Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant. Or: words make ideas make money.

The PR Friendly Index for August 2008

Posted in PR, bloggers, measurement by Brendan on August 19, 2008

Once again it’s been a bit longer than a month since last I compiled this. But at least I managed it eventually.

Key below, index below that, explanation below that.

You might also find the FAQ useful.

KEY
Technorati Authority – unique incoming blog links over the past six months
Technorati Inlinks – total incoming blog links over the past six months
Yahoo Inlinks – incoming web links, not including links within that site
HowSociable Score – social media score calculated by HowSociable.com
Google Blog Hits – Google blog search hits
Google Blog Hits over the past Month – Google blog search hits over the past month
IceRocket – recent posts that link to a site according to IceRocket
1   0  Micro Persuasion 1,858  
3,667  
487,660  
60  
224  
223  
1,814  
2   0  Online Marketing Blog 1,964  
3,890  
150,016  
33  
218  
215  
1,358  
3   0  PR 2.0 Silicon Valley 954  
1,768  
82,493  
41  
243  
243  
1,054  
4   0  PR Watch 590  
2,059  
318,346  
25  
126  
122  
526  
5   0  PR Squared 598  
513  
68,499  
22  
153  
147  
639  
6   0  a shel of my former self 410  
724  
97,052  
22  
87  
87  
506  
7   0  NevilleHobson.com 331  
661  
95,297  
19  
149  
143  
384  
8   +1  The Buzz Bin 387  
815  
44,714  
19  
40  
40  
627  
9   +1  Communication Overtones 282  
578  
41,795  
15  
58  
58  
358  
10   -3  Web Ink Now 588  
1,008  
63,283  
4  
137  
136  
630  
11   0  Pop! PR Jots 198  
286  
49,967  
16  
52  
52  
185  
12   +4  PR Blogger 167  
293  
38,671  
12  
34  
34  
126  
13   +1  The Bad Pitch Blog 201  
317  
42,347  
5  
53  
53  
167  
14   +12  Fleet Street PR 165  
349  
5,088  
42  
42  
42  
197  
15   0  Media Orchard 93  
309  
43,920  
10  
57  
57  
103  
16   -4  Canuckflack 238  
280  
10,870  
29  
18  
18  
264  
17   +4  Strategic Public Relations 156  
219  
32,867  
12  
26  
26  
105  
18   +2  Spinwatch 107  
235  
96,147  
4  
37  
36  
95  
19   +6  A PR Guy’s Musings 96  
213  
30,614  
11  
18  
18  
113  
20   -1  Pro PR 138  
341  
27,076  
19  
7  
6  
199  
21   +3  PR Communications 121  
221  
12,392  
14  
15  
15  
110  
22   -1  Young PR 140  
191  
19,764  
9  
12  
12  
133  
23   +7  CustomScoop’s PR Blog Jots 133  
200  
3,090  
14  
17  
15  
176  
24   +10  PR Newser 134  
289  
4,217  
21  
13  
13  
111  
25   +16  Murphy’s Law 69  
101  
23,388  
18  
18  
18  
51  
26   +17  Peter Shankman 219  
347  
1,578  
6  
16  
16  
189  
27   -9  PR Works 84  
139  
17,273  
2  
23  
23  
103  
28   +16  Brendan Cooper 95  
162  
7,748  
11  
16  
15  
75  
29   -6  Strumpette 90  
122  
10,713  
16  
14  
13  
78  
30   -17  Flack Life 236  
342  
19,096  
3  
13  
0  
266  
31   +19  Wadds’ tech pr blog 81  
135  
13,458  
1  
34  
34  
69  
32   -15  Todd Andrlik 354  
659  
12,174  
11  
1  
1  
450  
33   +3  ToughSledding 65  
114  
18,260  
3  
17  
17  
67  
34   -5  Paul Gillin – Social Media 103  
140  
32,872  
5  
6  
6  
91  
35   -4  The Flack 83  
127  
67,710  
2  
31  
0  
67  
36   +12  KDPaine’s PR Measurement 70  
110  
8,047  
18  
11  
11  
65  
37   -9  Common Sense PR 138  
692  
4,973  
8  
4  
4  
159  
38   +8  Wired PR Works 83  
148  
2,674  
1  
25  
23  
82  
39   -6  Occam’s RazR 78  
160  
9,354  
9  
7  
7  
91  
42   +15  Heather Yaxley 57  
100  
16,784  
1  
32  
32  
45  
42   -5  Naked PR 79  
115  
15,283  
8  
8  
