Atlanta Media Bloggers

We are Bloggers, hear us roar?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising | Reuters.com.

Whoo hoo! How about this new research in the Reuters article below?

What does this mean, tho? My immediate thought is that there is a great warning embedded here. Take a study like this and mindlessly apply the results to your thinking, and shift the massive advertising persuasion push to blogs, and you risk killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

You see this happen all the time in television. They get a piece of research that says audiences like "X," and without thinking about WHY audiences like "X," they just turn around and run "X" into the ground, until audiences absolutely HATE "X."

So here's my logic. Advertising is wholeheartedly NOT persuasive. With emotional branding (pathos), it does OK, but audiences are far too savvy to expect advertising to be logical (logos), and most importantly, audiences have been conditioned over time to distrust the source (ethos).

Audiences DO trust close family and friends, word of mouth, MORE THAN ANYTHING.

Insofar as blogs appear to be as trustworthy as close family and friends, audiences will treat them on par with word of mouth recommendations.

However, if bloggers by and large sell out, or if the trust/credibility link-love system fails, if scam-blogs and splogs proliferate and drown out all the signal for their noise, the truths of this study will evaporate as surely as people stopped believing the boy who cried wolf.

It always amazes me how business these days takes a scorched earth approach in pursuit of profit, instead of looking at how longevity and trust matter more than quarterly returns. I mean, what self-respecting capitalist would actually hype a lie or corrupt a source that reaches an actual audience (what should we call blogging payola? blogola?) if it means destroying his or her own future customer base or ability to reach that customer base?

What this research tells me is that when given a choice, people choose authenticity. Sales pitches don't feel authentic, so they are disregarded. Blogs feel authentic, so they are tentatively trusted. Those who promote rampant pitching without regard for authenticity will probably rush in and exploit this source.

Will authenticity be strong enough to win, or will the pitches drive the real audience out of the blogosphere?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising�| Reuters.com.

Blogs becoming force in advertising

Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:27pm ET

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products, according to a survey.

An Ipsos MORI poll found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing.

[...]

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services.

Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.

[...]

Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent), the survey commissioned by Hotwire, a technology public relations consultancy, said.

But they still lag behind newspapers (30 percent).

[...]

"Word of mouth is no longer restricted to close friends and family, it can have the same level of influence upon millions of people across the world."

Let's have a virtual meeting this month!

Hey y'all!

Yeah, it's been cooooollld out, and rainy enough to curl your hair. And yeah, a whole bunch of us have conflicts up the wazoo, preventing us from making a goodly quorum for our monthly mind meld.

And yeeeaaah, SOME of us got to go on a cool road trip, and they need to be telling the rest of us who didn't go some wacky stories, amazing anecdotes, and tortured theories about Web 2.0 and unConferences (what the hell is an unConference, anyway? I'm asking this on behalf of the peanut gallery. There are no stupid questions around here).

The topic for our meeting, if we had been able to hold it, was going to be Online Communities, and the intangible something that makes them hold together, that gives them power, that structures cyberspace perhaps more strongly than in some of our real lives.

What is it? One friend once told me that online communities were fake, no more real than the people who gather at around the piano in the lounge at an airport bar. He said there's nothing that really ties the people together, no strong ties, no obligations. People come, and they go.

And some of us actually like communities that have that kind of freedom, the freedom from guilt and obligation, the knowledge that the people who are present are there because they want to be, not because anyone is making them. That was one of the beautiful things I discovered in my online ethnography of the very strong communities of the Xenaverse, the fandom groups centered around the TV show "Xena: Warrior Princess."

I think of it like gravity, the so-called "strength of weak ties." Of all the forces in physics (electromagnetic, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force), gravity appears to be the weakest, the easiest to overcome (don't believe me? Jump!). But gravity is like a prevailing wind. You can stand against it, but it ends up shaping everything (even the shape of the cellulite in our legs!). Gravity holds entire solar systems in orbit, and more. I think the weakest force field can actually be the strongest.

Businesses look at the blogosphere and social media as an opportunity, but often they see it as a top-down opportunity for them, rather than a chance to harness real bottom-up grassroots force.

