As we continue to help clients in their social media outreach strategies, I’m starting to notice that more and more people are turning away from blogs and blogger engagement to focus instead on social networking sites. Which begs an interesting question: does blogger engagement still matter?
After all, if you can generate good word of mouth and drive sales from efforts in sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, why bother to court the hard-to-reach and often hard-to-impress blogerati like Scoble, Arrington, or Om?
Here’s why: because they’re hard to reach, and hard to impress, and everybody knows it. These bloggers have spent time building up a brand, and that carries value when they talk about your products or your messages.
Harnessing this trust, this existing relationship, is why it still matters to work with bloggers who have a name and a following, instead of simply trusting in the effectiveness of blind, stranger-to-stranger word-of-digital-mouth marketing.
If you’re a business blogger, building your audience is going to become a little obsession. Really, it’s building the right audience that you want to do.
There are all kinds of tricks, tips, and dirty secrets that you can find on the internet. A quick google search for “more blog traffic” yields somewhere in the nieghborhood of 9 million results. Everyone (with legitimate advice to give) will tell you roughly the same thing: write good content and work like a dog to get inbound links.
The trick is finding ways to consistently write good content. A good trick that I like to use is to write analogies.
Pick something that’s unexpected. Copyblogger today wrote about how you can learn to blog better from Winnie the Pooh. You weren’t expecting that one.
The nice thing about analogies is that once you find one comparison to draw, the others tend come more easily. Before you know it, you’ve found three or four parallels to highlight, and your post is practically written for you.
Blogging has done a lot to extend the idea of mobile technology. The desire (and growing ability) for people to post from anywhere about anything has led to technologies that happily support the blogger addiction—for a small fee.
I predicted a few years ago that laptops would be sold in the future with cell-phone like data plans attached. After all, the gap between the phone and the computer is getting smaller and smaller as technology moves forward.
Wired has called it the next netbook trend. On the one hand, I think it’s cool that we’re seeing more modular connectivity, and it’s going to open a whole world for bloggers and small business people to be on the move while keeping track of their blog.
On the other hand, it’s a bad pricing model for the consumer.
It’s no secret that, as Scoble himself puts it, he is FriendFeed’s “number 1 customer.” What remains elusive to most people is why Scoble is such a big fan of the slightly confusing, lifestreaming service that is FriendFeed.
Dave Winer draws a comparison between Twitter and DOS: it is pre-GUI, command line software. He’s right that there is a gap between the two services, and that gap is defined largely by the complexity of using the tool.
Scoble mocks the small-brained users who can’t handle the FF features. Dave Winer seems to think that it actually is more complex than necessary.
I’m inclined to agree with Dave Winer. FriendFeed is a robust dashboard-like system that does too much. Facebook appears to be creaking under the weight of its own capabilities. Experienced users sometimes find it difficult to find today’s events.
According to Gawker, the “highly anticipated” film Australia is rolling out to a lackluster reception in…Australia. Of course, just because it doesn’t do well down under doesn’t mean that the mass audiences in the United States won’t like it, but I’m willing to bet that most of the time a Bad Movie in Australia = a Bad Movie in the US.
But anyone can tell us if a movie is good or bad. The real golden nugget in the Gawker post is this:
We guess it’s just not possible anymore—people, what with the internet and all, are just too cynical—to manufacture a phenomenon. It has to come much more organically than this.
We’ve been telling people from the early days of blogging that authenticity is of paramount importance. Writing blog posts and engaging with people online is not like writing a press release or making an execuspeak presentation.
The audience is savvy, and they know when you’re laying down astroturf. The more you try to shove things down their throats, the less they’re going to pay attention to what you say, and I think the price you pay in authority for a few more ticket sales is not worth it in the long run.
Jordan Golson at The Industry Standard reported yesterday that Dan Lyons is giving up on his personal blog, Real Dan Lyons, after he was forced by Newsweek to pull some of his recent, profane posts.
I can only assume that Newsweek was uneasy about Lyons gunning for Kara Swisher’s reputation and for calling the Yahoo PR team “lying sacks of shit.”
Of course, Golson faithfully reproduces the missing Lyons posts in his own, so you can check them out and make your own opinion.
I’m wondering where the line is on this one. On the one hand, it’s pretty bad form to go around mudslinging at everyone in your industry. On the other hand, an employee forcing a blogger to pull their posts is pretty high up on the evil scale as well.
And I have to disagree completely. Blogging is far from dead—blogging is thriving. According to Paul, the reasons you should skip the blogosphere are, roughly:
There are too many other blogs
Writing more than 140 characters is too much work
Media companies are now blogging
Jason Calacanis isn’t doing it anymore
Blogging has always been a medium. It’s a tool that you can use in many ways, and what’s happened is that this tool has been adopted by a lot of people for a lot of different purposes.
