Comments on: Blog news travels fast

By: PR meets the WWW

PR meets the WWW — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 07:02:06 +0000

What are the standards for reporting blog surveys?

Summary: Why the articles published by The Guardian and The Times on the Blog Relations PR Survey are inaccurate (IMO); what are the journalistic standards for reporting a survey; a response to the comments of Hugh Fraser, founder of Blog Relation; wh…

By: Hugh

Hugh — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 06:08:31 +0000

Hi Constantin

The Guardian wrote as follows: â€œthe online survey, which the authors admit attracted responses from more blog-savvy professionalsâ€. I think that describes the general character of our sample well (although it did include some PRs who did not know much about blogs).

Iâ€™ve already written that it was odd that The Times did not quote the source, so that anyone who was particularly interested could look it up and find out the details.

We will see bigger survey numbers from Edelman and MIT who are sampling the entire blogosphere â€“ 17 million bloggers by some estimates. We limited our survey to one profession. I donâ€™t know how many PRs there are in the world, but thankfully it isnâ€™t anything like that number.

Each of the 50 PRs who took our survey was registered with us. We have verified their email addresses and know who they are. Some of them are quite well known in the profession. 22 left left on-the record comments which we have quoted by name (and some of which The Guardian picked up). Still more left URLS, which we have listed. This means that it is a very transparent and high quality sample – not just anybody passing by a website who had a few minutes to spare.

So the short answer to your question is no, I’m not losing any sleep over it. I won’t be ringing up The Guardian to complain that they reported our survey.

By: Constantin Basturea

Constantin Basturea — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 22:18:09 +0000

Hugh, congratulations for the Blog Relations survey’s media coverage. I was wondering — are you OK with the fact that both The Guardian and The Times didn’t report about the limitations of your survey? Aren’t journalists supposed to indicate when the results of a survey can’t be projected outside the small sample of respondents? Shouldn’t they report the -small- number of respondents?

By: Business Blog Consulting

Business Blog Consulting — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:13:30 +0000

Like Wildfire

Once bloggers get hold of useful information, news about it tends to travel rapidly. Hugh at Blog Relations and the Angel Blog notes how quickly news about his company’s PR survey spread. He writes: I published at 11 pm GMT