What do bloggers owe their audience?

It’s usually the blog posts that get my attention but this weekend, it was the fracas in the comment section on Guy Kawasaki’s blog post that got me thinking. Guy posted on how Houston has the "funniest Web 2.0 babes" and he went on to share this hilarious introduction by Jenny Lawson of Good Mom/Bad Mom.

… What does matter though is that Guy Kawasaki kicks ass. That Guy Kawasaki is totally famous. That Guy Kawasaki is a genius who looks a little like Jackie Chan and could probably take you out with a roundhouse kick if he wanted to. And, most importantly, that Guy Kawasaki is here with us tonight.

So without further ado, I give you…Guy Kawasaki.

You can read the full introduction on Guy’s blog. For sure, it’s very funny stuff and and I am glad he shared it. But I think the verbal free-for-all that ensued in the audience ie. the comments section is worth a mention. Here’s what I am talking about:

…This post had nothing to do with changing the world and everything to do with Guy telling us how great his is. No feed reader in the world can sniff that out. You read a para or two to see what’s up. Nobody was trying to be rude. Nobody died. You dn’t have to defend Guy. Read the blog and appreciate the fact that it’s free. We’re just asking for some consistency.

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Wow – if you hate Guy’s blog – why stick around and complain? Move on! …I like this blog and regularly read it. I am thankful for the free gift. I pay no money to read this blog. If I don’t find a particular post useful, I can move on. That’s why they invented feed readers – or come to think of it – Alltop!

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….Self-serving and off-topic posts are Ok once I a while, in the same way occasional contextual advertising is acceptabl. However a balance must be maintained.

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Denis says -  "when one posts to a blog he should largely post for the benefit of the readers."

I say BS to that! The question begging to be asked and answered is – what if anything, do bloggers owe their audience? When an author writes anything it’s going to be self-serving. That’s the point of self expression. Do you think that every great writer in history wrote to please everyone? No, one writes about what one wants to write about. Period. End of story. Get over it.

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Wow, that’s some debate! The question at the heart of this fracas is – what if anything do bloggers owe their audience? Wikipedia’s definition of blog(ging) is,

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

In other words, a blog is supposed to be personal. But as blogging has evolved, there has been an emergence of ‘blogberties’ and professional mega-blog sites like the Technorati, GigaOM, Mashable, Huffington Post who have turned these ‘personal musings’ into a lucrative business. These professional blogs have an uncanny resemblance to the traditional news media networks. The emphasis is on constantly spewing content or being the first one with breaking news. But aside from the behemoth blogs and small select group of professional/B-List bloggers, blogging still largely remains an individual endeavor.   

Bendy3008 blogged about the relative unimportance of blogging and social networks based on Edelman’s Trust Barometer survey, which shows that consumers still find traditional news media, business magazine and newspaper articles to be the most credible sources of information on a company and/or product while blogging and social networks rank very low.

While individually, some blogs and bloggers have tremendous influence and credibility, it hasn’t translated to the blogosphere in general. Technorati claims to be tracking over 100million blogs and there are 175K  new blogs coming up everyday. That’s heck-of-a-lot of content out there and it’s challenging to separate the good ones from the bad. Not only is the volume of content staggering, blogging still remains a highly unstructured media. Bloggers control the format, content, frequency of their blog posts but there is no standard format or consistency.

On the other hand, traditional media has a very structured format, you typically don’t hear the news anchors or talk show hosts veering off-topic or devoting an entire episode to a discussion of their personal life. If that happens, how long do you think you’ll stick around before you flick the channel? So, while you get a very narrow view of things, traditional media still continues to be a much more credible source than most of the blogs out there and for a good reason.

I truly believe that the essence of blogging is keeping it human and keeping it conversational. Rankings do matter, but there’s a fine line between being ‘customer-oriented’ and pandering. As an avid consumer of blogs and a newbie blogger myself, I am acutely aware of the time, effort, and dedication it takes to churn out quality content. The advantage of blogs vs. traditional media is that there’s a great deal of value in getting unadulterated content from someone’s who’s not trying to pander to the masses or obsessed with ratings.