Some of what Paul brings up is actually valid: gone indeed are the days when a wayward blog post about a popular subject like “Barack Obama” could rocket you to the top of Google. But a blog still beats a static web site on SEO hands-down.
And there’s also the way that a blog lets you connect with your niche. The Techmeme leaderboard does not define the blogosphere. It tracks the “broadcast blogosphere” - blogs from people and organizations big enough that they’re essentially going back to broadcast models.
Today is an excellent time to start a blog, either for yourself or for your business. You will undoubtedly find your tribe.
As many of you probably already know, our CES Blogger Party last year was an awesome success, so we’re getting right back into it this year: the It Won’t Stay in Vegas blogger party is back in force, and this time we’re doing a contest to get several gadget bloggers onto a private jet flight.
Yes, you read that right. Yesterday we announced the rules on how to get into the contest and how to increase your odds of winning (and for the record, no, this post doesn’t enter me into the contest).
If you want to come hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk and Robert Scoble at the CES Blogger Party this year, go request an invite to the party.
Paidcontent and ProBlogger reported this morning that the Bankaholic blog, which launched in July of 2007, was bought today by Bankrate for a cool $12.4 million, and the option to earn another $2.5 million over the next 12 months.
That’s an astounding payout for the amount of time that John Wu (who is the one person behind Bankaholic) has put into the site.
If you look at the Google trends chart, you can see a very convincing argument for building a blog to flip it:
Having been in the blog space for a long time, I sometimes forget that there is an actual market for blogs, but there definitely is.
Some people like Yaro Starek have occasionally suggested that you can make a business out of buying blogs, building them up a little bit, and then reselling them for a profit.
Darren Rowse (of Problogger, in case you don’t know) is such a prolific blogger that even though I’m pointing you to a September 30th blog post, it’s already the fourth headline on his home page.
Darren does a nice job of summarizing Gary’s points, but the real gem is the 30-minute video attached to the end of the post, where you can watch Gary interact with the audience.
Between this video and his presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, it’s clear what Gary’s advice is all about—and it’s really good advice: do what you do best, do it loudly, and do it all the time.
Below is the Web 2.0 Expo video, but I’d also check out the video on Darren’s post, it’s much longer and more informal.
Just tried QuarkBase, works great. Put in the URL, click the “technical” tab and voila, there it is. For years I’ve been viewing the source of a post and then trying to parse what the code is describing. Painful, but it worked.
I was hopeful that the service with the promising name: BuiltWith would do this for me, but IMHO it mostly overwhelms the user with SEO minutiae. It doesn’t actually tell you what the site is “Built With.” It can tell you a site is using WordPress plugins, but never gets around to telling you anywhere (I can find) that it’s built with WordPress.
I learn a lot by example. As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger noted recently, there’s a big difference between the “right” blogging advice and the “real” blogging advice, and it’s important to know the “real” strategies.
“Do as I say, not as I do,” is a great phrase for parenting, but it’s a lousy line for bloggers. If you see a successful blogger telling you to do something they’re not doing, or more importantly to not do something they are doing, red flags should start popping up.
One of the best examples of a successful and authoritative blog that regularly eats its own dog food is Copyblogger. Here are three great strategies for building authority gleaned from careful observation:
There are only a few sure-fire ways to get your newest genius product noticed. Maybe the A-list will start writing about you. Get a front page story in the New York Times.
Or you can get a free booth at the Consumer Eletronics Show, the largest new technology convention on earth. We’ve already submitted Sentimine, our unique sentiment tagging system, to the contest.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Joseph Gizzi at CEA about their i-Stage contest, what it’s about, and how the prizes work. Click through for the full interview.
Jason:i-Stage seems geared towards products that haven’t yet been launched. Is the competition open to anything that has already been seen by the public?
Joseph: CEA’s i-stage event is designed to showcase the world’s coolest tech products, whether they be from an entrepreneur in a college dorm, a university lab or an established company. If any person or company has something cool and new to show, they are welcome to show it to the world via i-stage. Greater weight in the judging area will be given to those products that have not been demonstrated anywhere else due to us truly wanting the the cool and new products.
At the Blog Business Summit in October 2006, John Battelle pointed out that search is in the “command-line” phase of user interfaces. Search is in DOS mode still, and we have yet to reach Windows.
In an interview today on i-media connection he says that the biggest surprise to him in search is that we are still in the same place:
Joe Kutchera: What is the most significant change we’ve seen in search since you wrote “The Search”?
John Battelle: The complete failure of any other company to gain significant share against Google.
Not only has Google continued to dominate search, but search has not really changed much in terms of what it means.
Battelle thinks—and I agree—that Google’s dominance will continue until we reach a point where current search is supplanted with something drastically different in terms of how the user interacts with it:
The big change will be a redefinition of search to a new, more useful result. In other words, the shift from DOS to Windows — that kind of shift, metaphorically, applied to search.
