When thinking about the concept of Micro Persuasion, it's only natural to wonder if all of this is really important in a PR person's day-to-day job or just something that's merely conceptual right now. After all, we still need to get back to pitching reporters or writing press releases once we finish reading this post. We have internal or external clients to please and bills to pay.
You already know my opinion here, so instead I thought I would share two new academic papers that shed light on the topic. One explores the blogosphere's influence on mass media, while the other gives us a bit of demographic insight into where bloggers live.
First, Kathy E. Gill, a member of the faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington has published a fascinating paper entitled "How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?" (PDF). She is presenting this research at the 13th Annual World Wide Web Conference in New York in a day-long workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem on May 18.
UW's Gill reviews ways to measure the influence of the blogosphere on public opinion and mass media. She covers anecdotes of stories becoming big in the blogosphere and then being (re)introduced into mass media and reports on the traffic blogs receive and their integration into political and news sites.
On a related note, Jia Lin & Alexander Halavais, students at the SUNY Buffalo School of Informatics, are developing a method of mapping the blogosphere. They have published a short paper (PDF) that lists the 50 area codes that have the highest concentration of bloggers who use either Livejournal and Diaryland, two popular blog hosting services. Halavais has posted more information on his Weblog as well.
Taken in tandem these papers point to bloggers' powerful influence on the press and where PR pros can find them in the wild.
