The belief that traditional media has become irrelevant is well particularly well summarized by David Meerman Scott’s recommendations to PR professionals in the popular The New Rules of Marketing and PR:

“Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micro-publications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants that reach the targeted audiences that are looking for what we have to offer.”

This sounds like an exciting new way of doing PR, but the only evidence that is ever presented to support this perspective are case studies of wildly successful and serendipitous marketing campaigns– usually about a brand with a viral video on YouTube (think Mentos and Diet Coke).

For the vast majority of clients I work with, mainstream media is still well in control and by far the most “relevant” source of information. Influential blogs, forums, Twitter, even YouTube discussions around most types of brands (I admit, consumer tech might be an exception) all source most of their information from two very old-school forms of media: the press release and mainstream print and online publications (and I mean very old-school mainstream media, the sort that Murdoch owns). To help illustrate, I’ve shown a scrubbed version of a blog map for a month’s worth of discussions around one of our client’s brands below. The nodes indicate mainstream and social media sites. The arrows indicate on-topic inbound links, meaning that one site has sourced information about a brand from a second site. Sites that are solid gray are blogs and forums, while sites that only have an outline are mainstream media and press releases.

It’s a lot to take in but, basically, it shows that there are a handful of often-linked to and widely-read influential blogs and forums that usually source news from mainstream publications, such as NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, etc., as well as corporate press releases (in this month, the client’s press releases were the most often cited source online– something we see pretty regularly). These influential blogs are then linked to by much smaller, less well-read blogs and forums (what is usually called the “long tail”). To put it in a simplified graphic, the linking relationships usually follow this pattern:

While there are always exceptions, I estimate that 9 out of 10 times, this is what we see when we assess the relationship between mainstream and social media for our clients: mainstream media and press releases drive conversation in influential blogs, which are then linked to and re-purposed by the long tail. Mainstream media is hardly irrelevant. It still seems to instigate conversations in forums and blogs. Bloggers and forum members will certainly edit the content, and provide their own commentary on top of it. But the demise of mainstream and rise of social media isn’t nearly as black and white as many people seem to think.

Given what Context Analytics generally finds for its clients, I would caution PR professionals against throwing out their press releases and mainstream media contacts. Mainstream newspapers might be in financial trouble, and they are certainly reducing the ranks of journalists and the amount of content produced. But, this doesn’t mean that mainstream media is any less important. If you want to influence conversations that are happening in the long-tail, convincing newspapers and magazines to cover you is still going to be your best bet.

So says a new study examining traditional news and blog coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Researchers at Cornell used computer algorithms to identify, track, and pinpoint the origin of repeated phrases on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs.

While a small subset of blogs such as Hot Air and Talking Points Memo generated internet widespread memes, most blogs lagged behind mainstream media by about 2.5 hours.

With Twitter getting all the credit for breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death, it’s nice to see mainstream media getting its due.

Read the complete paper, and New York Times coverage of the study, here: “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University

“Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle” The New York Times, July 12, 2009

1) Which blogs are driving mainstream media content?

2) When are blogs cited?

3) Why do journalists cite blogs?

We chose to answer the “which blogs are driving mainstream media content” question by creating a ranking system based on the number of citations each blog received in mainstream media over the past two years. We chose this method, as it parallels one of the key indicators of influence in social media (linking relationships), and the results of this research can be found in the full Power 50 report.

There are a few surprises in the rankings (who expected that icanhascheezburger would be cited by mainstream media more often than GigaOm?). But, I think that the rankings will probably confirm what many have suspected all along—“influence” in the blogosphere is mostly concentrated among a handful of well-known political and technology blogs. Perhaps the most surprising result of the rankings is just how concentrated that influence is. The top three blogs, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Politico, alone account for 44% of all traditional media citations among the top 50 influential blogs.

Readers of the final report will find that the answer to the “when and why do journalists cite blogs” questions depend on the blog type. Political, gossip and business blogs are usually cited as primary sources. News breaks on the blog and the blog is cited as a source of information, but the blogger is rarely mentioned and hardly ever quoted. Technology and Lifestyle blogs, however, are often cited as secondary sources. News rarely breaks on these blogs and instead of being cited for content; the bloggers are quoted and treated as industry experts. We think this finding is particularly useful for PR professionals, because it suggests that political and gossip blogs should be thought of as “newswires” while technology and lifestyle bloggers resemble industry analysts in the way they add opinion and/or insight.

On a final note, it’s important to remember that, although the Power 50 blogs appear to be gaining influence in mainstream media (45% year-over-year increase in citations from 2007 to 2008), these blogs are not cited nearly as frequently as mainstream media sources. In fact, even relatively small regional papers, such as the Arizona Republic and San Jose Mercury are cited more often than the Huffington Post. Interestingly, even other blogs are far more likely to cite mainstream media sources. A quick search in Technorati reveals, for example, that the New York Times is cited twice as often in blogs as the most cited blog, Engadget. So, while it’s true that blogs are increasingly becoming trusted sources of news and analysis among journalists and bloggers, one should not forget that conversations in social media most often are sparked by mainstream media. While social media helps amplify, drive and add color to those discussions, any communications strategy needs to think about all media as a whole. Ultimately, the key to unlocking this is to understand key influencers – be they in mainstream or social media. This report provides one viewpoint on influence and data can be interpreted many ways. I’d love to hear your opinions on influence in the blogosphere.

Go here for the report: The Power 50: Most Influential Blogs