8  
70  
42   +16  Drew B’s take on tech PR 63  
82  
21,354  
6  
16  
16  
29  
43   +8  Getting Ink 96  
182  
2,421  
0  
22  
22  
88  
44   -5  PR Conversations 59  
116  
17,673  
1  
14  
14  
54  
45   +14  Beyond PR 39  
107  
15,186  
2  
20  
18  
35  
46   -9  Cooler Insights 41  
98  
17,521  
2  
14  
14  
59  
47   +7  PR Studies 54  
111  
21,689  
2  
11  
11  
39  
49   New  Socialized PR 84  
119  
1,320  
11  
7  
7  
60  
49   -22  Tech PR Gems 78  
187  
7,181  
8  
3  
0  
147  
50   -5  Piaras Kelly PR 45  
66  
23,396  
2  
12  
12  
46  
51   +4  Simonsays 62  
87  
17,312  
0  
12  
12  
50  
52   -5  Valley PR Blog 50  
106  
7,939  
6  
7  
7  
47  
53   -21  PR Meets the WWW 53  
69  
35,646  
7  
5  
5  
30  
54   +13  bitemarks 39  
56  
10,701  
3  
14  
14  
24  
55   -13  IndiaPRBlog! 39  
89  
9,303  
4  
7  
6  
60  
56   -21  Blogging Me, Blogging You 52  
73  
17,825  
0  
11  
10  
46  
57   +14  In Front of Your Nose 36  
69  
4,220  
2  
15  
14  
32  
58   -18  Corporate PR 49  
81  
24,163  
5  
3  
3  
24  
59   +1  Engage in PR 36  
62  
7,227  
11  
5  
5  
49  
61   -12  PR Meets Marketing 65  
101  
1,700  
0  
7  
7  
99  
61   +2  The New PR 36  
49  
8,055  
5  
9  
9  
30  
62   New  From PR to Eternity 32  
71  
380  
1  
28  
28  
27  
63   New  Observations of PR 44  
53  
10,467  
1  
5  
5  
31  
64   -12  PR Disasters 48  
88  
7,934  
0  
2  
2  
49  
65   0  The Rosemont Loving 19  
28  
11,405  
1  
12  
12  
7  
66   +13  All Things PR 26  
48  
3,782  
1  
9  
8  
24  
67   -5  The New Marketing 53  
53  
743  
2  
6  
6  
30  
69   -3  my(PR)palette 26  
57  
961  
0  
13  
13  
28  
69   -13  Teaching PR 46  
77  
6,413  
0  
2  
2  
49  
70   -6  The PR 2.0 Universe 30  
89  
7,145  
8  
0  
0  
20  
71   -18  Strive Notes 35  
67  
3,909  
2  
2  
2  
36  
72   +2  Priscilla’s World 16  
31  
4,571  
18  
3  
3  
14  
73   New  PR Media Blog 34  
50  
1,654  
2  
6  
6  
19  
74   +6  Don’t eat the shrimp 18  
36  
1,772  
3  
7  
7  
17  
75   +2  Glass House 12  
18  
9,777  
1  
7  
7  
12  
76   New  Beyond the Hype 3  
59  
846  
2  
11  
11  
14  
77   -2  Alan Weinkrantz PR 17  
41  
2,815  
3  
6  
6  
9  
78   -6  media mindshare 25  
37  
6,695  
1  
2  
2  
15  
80   New  Flacks Revenge 23  
44  
1,250  
0  
3  
3  
37  
80   +5  Point oh 18  
30  
281  
21  
0  
0  
16  
81   -13  Media Guerrilla 10  
16  
7,437  
9  
0  
0  
14  
82   +1  Fusion PR Forum 13  
29  
774  
0  
8  
8  
18  
83   -13  PR Girlz 22  
24  
5,078  
0  
4  
0  
21  
84   +5  PR-otagonism 22  
41  
1,361  
0  
3  
3  
16  
85   -16  Tech PR War Stories 26  
53  
1,424  
0  
0  
0  
24  
86   +6  PR Voice 34  
68  
1,346  
0  
0  
0  
9  
87   +7  Corporati 12  
24  
5,594  
1  
1  
1  
6  
89   -4  nerd-in-residence 11  
20  
472  
11  
0  
0  
9  
89   +9  Change and internal communications 8  
12  
3,536  
6  
1  
1  
4  
90   -17  PR 2.0 20  
32  
6,861  
0  
0  
0  
8  
91   -10  wordymouth 17  
6  
541  
5  
0  
0  
11  
92   -2  Public Relations Rogue 12  
22  
1,706  
1  
0  
0  
8  
94   -1  Small Business PR/Marketing 21  
28  
176  
0  
1  
1  
7  
94   -16  The PR Place 7  
12  
3,057  
1  
0  
0  
6  
95   -11  GREENblog 6  
12  
3,632  
0  
1  
1  
6  
96   -1  DummySpit 9  
16  
2,127  
0  
1  
1  
4  
97   -16  First Person PR 11  
17  
1,205  
0  
0  
0  
7  
98   -10  Media Artifacts 4  
10  
311  
1  
0  
0  
8  
99   -12  note to editors… 5  
12  
1,513  
0  
0  
0  
6  
100   -9  The last man in Europe… 2  
6  
681  
1  
0  
0  
3  