But is that a real force? Or is it like herding cats?

Or maybe the mindset is all wrong. Maybe its wrong to even think that cats should be herded in the first place.

Soooo, what are we doing here? Do you want to be here? Are you obligated to be here? Do you get something of value out of being here? Is this a cool community to be a part of?

If so, I hope some more of you will chime in in this space. It's been a while since I sent out invitations on how to use this site, but I am happy to resend any invitations that got lost or misplaced. Just zap me a note.

If you have a blog or blogs, a good blog promotion strategy is to get hooked in with an existing community, so that people start reading your blog, and folks comment back and forth on each others' blogs, and we can spread some link love around.

I SURE WOULD LIKE TO BE SPREADING SOME MORE LINK LOVE AROUND!

So if you've got a blog, post up a little introduction to it here on this site, with your link. Tell us why we should peek in, check your blog out. Maybe you're feeling shy, just getting your blog legs. We'll hold your hand. That's what link love is all about.

We're Atlanta Media Bloggers. We're into blogs. We have blogs. OK, all together now:

Send us your links, your huddled URLs longing to breathe free...

Ahhh. Isn't that better?

Let the virtual meeting commence.

All in flavor? Up hosed?

respectfully submitted,

Chris Boese

How NOT to get lots of comments on your blog...

Yeow! When some friends first told me about this today, I really wasn't sure what a "sock puppet" was, and to tell you the truth, the guess I had in my imagination was a tad more off-color. I was glad to be proven wrong on that assumption!

So another professional journalist gets his poor ethics exposed, care of blogs and the blogosphere. I just have to point that out, because usually it is professional journalists ranting about the lack of ethical reporting standards in the blogosphere.

Link: New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog - New York Times.

September 4, 2006

New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog

By MARIA ASPAN

A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog. An editor’s apology replaced the blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted “misleading” its readers.

Franklin Foer, the New Republic’s editor, said in an interview that he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the Talkback section of Mr. Siegel’s blog that accused him of using the alias “sprezzatura” to defend his articles and assail his critics.

["sprezzatura" is a literary term, for art that seems effortless or comes easily]

[...]

In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, “I’m sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years.”

[...]

Mr. Siegel became a polarizing figure, coining the term “blogofascism” in the midst of a debate over The New Republic’s support of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Connecticut primary.

The user named sprezzatura, an Italian term for studied carelessness, posted comments that were hyperbolic even in the blogging environment. After readers criticized Mr. Siegel for his post about the host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, sprezzatura wrote: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” (A later comment deplored other readers’ “inability to withstand a difference in taste without resorting to personal insult.”)

Mr. Siegel is not the first mainstream blogger to use an Internet alias or the first to be unmasked. In April, The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of a reporter, Michael A. Hiltzik, after he admitted using aliases on his own blog and other Web sites. Mr. Foer said that as print publications engage the Internet, it can be difficult to clearly define and apply journalistic principles. “Obviously, this all happened in a newer medium where the rules are more ambiguous,” he said. “But we simply don’t tolerate the misleading of our readers.”

Another voice heard from on BlogHer...

From a person I haven't heard from in the blogosphere in a while, Burningbird (Shelley Powers). I've missed her perspective and am happy to have it back.

While it may be controversial, I couldn't resist pulling a few bits out, for discussion or whatever. I wasn't at the conference, so I can't say one way or the other about things that only eyewitnesses know.

This is sort of hard to excerpt, so if you're into this, I really recommend reading the original and popping off to all the different links in it.

Chris

Link: The Bb Gun | Blog Archive | Measuring Success.

Measuring Success

August 1st, 2006

Before I started the new weblog(s), I told a friend that I was going to avoid saying anything even remotely critical about BlogHer. It does no good to do so, I told him.

I’m sure he knew that I could not follow this vow. I don’t know if being critical of Blogher will do any ‘good’ or not. I do know that fighting for women to be heard–inside blogging or not– has been a part of me for too many years to see it co-opted into a new business model; or used as an excuse to disregard women (even the flirty, sexy, beautiful ones) the other 360 ought days when BlogHer is not running.

