This is a special edition of Great Blogs of Fire, usually hosted on the Buzz Bin! For the last two months, a post noted the five bloggers that were influencing me the most during that month. It’s a good idea to recognize influencers, so this will be a continuing monthly feature to be hosted on the Now Is Gone blog.
September’s Top Five Influential Bloggers
1) Jeremiah Owyang: Jeremiah went into overdrive with impressive weekly round-ups, primers, and great trade publication-esque tutorials. Then he went and got acquired by Forrester, demonstrating his incredible value to the industry. And that blogging can lead somewhere. Great job, Jeremiah!
2) Toby Bloomberg: Toby, the blue-chipper, because she is always reliable and helpful. Graceful, masterful, and really thoughtful. Her blog is a driving force in the marketing marketplace, and many credit her W-List posting as the tipping point for that meme which gave so many lady bloggers outstanding links.
3) Shel Holtz: Shel’s had a lot of great content lately. I don’t always agree, but think that any marketer can benefit from a weekly perusing of the wares here. He pointed out Delta and A&P, and this week features a podcast (with Neville Hobson) noting a study that demonstrates Facebook causes productivity downturns.
4) Ike Pigott: His blog is humorous, but make no bones about it: Ike’s one of the leading marketers in the biz. A thought leader at the Red Cross, he is leading their charge to adapt social media. He is commenting everywhere. Off-line chats are impressive. And almost every prominent PR blogger cites him. But the funniest thing about Ike is that the Ad Age Power 150 won’t list his satirical blog thus demonstrating that sometimes getting banned is a good thing.
5) Seth Godin: I do tend to stay away from A-Listers, but I’ve been reading a lot of Seth lately. Simple, always thoughtful, and very useful. Seth Godin’s blog always sends me away thinking.
Honorable mentions go to Kami Huyse (back from maternity leave and blogging again!), Valeria Maltoni, Brian Solis.
Quick recap: August’s top five in order were Valeria Maltoni, Rich Becker, Shel Israel, Toby Bloomberg, and Eric Eggertson. July’s were Brian Oberkirch, Chris Heuer, Kevin Dugan, Jeremiah Owyang and Kami Huyse. Yes, continued link love for the rest of the year for all noted parties.
I started assigning weights to these: Five points for first place down to one for fifth place, and cumulating the score. Yes, this is completely silly and subjective, but as the list changes quite a bit from month-to-month, ranking by cumulative score allows for a better picture of my most influential bloggers. And this also creates a nice year end post.
- Jeremiah Owyang – 7
- Toby Bloomberg -6
- Valeria Maltoni – 5
- Brian Oberkirch – 5
- Rich Becker – 4
- Chris Heuer -4
- Kevin Dugan – 3
- Shel Holtz – 3
- Shel Israel – 3
- Ike Pigott -2
- Eric Eggertson – 1
- Seth Godin – 1
- Kami Huyse – 1