Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster spoke to Wall Street analysts this week, stunning them with his lack of interest in maximizing profits or revenue. Two years ago, a study estimated that Craigslist is costing Bay Area newspapers $50 million annually in lost revenue. Today, the site is far more influential. And it doesn’t care about profits. How do you compete with that?
The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School has released its sixth annual “Surveying the Digital Future” report and the findings validate the momentum of social media communities. Among the highlights:
That last point is important because online communities are frequently criticized for making people less socially interactive. In fact, 43% respondents to the survey said the Internet has increased the number of people they stay in contact with.
I expect this last number to grow as social media proliferates. The first decade of the Web was mostly a read-only affair. With one in eight Americans now maintaining a website, you can expect interaction to drive the next phase of growth. The belief that the Internet makes people more isolated is a myth.
Three months ago, Christina Kerley asked a group of marketers and frequent bloggers (including me) a simple question: What is the single greatest point of value you receive from blogging? I thought the question was phrased well because it asked about value (which is a bottom-line thing) and it forced people to choose just one answer.
CK has compiled the responses from about 30 bloggers, some of whom you will probably recognize, into a clever PDF collage that she’s giving away for free. It’s a quick read and gets to the heart of why people are so passionate about blogging. Notice how few bloggers mention money as a motivation.
But speaking of money, CK’s experiment is also a smart move for her business. For the price of her own time and whatever she paid a deisgner, she’s come up with a unique product that demonstrates innovation, market knowledge and focus. I have no doubt that thousands of people will read this document and the viral buzz will be good for Christina’s business.
I love the idea of giving away useful content as a way to demonstrate market mastery. It’s a win-win for the giver and the receiver. The best example I’ve seen of this was David Meerman Scott, who used a free ebook called The New Rules of PR to establish himself as a thought leader in his business. Nearly 100,000 downloads later, he’s got a new career, a book in the works and a lot of running room in front of him.
WOMMA Puts Edelman On Probation – Looks like the PR industry’s social media poster child is on a 12-step program. Ironically, Edelman helped write the WOMMA ethics code.
Web 2.0 Growing Faster Than Online Video, News – This is an excellent roundup of trends in social media properties from the ad:tech conference. One surprise: Feedburner is the fastest-growing Web 2.0 site. Interesting data, also, on search engine use by Web 2.0 participants. They’re much more active than typical surfers.
eMarketer: Online Video Ads To Surge 89% In ’07 – Video is the next frontier. EMarketer predicts the online video ad market will approach $3 billion in 2010.
Four Industries Expected To Top Half Of Online Advertising – and they are media and entertainment, financial services, travel, and automotive. Not too surprising, really, but Jupiter expects those four industries to spend $11.5 billion on line in 2011. But Jupiter was also the company that said 35% of businesses would launch blogs this year.
Hackers, Plagiarism Claims Hit Wikipedia – It was a rough week for everyone’s favorite wiki. One researcher claims that about 1% of Wikipedia content is plagiarized. Of course, about 1% of everything on the Internet is plagiarized.
Review: Netgear’s Skype Phone Keeps You Connected – In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas…
Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? – This detailed analysis of Wikipedia from The Chronicle of Higher Education moves the ball forward in the ongoing debate over trust. Basically, can a community-edited encyclopedia ever be really credible? There’s an interesting dissection of the Wikipedia culture, which is almost hostile to academic research, and the Chronicle submitted some Wikipedia entries to experts for grading (they didn’t fare so well). There’s also a reference to Citizendium, a project by a Wikipedia co-founder to create an alternative encyclopedia with formal editorial oversight.
Congratulations to Ted Demopoulos on the release of What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday.
Ted interviewed 101 bloggers and podcasters to find out their secrets and ideas. The book is a nice compilation of advice and must have been a heckuva lot of work to assemble. It’s short (186 pp. plus a glossary and bibliography) and easy to read.
Full disclosure: I’m quoted in a two-page section called “What Makes a Great Podcast?” Although I wasn’t doing much podcasting at the time I talked to Ted, it’s since become a major part of my business. I’ve done custom podcasts for an IBM/Ziff-Davis project called Innovations, several clients of TechTarget and the SaaScon conference. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment and good podcasts get great results.
Relevant to my post earlier today about engagement, The Diffusion Group put out a press release about a new report called Measuring the Value of Media Engagement Against the Economics of Attention.
