Measuring the impact of blogs on companies

The San Francisco Examiner, February 12, 2006 by Natalie T. Del Conte

Web logs, or blogs, have become an influential indication of a company's reputation and the measurement of blogs' effect is becoming a business in itself.

It is surprising that anyone cares what random people have to say daily about a specific subject, but people do. To quantify just how influential blogs can be, companies such as Biz360 have come up with a way to quantify the impact of blogs.

"Search is good if you know exactly what you're looking for, but if you need to understand what's going on in the blogging world, that's a harder question," said Tony Priore, senior manager of the San Mateo company. "Executives want to know three things: What's going on today, what's different from yesterday and what do I need to know about?"

Biz360 partnered with Feedster Inc., a blog, news and podcast search company in San Francisco, to help develop a system that can aggregate and analyze all of the blogs on a given subject. Biz360 compiles the information for marketing executives.

"Kate Moss is a good example of this," Glover said. "The blogosphere said she had a bad coke habit so H&M pulled their sponsorship. Marketers don't want to be surprised. They don't want to find out when it hits the mainstream press what is going on, so the blogosphere is a good way to monitor what goes on."

San Francisco food blogger Amy Sherman believes most bloggers write with good intentions, but she admits when she mentions a corporation in her blog, it usually takes notice.

"There are some people who really attack corporations and write about their practices, but it's rare," said Sherman, who maintains her own personal blog and also contributes to KQED's food blog. "I'm sometimes critical of organizations but I think when I write something positive, I get feedback from them, so clearly they're reading and paying attention."