Anatomy of Top Marketing Bloggers

This is a very interesting post from Kevin Hillstrom's MineThatData Blog (nice name!)

As someone who works with brand marketers (and monitors various blogs for brand pick-up), Kevin dissected 188 posts from Mack Collier's Top 25 Marketing Blogs (I am 21st) and concluded the following:

• Only 14% of the posts are about brand commentary, about 60% of these articles were negative or critical.
• The top 10 marketing bloggers were largely negative when talking about a brand.
  • Bloggers 11-25 were largely positive in their commentary about brands.
• When talking about marketing strategy, this group of authors was positive by a margin of 2:1
• There is a difference in writing style between the top 10, and bloggers 11-25. The top 10 were more promotional, overwhelming more critical of brands...

One logical explanation of the difference between top 10 and 11-25 is the public visibility, perception and expectations. Negativity attracts more attention than praise. Put differently, being more controversial or heated will lead to more discussion. In addition, leading blogs have got to work harder and certainly need to be more focused and single-minded when it comes to maintaining their position - "links of the day", "top hacks", "lists", "shorter posts" and news headlines are going to "sell" better than longer, more discursive posts.

That's one hypothesis and it is a generalization - one size does not fit all especially in the good old blogosphere, but it does give interesting insight into blogger outreach (which I suspect is the inspiration behind Kevin's post in the first place).

If you're engaged in blogger outreach in any capacity, you know as much I do that you approach your outreach by starting at 1 and working your work downwards. You're prioritizing based on "quantitative reach" and what Kevin's analysis infers is that it could be a catch-22 i.e. the larger the blog, the more likely the response to be negative.

Kevin was "surprised" that marketing bloggers were in fact less negative (snarky?) than he would have suspected. As John Moore from Brand Autopsy (one of the MVB's) points out in the comments section, what might be construed as negative could also be interpreted as constructive criticism.