I’m not likely to spring for the $995 report, but the summary makes a good point that measuring engagement in an age of what pundits call “continuous partial attention” has become almost impossible. When someone is watching TV, surfing the Web and responding to e-mail at the same time, how can you tell what’s engaging them? This will baffle marketers for some time to come and generate nice consulting fees for social media experts. I hope! 🙂
The always-insightful Max Kalehoff of Nielsen BuzzMetrics has a provocative column on MediaPost about engagement. Basically, how do you determine the value of a media outlet as it relates to bottom-line sales? He notes that some websites and blogs have massive traffic but very low click-through rates, while other sites with much smaller audiences have far more activity. Which is more attractive to marketers?
This is the rule of small markets and it’s something marketers need to understand. An engaged audience is a much better target to reach than a mass market. Engaged audiences are interested and respond. They’re much more likely to buy because they have a meaningful interest in the topic.
Traditional media planning has focused on broad reach with an overlay of targeting. In other words, we now buy the Cooking Channel instead of the Today show. Web 2.0 lets you find the audience of people who specifically like baking brownies. This takes engagement to a whole new level.
But, as Kalehoff points out, measuring engagement is very difficult. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity there.
I was at the Society for New Communication Research’s annual forum yesterday in
About 100 of them have done so. Anyone at P&G can have an internal blog, he said. They just put up their hand and P&G gives them an account, some training and a presence on an internal portal that links to all the blogs within the company. Initial interest came mostly from the technie crowd, but word is now spreading to the business people and the internal P&G blogosphere is becoming more diverse. That’s good, because the purpose of blogging is to share information about the business.
P&G’s experiment is being played out across the corporate world, where blogs are becoming a more and more important tool in internal communications. It’s what I call the shadow blogosphere. Lots of journalists and bloggers have complained about the lack of blogging activity by big businesses. I’d guess that less than 20% of corporations outside of the tech sector have public blogs (The New PR Wiki maintains the best list I’ve seen in this area). I think there are good reasons for corporations to be skeptical of public blogging, including legal liability, compliance issues, the risk of public embarrassment and competitive sabotage. I expect big businesses to continue to creep slowly into the blogosphere.
Behind the firewall, though, there’s plenty of action. Talk to companies that sell content management systems and they’ll tell you that most of their corporate business is internal. It’s not that big businesses don’t “get” blogging. They just don’t see a compelling need to blog in public.
There are compelling reasons to blog internally, though. Dill noted that because blogs are easy to archive and search, they create a database of corporate knowledge over time. This is a resource for new employees, in particular, since they can now tap into historical information that helps them come up to speed quickly on the company. Blogs are easier to maintain than e-mail lists and they’re a great way to disseminate timely information. The idea of an internal corporate portal is great. Employees should have one place they can come to discover what information is available around the company. These portals are fulfilling the promise of intranets.
P&G is now experimenting with blogs in its supply chain. These are private journals intended for use by its suppliers and distributors to keep current with news that relates to them. That’s another great application of this technology.
It’s hard to tap into the conversations that are going on in the shadow blogosphere because companies don’t see a need to talk publicly about it. But I’m convinced that this is where the action is in corporate blogging right now and may be where it will stay for the next couple of years.
The problem for newspapers is that they may just run out of time.
It’s quarterly earnings season, and that means another round of speculation and analysis of what the future holds for newspapers. The picture looks bleaker and bleaker every time. Editor & Publisher reports on a new Merrill Lynch study that says it’ll be 30 years before online revenue equals print revenue at newspapers. MediaPost also covers the same report, noting that most papers get less than 7% of their revenue from online ad sales. Who’s got 30 years to wait, particularly when newspaper readership has sunk by 8 million people in the last 17 years?
MediaPost has a column by the head of an advertising network that prescribes four steps newspapers must take to adjust to the new realities of Web 2.0. They include breaking apart online and print staffs and embracing local ad networks. But can newspapers change their cultures and their business models enough to do that? Most won’t. Meanwhile, there’s a young man in Kansas who’s shaking up the newspaper business by building a profitable network of community newspapers. He’s drawing attention from newspaper execs, but will they have the courage to change their models?
History says they won’t. As Clayton Christensen points out in The Innovator’s Dilemma, successful companies are almost incapable of making the changes needed to respond to disruptive change in their markets. It’s simply too painful to endure the layoffs, losses and restructuring turmoil. This is particularly a problem for newspapers, because their print operations, while shrinking, are still profitable. Even if executives see the iceberg ahead – and I think most of them do – they don’t have the mandate from their stakeholders to remake the business. So they just steam ahead and rearrange the deck chairs a bit.
Mainstream media plays such a vital role in the information ecosystem that it’s alarming to see this trend playing out. It may be that the future will belong to something that replaces the current generation of mainstream media rather than to the brands that have existed for over 150 years.