Who's blogging about your business?
Posted 4 June 2007 at 10:27AM by Simon Dickson in Business blogging
A couple of weeks back I mentioned Canterbury-based consultancy X:Drive and their web 2.0 'sideline' project, WhosOff.com. I wrote:
Reading some of the 'hot startup' websites out there, like the highly-regarded TechCrunch blog, you'd be forgiven for thinking that unless you're young, good-looking and living in California, you're nowhere.
So when I saw a story popping up on TechCrunch about - you guessed it - WhosOff, it did bring a smile to my face. Can we claim some credit? I don't know what PR activity the company was getting up to itself, but our reference to TechCrunch in the text certainly won't have done them any harm.
I've seen this phenomenon several times: you mention someone or something on your blog, they spot it, and respond. Think of it as the online equivalent of 'press cuttings'. Perhaps the most common way to do it is using the leading blog search engine, Technorati. Do a search for your company or product name, then click on the 'posts' tab. This will take you to a page showing all the latest blog posts mentioning your search term. In the top right, you'll see a 'Subscribe' link, with the familiar orange RSS Feed icon. This feed is effectively a 'saved search', so each time you call up the feed, you'll be running the same Technorati search again - and it will show you any new items it's aware of.
If that sounds like too much effort, you can usually rely on bloggers' willingness to create links at every given opportunity. Your website's traffic analysis software will almost certainly include a 'referrers' list: any time someone visits your website by clicking on a link from another site, details of that linking site are passed to yours. It will certainly help build a better picture of the sites which are delivering for you; and it might give you a few hints about ways to boost your site's profile.
Tags: referrer logs, rss, saved search, techcrunch, technorati, whosoff
New feature: Rate this post!
Average rating: 2.8/5