I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this debate. As blogs evolve, so will the audience and the expectations will go higher rather than lower. The blog audience has many choices, if they find that a blog doesn’t meet their expectations, they will vote with their feet or in this case… their mouse.

Why enterprise social networks don’t work

Knowledge Management has been around since the 90s and every so often it makes a prime-time re-appearance. Last week it was on Techcrunch, who featured UK-based Trampoline system’s Sonar Dashboard, a social network utility for large companies being touted as ‘Facebook for business’. Adding a coolness factor to the social enterprise networks by riding on the coat tails of a popular social site is a clever PR ploy but here’s why I am not buying into the hype.

I am a big fan of knowledge-capture/share systems but no matter what fancy name you come up with, these systems have the same fundamental issues. We all know that employees aren’t just sitting there waiting for a cool tool so they can share their information with thousands of co-workers. Sure they update their Facebook profile gazillion times a day, but that’s personal and it’s fun. In the professional context, what’s the incentive for keeping your profile updated? And do you want to be the slacker who’s constantly overloading the corporate site with boring details of his/her inconsequential project?

Trampoline Systems acknowledges this lack of inclination on part of the employees and says,

Automation is critical to enterprise social computing. Employees are less inclined to update profiles at work in comparison to consumer social networking. SONAR Dashboard is connected to SONAR Server, which analyses a company’s email and documents to discover the key themes and relationships hidden in electronic information.

TBH, this ‘automation’ reeks of corporate snooping. Over the last year, I interacted with at least 20 different teams in my organization and every day I find new individuals who impact my work. Unless you read my emails, you probably won’t know what I am doing or the projects that I am working on. So I am leery about how effectual this feature really is going to be. The text in the screenshots of the Sonar Dashboard or social maps (even those on Techcrunch) is not legible, so it’s impossible to tell what these relationships or the profiles really look like or what information is being extracted ‘automatically’. That just adds to the intrigue and ambiguity of their product and how it really works.

Some companies already have social ’sharing’ features built into their intranet, where employees can add pictures, profile information, discuss questions, but you typically see the same handful of folks posting information most of the time. So the companies need to figure out how to encourage mainstream adoption, ie. how to get a critical mass of their employees to use and leverage the social network to make it meaningful.

Lastly, there’s a question of churn. I can see how the Sonar Dashboard could map my relationships to other divisions/groups and that’s valuable but those relationships are constantly evolving, people leave the companies or take up new roles, so the question is how regularly will these maps be kept updated?

I saw all the accolades that Trampoline has received, so naturally, I was curious as to who their customers are. There seem to be only a couple of firms who’ve signed up so far.

Trampoline’s clients include the Raytheon Company, a top 5 global management consultancy and the UK Foreign Office.

I can see this Sonar Dashboard and others like it, being very effective in a company with low churn and fairly stable processes and Raytheon seems to fit that description. In addition, law and consultancy firms also would highly benefit from this system, given the knowledge-intense nature of their business. However, companies in fast-paced environments, where things are a bit more fluid, would have a tremendous challenge in getting such a system implemented and getting any value from these types of systems.

I think it’s essential for larger companies to put some system into place encourage information-sharing and making it easier for employees to tap into their geographically-dispersed knowledge base. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there needs to be a cultural shift and incentives should be put into place to get employees to share information. As much as I think technology is great, but it can’t solve a company’s process and cultural problems. If the company culture is not inclined towards collaboration and sharing, no fancy-schmancy system is going to help the company. Any technology, including social-networking utility is a means to an end, not the end unto itself.

Nintendo Wii mainstream marketing woes

While Nintendo Wii sales continue to outpace the Xbox and PS3 machine sales, the Wii games aren’t doing that well, says New York Times.

Typically, the discussion in the tech world revolves around how to get your product into the mainstream, but Nintendo has an unique dilemma. Its hardware has gone mainstream, but this demographic is not as fanatical about new games as is Nintendo’s hardcore gamer base. The NY Times says,

"Some major retail chains — including Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us — have already begun bundling the Smash Bros. game with Wii machines for sales online, a sign that the base of hard-core gamers who went looking for the game has been depleted."

