Development Seed Blog

Spikes in Blog Chatter Can Predict Book Sales

There is certainly no shortage of stories of bloggers taking down politicians (Trent Lott, Mark Foley) or other public figures (Dan Rather) by keeping stories alive that then eventually work their way back into the traditional media. But do blogs also cause stories to reach the mainstream media in the first place, stories that otherwise may not have?

Conventional wisdom led me to believe this was the case, but I was curious to find out if there was any documented proof of this correlation. So I did some digging. And although I didn’t find any research specifically on the correlation of blog spikes to traditional media coverage, I did find some interesting research that shows that blog chatter actually does create bumps in online sales (specifically in Amazon.com sales rank and online music sales). This is pretty good proof that this chatter is also having an impact elsewhere as well.

One article (Gruhl, et al, this is an academic paper so you may need to recruit a student to access it) explains that a study found that a spike in online chatter about a particular book title or author tended to predict a spike in that book’s Amazon sales rank about half the time. This graph shows the curve in blog chatter about Lance Armstrong or the Tour de France compared to the sales rank of his book. 

In this particular case, it took about a two-day lead time for blog chatter to impact the book’s sales rank. However in other examples the lead time varied as far ahead as two weeks. 

If increases in blog chatter about a certain topic or individual increase sales, it’s safe to say that this chatter piques an interest in people. It’s pretty safe to assume that the impact of this greater interest is much more far flung than simply online sales – in many cases it’s bound to reach into offline sales, traditional media hits, and in the case of nonprofits and advocacy groups, more action.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that you should keep their ear to the ground (well, internet) for buzz relating to your organization, candidate, and the issues important to you. That online buzz may be predictive of coverage in more traditional media or have an impact on your mission in other ways, like changes in fundraising or your sign ups. So if you’re STILL trying to convince your Communications Director or other top brass that he or she should pay more attention to online postings, I suggest you email them a copy of this graph and perhaps the conclusions from Gruhl, et al.

And if you’re going for a big reaction, you may want to put something like this in the subject line: Science Proves Blog Can Increase Sales*.  That should do the trick. Feel free to also cite Whitman and Lawrence (2002) who found that increased online mentions correlate with increased music sales.

* Note: Technically this research only found a strong correlation between the two that tended to materialize a couple days in advance. But then functionally it is nearly impossible to prove causation.

References:

Daniel Gruhl, R. Guha, David Liben-Nowell, Andrew Tomkins. Information diffusionthrough Blogspace. Proceedings of the WWW 2004, pp 491-501.

B. Whitman and S. Lawrence. Inferring descriptions and similarity for music from community metadata. In Proc. of the 2002 International Computer Music Conference, pages 591–598, 2002.