Edelman's Technorati deal and the blogosphere...
By Tom Foremski - May 24, 2006
[This stomach bug has taken the wind out of my sails for a few days, my apologies about the backed up emails I hope to get to them in the next few days...]
Edelman's deal with Technorati is interesting. For an undisclosed sum of cash Edelman, the world's largest private PR firm is financing Technorati's expansion into the rest-of-the-world blogosphere. It's a savvy move, not one without risks, but Richard Edelman has been out in the forefront in trying to understand the blogosphere and the need for tools to measure influence and reach within the entire (global) mediasphere (of which the blogosphere is a subset).
There are lots of comments on the deal out in the ether, but none seem to get it. We won't know unless we know the terms of the deal, either way its a bold move.
So far, Edelman has hired the top PR industry bloggers and it is moving ahead on a course that I do not see other PR firms following. And I think it is because they don't understand the nature of the game.
Edelman's moves are very interesting because they are potentially game changing, they are risky, and bold. Let's see if the other the-game-is-still-the-same PR firms figure things out. Can they be fast followers? I don't think so . . . but I'd love to be proved wrong.
Technorati has had problems scaling its infrastructure but that's probably because it has done a masterful job on branding. It really understands the psychology of the blogosphere and it has managed to keep that balance of being a good community citizen along with its right to monetize what it is doing.
Technorati has managed to almost privatize the trackback--a key element of the blogosphere. Trackbacks seem to have stopped working but if I look at my Technorati links there are many links that don't register as trackbacks. I've no idea why that is the case but Technorati offers a solution.
By Tom Foremski - May 24, 2006 | Permalink | Comment
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Comments (5)
To your point on the trackback: the operation of finding the trackback URL of a post you are linking to, and manually adding it to the list sites to be pinged is so cumbersome that not that many people bother doing it. This is something that blog editors or blogging platforms should do (like Wordpress does). Hence the opportunity created to companies like Technorati or more recently MyBlogLog.
Hope you are feeling better now...
Posted: May 25, 2006 5:59 PM
Thanks Jeff, but I thought that the platforms such as Movable Type did that automatically. I know that trackback spam is a huge problem and I wish GOOG would publicize that it doesn't work, it would do a lot to alleviate all the spam comments and trackbacks. And yea, thanks, I am feeling a lot better--I hate standalone journalism it's a bugger when you are sick that's why I'm recruiting an editorial team.
Posted: May 26, 2006 11:15 AM
Perhaps the competition does get and just isn't as easily convinced of its value as the Edelman gang seems to be. That doesn't make them wrong or that they "don't get it."
Plenty of big time PR agencies have blogs. They just don't seem to want to make this the crux of their expertise.
Edelman, while bold and certainly a great agency, might be getting to far ahead of itself.
Posted: June 4, 2006 10:27 AM
Mike, we are way to early into blogging and the new media to say that some large agencies choose not to get involved or want to distinguish themselves in other ways. There are a tremendous amount of new answers to new questions that need to be found and that's exciting. And how do you communicate effectively and truthfully with a fractured two-way media is one of the big questions...
Posted: June 4, 2006 11:19 PM
I see you are on TypeKey. Me too. I got a trackback the other day that was sent out a month ago. But, technorati is worse. It only registers about 60% of the blogs that link to mine. If someone could hit 98%, they would have a sure winner.
Posted: January 7, 2007 8:53 PM