Monday, August 2, 2010

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:
 
RankAuthor# Posts YTDAlexaGoogle Page RankTechnocrati AuthorityKlout ScoreTwitter Followers
1Jon Mountjoy, Quinton Wall, Reid Carlberg, Umit Yalcinalp, Dana Le177200,8675126251436
2Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, Steve Gilmor4531200499025
3Steve Anderson161,527,0756125474
4Jeff Douglas69650,4094019417
4Appirio Tech Blog16304,25450101181
5Scott Hemmeter61,275,87261251436
6Jeff Grosse112,962,39840281532
7JP Seabury62,918,13131181066
8MK Partners971,020,4113110169
9David Schach78,045,3994043934
9Jason Venable272,213,0813019167
10Mike Gerholdt1827,426,3423022627
10Alessandro192,978,2383013202
11Mike Leach234,393,5770014585
11Jared Miller100207251
12Wes Nolte12408,999008211
13Mark Christie31911,74520034
14Joel Dietz1612,357,4410015142
15John Rotenstein103,855,81060045
16ForceTree102,059,2322000
17ForceDotCom1210,359,8272000
18Sid69,440,6520000

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!

20 comments:

  1. Okay #6. You've given me something to shoot for

    - #7 @dlog

    ;-)

    Excellent compilation. Updating my RSS feed reader now!

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  2. Mike, you scored among the best in # of Posts YTD. "Embracing the Cloud" put many of us bloggers to shame with a whopping 23 posts YTD. When you exclude blogs that are co-authored, the average # of postings for blogs in this list was 11 posts YTD.

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  3. Didn't realize Google is tanking my PR (0).

    Wow! I must have some anti-SEO strategy going on with my blog :-)

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  4. I haven't given my blog much SEO love, either. I suspect most non-professional bloggers (i.e., those who don't blog as a primary source of income) are in the same category.

    I might rethink that, after doing this exercise. I'm not out for #1, but if my articles are at least moderately helpful to some Salesforce.com users, I'd like to make sure they have the best chance of getting viewed.

    Or maybe I should just ask Jon Mountjoy if I can post on the Force.com Blogs now and then -- let Salesforce do the SEO work!

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  5. Wow very interesting post JP. I'm going to have to get posting and out of the honerables! Cheers,
    John

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  6. Nice to be part of #2! It confirms the value we are bringing to the dev community. So delighted :)

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  7. There was an error in the original sorting method. I mistakenly thought that a high Alexa ranking was favored over a lower ranking. The reverse is true. The "Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers" has been updated with the corrected Alexa ranking.

    Umit and the Force.com Staff Bloggers move to #1 (sorry to topple you from that throne, Mike!) and the Salesforce Executive team moves to #2. Gokubi, the Appirio Tech Blog and Jeff's blog also moved up, which all resonates "closer to truth", at least in my view.

    Other changes: There were a few blogs who's authors were not easily discerned. Rather than labeling them as "Unknown", I have listed the blog name.

    And yes, John, you need to start posting again. ForceCertified.com is a great blog for those prepping for their Salesforce.com Certification exams!

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  8. MK, you are in my sights. (And JP, by Dreamforce, your ranking will be mine!) Time to do a weekly post.

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  9. Glad you sorted it out (sigh)

    ;-)

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  10. Nice compilation @JP, I got good pointers to many new blogs.

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  11. w0000t. Awesome work all - honoured to be in your company!

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  12. Thanks for the recognition. It is much appreciated, and our job is made infinitely more easy by blogging on some amazing technology by the entire Salesforce engineering team. I have worked for many big tech companies in my career and never seen such constant innovation --- it certainly makes writing about it much easier!!
    Thanks again

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  13. Nice post JP - always glad to be a part of the SFDC online community!

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  14. JP,

    Thanks for the honorable mention. This is a great post. I read a handful of these already, but clearly there are so many more for me to read.

    Also, you have me listed twice in the Honorable Mentions. My old blog URL was sfcnmore.com (it's still alive), but I finally got around to re-doing my site and now everything redirects to my official site at force2b.net.

    Hope to see you at DF!

    Mike Smith

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  15. http://salesforctrekbin.blogspot.com
    I am also trying to help out people there. Hope I will make one day to reach you people :)

    Srinivas
    www.trekbin.com

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  16. hey didnt see this one, thanks a lot man... :D I appreciate my small effort on SFDC is being registered.

    This actually has motivated me to have more post per month, now that i know someone reads it... :D

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  17. JP - find my articles here

    http://www.forcelabs.net

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  18. Nicely done,
    Looks like hard and short list to squiz in...
    How can i join the next list??

    Gil Hod
    crm-period.blogspot.com

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  19. Find All Question and Answers about Salesforce CRM:

    http://salesforcecloudcrm.blogspot.com/

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  20. Please add my blog as well. I blog regularly about custom apex and visualforce development for the salesforce platform.

    http://codedevstuff.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete