The power of blog buzz
: Many of us have seen it: A mention of a blog in a paper or a magazine or even on TV doesn’t bring in nearly the traffic of a big blog link. I get much more traffic from a mention by Glenn Reynolds than from a mention in Time magazine or the New York Times.
I remember the business head of MSNBC.com telling me sometime ago that Glenn Reynolds’ column there gets more traffic from external blogs than from the internal promotional power of the meganewssite.
See Media Drop‘s comments (and links to Terry Heaton and Bill Hobbs) on a panel discussion that brought gasps to the lungs of flacks when they heard this phenom: Blogs cause more links than big, old media.
Now on the one hand, this may be stating the obvious: A linking medium causes links. But I do think it is proof of the influence and buzz-making power of weblogs. Print and TV have no means to answer a call to action; blogs do. Print and TV give us a big tapioca of information; blogs give us personal recommendations (someone who says, click here because I think you should).
This should be an underlying theme of tomorrow’s Bloggercon session on making blogs make money, for it points to the unique value of this medium over others. We (pardon me) make buzz like a machine.
