Misc.

So…is Blogging Becoming Marginalized or Mainstream?

A year or two ago, there was so much irrational exuberance around blogging that it was a foregone conclusion that within a few years there would be five blogs for every person on the planet, no one would get information from any other source and we would have robots in our cars to make us breakfast on the way to work.  Ok, maybe it didn’t go that far but there was certainly no shortage of numbers from the likes of Technorati to make you think that blogs wouldn’t become so prevalent that they would essentially be inescapable.  Sure, blogging was swimming against the current created by traditional media but at the rate it was growing it would certainly take over at some point.

Well…not so fast.

Blogging, like many other infallible social technologies (I’m looking at you MySpace), appears to be slowing down and possibly even in decline.  Technorati has just issued their fifth annual State of the Blogosphere and the numbers aren’t all pointing to the sky.

Sure, many facets of blogging are thriving.  By almost any measurement, blogs now dominate entertainment media, with TMZ and Yahoo’s OMG leaving traditional outlets like People and Entertainment Weekly in the dust.  You see it in technology as well.  It’s hard for me to think back to the time when the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg could be considered one of the most influential people in consumer tech.  Now he’s lucky if he has as many readers in a month as Engadget has in a day.

As with most statistics, the real truth is one or two layers deep.  Are there really 133 million blogs?  Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb was quick to point out that only 1.1% of them had been posted to in the last 7 days.  As he outlines, that’s slightly less than amount of people that have defaulted on their mortgages in the US over the past year or the amount of people that went to the Minnesota State Fair last year.  If only 1.5 million blogs are active on a weekly basis, is it really such a juggernaut?

What about SOV or traffic?  Here’s what Kirkpatrick says about that:

The average number of monthly unique visitors reported by these bloggers? In the US it’s only 18,000. That means 600 people per day. 600 people reading your thoughts each day is pretty fabulous for the vast majority of people on the planet, but as media goes it’s not very mainstream. Especially if there are only a million and a half people doing it.

It’s starting to sound pretty fringe again, isn’t it?  There were about 35% less blog posts this year than there were last year.  That’s a significant decline.

By the raw numbers, yes, blogging is becoming an increasingly marginalized media channel.  The top 1% may be dominating but I think you can make a case that those blogs are becoming indistinguishable to their mainstream counterparts once they begin relying on advertising revenue.

What I found interesting though was some of the demographic information.  About half the bloggers Technorati surveyed made more than $75,000 a year in household income.  While this isn’t impressive to a lot of the people that will cover this story, it’s still well above the median household income in the United States (the last census in 2006 had the median at $48,201/year).  Maybe this can’t be classified at affluent, per se, but these are certainly people with some purchasing power.

But what about the 600 people who read each of these blogs everyday?  Yes, it’s not a huge number but who are those people?  They are most likely peers, meaning that they are probably in roughly the same demographic.  I’d say a blogger that speaks to 600 people everyday with a median household income of greater than $75,000/year is someone significant, especially to marketers.  Does it really matter how many people Fox News reaches if they are predominantly undereducated low-income individuals?  I’m not saying that they are but we now have a pretty good idea of who is reading these blogs everyday.

So I would agree that blogging has become more marginalized but I think that is also where the value lies.  To go back to my old anti-reach marketing credo, it’s not how many people you’re reaching but who you are reaching.  It’s kind of like the picture above in that the fight against the river isn’t as important when you’re mainly interested in the fish.

If You Can Guarantee WOM Success, You’re Probably Measuring it Wrong

Maybe it’s just me but I’ve always been wary of money back guarantees.  With very few exceptions, returning products or getting refunds is generally a hassle.  By the time you’ve been through the whole process you generally regret the whole experience and that attempt at a “clean slate” with the brand is rarely achieved.

BzzAgent disagrees with me.  In a move Ad Rants is calling “desperate,” BzzAgent is guaranteeing that their word-of-mouth campaigns will perform 20% better than other media or you can have your money back (if you’re spending more than $300,000).

So what is 20% better?  Is it 20% more conversions?  WOM is about more than just selling products and services in a one time hit, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s our beloved Net Promoter score rearing it’s ugly head again.  If you can prove that your banner ads make more people likely to recommend your product then you can have your money back.  Nope, that doesn’t sound right.

The problem in the money back guarantee for me is that it undermines what I consider is the true value of what BzzAgent does.  Over the years the company has built a network of “agents” who are basically people that like getting free stuff to try.  The company is criticized by those who say that these people aren’t influencers but, if we’re talking about candy bars and laundry detergent, one-to-one recommendations from average consumers are just as valuable as one from the hyper-connected.  Is Seth Godin really blogging about how soft his toilet paper is?

