The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton


Updated:  I found an error in my earlier posting: the value of the Alexa ranking was reversed. I mistakenly thought that a high Alexa ranking was favored over a lower ranking.  I corrected the ordering based on the Alexa scores (sorry, Mike - now I'll have to buy YOU a beer at Dreamforce!). 

Mark Fidelman (EVP Sales @ MindTouch) recently wrote an article for the Cloud Ave blog titled, "The Most Influential Technical Communication Bloggers".  I recognized a few names, added several to my Google Reader feed, but most were unfamiliar to me.  Blogs are a primary information source for me, and I read a lot of them each week.  When I first started working with Salesforce, I grew up on a steady diet of Gokubi.com, CRM FYI, X2 On-Demand, and Perspectives on Salesforce.  These were the giants on whose shoulders I stood.

I compiled a list of Salesforce.com Bloggers, and then because I was curious, ranked them in a similar manner as Fidelman's Most Influential Blogger article: a weighted formula across a range of metrics, including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technocrati Authority, and Twitter Followers.  I also added a 6th category: # Blog Posts YTD.  Each category was given an equal weight, scaled on a rank of 1-10. With 6 categories, a blog could have a ranking between 6-60 – the most influential bloggers scoring at the top side of that range.

I started with a simple Google search on “Salesforce Blogs”, recording the URL for each. I arbitrarily stopped after the first six pages returned by the search engine. If the authors of various blogs included links to other Salesforce blogs (and many did), I added those to my research list, as well. In the end, I found 47 different Salesforce.com blogs. To be included in the ranking, a blogger needed to focus their posts on Salesforce.com, with at least 6 Salesforce-related blogs posted YTD.


For blogs that were co-authored, I used the Twitter account associated with the “Retweet” button on that blog. For instance, the Cloud Blog is co-authored by various Salesforce.com executives: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, and Steve Gilmor. The “retweet” button on this blog uses the Twitter alias @salesforce, so that is what I used to evaluate the Klout influence and Twitter following of that blog.

Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers
Here are the Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Bloggers (NOTE: There were ties for 4th, 9th and 10th place):

 
Here is the detail break-out for all of the blogs that made the ranking qualifications:
 

Rank	Author	# Posts YTD	Alexa	Google Page Rank	Technocrati Authority	Klout Score	Twitter Followers
1	Jon Mountjoy, Quinton Wall, Reid Carlberg, Umit Yalcinalp, Dana Le	177	200,867	5	126	25	1436
2	Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, Steve Gilmor	45	312	0	0	49	9025
3	Steve Anderson	16	1,527,075	6	1	25	474
4	Jeff Douglas	69	650,409	4	0	19	417
4	Appirio Tech Blog	16	304,254	5	0	10	1181
5	Scott Hemmeter	6	1,275,872	6	1	25	1436
6	Jeff Grosse	11	2,962,398	4	0	28	1532
7	JP Seabury	6	2,918,131	3	1	18	1066
8	MK Partners	97	1,020,411	3	1	10	169
9	David Schach	7	8,045,399	4	0	43	934
9	Jason Venable	27	2,213,081	3	0	19	167
10	Mike Gerholdt	18	27,426,342	3	0	22	627
10	Alessandro	19	2,978,238	3	0	13	202
11	Mike Leach	23	4,393,577	0	0	14	585
11	Jared Miller	10	0	2	0	7	251
12	Wes Nolte	12	408,999	0	0	8	211
13	Mark Christie	31	911,745	2	0	0	34
14	Joel Dietz	16	12,357,441	0	0	15	142
15	John Rotenstein	10	3,855,810	6	0	0	45
16	ForceTree	10	2,059,232	2	0	0	0
17	ForceDotCom	12	10,359,827	2	0	0	0
18	Sid	6	9,440,652	0	0	0	0

Honorable Mentions
There were 30 other blogs, but many were filtered from the rankings process due to the infrequency of their posts (the arbitrary cut-off was 6 posts YTD, averaging 1 per month). Of these blogs, Honorable Mentions go to:

Michael Smith, Simon Fell, Liz Kao, Jesse Lorenz, John Coppedge, Alex Sutherland, Joe Ferraro, Michael Smith, Dave Manelski, Interactive Ties, Shamrock CRM, and Sam Arjmandi.

If I missed your blog (or a Salesforce-related blog that you read regularly), please let me know!