BurrellesLuce and “non-optimal veracity” (from: Bob Wyman)
http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/03/burrellesluce_a.html
As reported elsewhere, BurrellesLuce recently published a press release which not only insulted much of the blogging community, but contained a number false claims and provided clear evidence that they are clueless as to the importance of monitoring Word of Mouth Marketing or Consumer Generated Media. One can hope that the false claims were simply the result of ignorance… The other things they say force one to question how well they can serve the needs of PR professionals who require up-to-date and competitive methods for monitoring their markets. Perhaps after having been "industry pioneers for over 100 years," their time has passed…
The BurrellesLuce press release claims:
Despite competitors’ claims, BurrellesLuce covers more web logs, or "blogs" — and notifies you sooner — than any other media monitoring service.
Both claims (number and speed) are false.
Re: The Number of Blogs Monitored: As of a moment ago, PubSub monitors 8,832,293 blogs (for the latest count, see our home page). Thus, we monitor over 8,400 times more blogs then the mere 1,500 that BurrellesLuce claims. The number they monitor is, in fact, less then 10% of the number of new blogs that we add *every day* to those that we monitor… Additionally, there are many other blog monitoring services such as Technorati, Feedster, Intelliseek or BuzzMetrics that monitor fewer then PubSub but still massively more than BurrellesLuce claims.
Perhaps BurrellesLuce takes some harbor in their definition of term "media monitoring service." They may be trying to distinguish themselves from the free services that offer broader monitoring then their high-priced solutions. But, even this wouldn’t bring veracity to their claims since Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics offer excellent monitoring and measurement services for pay. (Intelliseek also offers BlogPulse for free…) Additionally, the many PR firms and PR consultants that rely on the free PubSub service can all claim to "monitor" more then BurrellesLuce does.
Re: Speed of Notification: BurrellesLuce’s claim that they notify their clients "sooner" than any competing services simply can’t be true. Given our support for pinging technology and the instant notifications delivered via PubSub’s SideBar technology, we’re often able to notify our subscribers of blog updates less then one minute after new posts are created. Given that BurrellesLuce also claims that "All stories and online mentions are reviewed by an editor" before being provided to their customers, it is inconceivable that they could be faster then us or the many other services that do not introduce latency into the notification process by requiring human review. Perhaps what they meant to say was something like: "We’re the fastest of the systems that relies on human review." If that is what they claim, then it is what they should have said… Of course, it would also be good for them to reflect on the fact that some of their customers have recently been complaining (in blogs) about how slow they are — but, they might not monitor those blogs…
BurrellesLuce also claim:
"…we deliver just what our clients want… We don’t simply supply every ‘mention’ of a company name or issue."
If you’re a BurrellesLuce client and have learned, as many of your competitors have, that you can get great value by mining "every mention" of your company or product name, then BurrellesLuce is refusing to provide what you need to remain competitive. Modern PR and MarCom metrics like measures of "Buzz," Sentiment Analysis, Business Intelligence, etc. can’t be used by BurrellesLuce customers — unless they go outside to find such services. It also appears that BurrellesLuce is not likely to recognize the value of such services any time soon. This can be seen in their comment that:
"Most blogs are merely the irrelevant musings of an individual."
In this comment they clearly show that they don’t realize the key value of monitoring blogs: Blogs allow monitoring services direct access to the thoughts, sentiments and "musings" of large numbers of individuals. This is not only of intuitively obvious value but we have the proof-points of Intelliseek, Buzzmetrics and Monitor110 who are delivering valuable services based on the aggregation and evaluation of such "irrelevant" Word of Mouth and Consumer-Generated-Media. (See: Intelliseek WhitePaper and BuzzMetrics Case Studies. Also, see the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association site.)
The most astonishing thing about BurrellesLuce’s release is that it was totally unnecessary to make these inflammatory and inaccurate statements. It may be that BurrellesLuce considers only 1,500 blogs to have enough weight that they should be specifically monitored. However, the fact that there exists an elite of 1,500 blogs does not mean that the others should be ignored. Frankly, I would suggest that BurrellesLuce, and others who need to monitor blogs, would be wise to follow the pattern that Robert Scoble and others have found to work best:
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Identify a small set of blogs that are worth dedicated monitoring. These will be the blogs that are known to be widely read and are influential in the domain of your interest. Subscribe to these blogs directly. In the BurrellesLuce case, this would be a set of 1,500 blogs.
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Create PubSub subscriptions for mentions of your name, your company’s name, product names, competitors, etc. In this way, you’ll be able to catch mentions of these keywords in any of the millions of blogs that you don’t subscribe to directly.
This "two-pronged" approach will give you the best coverage of blogs that can be had. The quality of your results will depend on how well you select the blogs that you read "cover to cover" and how well you define your subscriptions. In any case, no one will be able to claim they monitor more then you do. If nothing else, BurrellesLuce should probably be following this two-pronged approach if only to be able to say that they are actually montoring the correct set of elite blogs! One of the best measures of the influence of a blog will be mentions of that blog in other blogs… How can BurrellesLuce know which blogs have "influence" if they don’t monitor the blogs of those who are influenced?
Enough said… My hope is that BurrellesLuce will at least consider providing either an apology or an explanation for this rather shocking release…
bob wyman