BzzAgent is in a unique position as a word-of-mouth marketer.  If you’re interested in seeding a packaged goods product, there is probably no better company to get it out to most major demographics.  They’re ethical marketers who keep their agents informed of the WOMMA rules and have more experience than just about anyone else.

The only problem I have with this is that it once again shrinks WOM down to the campaign level.  Sadly, there are no great metrics of WOM except trying to find out the number of recommendations or somehow being able to track conversions, neither of which are usually an option.  The level of WOM that a brand attains is more akin to brand awareness than it is to most of the common marketing metrics that advertising and PR are based on.  This is a discipline that can only be measured by trend data and I don’t think you can compare that to other media that delivers short term reach.

I side with Contagious on this one.  The guarantee is a stunt that gets BzzAgent some added visibility but it raises more questions about measurement than it attests to the true value of WOM.

Let There Be iPhone

While I fully realize that the last thing anyone needs is another post either criticizing or hyping the iPhone, I simply can’t resist.

For starters, the iPhone will change mobile media habits forever.  I’m not saying that everyone will own an iPhone but I am saying that Apple’s mobile OS runs cleaner and smoother than any interface that is currently available and consumers respond to good interface.

Secondly, with the iPhone comes the only real next generation development platform.  Buying and installing an application on your iPhone is as simple as a couple taps.  This is exactly how Apple pioneered digital music distribution with the iTunes store only it’s slightly easier.

The funniest thing about the 3G iPhone is that the 3G network is pretty much irrelevant.  Most consumers will have a hard time finding it in the wild and unless you’re very in tune with download speeds and are downloading a significant file, you probably won’t notice that it’s “twice as fast.”

Then of course there’s the size, or form factor, if you prefer jargon.  Watching video on an iPhone is actually enjoyable and some of the application developers, like Major League Baseball, are really getting it right.  Sports highlights, YouTube videos and most video podcasts make perfect sense for this platform.  Whether or not long format video, like Hulu or traditional TV/movies, will work as well remains to be seen.

Google is going to be taking a crack at this before the end of the year as well.  They’re great content aggregators but they haven’t proven that they can build a usable OS yet.

Apple has one more advantage here.  They now own one of each of the “three screens.”  They are a juggernaut in the PC market, they’re picking up major momentum in mobile and the Apple TV remains, in my opinion, to be one of the most underrated devices in consumer electronics.  I can’t imagine that syncing media between these three devices is more than 18 months away.  Once that hits, you will be seeing a truly seamless media consumer and it will be interesting to see which channels survive and which fade.

The Nelson Award: PR People Impersonating Rabbis

You almost want to let this one slide on the basis of pure hilarity but, alas, you cannot.

We’ve all been there.  You toil away on your kosher slaugherhouse account, putting your heart and soul into every deliverable when, completely unbenownced to you, one of your “interns” jumps on Failed Messiah and starts impersonating rabbis to further your messaging and respond to critics.  Oy vey!

Unfortunately for the otherwise legit PR firm 5W, that’s exactly what happened.  Regardless of what you may think of their CEO or Gawker’s characterization of him, 5W is probably one of the better pure media driving PR firms out there and they have lots of good people at every level.  However, I don’t think “the intern did it” is a viable excuse anymore.

Social media is a minefield so people rely on their professional services firms to help protect themselves.  If PR firms can’t train their employees from top to bottom on how to navigate a modern media landscape then they are in the wrong business.  I know it happens everywhere but that doesn’t excuse it.  Everyone needs to know the risks and take responsibility when things go wrong.  5W, this Nelson Award is for you.

As a side note, this is a immensely comical thread to read through, if you have a few minutes.  I’d start with the Failed Messiah post that outs 5W and then continue on to the follow-up.  It’s not just the scandal that makes it a good read but the comments are priceless.  I particularly like when they get off topic and start arguing about whether or not Jack Daniels is a bourbon (it’s not).

L’Chaim!

Update: It gets worse.

Who Wants to Get Into an Intense Debate?

Looks like I’m going to experiment with a new commenting system called Intense Debate.  I tried to import all the old comments but they appear to have all been lost so, if you’re looking for an old thread on here, you probably won’t find it.