I wanted to point you to Jeneane and Stowe Boyd’s response to Dave Winer’s Blogher recap. I particularly want to empathize Boyd’s reaction to the conference, which I found honest and direct.  Tara Hunt also came out with a post related to some of the ‘bloghim’ responses. In addition, she provided her reasons why Blogger is not for her–most of which parallel other’s thoughts.

I’d already mentioned my concerns about the marketing aspects of BlogHer. These were, in a way, enforced by Lisa Stone’s only mention of the conference at the BlogHer site. In it she discusses the ’success’ of the women in the keynote panel of the conference; their success, and how, it would seem, the new BlogHer measures such:

If success is the best revenge, revenge must be sweet indeed for this quartet. For today, each of these women todays enjoys kudos from their readers/users (even critics), while at the same time being able to point to cold, hard facts such as Web traffic and revenue that demonstrate their ideas were worth pursuing.

Is that the true mark of a good idea within weblogging? Web traffic and revenue? Not writing or worth of the thought or the person…web traffic and revenue?

Women make up 50% of weblogging. That used to be a rallying cry, demanding that we be heard. Now it’s been reduced to facts and figures to place in front of the likes of Johnson & Johnson, GM, or some condom maker. This is influencing, heavily, the direction BlogHer seems to be taking.

Barbara Ganley wrote on some of this, in reference to the fact that DOPA passed–a law that has dangerous implications to the freedom of the Net in our country. Not a word was mentioned at BlogHer:

[great quotation snipped]

If DOPA did not generate interest, where was the emphasis at BlogHer? From what many of the attendees stated: Mommyblogging.

[...]

If we, women and men both, follow a path where the only measure of success is the number of ads at our site, the links we have, the money we make, then the only power we’re exercising is that of consumer–catered to, perhaps; but essentially meaningless.

Melinda Casino, who is both a contributing editor and was a panel presenter at BlogHer, wrote a long and thoughtful response about her impressions of Blogher tonight. It was titled, appropriately enough, Goodby Grassroots BlogHer. In it she lists out her disappointments of the conference, including the marketing and, ironically, the lack of diversity.

[...]

I read in the liveblogging of the session on sex how the representative of the company that supplied the condoms for the goodie bag participated in the discussion. From this, I gather we can rest assured that the constuction of their condoms is of the highest quality.

I will freely admit that it is Melinda’s post that spurred me to write this one last post on BlogHer. When she mentioned this event, it reminded of all the concerns that have been expressed the last few years about the growing ’selling’ of weblogging–that one day we would be sitting there, in pleasant expectation of a conversation, only to be given a sales pitch. When the lines start blurring, we don’t know what’s real anymore. That will kill this environment faster than any law like DOPA.

[...]

I also wish, and I mean it, much success for the organization. I have no illusions that I will change anyone’s viewpoint with this writing. Perhaps the emphasis on women’s purchasing power can, this time, be used as a weapon for social change. In this, I hope they succeed.

I’m going a different path, though. One that doesn’t measure success based on ads, links, and revenue. And I’m not going to look back.

Will Digg for money

Netscape boss Jason Calacanis is showing the money to the top users on Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit for $1000.00 per month. Check out this lil' snippet from his blog...

..snip-snip..

Before launching the new Netscape I realized that Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and DIGG were all driven by a small number of highly-active users. I wrote a blog post about what drives these folks to do an hour to three hours a day of work for these sites which are not paying them for their time. In other words, they are volunteering their services. The response most of these folks gave back to me were that they enjoyed sharing the links they found and that they got satisfaction out of being an "expert" or "leader" in their communities.

Excellent... excellent (say that in a Darth Vadar/Darth Calacanis voice for extra impact).

That is exactly what bloggers told Brian and I three years ago when we started. Given that, I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline).

Read: Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.")

Woman fired for blogging (Keep an eye on this one)

A 33-year-old British secretary has launched a test case before a French employment tribunal after bring sacked from her company for writing a blog about her day-to-day life in Paris.

The blog - written under the pseudonym "La Petite Anglaise" - has built up a sizeable international following over the last two years, with up to 3000 people a day reading diary-style accounts about work, relationships and the travails of single-motherhood.

