If you’re a blogger, you should know about Technorati. If you’re a marketer, you should know about it as well. Technorati is an online search engine for blogs. For a blogger, you can log in and see who is talking about your website and who is linking to you. For a marketer, you can see who is talking about your product on their blog. You can see what people think about your service and products (see A Preferred Customer’s Story as an example). It’s a great tool and I use it quite often.

Technorati has become a tool for marketers who are gauging word of mouth marketing efforts. It is helpful, but there’s a problem. Technorati treats blogs like a commodity. If your product is mentioned on BoingBoing (the most popular blog on the net currently), technorati treats that one “hit” equally as it would if it were mentioned on someone’s personal blog with .000000001% of BoingBoing’s readership. This doesn’t really tell you how effective your word of mouth effort is. It tells you how many people are talking about your product, but it doesn’t tell you how many are listening. An important aspect of word of mouth marketing is spreading the word to influencers, so they can spread the word to a considerable segment of your market. Technorati doesn’t let you know if you’re accomplishing that on the blogosphere.

It’s just a matter of time before Technorati (or someone else) starts to show you how many people saw posts concerning your products. Until then, the results are not all in yet.