Following on from my lst post about Pubcon, I was looking through my notes and I figured you may want to see a couple of sites that were noteworthy on the Social Bookmarking scene

Pligg - a content management system allowing you to have your own 'digg' type site. Being opensource, its free.
My commnent: you need a vibrant community to make this work well and you need to be at the hub of this community so you can get the votes for varoius submitted stories. A great example of this niche community site is Sphinn, a site geared to SEO, SEM

Buzzlogic - a 'hub identifier'. 
The big thing these days is targeting influencers who other sites reference from. I've covered this somewhat in my last post with http://www.blogpulse.com/

I've been to pubcon ! hooray ! that to the layperson is a 3 day 'geekfest' search marketing conference held in Las Vegas between the 4th and 7th of December 2007.

The session most relevant you (Online PR person) was:

Reputation Monitoring and Management
If you are not talking with your customer base your customer base will be talking about you. This session will look at ways to monitor, manage, and influence your reputation within the blogosphere and press.

I won't go into all the specifics, but the must useful points were:

Use the right tools to monitor what is being said about you.

When something flares up (like a disgruntled customer ranting about you) get in there and do serious damage limitation.

When you want to spread a message, find the 'hub' sites and help them write about your product or service. Then if all goes well, these sites disseminate a story across the blogosphere and consequently your originating site will be ranked on the search engines.


The right tools:
(An extended list here: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/08/26-free-tools-for-buzz-monitoring.html)

Google blog search:
Does a great job indexing blogs and flagging up chatter about YOU

Google Alerts:
Same story, but to your inbox and it covers web, discussions, videos and of course blogs.

And then you have the more sophisticated tools like: this one from BlogPulse which tracks blog conversations between various blogs who link in between each other.

The pattern to look out for here is where you find one BIG blog talking about your story and then looking how other blogs respond to the story and link back.

It is in effect an 'eco system' similar to this kind of thing (left: a diagram of a social network with a famous (deceased) person at its hub.

As you see, there are core influencers who influence others to a greater or lesser extent. The big blob in the middle is our main man here.

 So to see this tool in action, you should have a look at these results:

Here is one for 'Pubcon'  and another for 'Paypal' (not much happening here!) and 'Facebook' - hmmmm....very busy!

and how about a normal 'corporate' like Dell - for me the intersting bit is this :

• 11/16/2007   Dell's XPS ONE now on sale (from: Engadget)
• 11/16/2007   Dell's XPS ONE now on sale (from: Toys & Gadgets)
• 11/16/2007   Dell's XPS ONE now on sale (from: Component Apple)
• 11/16/2007   Dell's XPS ONE now on sale (from: BlogJunkies)
• 11/16/2007   Dell's XPS ONE now on sale - Engadget (from: BWOne.com)
• 11/16/2007   XPS ONE from Dell now available for purchase (from: CrunchGear)
• 11/19/2007   XPS One: New Dell All-in-One PC (from: Direct2Dell)
• 11/20/2007   Todos aman a Mac (from: Reymond Blog)
• 11/22/2007   XPS One - Beauty! (from: Andrew Lark)

Engadget has blogged on the Dell XPS, and this has caught on with a number of other blogers.

How about this one for 'will it blend?' the you tube movies of a guy blending various things including an iphone.

• 11/25/2007   Guitar Hero: it shreds, and, yes, it blends (from: Engadget)
• 11/25/2007   Guitar Hero: it shreds, and, yes, it blends (from: Toys & Gadgets)
• 11/26/2007   Rock on, Ottawa-Gatineau! (from: Population of One)
• 11/27/2007   GNC-2007-11-27 #320 (from: Geek News Central Podcast)
• 12/03/2007   Blendtec (from: ANCPL's Blog)

(notice Engadget again ! )

 The Message here is clear: reach online influencers with a good 'viral' message and your message will travel.

There is whole lot more I can talk about in reference to Pubcon, but I'll save that for another post.