I have one...
Then Stephen looked at his logs - and discovered he was getting a lot of hits from people searching for Orbit 2. So he checked Google himself. Try it - you will quickly come to Stephen's post, and then to Neville Hobson's posts.
In a comment to Stephen, Amelia of VCCP explains:
"As the agency Planner on this I can certainly tell you that the Search element was central to our thinking. At VCCP sometimes we talk about “the world according to Google…” and I think that is right. Part of our measurement evaluation centres on just this.
"What is hard to know though, unless individual Bloggers share back-end data, is how popular a specific blog post is. With Cocoon we never asked for it, we were very very conscious of not over-stepping the boundaries at all but I wonder whether maybe we should be asking if people would be willing to share any of this?"
It's surprising that SEO isn't a hot topic for conversation among PR people really.
As Wired magazine once said: "Google isn't just a search engine, it's a reputation management system."
Posted by: Stephen Davies | March 22, 2008 at 12:57 AM
In case you are interested this is the strategy that went into the planning of the original O2 blogger outreach for Cocoon. The learnings fed into XDA Orbit.
http://ameliatorode.typepad.com/life_moves_pretty_fast/2007/08/o2-cocoon-blogg.html
Posted by: Amelia | April 01, 2008 at 06:45 PM