MIX07 Update: The Impact of Bloggers on Public Relations

CIO.com reports that there was a disappointing talk at the MIX07 conference on "digital entertainment". I didn't attend they keynote (preferring to take the time to put up some blog posts instead) but the immediate reaction shows the power of bloggers controlling news.

Before even the talk was concluded, people were blogging about how poor the talk was in near real time. It shows how important the blogging community has become in the following ways:

1. News is released in real time by thousands of bloggers. MIX07 and Silverlight both made the top ten searches in Technorati. Managing this spin cycle in real time becomes increasingly important for any PR department or agency.

2. The news dies quickly. I was blogging every 3-4 hours, and my the time my post was up on Technorati, the last one was already buried off the first couple pages. The best thing you can do from a PR perspective is to flood the network with news - this helps to bump older content down the list and traffic to those news items dies as a result. I have personally seen a massive drop-off even with my own posts after about 24 hours in traffic coming from news search engines such as Digg, Shoutwire, Technorati, etc.

3. Reading is happenning in real time as well. I was blogging throughout the MIX07 and I could see through analytics each post was getting traffic within minutes of being posted. Its hard to tell whether these readers are people at the conference or those simply visiting from the outside and experiencing it vicariously, but if you can generate enough awareness there will be a large amount of readers who will grab your message in near real time.

4. Its a bit hard to understand the impact of blogging on conference goers themselves. For example, did enough people start reading blog entries or news sitting in the talk that they got the message to walk out? Given the number of blackberries and wireless laptops in the room, its a possibility.