Once again I’ve left it quite a while since the last index, so there are some new entries: Socialized PR, Flacks Revenge, PR Media Blog, From PR to Eternity, Beyond the Hype and Observations of PR.

This means I’ve had to drop some other blogs, which have either sunk, been untouched for ages, or don’t quite fit here any more. They are PR In A Jar, Point Being, Indian and Global PR, Tech for PR, Wagner Comms, and Onalytica. The last one I feel a bit sad about because I’m a big fan of what Onalytica do, but I haven’t seen much PR discussion on the blog for a while. I may revisit this decision.

The other main change is that I’ve dropped Google. This is purely because Google has done something to its search results layout which means I can’t use Google Docs’s own ImportHTML function to bring that data in!

Fortunately this gave me the opportunity to use my Easybee software on a newcomer to the social media measurement world: HowSociable.com.

HowSociable is an intriguing prospect. It grabs metrics from 22 social sources such as Flickr, Twitter, Technorati and so on, then calculates a ‘score’ based on a brand’s performance across all these sources.

There are drawbacks (naturally – aren’t there always?). Firstly, given that it doesn’t class a ‘brand’ as a URL, and doesn’t allow forward-slashes, I’ve had to take educated guesses on blogs that are subdomains, so for example with a URL like http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/davidferrabee/default.aspx I’ve had to take the ‘davidferrabee’ as the HowSociable search term. So I’ve tried to compare like for like, but I cannot be absolutely certain I’m being fair across the board.

Also, we don’t know how it calculates its score. I suppose this doesn’t matter if it’s consistent, but with such a new site I do wonder how much it will change over the coming months. It already experienced some downtime recently, and I have a feeling it compiles its figures through scraping. So all it takes is for the target sites to get wise, change their formats slightly, and HowSociable is comprised. So let’s hope the people behind HowSociable are clever enough to develop the site to the point it becomes a useful and trusted source of measurement for people like me.