Detail oriented Point Oh! readers will possibly remember that I tried out Disqus a little while back.  I’m actually pretty impressed with Disqus but in the long run I didn’t really like how it integrated with WordPress so I let it go.  I continue to use Disqus on Tumblr and would still recommend it to just about anyone.

I think what attracted me to Intense Debate was the simple way it manages user profiles and I think it looks a little nicer in threaded comments and replies.  WordPress integration is still a concern since I technically imported all my comments and still found that they all disappeared when I activated the plugin.  Sometimes it takes a little time to see how these things work so I will continue to tinker with the system and see if Intense Debate really is the special sauce it claims to be.

Another in a Series of Bad Excuses

In case you’re wondering why the post frequency has been way down here, it’s because I’m in the final stages of the long complicated process of moving across the country. I will begin the trek from New York to Portland, OR, next week so I probably won’t be posting here (though maybe here and here). Oddly enough, the lower frequency hasn’t really hurt traffic or new RSS subscribers over the past month so I may take that as a sign to try to post higher quality but less frequent items. Hmm…maybe I’m turning into traditional media. Ouch.

The Flu is Viral, Marketing is Not

My number one least favorite term in the world of marketing and PR is “viral.”  No term is more misleading or shows less insight into the key motivators in media habit than suggesting that people are merely mindless cogs that perform a certain behavior when introduced to a certain kind of stimulus (sorry, Dr. Skinner).

For starters, the behavior that is commonly referred to as viral is a classic example of word-of-mouth.  Someone discovers a piece of content that they find compelling and then they share it with their wider social network.  A certain percentage of that audience performs the same behavior and if the number of people in the next generation of the cycle are greater than the previous then the impressions expand and something seemingly “viral” has occurred.

The only problem is that if the response was merely viral in nature than just about all spam would “go viral.”  Sure, not everyone would forward a spam message but a percentage of the recipients would and then the distribution would grow over time and the Internet would be littered with spam memes.  Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very frequently.

The reason it doesn’t happen is because widespread word-of-mouth distribution is all about trust.  In the first cycle of a “viral” distribution, that first person sends the content to a portion of his or her social network and the only reason it is viewed is because of a level of inherent trust from the source.   If the content producer sent that content to that same group, as is the case with most advertising, it would be spam and probably not viewed at all.

Unfortunately, ethical word-of-mouth marketers now have another challenge to face in “viral marketing” companies.  Some of these companies charge brands for access to a group of people that are willing to send content to their social networks (usually posting content on their actual online social networks) for some sort of reward incentive.  Over time this dilutes the whole concept and will make people trust less in the content they get from their friends and colleagues and bad marketing will have ruined yet another communications channel.

A Brooklyn High School’s Take on Social Media

A teacher friend of mine invited me to come speak about careers in social media at Acorn High School for Social Justice in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn last week.  When he first brought it up, I politely declined.  You see, I live in Brooklyn and grew up around New York City so when someone says “Bushwick” to you, you generally politely decline due to the amount of times you’ve heard the word connected to “fatal stabbing” or “drive-by shooting” on the local news.

I eventually started thinking about it more realistically since I will be leaving the city at some point and no longer have access to the kind of diversity that I imagined I would encounter at the school.  Secondly, I’m also genuinely interested in what high school kids think about the Internet and social networks.  Either way, I was pretty sure it would make a good story some day.

Upon arriving at the school I realized that most of my prejudices were completely false.  The school was a refurbished six-story theater building on Broadway in Brooklyn, flanked by the J and Z above ground subway lines and a McDonalds.  When you walk in you have to check in with an armed security guard but I’m told this is pretty standard practice in a lot of high schools around the country these days.  Once beyond the checkpoint, it was like pretty much any high school you’ve been to except, in my opinion, significantly nicer.  It was not only cleaner than the over-priced New England boarding school that I attended, but there appeared to be a greater emphasis on global education when you looked at what was posted around the hallways.

The school has also employed the first “executive principle,” which is a program designed to get proven successful principles to take difficult assignments.  The program pays these principles a bonus of $25k a year if they commit to at least three years to turning these more challenging schools around.  This doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me when you consider the 700+ students whose lives can be changed drastically by receiving a good education.  In the case of Acorn High School, Karen Watts started as the executive principle in January and the school looked pretty good to me in my limited time there.

I presented to three classes and tried to use video as much as possible since I vaguely remember career days and how much fun it is to be talked at for three straight periods.  Since the theme was “Working in Social Media,” I used examples of some consumer generated content from past campaigns and a viral video we did recently.  Working off a version of a deck I used at a recent tech tradeshow, I went through the changes that are occurring in PR in a Web 2.0 world and new media channels, like Google, are changing the way people define media.  All in all, I think I bored them a little and I would definitely change a few things up if I could do it again.

