Fools Rush In ... to new Social Media Sites

The New Communications Forum is coming up in January. Who should go to this? Anyone in PR, corporate communications or marketing communications that is looking at the blogosphere as a next step in their communications plans. This is the event that is a must-attend for communications professionals - the single practitioner, the in-house PR person, the large agency or boutique firms - everyone will find things that will make their communications me more amorphous.

And, no, I'm not just saying that because I am one of the people presenting at the forum. My session is on blog measurement, publicity and tracking, and I have begun gathering more structured information for the audience. The outline so far includes: PubSub, FeedDemon, Topix.net and other tools that I use to track the blogosphere.

How fortuitous of me that Bacon's just announced their blog tracking tool, which will be part of their MediaSource service. Beyond the press release, MediaPost's MediaDailyNews also covered the announcement.

I spoke to Ann Ertsas - the Marketing/PR Director at Bacon's - to get more information. We're all in PR, we know there's always more meat than the press release.

Not to give too much away - hey, I need you to come to my session and to the NewComm Forum! - but here's a recap of our conversation.

The value-add on blog searching really depends on what a company wants to do. If they want to track their own coverage in the blogosphere, or if they want to track for competitive analysis, competitive knowledge.

Bacon's believes in quality versus quantity for this product - we have research people that have identified good, respectable blogs written by journalists or pundits. It's a whole big world out there, and Bacons took the time to identity which blogs to track. Right now, it's 250 blogs of quality, where we would rather monitor less blogs, but those that are reputable and are news related.

There will be more about Bacon's during my presentation - with screenshots!! And some of the blog names!! - but right now I'm just trying to find out what Lexis/Nexis and Factiva are doing in blog tracking ... if I could only get calls back.

On a sidenote, kudos to Ann at Bacon's. Even though Musings from POP! is just a blog, she realized that there is value in reaching out to blogs, and taking the phone call and working with me on this presentation. Thanks!