Measuring the influence of blogs
Market Sentinel (together with Onalytica and immediate future) released a white paper on measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation. They looked at Jeff Jarvis's campaign against Dell and show for the first time how his influence and the possible damage to Dell's reputation can be measured.
These are the main conclusions:
- Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine is the key online source for those who have a negative perception of Dell’s customer service
- Its influence is enhanced by support from a closely-allied group of bloggers
- Dell’s own influence on the topic of its poor customer service is weak
- Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine is the key source for low-influence stakeholders (normally bloggers) writing about Dell customer services in general
- Taken all in all Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine is the eleventh most influential voice on Dell’s customer services in general
- If the bloggers were aggregated they would be the second most powerful influence on perceptions of Dell’s customer services after Dell itself.
Link: Measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation (pdf)
Comments
Hey Gert,
I've just finished reading it and this paper is a mindblower. They've made a brilliant analysis of the extent of the impact of one single blogger, complaining about Dells service. The cool thing is that Jarvis used the phrase "Dell Hell" for his post and all the people that linked to it, started using the same "tag". This folksonomy made it easy for the researchers to measure the extent of which the "Dell Hell" story floated through the network.
Hey Tom,
Have a look at Opinmind (www.opinmind.com) and type any subject into the search box (Dell for instance) and you'll find people with opinions (good and bad) on your topic of interest.
Best regards,
Gert