The initial marketing of the Wii gaming platform was phenomenal, everyone and his grannie got themselves one. However, this demographic is content with one or two games. There’s no fervent desire to own every new game on the market, unlike the typical gamer who’s craving the next new game. The NY Times says,

"The average Wii owner buys only 3.7 games a year, compared with 4.7 for Xbox 360 owners and 4.6 for PlayStation 3 owners, said a Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter."

I think this is where competitors like Microsoft and Sony have an advantage. While the sales of their game hardware may not be as spectacular as the Wii, but they will probably make up for it in their new game sales.This is where marketing genius of Nintendo falls short, it hasn’t devoted as much as effort in marketing its games to this broad demographic as it did for selling the hardware. Mainstream market requires mainstream/traditional advertising. It definitely needs to put its money where it’s audience is. I mean how likely is the typical mom and pop crowd to go to 1up.com or any other gaming site? Not very.

I can’t tell if the ‘mainstreaming’ of Wii was a strategic decision or Nintendo just stumbled onto it. While, this move could alienate Nintendo from the core gamer base but on the other hand, I think it is carving out an unique market positioning which might serve it well.

If you look at the site design, marketing for PS3 and Xbox (both hardware and games), their relative market positioning is very clear.

 

No prizes for guessing which one is aimed at the young male gamer and which is squarely aimed at geeks. 

It doesn’t matter what your positioning is, as long you have one and it’s very clear in your marketing and product development.  So what’s next for Nintendo? The company is no longer going after the hardcore gamer crowd. It’s launching Wii Fit, an exercise game designed for the couch potatoes and soccer moms, ie. the Oprah crowd. Mr.Pachter says,

“It’s definitely aimed at the Oprah crowd. I bet they sell a million units a week for every pound that Oprah says she lost on it.”

If the increase in revenue from this new ‘Oprah’ demographic makes up for the loss in revenue from the average gamer (new game sales), then this positioning might just pay off for Nintendo in the long run.

Blogging metrics gone wild

There’s yet another Top (insert some blogging metric here) list out this week and this time it’s Techcrunch with its Top 100 tech bloggers list based on headlines in Techmeme, which Mathew Ingram has described as ‘trolling for links’ on a slow weekend. There are plenty of other top blogs lists out there and everyone has their own metrics on how to measure a blog and/or blogger’s popularity.

Some like Alexa use the same metrics to measure social media like page views and traffic rankings, which are used to measure the popularity of static websites. Rating Burner relies on number of RSS subscribers to compile its list of popular blogs, which isn’t all that different from traditional media, which uses viewership or circulation numbers to measure a network’s or print media popularity.

Technorati has its own set of metrics – ‘authority’ and ‘ranking’. Technorati Authority refers to the number of blogs linking to your website in the last six months, while Ranking is based on how far your blog is from the top. I think Technorati’s methodology stays true to the spirit of ‘fractured conversations’, which in essence is what blogging is all about.

The recent discussion on the loss of control (and revenue) to content creators, highlights the critical often-overlooked question which is – how can bloggers monetize their content across the gazillion new social aggegators that are cropping up everyday, especially ones like Friendfeed?  If blogging is all about ‘conversations’ and engaging the audience, how can a blogger track (and monetize) those ‘conversations’ when they are happening unbeknown to the blogger on a different platform?

This where I think the popularity metrics propogated by social media tools are sorely lacking. It’s still unclear how valuable are Stumbles or Diggs to a blogger’s revenue-generating potential. I mean, what impact do ‘Like’ or comments through Friendfeed have on a professional blogger’s ability to attract advertisers? There’s no easy aggregation of social ‘popularity’ metrics and that’s a huge gaping hole that the social sites and feed aggregators need to fix.

Blogging and social media in general, needs its own set of metrics and new social media tools should provide analytic support to capture those metrics within and across various platforms. I don’t think mega-blog sites like Techcrunch or GigaOM (which are eerily similar to traditional news media) have any cause to worry but the smaller professional bloggers could benefit from some much-needed changes. Especially, if the conversations they spark around the Internet are a true measure of their influence in the blogosphere.

Blogging – It’s about the conversations everywhere, stupid.

