My colleague, Anne Green, an eight-year veteran of CooperKatz and our SVP, attended this morning's iBreakfast on “The Business of Blogging.” The session featured Henry Copeland, CEO, Blogads, Stowe Boyd, COO, Corante, Bob Wyman, CTO, PubSub.com, David Teten, NitronAdvisors, and Ishwari Singh, CEO, a1technology.com. She graciously sent me her bulleted highlights, which I have posted here verbatim in her words.
[A special preamble note to my occasional critics - PubSub is a CooperKatz client. I am posting this not to hype them, but rather because the entire event summary has broader value to the blogging community. Take shots at me if you will, but I can't post a summary without mentioning PubSub.]
Henry Copeland:
* Believes blogs / blogging will change the world
* Who are bloggers? “Bloggers are mavens”
* Big advantages over traditional media (not corporations, not generalists, highly networked)
* This is versus traditional media which treats readers as proprietary – i.e., you don’t see the New York Times linking to Wall Street Journal
* By contract, bloggers are “promiscuous” and love to swap readers
* Networked nature of medium means “Bloggers are 10 times more productive per keystroke than traditional journalists”
* Who are readers of blogs? Mavens, news junkies, participants
* BlogAds did survey earlier this year: out of 17,000 blog-reading respondents, 20% were also themselves bloggers – indicating a high level of active participation
* BlogAds had 5 million page impressions per month earlier in yea, and has reached 50 million per month; by contrast, the New York Times has 400 million page impressions per month – so this gives clear indication of how the gap is closing
Stowe Boyd:
* Saw an ad on a bus shelter this morning saying “The rules have changed but the game is the same”
* But now, he feels the rules are changing so much the game itself is changing too
* Blogging is so profoundly different – we will see it drive a revolution
* There is a tremendous opportunity now for participatory media – blogs are a great example of that
* Outcome? A revolution that will upset an array of applecarts (traditional media; the core principles of marketing; how governments and other entities interact with constituencies; etc.)
* What makes this different?
- It’s a dialogue between members of a community (not writing to passive readers; but rather conversations)
- It’s more democratic (everyone can see, publish, comment; best content rises to top and worst gets ignored)
- It’s more interactive
- It’s unmediated
- It’s generally in the 1st person
* Blogging works bottom-up; as a result, organizations that want to adopt it must shift to a bottom up mode as well
- Warning to those who go into blogging thinking corporate business as usual (e.g., hiring someone to ghost-blog for CEO); stories abound of people/companies being called out for mis-using blogs
- “These attempts will fail profoundly”
* “The world is made up of small markets”
* “A personal brand can’t be manufactured”
* Technologies surrounding blogging not fully baked yet
* Blurring of lines between traditional “op ed” versus “factual” journalism
* Blurring OF lines between advertising and editorial sides of the house
* How can business apply blogging?:
- Use blogs to open authentic dialogues with customers (look at MS or Macromedia as great examples)
- Burn all brochureware and let the service/product people converse directly with constituents re: plans and goals
- Develop a community of those who use products
- Build blog networks inside organizations to make communication more efficient (forget the org charts; let teams build from bottom up)
* The ‘old saw’ that a ‘brand is a promise’ is changing – now it should read: ‘a brand is an invitation to become involved’
Bob Wyman:
* Anecdote about his days at Digital in late 70s / early 80s when the then CEO made famous comment “why in the world would anyone want a computer on their desk?” – illustrates need to look forward to where the current market is headed
* Right now, feels like dot-com days again, in terms of sense that something bigger is happening
* “We are going through a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the network and the way we communicate”
* This change is not blogs per se – blogs are both growing out of this shift and being driven by it
* The changes are in how we relate to info – in development of Web, we learned to we could get access to almost any info we needed by going to various repositories of info and taking what we need
- This is the essential meaning of “polling”
- Now many people are using aggregators to pull in news, etc. – a more mechanized version of polling: “We’ve gone from a mode where the person is polling, to a mode where the machine is polling”
* We need to move toward more efficient ways to interact with the network
- This will help address growing bandwidth issues, plus have side benefit of making Web tools / computing more accessible to developing nations where broadband is not currently feasible vis-à-vis larger infrastructure (Bob recently commented on someone’s blog RE: this very issue)
* Today the market is moving toward new patterns of accessing information: PubSub addressing “the other half of the search problem”
- He outlined retrospective vs. prospective - Need to bring prospective approach into overall toolkit of search capabilities
David Teten:
* He blogged his notes from this morning and his presentation
* Publishing book next year titled The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals with Online Social Networks; will also have a blog on this book and its subject matter
* His presentation covered 12 ways to make money from blogging technology
Ishwari Singh:
* Talked about how to use blogs to promote person or company, as well as how his organization uses blogs internally for project management / collaboration
* Noted that blogs can draw high ranks of search engines
* Noted that instant publishing, cheap and easy software, no need for programming knowledge makes barriers to entry low
* Internally, blogs make managing communications easier for his teams
- Anecdote: his programmers need to submit daily status reports. Instead of reading them all in email, they publish internally via RSS which he reviews and can search via his RSS reader
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE Q&As:
Q) What is the definition of a blog:
* Henry – a blog is a personality (“a prosthetic device for your entire being”)
* Bob – from a tech POV, a blog is experienced as a feed or stream of information; a sequential creation of content
- He referred group to Harvard Business Review article from June 2004 titled “Feeding Time” – article says virtually every data point generate by an organization should end up being published by that organization in some kind of syndicated feed. This is so the right audiences can find info they need easily – instead of always have to ask the organization “have your prices changed?...Are you in new stores?”...etc.
* Stowe: Beyond the technology, blogging is an aesthetic – is it the attitude of the authors and the attitude of the readers. This is versus other formats like knowledge databases which are “soulless” with no mechanism for feedback and no interaction
* Bob on difference between blogs and usenet groups – they follow totally different way of interacting. Usenet groups, like any group, will tend to be dominated by a few individuals. Blogs are more democratic.
