Spotter’s Blog 
Paul Brummitt
Spotter
Find that blogger
Many bloggers are, or become, Key Opinion Leaders. Organizations often want to nurture them proactively – which means they need help to find them.
Paul is a media and linguistic expert based in Copenhagen. He has many years of experience in the information industry and joined Spotter in 2010 as Business Director Northern, Central & Eastern Europe. As well as looking after Spotter’s business in those regions, he also helps to develop the company’s Media and Social Media Monitoring and Analysis product portfolio.
For some strange reason the other day I decided to google “how many blogs are there?”. Surprisingly, I got a useful answer!
Of course, I didn’t go any further than the first page of results. So maybe there was a better answer further on (more about that later). But that first page revealed that in 2006 someone had written “50 million and counting” and as long ago as 2008 someone else had asked “who’s still counting?”
So how are those answers useful? At first sight it might seem overwhelming to have had 50 million five years ago, let alone what (and here comes my favourite buzzword) the “exponentially-increasing” number probably is today. Well the useful information is that we’ve already gone past the point where ordinary search engines can no longer keep up. When a data dump will be staggeringly, impossibly enormous.
So how do we find our way through all that to get what we need for our clients? Clients who trust us at Spotter to help with monitoring and analysing what their clients say, to monitor their e-reputation and contribute to risk assessment.
The answer is that the ongoing mix of automated searching, data collection and machine analysis combined with human intelligence in the form of expert, multilingual analysts means that we can quickly identify key bloggers. It’s relatively easy to use Google and Bing or whatever search engine you prefer to find individual articles. But the key to success is in defining what we call a “Corpus” of sources – be they social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook or forums, or traditional online media and even radio and TV. These form the main, ongoing basis for analysis and are agreed with you the client.
But we never rest – we constantly check to see if anything appears elsewhere by using those search engines. And by going much, much further than just page 1 of the results – as I mentioned a moment ago – we can find that new blogger for you, and determine whether he or she might be relevant to include in your Corpus going forward.
Many bloggers are, or become, Key Opinion Leaders. Organizations often want to nurture them proactively – which means they need help to find them. And when they’ve been found, Spotter can help you monitor and analyse what they say, and what their influence is.
Are they leading a discussion or just repeating someone else’s points? Are they attracting useful comments? How influential are they? All questions which can be answered with Spotter’s help. We call it Decisional Analytics.