It's context that's important

Steve Broback at Blog Business Summit has posted a list of 51 PR firms whose websites include the word 'blog':

[...] As a non-scientific research project, I asked our research geek Jason Preston to identify the top PR firms websites and using Google’s “search within” ability, log how many times Google detects the word “blog” within the site of each firm.

At left is the Top 13 - name of firm and how many times Google found the word 'blog' on their websites.

The other 37 firms in Steve's list (included in his post) have zero mentions.

What's the conclusion from all this? Steve asks the same question, in fact. While I don't think you can draw any meaningful conclusions from this, it's good to speculate a bit on what any PR firm may or may not be doing regarding blogs. It does illustrate that 13 of them are talking about blogs. At least, on their websites.

Interesting to see the leading role Edelman has in numbers of mentions on their website. If you go to the Edelman site and do a search there on the word 'blog', the results will show you the context in which the word is mentioned. That's the important thing to pay attention to in all these cases - context of mention.

Is there any significance if a well-known PR firm doesn't mention the word 'blog' anywhere on their website? Fleishman-Hillard, Text 100, Waggener Edstrom or Weber Shandwick, to pick some names at random - each of these firms has a zero count in Steve's list.

Well, at the least it might indicate to a visitor that this is a topic which the agency either isn't interested in or doesn't know about. If blogs as communication channels are part of the PR mix, then I'd expect them to be at least referenced or mentioned somewhere on an agency's website. In the right context.

(Hat tip: Silicon Valley Watcher)