Category: web 2.0

Higher ed bloggers: show your power!

Doing a bit of blog-surfing this evening and followed a link to the Ad Age Power 150 ranking of the top marketing and media blogs.

power150.png

The Power 150 was created by Todd Andrlik, who developed a simple multimetric algorithm (later expanded) based on page rank, links, subscribers, etc., to provide PR and marketing people a ranking of our own. (Being a marketing exec himself, Todd knows how obsessed we marketing and PR types are with rankings.)

I posted something about the rankings more than a year ago and, being the good PR guy that I am, decided to engage in a little self-promotion. So I submitted this blog to the rankings. I didn’t think I’d crack the top 150 but figured I wouldn’t know unless I tried.

To no one’s surprise, this blog is not listed among the elite top 150. But now the Ad Age rankings include 658 blogs, and this one has found a respectful niche in the middle of the long tail. As of today, Higher Ed Marketing is at No. 340, right between HRmarketer.com and Drew B.’s take on tech PR. (Technically, these three blogs and six others are in a nine-way tie for 338th place, as we all have 44 points.)

What really surprises me, and bothers me, is that I appear to be the only higher ed blogger in the rankings! Or at least in the top 500. I didn’t bother to surf the remaining 158 blogs, because I figured if some of the best higher ed blogs weren’t in the top 500, they most likely weren’t in the list at all.

My fellow higher ed bloggers, this state of affairs is unconscionable. There are some terrific higher ed blogs that focus on marketing and PR. Many of them are listed on my blogroll. None of them are in the Ad Age rankings. Why?

There’s no excuse for higher ed bloggers to be absent from this list. So consider this an open challenge to the higher ed blogging community to get its collective act together and get on the Power 150 rankings.

It’s as simple as visiting this site, filling out an online form and clicking the submit button. Really, how much easier does it have to be?

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your URLs!

I’m issuing a challenge to five veteran higher ed bloggers: Karine Joly, Andy Shaindlin, Robert French, Brad Ward and Kyle James (OK, Kyle’s not a veteran but he blogs like one). Here’s the challenge:

  1. Submit their blogs to the Power 150 rankings, and
  2. Challenge five other higher ed bloggers to do the same.

Let’s get off the sidelines and into the game! After all, we are in the marketing business, right? It shouldn’t take the guy who runs the 340th most influential marketing blog to remind us.

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Now playing: Radiohead – 15 Step
via FoxyTunes

The blogging informavore’s dilemma

According to this Slate article, I’m an “informavore.” You probably are, too.

The informavore is a new breed of hunter-gatherer, who forages for information online.

“On the Internet,” writes Slate’s Michael Agger, “we hunt for facts. … [W]e assess a site quickly, looking for an ‘information scent.’ We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.”

The dilemma for an informavore who also happens to blog (and hopes for a modest readership) is that blogs aren’t very good sources of information. That’s according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who is the primary source for the Slate piece. Nielsen suggests that most blog postings are limited in their value to building business.

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value.

So, what’s a blogger to do in a world of informavores? Can a blog succeed only by linking to and sharing information? Agger argues that “a thoughtful blogger who tags his posts can cover a subject well.”

I tend to agree with Agger. I enjoy reading blogs that don’t necessarily follow the readability (scannability?) formula designed to cater to informavores:

  • bulleted lists
  • shorts paragraphs
  • lots of white space
  • bolded words
  • subheads
  • etc.

This is a subhead (in bold type, no less)

So, maybe blogging success equals thoughtful posts plus thorough taxonomy.

Based on my own experience since the first of the year, the theory that informational posts are of more interest seems to hold true. For this blog, posts that offer information of value to my main audience (higher ed folks, marketing and PR types) seem to be the most popular in terms of unique visits.

Since the first of the year, the top five posts (in terms of click-throughs) have offered something of value to the online community I interact with. Here they are, in order of number of unique visits. (Interestingly, each of the five links has an average time-on-page that is less than the site average. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it means that since I provide links to other information sources, as a good informavore-centric site should, they find the info they’re looking for and click through to it.)

  1. The habits of social network addicts pointed to a study comparing the characteristics of hardcore Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users. That’s obviously of interest to higher ed marketers.
  2. My “breaking news” post about the Northern Illinois University shooting last February.
  3. del.icio.us as a PR measurement tool.
  4. Friday Five: Q&A with Roy Adler and Tom Hayes, authors of ‘University Marketing Mistakes’.
  5. Book review: ‘University Marketing Mistakes’, a follow up to No. 4 on the list.

Each of these posts includes a morsel or two of info that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog. Still, I don’t think I would ever beat Google, Digg, del.icio.us or any of the other info-portals. Nor do I hope to.

One thing blogs can do that those sites can’t is provide a bit of human voice and context to the data.

But maybe that isn’t the point anymore. Maybe it never was.

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Now playing: Ladytron – Predict The Day
via FoxyTunes