Microsoft is looking the wrong way if they’re only trying to increase the quality of their search results. Google search results show 70% spam and people still use it more than any other engine. It’s not about what you find, it’s about how you find it.
For an industry that is often criticized on its monopolistic practices and habits of relying on cripplingly intense DRM, the Hollywood studios sure got Hulu right.
I’ve never bought the idea that consumers are “entitled” to free content. That’s crap - creative content costs money and takes time to create, and video especially can be an expensive and risky product to make.
The problem has always been a question of lock-in and user experience. So long as the cost of buying video (or music) is greater than the inconvenience of getting it illegally, people won’t be buying video.
And since people are already paying for their internet connection, you can scratch off trying to get people to subscribe to an extra fee for TV online. So the studios figured correctly that if you made free video widely available in a really great player with limited commercial interruption, people would flock to it.
I logged in to Hulu today to watch Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog, and I realized that Hulu has taken a swing at one of the bigger problems with embedding and sharing video: sometimes you only want to share a segment.
When you click to embed a Hulu video, they let you crop the embed video to whatever segment you want. Think that one-liner was the most hilarious thing ever? No problem - share just those 10 seconds.
The search for the holy grail of targeted advertising is still on. Veoh just recently announced that they’re going to start letting advertisers target video and display ads based on their users’ viewing habit.
Blogging and other web 2.0 and social media platforms are now maturing to the point where businesses are really starting to look for the business model. Nick O’Neill talks about how many blogs are turning to events or maybe even newsletters for revenue.
I think that moving to a place where consumers will pay for premium content is not unreasonable. Freemium should work as a content business model.
But I have maintained for a while that the best way to use blogging in a business atmosphere is as an architecture and a marketing tool, not a business in and of itself. If you were doing a direct mail campaign, you would not expect to make money from the mail. You expect to make money from the sales that it would generate.
Blogging is the same way. Most businesses should not expect to make money by selling ads or sponsorships or t-shirts on their blogs. They should use blog architecture to make their web sites dynamic and search-friendly. They should use the blog as a marketing tool to drive interest and sales in their primary product.
That is where I think businesses will get the most use out of blogging.
Although they do refer to it as a “blog” in the article, the Wall Street Journal headline In Big Sur, Web Site Run by Resident Is Key Data Source exemplifies the trend we predicted back in 2005 when we said that blogs will be the Web “sites” of the future.
“The Web site and blog are run by Lisa Goettel, a temporarily homeless Web designer whose move to a new Big Sur house about 150 miles south of San Francisco was derailed by the wildfire, which was 18% contained Tuesday. Ms. Goettel runs the site out of a coffee shop with free wireless Internet in Carmel-By-The-Sea, about 25 miles north of Big Sur. She depends on five residents and businesspeople who remain in Big Sur — defying mandatory evacuation orders — for on-scene reports.
The site has become a must-read for Big Sur residents, the media and even fire officials. It routinely scoops fire officials and newspapers. The site also provides displaced residents a space to find temporary employment or shelter. The blog has already received 73,000 hits since it went up on July 3.”
And it’s no surprise that the blog is driven by WordPress, our favorite blogging engine for this type of site. We’re converting more and more traditional client “sites” to WordPress these days…
“The gap between blog hype and reality widened in 2007,” said Laura Ramos, Forrester analyst and chief author of the report. “After counting 36 companies that started promoting corporate blogs on their Web sites in 2006, the number of B2B firms starting up blogs dropped sharply to 19 in 2007.”
One of the big problems with blogging is that it’s too easy. Twenty seconds on WordPress.com and you can start posting to the world at large without having to talk to a single person in the IT department.
But there’s a big difference between simply blogging and blogging well, and that’s why businesses aren’t necessarily seeing the kinds of results that blogging hype has promised them.
To be fair, hype is hype, and there was a lot of it in 2006 (although the trend still points upward). I can understand why some companies who haven’t seen ridiculous upswings could think they’ve been had.
There really is value to be gained form blogging, but it’s all about the kinds of conversations you start and the relationships you build, not it how well you can, in the approximate words of Eminem, “get up on the mic and spit it.”
For ages and ages “publishing” has meant going to a whole lot of expense to get something distributed to a large number of people.
If you look at things on a large enough scale, it goes like this:
First, if you wanted to share information with someone, you had to see them and talk to them.
Then, you could write it down and give it to them. They could write it again or simply pass the original document on.
Then someone figured out how to make identical copies of an original item without actually re-making the original.
Then we separated information from its physical form, and freed it from the laws of physics entirely. Suddenly getting information from point A to a place where every other person in the world can see it is easier than cooking dinner.
Often, this is called blogging. If you’re a company and you’re blogging, are you in the publishing business? Are you competing with your local newspapers and TV stations to get your customers valuable information in your space?
If you’re not, you’d better think about starting. Publishing is so cheap, there’s no reason not to be doing it.