But in April Catherine - she refuses to give her family name - was called in by superiors at the Paris office of British accounting firm Dixon Wilson and told she was being dismissed for gross misconduct.

After working out her notice, Catherine today posted news of her dismissal and impending legal case for the first time on her blog - http://www.petiteanglaise.com - prompting a flood of sympathetic comments from readers.

"In the dismissal letter they told me I had brought the company into disrepute, but I never once referred to it or the people there by name," Catherine told AFP.

Managers had also discovered from reading the blog that on two occasions she had lied about having nanny problems to take the afternoon off, Catherine said. And they objected to her using the computer in office hours to write the blog.

"I can understand why they might have felt a little aggrieved, but I cannot accept that it is a sackable offence. It was a gross over-reaction. Only a few days before I'd been told how good my work was," she said.

The case - one of the first of its kind in France - will be brought before the "prud'hommes" or labour tribunals later this year, and Catherine's lawyer is pressing for an award of two years' salary.

READ: Secretary sacked for blogging

The Rule of 1%

After our discussions on user-generated conent, I thought my fellow Atlanta Media Bloggers would find this interesting. (I wonder how many will interact with this post?)

***

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It's a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.

The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads - which as Antony Mayfield (at http://open.typepad.com/open) points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m unique users per month.

That puts the "creator to consumer" ratio at just 0.5%, but it's early days yet; not everyone has discovered YouTube (and it does make downloading much easier than uploading, because any web page can host a YouTube link).

Consider, too, some statistics from that other community content generation project, Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).

Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.

***

READ: What is the 1% rule?

Speaking of media cluelessness in regard to Web 2.0....

I wrote something by accident on my blog today that I've reflected on and gotten attached to, a way of explaining, sort of, what's really happening with old media, new media, and the folks who ride about in "horseless carriages" in between the two worlds.

Because I've grown so fond of my accidental metaphor as the day wore on, I decided to share it with you, to see what folks here think of it.

Chris

Link: Chris Boese's Weblog: Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money".

Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money"

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

While I am certainly NOT one to think that Nick Denton is the online equivalent of Warren Buffett (heavens, no!), nor do I necessarily think he "gets" interactivity and grassroots media in a real sense (I'd still put him firmly in the "horseless carriage" category), I do have a great deal of interest in the article below.

First, holding my finger up into the wind, I am interested to hear that the "party" is back on. I wasn't too fond of the dot.com bubble "party" of the late 1990s, and my biggest complaint about it was how "stupid money" went around chasing after other "stupid money" in the form of venture capital and angels who didn't read business plans, dispensed with P/E ratios, and worst of all, had NO understanding of the larger concepts governing Internet communities and online interactive spaces.

They were carpet-baggers, in other words, and dumb carpet-baggers at that. And they were so full of themselves, they threw a big party of excess and actually believed it would never end, oblivious that the world of real people online went happily on without them.

[...]

Think about what Web 2.0 means.

What does it mean for me? Maybe I'm half a bubble off here, but Web 2.0 for me means one major step closer to the Semantic Web (the Semantic Web, in my mind's eye, will be driven by AI), with XML- and tag-driven meta-information creating spaces for higher-level "smart content," or content that knows its own name, knows things about itself, can parse itself, and knows how to fit itself into larger contexts. Oh, and all these relationships are formed by many-to-many communication links or conversations, forming and reforming dynamically, on the fly. It's been called an "ecosystem."

[...]

Just think about ways to visualize cyberspace, and think about how relationships can be represented so that items don't exist in space, all by their lonesome, but rather, are defined by their relationships to each other in a vast web of ongoing dialogues and conversations.

Or better yet, visualize a busy parlor with people clustered around, talking here and there in groups. Some of the people there are related, even second cousins twice removed. Some are married. Some are friends. Some are having secret affairs no one knows about. And most importantly, SOME drove in on horseless carriages from this big auditorium a few blocks away, where the only folks allowed to talk had to wait for a turn to get up on stage and hold forth with a microphone and a PA system.

