iPod Search Influence: Engadget Beats Gizmodo, Parnassus Beats Technorati

The debate for what determines “influence” among online content creators has been raging for years.

Scoble is right when he says all bloggers matter. Chris Brennan, who publicized the Kryptonite lock security flaw — was on no “influencer” list — yet his content forced Kryptonite to recall millions of dollars worth of locks.

However, Scoble is also right when he says “it’s still a Google world.” This means the bloggers who are topping organic results certainly do have more direct influence — depending on what the searches are. All research shows that millions of shoppers rely heavily on traditional search before buying. This will certainly shift significantly over the coming years, but for now we believe it’s the pivotal online arena to leverage.

Our process at the Parnassus Group for helping companies connect with appropriate bloggers, content-creators, and other influencers is becoming more and more reliant on analysis of traditional search results. Luckily, we have automated processes now to make this a fairly straightforward effort.

Here’s an example. Imagine that you (are clinically insane) and are about to enter the market with a new digital music player. Who is influential in that space? Who do you solicit for input?

Some companies might do a search on Technorati and see who is deemed as being the most “authoritative:”

Then they’d fire up Outlook and start emailing.

We have a different approach, one that we feel much more closely aligns with true “influence” and is more likely to flag bloggers that might actually care about what you have to say. Here is the cliff notes version of our approach — the actual process we use is more complex, and uses more data. Even this abridged version we think provides results superior to traditional Pagerank and Alexa-centric approaches.

The first step is to discover what searches are relevant for this space. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the simplest one is to find a smart (and strongly aligned in market) vendor who has been buying keywords for some time and to leverage their optimization efforts. Fortunately, we’ve compiled keyword data for thousands of companies, and millions of keywords. Since Apple is not buying search terms to sell iPods, for this example — we’ll use Circuit City’s ipod sales portal. As it happens, they’ve bought several hundred terms that we can analyze.

The next step is to rank them. In this instance, we’ll prioritize based on how often the term is entered by searchers. Here are the top twenty:

These 20 account for 96 percent of the search volume measured for the terms at hand.

All we have to do then is review all of the organic search results for these 20 terms and catalog the top five posts or articles contained in each result. That provides us with 100 content items. We then tag each content bit with a source, and then compile the sources.

In the case of iPods, here is what we see as being the “real” influencers. For search results that matter, these are the high ranking sources:

We were surprised to see Gizmodo running so far behind Engadget in this analysis — but there are many more products and searches to be done. Some CES exhibitors might argue it’s because Gizmodo focuses more on vendor-disruption than on editorial compared to Engadget.

Note the vast difference between who we think are influential and who Technorati says are authorities.

Let us know if we can do an analysis like this for you. Just email me: Steve [at] parnassusgroup [dot] com.

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