Yesterday, we received an email from Plugger, a new tool that aims to help us stay on top of Australian news and blogs. I'll happily add it to my list of Australian social media research tools, but for deep insights, none of these tools can substitute for reading blogs, becoming a blogger, and immersing yourself in the community.
Right now, the Australian social media research tools I use are:
- Plugger. This is great for getting a quick "lay of the land" when looking at a company or industry for the first time, especially using the "related companies", "related people" and "related themes" links down the right side of any company search. You can't separate social media from mainstream media in the search results.
I'm also aware of, but rarely use,
The Australian Index and
The Adelaide Index. The only reason I don't use
Blogs.com.au is I'm in the habit of search Gnoos, but I'm a very happy reader of their blog —
The Local.
If you need to find Australian bloggers outside your areas of knowledge, these tools are a great place to start — but for public relations, we must understand much more than these tools can tell us. Who reads whom, for example.
The measurement giants are working furiously to measure patterns of influence within the global English language blogosphere, but I expect it will be a long time until they start slicing and dicing this data for a country that accounts for a tiny fraction of all worldwide traffic.
Meanwhile, Australian blog consultant Alistair Cameron dreams of a Google solution to our measurement problem and says he's even begged Hitwise to step into the breach. If his dreams come true, I'll be the first person to crack open the champagne, but even then — and I'm sure Alistair would agree — real understand of the Australian blogosphere will only come from writing, reading and interacting.
Yes, measurement is critical, but the numbers that matter can be found in the brand tracker and on the balance sheet — not Technorati. Numbers and rankings can be a handy way of reality-checking your intended strategy, but if you can't tell a story about why certain bloggers are influential, I'd take any Australian numbers we can access in 2007 from the tools listed above with a grain of salt.
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