The blog search engine and the largest independent PR agency in the world will team up to offer blog tools in several languages.
Analytic tools from Technorati have been available for some time in English and Japanese. The partnership with Edelman will expand that offering to more languages, starting with French in July of this year.
Through early 2007, Edelman will roll out the Technorati tools in Chinese, German, Italian, and Korean languages. CEO and president Richard Edelman blogged about why he thinks the deal is important:
First, we believe that every company is or can be a media company (take a bow, Andrew Heyward, until recently president of CBS News, for this line).
Second, we are convinced of the power of consumer generated content.
Third, we will have the ability to improve our work product; specifically, to make PR people valued contributors to the discussion, not the often-reviled spinmeister or hype artist lampooned in the media.
Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg also posted about the the deal, recalling how only a third of the posts tracked by his company’s index are in English today:
The clout that bloggers have developed the U.S. is going global. The lessons that marketers have begun to learn here— get a clue, listen, participate, engage— will soon apply everywhere.
Naturally, other bloggers of note have commented on the pairing. PR blogger and consultant BL Ochman cautioned on the use of machine translation software in the effort:
The announcements sound as if machine translations will be used, augmented with local translations by humans. Given the extremely primitive state of currently available machine translation software, that’s a massive, and very expensive, undertaking.
Right now, machine translations are in a sorry state, generally not suitable for business use. And an incorrectly translated blog post could become a PR landmine in no time flat.
PR Squared blogger Todd Defren expressed some concerns about the new partnership:
I am a li’l troubled by this move on Technorati’s part, though. Aren’t all PR firms and corporate marketers currently “working with clients on how to listen and engage the blogosphere”?
Imagine if the recently-unveiled Google Trends had been exclusively available to Fleishman-Hillard, for a year before its public debut. How would that have made you feel?
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