However, it was probably more of an education for me than it was for them.  By asking some questions and surveying the room a couple times, I learned some things that came as a bit of a surprise to me.  For example, most of the kids had no idea what blogs were and didn’t read them, although many admitted to blogging on social networking sites.

Also, as expected, mobile is huge.  The only thing that surprised me was the brands that they had affinity for.  Maybe I’m too caught up in a world of people obsessed with their iPhones but these kids generally dismissed the iPhone as being too expensive and universally loved the T-Mobile/Danger’s Sidekick.  While no one knew what Twitter was, they became very interested once they found out that they could Twitter from their phones and receive updates via SMS.  It’s obviously going to be important for any new communications technology to be easily ported over to a mobile platform for the next generation of users.  This also goes for blogs…if they can’t be easily read through a phone then they may lose this age group when they all get jobs in a few years.

Overall, I loved the concept of career day and I wish it was a bigger part of my high school education.  When I was 17 and graduating from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to study and very little exposure to careers outside of my parents.  I was psychology major for a year and then an english major, which sort of led me into PR in a roundabout way.  Regardless, it’s an exercise that helps both the students and professionals get more in touch with what the other one is thinking.  Definitely take advantage of the opportunity if it comes your way.

The PR Practitioner Guide to Wikipedia

WikiGeoff Livingston surfaced the topic of marketers’ tumultuous relationship with Wikipedia a while back so I’ve been tinkering with this post for a while.  Considering how the next major Wikipedia/PR snafu is due any minute now, I figured this might be as good a time as any to share a few of the things I learned this year about existing as a PR practitioner in the dangerous nerd jungle that is Wikipedia.

First of all, contrary to what some social media purists think, everyone belongs in Wikipedia. This includes PR people, internal employees, disgruntled customers, academics and anyone else you can think of.

The Wikipedia rule that scare most people away is the conflict of interest (COI) section of the guidelines.  The most important passage is as follows:

A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor.

COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where an editor must forgo advancing the aims of Wikipedia in order to advance outside interests, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.

COI edits are strongly discouraged. When they cause disruption to the encyclopedia in the opinion of an uninvolved administrator, they may lead to accounts being blocked and embarrassment for the individuals and groups who were being promoted.

While I think everyone agrees that Wikipedia should not be used to “advance outside interests,” the real gray area is in the neutrality.  Put simply, neutrality is rare amongst Wikipedia editors.  The kind of people that actively write and edit the articles you find in Wikipedia are generally enthusiasts who have a distinct point of view and are able to mask it with varying degrees of success.  As a brand participating in Wikipedia, you have to be very careful to not interject your point of view and preserve a very high level of transparency but there is still some content that you are probably the best person in the world to edit.  If the number of employees is incorrect or your stake in investments is misrepresented, I firmly believe that you are in the right to edit it.

Ok, so these are all grand principles, which PR bloggers are all great at pontificating about, but how exactly do you do it?  In my opinion there are a few rules that brands can follow to participate organically in Wikipedia:

  1. Create a profile – Your user profile is your best tool to promote complete transparency.  Say exactly who you are, who you work for and what exactly you plan on doing in Wikipedia.  Maybe you won’t be editing but you will be contacting editors so it’s still important that it is clear who exactly you are.  This goes for both PR agencies and client side representatives.  Anonymous edits hold very little weight and are usually overwritten within days.
  2. Know your editors – Chances are that you’re only monitoring a few Wikipedia entries and you are more than likely to come across editors who participate in more than one article.  These editors have Talk pages and this is generally the best way to engage with them directly but keep in mind that Talk pages are public so you shouldn’t call them out or expose them in any way that might make them defensive.
  3. Know your Sandbox – For some reason, very few marketers seem to know about the Sandbox in Wikipedia.  The Sandbox basically has all the functionality of a normal Wikipedia page except that it doesn’t get published to the community.  It’s a place to work on entries and get an article up to the guidelines without risking the violation of any policies.  You can still flag your articles to get help from other members of the community and, ultimately, get other more established editors to finish them and publish them without raising COI suspicion.
  4. Know the language – If you can learn basic HTML, you can learn most of the important codes and rules of Wikipedia.  There are many ways to flag articles to get the attention of other editors if something is wrong.  There are also fairly strict formatting and content rules that you should be aware of before doing any editing.
  5. Don’t just stick to your brand – If you work for a dishwasher detergent company, I’m sure you’re an expert on more than just your detergent.  Don’t be afraid to tell the world about what you know about different dishwashing technologies and the environmental impact of different kinds of detergent.  The more you contribute, the less you will be suspected of astroturfing.
  6. Only edit articles relating to your brand as a last resort – Sure, if there is a factual error on a Wikipedia page about your CEO then I believe you have a right to correct it but that doesn’t mean that jumping in and making an edit is the best way.  Try contacting the creator of the article on his or her Talk page to make a correction or flag the article for an inaccuracy.  There are people policing Wikipedia for every possible flag and, if you flag something, they will generally find it and act surprisingly quickly.

