Blog relationship building

One of the greatest challenges in doing blogger outreach for PR purposes is selecting the right candidates for contacts. It isn’t like the old days, when you could just contact the editors of trade journals in your industry. Here’s a simple procedure using AlertRank that will give you a complete report on authoritative bloggers for any topic. I created a public AlertRank account for Google Alerts on political issues, and started it out with a search for  health care reform last week.  Let’s take a look at what we’ve got. I made the account publicly available, so you can look at it directly, or just use the screen images here.

The first step is looking at the alerts themselves. While on this screen I can click the sentiment column to flag any alerts as positive or negative. That data can be used later to classify sources. You can’t change the sentiment of my alerts in a public account, but if you were logged into this account, you could make this type of change.

Right now we’re interested in the summarized data on sources, which can be viewed by clicking the “Sources” link.I want to see the sources that write about health care reform most often. Clicking the “# of Alerts” column heading will sort the sources by that value, showing me the most frequent writers on this topic.

AlterNet.org looks interesting. They have written 3 articles on my topic in the last few days, they have a high Google PageRank, and a very high number of Delicious links. Clicking the row for this source will display its details report.

I can now see the alerts that I’ve received from AlertNet.org, and the report also displays the top Delicious tags that have been assigned to it, which gives me an understanding of their political perspective on this issue. If I decide to start making contact with this site, I can open any of the alert pages in their own window. The report tells me that the site allows comments. If I want someone else to follow up with the outreach, I can save this page as a PDF report, and email it to a colleague. Here is a copy of the PDF for this source. I can also return to the source listing page, and produce a PDF report for all the sources.

Tagged as: AlertRank, blogger outreach, Google Alerts, PR

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