You can tell the ones who drove in their horseless carriages over to our parlor here, because they walk into the room and ignore everyone else, and they just START TALKING IN VERY LOUD VOICES.

Some of the small conversations are disrupted by these obnoxious people, but others are not. This does not daunt the loud-talkers. They raise their voices more. They want everyone to pay attention to them exclusively, even if they kill off the party in the parlor in the meantime. That really doesn't bother them, because enough of the disrupted conversations will be lured into the loud-talkers' orbits, and those people (sheep) can be persuaded that what the parlor really NEEDS is a stage, and maybe, oh, you know, a PA system...

Got that image in your head? OK, now go read about Nick Denton below, and remember, he's no Warren Buffett, and not even a Tarot card reader.

Web 2.0 lives in the parlor, and turning the parlor into an auditorium is NOT Web 2.0. IMHO. The people who have this compelling need to turn it into an auditorium will just take a powder when their audience goes away, jump in their horseless carriages, and ride off in search of another busy parlor to disrupt.

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

[...]

COMIC: Blogging For Dollars #2

Blogging For Dollars by: Jim Stroud and Gnomz

Collaborative CRM

For someone that has never blogged before, I sure have a lot to say! Chris B gave me some assurance and confidence by inviting me into the waters; into unchartered territories. African-Americans have been stereotyped as not being good swimmers. Thanks to Chris B & Sherry H, I guess I am proving the critics wrong!

But this post is not about race relations or stereotypes. This post is about one of several topics I have a lot of passion for - CRM. You can classify me as a CRM Enthusiast. It is not about the technology or what is commonly referred to as "Operational CRM" and it is not about the deeper insights that an organization can gain about it's consumer market which is commonly referred to as "Analytical CRM." True CRM is about an organization effectively engaging its consumer base in relevant, real-time and personalized dialog across the enterprise and across multiple touch points with the intent to create and deliver value for the consumer not just for an organization's bottom line.

In my opinion, I think this was the promise that CRM intended to deliver over a decade ago however very few companies are actually living up to this promise much less creating customer-centric strategies to deliver on this promise.

Dialog, Relationships and Emotional Bonds

I was recently sent an article entitled "The Rise of Corporate Blogs" and the last paragraph of the article is what motivated me to post my "official" first blog. David Schatsky, president of JupiterKagan, stated that organizations that utilize corporate blogs can generate a buzz around their products and services while eliciting feedback and collaboration from product evangelists. He went on to say that by engaging prospective in active dialog, companies can showcase their expertise and domain knowledge, creating a forum for communication of their [an organization] strategies and vision.

Isn't this what true CRM is all about?! You better believe it is! One of the main reasons why there was so much failure in CRM implementation in the mid-to-late nineties and into the early 2000 is because organizations never considered their customers as a scarce resource. CRM became synonymous with the technology like Siebel (now Oracle) and as a result CRM became a three little dirty word in the minds (and mouths) of executives and practitioners alike because CRM, devoid of a relentless focus on the customer, never achieved the Return on Investment (ROI) that many of the solution providers promised. There are some organizations that are still recovering from early CRM investments and there are many organizations that will not adopt CRM as a result of the early failures.

Blogs or "blogging" is one way to create dialog, relationships and influence customer emotions and should be considered as part of a CRM strategy. The economy that we live in today is where the customer experience; the emotional experience is now the competitive and comparative differentiator for organizations. Influencing customer emotions is the most often missed tool in ensuring that an organization has a customer for life; a customer advocate or evangelist if you will.

The key to share of wallet is customer authenticity - if an organization proactively engages customers in product/service creation or shares with customers and prospects initiatives that an organization are considering and gives customers or prospects to weigh in on those initiatives, organizations has created a dialog with their consumer base thereby establishing a relationship which is critical to influencing emotions.

I think for some organizations they have a decision to make when it comes to emerging media channels like blogs and the potential impact blogs can have with its consumer base. Organizations can act like ostriches and put their heads in the sand pretending that technology (blogs) has now changed the way consumers buy OR embrace this new and unchartered territory and figure out ways to integrate blogs and other emerging media channels as part of their marketing, sales and service value proposition.

My name is Art Hall and I am a Blogger!