There’s an interesting debate going on in the blogosphere and at the center is Shyftr, yet another content aggregator. (I think my next post should be on ‘How many content aggregators do we really need?’)

Tony Hung’s railing against ‘content scrapers’ and Robert Scoble’s proclaiming that "Era of blogger’s control is over’. There are two issues here, one is about content plagiarism that Tony is most concerned about ,

However, in my mind, when a service cannot exist *without* republishing others content in its entirety, and directly profits from that republishing without the original consent of the author, there’s something that isn’t right.

I see Tony’s point, but bloggers can limit or block their feeds from being published in their entirety, thereby forcing folks to come to their blogs for the whole content. However, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t condone plagiarism, but isn’t this is the same argument that traditional news media used when blogging was in its infancy? As I recall, there was a huge hue and cry about how bloggers were taking content from the news media and reposting with some comments on their own blogs, thereby driving traffic away from the traditional news media sites and to their own blog. Ironic, that bloggers have now started complaining about others ’stealing’ their content.

The second and much bigger issue is around ‘fractured conversations’ that have proliferated due to feed readers like Friendfeed that allow comments. Louis Gray says,

The Web as a whole has clamored for full RSS feeds, not partial, so we don’t have to return to the originating site. Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we’re starting to see what it’s like, maybe it’s not what we had fully anticipated.

That’s a great point, Louis. I can’t help but wonder if bloggers ever had control over the conversations in the first place?! Blogging has always been about distributed content (and conversation). The reason blogging took off the way it did, was because discussions were no longer monopolized by a few individuals/media networks. Some Joe Schmoe in Idaho could start a conversation around organic potatoes and get a gazillion people participating in that conversation. That’s true democratization of content and communication, thanks to the Internet and social media, blogging included.

I really liked Alexander van Elsa’s thoughts on this,

Conversation takes place everywhere. On the web, at home, in a restaurant, with family, friends, work, you name it. There is no controlling that, but we shouldn’t want to either.

To be honest. If a blog post of mine leads to discussion anywhere on the web I would be very satisfied with it. I’m not in it for the traffic, the amount of readers, the number of pageviews. I blog because I believe that I might be able to give something to the people that want to take the time to read my stuff. …It tells me that the things I have written could perhaps inspire others to do something with it, completing and starting new circles.

Say, you’re at a cocktail party and you start a conversation with one person. If it’s an interesting conversation, more folks will join in and the conversation will happen around you, with you. But if you (your conversation) aren’t engaging, folks may very well take that discussion elsewhere. I think the same theory applies to blogs, if you aren’t engaging the reader, they will move on and take their conversation with them. It doesn’t matter if you were the ‘original’ initiator of that conversation or just a passerby.

Here’s the thing, if someone picks up my feed through Friendfeed, and starts a conversation around it, I am okay with it. But you can’t force conversation and you can’t control where conversations happen, that’s true offline and that’s even more true online, where it is becoming easier to ‘move’ conversations.

That being said, would I love to have some type of ‘comment aggregator’ to help me track my ‘popularity’? You betcha. For folks who blog for a living, the lack of trackability (and measurement) is a real issue and needs to be resolved. I think that the social media tools like feed readers have evolved so fast that the players/bloggers haven’t been able to keep up. Now we are scrambling to control the conversation, instead of enhancing the tools that caused this ‘fracturization’ of conversation in the first place.

Last year, Washington Post reported on how RIAA was suing music fans. I saw many commonalities between that debate and this current one. Here’s an interesting insight,

As technologies evolve, old media companies tend not to be the source of the innovation that allows them to survive. Even so, new technologies don’t usually kill off old media: That’s the good news for the recording industry, as for the TV, movie, newspaper and magazine businesses. But for those old media to survive, they must adapt, finding new business models and new, compelling content to offer.

I think blogging is slowly turning into the ‘old media’ and the same advice holds true. I don’t think the question is about ‘picking sides’ as Scoble would have us do, it’s more about the fact that the Internet is constantly evolving and blogging, bloggers, and blogging metrics also need to evolve. It’s Darwinism, pure and simple, you can’t stop change, the only choice we have is to adapt.