Blog readers are shockingly influential

Yes, you already knew that intuitively.

Now you can tell your pajama-bashing friends that the data from last week’s blog reader survey indicates that 70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%. (RoperASW, the folks who wrote the book on Influentials, have more information on the definition on influentials here.)

I guess the CBS guy just forgot to mention that those pajamas are silk, not rayon.

When I mentioned 70% data last Friday at the panel on influentials at the George Washington University conference on Online Politics, Carol Darr, the institute’s director, said this ratio correlated with the data that her group had observed last year in a study of influentials online.

To put the blogosphere’s influentials density in context, consider that the WashingtonPost.com likes to brag that 34% of its readers are influentials. (See bottom of page 4 on this PDF.)

MediaPost did a good job synchronizing last week’s blog reader poll with Gallup’s survey, also published last, indicating that only 32 of Americans are even somewhat familiar with blogs.

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion. Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. “We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read.”

“In conducting our poll, it was not our intent to measure blogs’ gross influence,” said Newport. “I think it’s obvious that the most influential people in our society are the ones who read these things.”

For another angle on the same topic, see Kate Kaye’s post about my question to the WashingtonPost.com’s Cliff Sloan at Friday’s IPDI debate.

Here’s more coverage of the reader survey.

(We’re still exporting stuff from SurveyMonkey… slowly.)