Because it’s been an interesting inclusion. While it doesn’t seem to have hugely affected the rankings, there are some very noticeable spikes lower down the table. For example Dave Fleet has a very high HowSociable score (I just checked – davefleet.com is now at 46 so it’s even higher), and I assume this is down to his Twitter omnipresence. I would say this is the case for the other lower-ranking bloggers too – that is, they may wield more influence as social media-ites rather than purely as bloggers.

One quite alarming observation this month is that the Google Blog figures are screwy. The figures over the past month are virtually identical to the figures from any period. This implies to me that either Google’s having a bad time, or they’ve deliberately wiped some data and their records are counting again. I’ve seen only one mention of the Google Blog data issue so either it’s not an issue, or I’m wrong, or maybe Google are just hoping no one notices. I do wonder whether this is related to the recent problems with GMail and Feedburner.

In fact, these results were so plain daft that I was considering not even compiling the index. But I figured that, if Google really have reset the figures, then I could be waiting for quite some time before they started becoming meaningful again. I could remove them altogether in future.

Technorati was also a bit flakey this month. I just couldn’t obtain inlinks figures for some sites so I averaged out the inlinks-to-reactions ratio for the other sites – it comes to about 2.14 – and calculated substitute scores for them.

So, there you have it. All comments/questions/suggestions welcome.


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13 comments

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  1. socialized » Socialized blog #49 on latest PR Friendly Index said, on August 20, 2008 at 7:27 am

    [...] out Brendan’s blog for all 100 top PR blogs and an explanation of the how the rankings were [...]

    Reply
  2. Ike said, on August 20, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Thanks for the heads-up on HowSociable. I do wonder, though, if that boosts people like Dave who have a URL branded under his name at the expense of people like me. I have ikepigott all over the place, and it is typically associated with Occam’s RazR as far as humans are concerned. Don’t know if the machine picks that up….

    Reply
  3. Kami Huyse said, on August 20, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    I also didn’t know about How Sociable, so I have learned something today. When I searched for kamichat, which is my nom de plume across the social networks, my score was 42. Also, if you spell out the whole blog name “Communication Overtones” (vs. overtonecomm) it gets a score of 37 (vs. 15).

    All very interesting. I am looking forward to playing with that tool a little more.

    Kami

    Reply
  4. Brendan said, on August 20, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    OK, the rules I have adopted for HowSociable regarding URLs are:
    * If the blog has its own domain, I use that. So, for http://www.micropersuasion.com I look for ‘www.micropersuasion.com’; for http://brendancooper.com, I look up ‘brendancooper.com’

    * This also applies if it has a blogging platform domain. So, for http://armourpr.wordpress.com/ I look up armourpr.wordpress.com; for http://topazpartners.blogspot.com/
    I look up topazpartners.blogspot.com

    * If a blog is in a subdomain, I have to make an educated guess as to which bit to use. So for http://simoncollister.typepad.com/simonsays/, I’ve looked up simoncollister.typepad.com; for http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/ I’ve looked up kdpaine.blogs.com.

    Ike, this means I’m looking up occamsrazr.com for you, and Kami, for you it’s overtonecomm.blogspot.com.

    I know what you’re saying about looking up names that are closer to your ‘real’ names or your ‘web’ names. But there are difficult decisions to be made here. For example, for greenbanana.wordpress.com, should that be a search for Heather Yaxley instead? What about PRNewser, because that’s a group of people? Same with TechPR War Stories, that’s David Strom and Paul Gillin. So do I then search for their names and add their HowSociable scores together?

    Then what about names that might have frequent hits but for the wrong person? Media Guerrilla is in fact Mike Manuel, but type that name into Google and you get http://mikemanuel.com/ who seems to be a Country & Western singer!

    So, you see, the question of what constitutes a ‘brand name’ is itself riddled with difficulties. This is why I deliberately chose to go with something that would be as close to unique as possible – the blog URL – and that would deviate as little and be as objective as possible – again, the blog URL.

    Or how about I go with the blog names instead? In which case, how would I deal with blog names such as ‘PR 2.0′ or ‘Change and internal communications’ which are so generic they’d get all sorts of unrelated hits?