Although I don’t think this justifies it’s own rule, it should go without saying that Wikipedia should never ever be used as an SEO tool.  Yes, Wikipedia is one of the most valuable properties to Google but if you start manipulating the links on your Wikipedia article to move search rankings, you’re really doing a disservice to both organic search and social media as a whole.  You might get away with it but if you don’t you will feel the wrath of a lot of people.

That said, Wikipedia is not the playground of purity that social media pundits would like you to believe it is.  It’s a sector of media that brands have a right to participate in as long as they understand the rules and leave everything they know about PR and advertising at the door.

Measuring the Awesomeness of Jimmy Page’s Stairway to Heaven Guitar Solo

One of the greatest guitar solos of all time is Jimmy Page’s masterpiece on Stairway to Heaven. Right after Robert Plant sings “your stairway lies on the whispering wind,” Page launches into an epic solo that, at the time, extended the song well beyond the limit of any airtime that radio stations could give it (this would later be amended). Yes, the solo is awesome but how do we measure how awesome it is?

For starters, let’s look at engagement. The average guitar solo is about 15-20 seconds so, if you count the 12-string strumming part, the Stairway solo is easily over a minute, making the solo 3-4 times more awesome than your average guitar solo.

Let’s not forget about impressions either. Stairway has been a AOR staple since November 1971 and often appears near the top of the list on Classic Rock Greatest Hits of All-Time countdowns. According to Wikipedia, it is the most requested song of all time on FM radio despite never being released as a single. Don’t forget about all the amateur guitarists playing this song in Guitar Centers all around the country at this very moment either. Yeah, they may be annoying people but those are impressions too.

Then, of course, there’s Page’s use of the double-neck guitar. Sure he probably didn’t use the double-neck in the studio but it’s still implied in the overall awesomeness quotient due to the live performances. Using the ad equivilency model, I think that makes all these numbers worth 1.75 more than other guitar solos by the same measurement. Keep in mind that this formula doesn’t apply to the five-neck guitar that the guy from Cheap Trick uses. After three, each additional neck begins to count against you.

Ok, this is obviously stupid, right?

The parallel hit me while reading the excellent Brains on Fire post in response to an Ad Week interview with Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bogusky was quoted as saying:

We are so lucky to be in a creative field at a time when the economy is running on creativity. Yet we are still inculcated to mistrust the concept of creativity. We may be perfectly positioned, but we spend our time trying to add scientific processes to our strategies and scientific testing to our work. Why do we distrust something that is so easy for us all to identify and identify with?

It still amazes me when I hear clients that are really drawn to a creative idea, have the budget to do it but can’t justify it unless they can measure quantifiable results. If this approach was taken to any other creative discipline I would be amazed if any creativity survived. Not to mention, it’s probably at the root of many consumers’ disdain for marketing.

In a world where singles had to be under five minutes long (it would’ve been shorter if not for Dylan, btw), how would Jimmy Page have made a case for his epic guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven? More importantly, if it was omitted, how would it have affected the legacy of Led Zeppelin?

The fact is that attaching your brand to a creative idea makes you look more intelligent, inventive and creates an actual connection with another human being that goes one level deeper than an overused emotional trigger. Good design, writing (you know sometimes words have two meanings) and compelling interactivity can only be measured on the most basic levels but the real value is far more obvious. Not all that glitters is gold, but some of it is.

So when will this new day dawn for those who stand long? Hard to tell. Interactive platforms are certainly expanding the canvass for creativity, as I learned when I visited the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley this week, but there is still a ways to go before everyone can climb the stairway over quantifiability. Perhaps only then will our shadows be taller than our souls.

(ed note: forgive me for this self indulgence…at least I didn’t use every line from the song, as I originally intended)

1 2 3 4 … 6  Scroll to top