I’m working on a project that could involve building a community and one of the tactics is blogger outreach. Say … you want to find a bunch of local “resources” in a subject area, and invite them to an event.
The Social Media tools I’ve used, so far, seem to be next to useless for this kind of thing – on Aaron Newman’s suggestion (see Two Interesting Meetings and the insights from them) I tried an SM2/Techrigy search for food bloggers located in New York City (my searches included New York, New York City, NYC, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island and Queens, along with food items).
But when I looked at the results of New York Queries that where soposed to be Geo-located in New York, I found only one in 30 were, on average; some of the posts I found using SM2 were even in China.
Looking in Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, IceRocket, Twitter Search and the apparently defunct blogdigger.com didn’t help. While Twitter Search could give me tweets that had certain keywords and came from a Twitter user who registered their location nearby, it may be very inaccurate (didn’t many people on Twitter register their location as Terhan, Iran, recently?).
So what is one to do? You want to reach local resources so you can build on and create local conversations that drive “local” business. My mind was racing tonight – nothing I did seemed to work, but I didn’t give up, widening my search – and I came up with a few answers that may help you to do blogger outreach to a local, theme related, community of blogs/bloggers, if you want.
What I found – you need directory related services to find local blogs and bloggers – using search, even when the keywords are hyper local and theme related, if too filled with noise, with results that aren’t local, and often, aren’t relevant. A clue of where to find local resources and how to use them was a post in Search Engine Journal titled Find Local Blogs and Discussions to Build Links and Connections by Ann Smarty.
I came up with much better results than Techrigy or Google by using:
- Placeholder
- Outside.in
- Everyblock.com – interesting though it is just location based, can’t search on a theme.
- Twitter Search – see this link – problem is the search will be filled with real time information.
Using Yahoo! Directory (yeah, that 299.00 USD a year is actually useful, for a change) gave me a few more links -
I actually found several blogs near my local train stop - but in this case, I’d be looking for blogs in NYC and those not too far from a clients’ location (to make it easy to have face to face gatherings).
Finding blogs on “food” also gave me interesting results – while it’s not comprehensive, by any means, it’s a start – and that’s a lot more than you’ll get from almost any Social Media platform, or Search Platform, for that matter.
Success will depend on combing and data-mining information.
What you’ll get is local news and review – but not local bloggers – unless you want to invited the people from Curbed and Gothamist to your event, say, in New York.
3. Globe of Blogs (some examples, below)
New York City Restaurants ::: jack
Eats is the New York City Restaurants guide. It provides the information of New York City Restaurants, Fine Dining New York Place, New York City Night Life, Restaurant reviews, Restaurant ratings, Best Restaurant New York, Best restaurant in New York City, New York Dining and Food Delivery Service.New York City Restaurants ::: Jack Menon
Eats is the New York City Restaurants guide. It provides the information of New York City Restaurants, Fine Dining New York Place, New York City Night Life, Restaurant reviews, Restaurant ratings, Best Restaurant New York, Best restaurant in New York City, New York Dining and Food Delivery Service.New York City Restaurants ::: jack menon
Eats is the New York City Restaurants guide.It provides the information of New York City Restaurants,Fine D ining New York Place,New York City Night Life,Restaurant reviews,Restaurant ratings,Best Restaurant New York,Best restaurant in New York City,New York Dining and Food Delivery Service.Dining Fever Blog ::: Boazon
Get the latest on the hottest dining deals at New York City’s hottest restaurants!Deep End Dining ::: Eddie Lin
There’s high end dining. There’s low end dining. And then there’s everything else in between. We’d like to introduce you to another level – Deep End Dining. This website is dedicated to seeking and devouring the food uncommon, the cuisine exotic and the entrees less ordered. Have an open appetite and get ready to take the plunge into the Deep End.
Not sure how good the list is, but you can get a local listing of blogs/bloggers by location and topic.
I didn’t but scratch the surface of this topic of finding local blogs and bloggers – and I wish it was possible to do it easily just form Meta data and a meta data enabled search engine – but I didn’t find anything quite like that.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cab99c7a-efdc-4a61-ae29-1ddf1c739109)
[...] As a Web Analyst I’ve found Social Media tools such as Alterian SM2 Techrigy, Radian6, next to useless in geo locating food bloggers and others who might be interested in an event like this, and that, social networks like Meetup and local directories are usually much, much more effective – in fact, I wrote a post about it on it last month. [...]
[...] of what the companies tell you and wrote about it in a post on finding local blogs and bloggers where I gave up on Alterian and Radian6 for hyper local searches as the platforms were not designed for it. In the future, this may [...]
[...] of what the companies tell you and wrote about it in a post on finding local blogs and bloggers where I gave up on Alterian and Radian6 for hyper local searches as the platforms were not designed for it. In the future, this may [...]