PR Blogosphere Introspective

It’s interesting, if you take a step back and look at just the PR corner of the blogosphere you quickly realize one thing – we’re an active little community.  With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to take a sampling of PR bloggers over a one-month period and look at both our individual and collective contributions to the blogosphere. 

This simple chart is created based on the frequency of posts from a dozen PR bloggers and I’ll just add the caveat upfront that the bloggers cited here are merely a subset of the community and that I’m by no means trying to be exclusionary of bloggers not on this list – in fact, I’d like to revisit this chart again early next year and really build it out with some of the new voices entering the PR blogosphere.

With that being said, here are a few observations:

• Nearly 620 individual blog posts were generated in this time period and while it’s unlikely all of this content was original (e.g., cross-linking, multiple references to the same source, etc.), it still demonstrates a respectable contribution level.

• Based on this figure, the average PR blogger creates a little more than 50 posts per month or ~2 posts per day

• Steve Rubel is a machine.  He generated about 25% of the total content or more than Trevor Cook, Jeremy Pepper, Elizabeth Albrycht, Matthew Podboy, and Richard Bailey combined.

• Neville Hobson and Robert Hecht followed with the second and third highest totals respectively for the month, and Active Whisper Voice was the least active this month with 14 total posts.

Given this is just a snapshot in time these are obviously soft numbers, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see just how engaged the PR community is overall with the blogosphere – but don’t let this go to your blego. 

Of the estimated 140,000 PR practitioners in the U.S., PR bloggers make up barely a fraction of a percentage point and if that doesn’t put things in check, consider the fact that there are nearly 4.5 million blogs today.  Pretty quickly you start realizing just how small our corner of the Web really is…

Regardless, this should be fun to revisit in the future.  Keep up the good fight everyone.

Comments

[Steve Rubel]

Michael, interesting. What about looking at this in terms of our influence by layering in Technoarati data?

[Matthew Podboy]

Active Whisper, eh? Payback is a bit$h. Try this on folks. Here are some rough numbers to chew on. The average is around 50 posts/month. Let's say the average time per post is 20 minutes. That's 16 hrs and 39 minutes of blogging. Call it 16.5 hrs. Let's also say that our average billing rate is $150/hr. That adds up to almost $2,500 in blogging fees. I'd like to know where you folks get the time!

[Kevin Dugan]

Mike: I'm happy to have made the list. I'm also happy to claim the penultimate spot on the list.

Why? I aim for quality, not quantity/frequency. And, while this is NOT a comment on ANY blog, I like to add to the conversation and not simply link to it. My traffic probably suffers as a result, but...

Also, it occurs to me that we need to swap links. I'll add you to my blogroll shortly.

Matthew: At least you are in first for last place, I could argue my spot is least prominent. Which is why, in my Friday afternoon opinion, they created the word penultimate. It has cache and softens the blow.

[Mike Manuel]

Steve, I actually thought about adding reach on top of frequency, I was just being lazy. I'll do this next time round...

And Kevin, I couldn't agree more, it's about quality not quantity. If one of my peers was to only post something once a week, but it was always really good, I'd never unsubscribe.

MP, take some comfort in this dude;)

[Matthew Podboy]

You're a good man, Kevin. We need to stick together. Mr. Manuel, you're a colleague and a friend and I appreciate you taking the time to pull this together. I find it much more interesting than the link-back-chatter that populates most blogs. For some of us, blogging is a chance to think LIKE a journalist - I'm not saying because we blog we are journalists - but we can practice the art of writing and researching unique content. And that's what you've done here, Mike.

[Jeremy]

So, what you're telling me Mike is to break up my Snippets into separate posts? ;-)

We all blog for different reasons. I blog to bring up issues or bring things to the forefront, and hope that they spread to other PR blogs and that we are a unified voice in the industry.

And, sometimes I post stuff because it makes me smile.

But, that's the philosophy degree in me: trying to create a better universe by working for the betterment of public relations as a whole. That's what I try to do with my blog, make PR better, bring up issues, help raise the bar in PR.

[Neville Hobson]

Mike, interesting data. When I saw it, I had similar thoughts to those of some of our blogging colleagues posted here - great to see high quantity rankings, but what about quality?

Steve's suggestion re Technorati is a good one.

Jeremy, I wholly agree with you: I, too, sometimes post stuff because it makes me smile. Or grind my teeth in frustration at times...

[H.Emami]

It was very interesting. I wrote a message in my blog about your research.
http://pr.eprsoft.com/archives/004474.html

[H.Emami]

It was very interesting. I wrote a message in my blog about your research. Iranian PR Blogger
http://pr.eprsoft.com/archives/004474.html

[PR Machine]

A handful of "before the bubble" PR bloggers will have drawn an entire industry into blogging. In no time, the PR behemoths will catch on and offer blogging services to clients. But, I don't think the early adopters will lose their voices in the blogosphere. And sure, there is a difference between frequent posts like NevOn, MicroPersuasion and PR Machine. Jeremy Pepper and Jim Horton, alternatively, provide in-depth analysis of PR topics.