    I’m glad you’ve both raised this however. I thought long and hard before including it, and I should probably have explained my reasoning more carefully in the original post. I’m open to suggestions for how to improve this approach.

    Reply
  5. Karen Russell said, on August 21, 2008 at 2:12 am

    Hi Brendan, You’ve actually got my old blog linked here — which is probably OK because http://www.teachingpr.org hasn’t caught up with it yet, so I’m better off in the rankings with the old one. Sad, I know.

    Reply
  6. Brendan said, on August 21, 2008 at 9:28 am

    Hi Karen, thanks for the heads-up, duly noted for next time around…

    Reply
  7. Barbara Rozgonyi said, on August 21, 2008 at 6:15 pm

    Hope you get lots of traffic from this post, Brendan!
    You certainly deserve lots of attention for your efforts – the PR Friendly Index is a truly unique scoring system that keeps evolving.
    Appreciate the introduction to How Social – fun to play around with my multiple online personas and see how each measures up.
    @wiredprworks on twitter.com

    Reply
  8. Lee Odden said, on August 22, 2008 at 3:20 am

    Lists are always fun and tough for the list maker. So many things to consider.

    RE: Yahoo Inlinks, I noticed you’ve used the home page, not the entire blog for link counts. Of course as blogs, people link to individual posts as much or more than the home page. It’s a sign of quality content.

    Here’s an interesting comparison:

    micropersuasion home page links: 512,766
    micropersuasion site links: 646,579

    toprankblog home page links: 148,905
    toprankblog site links: 666,577

    When you use a measure of inbound links to an entire blog, then toprankblog actually has more inbound links than micropersuasion.

    By pointing this out I am not suggesting a change to your methodology because if you were limited to checking links to an entire site, it would not be possible to distinguish links for blogs hosted on 3rd party platforms like blogspot.com, wordpress.com, typepad.com etc. That is a limitation of the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.

    Thank you by the way, for including Online Marketing Blog in the consideration set. There are many great PR blogs in this list.

    Reply
  9. Geoff Livingston said, on August 22, 2008 at 7:39 am

    Thanks, Brendan. BTW, for your stats purposes, we changed the main URL of the Buzz Bin to http://www.livingstonbuzz.com. /blog/ is no longer sourced for inbound links to individual posts. Best wishes.

    Reply
  10. Brendan said, on August 22, 2008 at 6:58 pm

    Wow, I leave my blog alone for a day and come back to so many great comments!

    @Lee, very interesting point. But wouldn’t inlinks throughout the entire blog also be ‘muddied’ by the amount of internal linking done within the blog? That is, if I were to link very often to my own previous posts then I would get a higher inlink score? In fact, the recent addition of automatically generated ‘Possibly related posts’ on WordPress could be doing this too.

    I will think on that one.

    @Geoff – thanks, noted for next time around.

    @Barbara – thank you! Actually I can reveal that this has been my single most popular post ever with approaching 900 views so far, and by far the most links coming from PR Newser.

    Reply
  11. Resume 2.0 - Who are you online? « said, on September 21, 2008 at 6:05 pm

    [...] recent post shows this blog declining in activities,  (currently at spot 39, declining at -20… ) but an increase in “sociability” This just means, I still “socialised” [...]

    Reply
  12. Vibemetrix Daily Vibe - September 24, 2008 | VibeMetrix Blog said, on September 24, 2008 at 6:11 pm

    [...] Cooper of Feishman-Hillard London has put together an index ranking PR blogs based inbound links, blog search hits and HowSociable scores.  While the system Cooper uses to [...]

    Reply
  13. Bookmarks about Fusion said, on December 16, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    [...] – bookmarked by 5 members originally found by antiacido on 2008-11-12 The PR Friendly Index for August 2008 http://brendancooper.com/2008/08/19/the-pr-friendly-index-for-august-2008/ – bookmarked by 2 [...]

    Reply

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