How do you decide who at your company should blog for your brand? The NextStage CRO is on the case.

Is there a way to determine ahead of time if a given individual would be an influential blogger? It turns out that the answer is yes. Knowing this can have an impact on how you think about your brand's reputation online, particularly when you're developing your corporate blogging strategy and deciding who in your company can and should best represent your brand by blogging.

I've written before about the differences between Holmeses and Watsons when it comes to branding. Both Holmeses and Watsons are influencers, and they influence different things differently.

Before going further, it might help to know that NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global are staffed primarily by social scientists. We don't do web analytics as the industry thinks of it. In this case, we analyzed psycholinguistic and semantic similarities between the posts of bloggers and those who commented on their blogs.

Solving easy problems first
It turned out that answering my starting question was a relatively easy problem to solve. We could determine the topics on which given bloggers were the most influential:

We could also determine where geographically they had the most influence:

And we also determined when chronologically the bloggers had the most influence:

In addition, we could determine who had the most influence regardless of subject domain or vertical, who had the most influence within a given knowledge domain (that is, who was recognized as being a Subject Matter Expert or SME) and whose influence waxed and waned over time.

The learning: part one
We learned two things. One was something we thought might be true going in, the other was one of those wonderful discoveries that make research so worth doing.

We guessed that there were essentially two types of bloggers out there; what we call Holmeses and Watsons. These two bloggers can't exist without each other. The Holmeses have incredible depth of knowledge while the Watsons have an incredible breadth of reach.

People familiar with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories remember that Holmes would explain something to Watson and a Scotland Yard Inspector in a few very concise sentences. Watson would then explain it in detail to us, the reader, and to whomever else was in the story at the moment. Watson's method of explaining things to us and everyone else is something often used by Blogosphere Watsons today.

As I mentioned above, both Holmeses and Watsons are influencers. The Holmeses are the people everybody knows but few people can easily understand. Most commonly, Holmeses are interviewed or guided by Watsons. (Readers who've participated in some of my iMedia Summit presentations are aware of this interaction between Brad Berens and myself, where Brad plays Watson to my Holmes.)

People aren't expected to understand what I'm talking about, they're expected to go "Wow, that's really...I could...what the heck did he say?" Occasionally you'll have a Holmes who is also a Watson. It's rare and most of them are writing popular science books. (My attempt is called Reading Virtual Minds, by the way.)

The learning: part two
The second thing and one we did figure out was that bloggers and their audiences have highly congruous communication styles. (This is where psycho-semantics plays a big part.)

The way a blogger writes may or may not closely match the way his or her audience writes. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that they think alike. This image shows a typical Holmesian communication strategy as existing (up) and missing (down) modalities:

A modality can be thought of as a specific way someone thinks, except here we apply it to how the person uses written language as a vehicle for his or her thoughts. Readers reading something written using specific modalities must use those same modalities to understand what it is they're reading.

Think of it this way: Two people are talking, and they pretty much understand each other. The reason they can understand each other is because all the necessary parts are there for understanding to occur; they're using the same language the same way to mean the same things. If one is speaking jargon the other understands that jargon. If the microbiologist says she has to go kill a culture the anthropologist doesn't have a heart-attack.

You can see in the above image that a typical Holmes is very selective in how he or she thinks about things. This may contribute to the person's depth of understanding in specific subjects.

Compare the above image with this one, a typical Watsonian communication strategy:

They probably look quite similar, and so they should. But look carefully and you'll see more modalities existing (up) than missing (down) in the Watsonian image than in the Holmesian one.

Compare these two with this image and you'll see even more modalities in place:

These three images basically show that the Holmeses couldn't be understood by the general audience by themselves. They simply don't communicate well enough. Without a Watson to explain their message using more modalities, the Holmesian wisdom is lost to the general public.

These differences in modalities are important in more than just Holmes, Watsons and the blogosphere. They're required in normal conversation because they make conversations interesting. Specifically, they make them just interesting enough for inquiry, discussion and explanation. It's a wonderful world, isn't it?

The direct implication of this is that Holmeses and Watsons have the same audience, Watsons are just better at communicating to it than Holmeses. Sometimes Occam is right and things really are that simple.

However, there is something that falls out of the above although it isn't directly demonstrated by it. In a nutshell, the Watsons, the conduits, are the blogosphere powerbrokers. The masses only learn what the Watsons are willing to share, the only Holmes recognized are the ones the Watsons are willing to identify.

So what does this have to do with your online marketing?
The best blogging situations, whether corporate or private, are going to be those where a recognized deep matter expert and an individual adept at communicating that expertise blog together. This can take the form of co-authoring, author-regular commenter and, most often in the world of corporate blogging, an idea formulated and outlined by the blog's designated owner then elaborated upon, written and posted by someone in the marketing department.

High readership in and of itself doesn't equate to a blogger being a strong influencer: it's the conversation within the blog that matters.

I'll cover this more in my next column.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.