Church of the Customer Blog

Can you be a media darling yet not have much buzz?

Seems like a PR paradox. As a brief case study, let's look at one company I respect. Since this is written in the spirit of evangelism, I hope they won't mind.

comScore is our example. By way of explanation, the company maintains a panel of a few million online users and studies their behavior to help companies with their marketing research. It is arguably the company cited most often about online traffic statistics. Try for yourself:

Search for comScore on Google. It will return an eye-popping one million+ results. From a purely PR metric, one million Google citations is a big number.

Now search for comScore on Technorati. It will return some 5,000 results (or about 400 if you use Technorati's "sort by authority" filter). That comes out to about 25 mentions per day. Compared to the Google number, 5,000 citations is a vastly different number. The Technorati results show that most blogs are also just citing comScore's traffic stats via media reports. If we are to assume that Technorati is the primary barometer of online buzz, Technorati tells us that bloggers are not talking about comScore. (And they should be.)

As a point of comparison, more people are talking about Writely (using the sort by authority feature), the tiny firm that makes an online word processor and was recently bought by Google, than they are comScore, which has seven offices in three countries.

Now, search for Technorati on Technorati. It will return some 600,000 results. That's about 5,000 mentions per day. Lots of people are talking about Technorati, and they're probably many of the same people that comScore hopes to attract as customers. They're talking about Technorati's innovations, its new features, and Dave Sifry's blogosphere reports. They're speculating about Technorati's future and what it might be like.

The same level of user ownership could be true for comScore, it's just that those referenceable discussions are not happening out in the open. I suspect that the level of good buzz companies generate is in direct proportion to their level of transparency.

If comScore -- or any company, really, that stores and manages vast levels of data and metadata -- created sockets into its vast warehouse of data, or just shared data more frequently with the thousands of marketers, technologists and researchers who roam the the alleyways of social media, it would create new landscapes of buzz and ownership.