In media on
8 July 2009 with 1 comment
Charles Arthur wrote about how he was finding blogging changing as blogging at the ‘tail’ has dropped off. Couple this with moves to lifestreaming from FriendFeed to video services like Qik being adopted by some leading bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel and you could be fooled into believing some of the nay-sayers who write-off blogging as thing of the past. Though Robert Scoble has seen a dramatic drop in readership since his move towards lifestreaming according to Silicon Valley Watcher written by Tom Foremski.
This is not a new proposition, I blogged in response to similar claims from Ian Sample and Paul Boutin last year where I acknowledged that blogging had changed due to new channels like Twitter, but was definitely not on the endangered list.
At the other end of the scale is Stuart Bruce, who is not only sticking by blogging, but points out the foibles of micro media distracting the thought leader from having suitably olympian thoughts. Stuart contends that the efforts in mining life stream content like Twitter is unproductive as it has a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Secondly, if you look at Text 100’s recent research about blogging around the world bloggers have become more influential, blogging is mainstreaming as a communications channel: I guess this is a positive spin Arthur’s withering of the blogging tail.
If Charles Arthur is correct, then the signal-to-noise ratio is certainly improving, and if you have a look at leading media sites like The Telegraph Online, the BBC or Guardian Unlimited you can see the influence of blogging on their site in terms of presentation, editorial style, audience participation and the ever-present comment box.
So what is really happening then? My best guess is based on a phenomena known as the ‘hype curve’ which different people credit to analyst firm GartnerGroup or Judith Hurwitz depending who you ask.
Over the past ten years or so, we have seen blogging climb to what can be reasonably considered to be a peak of unrealistic expectations and it could be considered to heading towards a trough of disillusionment. A scientific-sounding version of the tall-poppy syndrome. From a PR perspective experience which has been gained is still valuable as blogs hit the plateau of productivity. It also means that the bloggers who stick with it are more likely to come out the other side even more influential as the noise around them will have reduced substantially.
Well its a hope, rolled into a theory based on a curve developed by people who think that they are smarter than you and I. So what’s not to like about it?
In ideas, innovation on
6 July 2009 with no comments
I have been thinking about legislation and innovation recently, triggered in part by a conversation over Twitter that I had with Phillip Sheldrake over Twitter whilst he was at the Intellect conference.
In western countries such as the UK, France, Sweden and the US we have seen legislation and authorities act out of fear and the fear of disruption. There are precedents that we can look at to see the relative benefits or otherwise of this approach.
For instance Steven Levy documents in his book Crypto
how a few geeks with the necessary foresight realised how important encryption would be for online communications and business. The US government considered encryption to be a munition and consequently something that should not be known about by consumers, nor in their possession.
Fortunately, the geeks persisted and now thanks to their efforts you can now shop safely online as your credit card details are sent via an encrypted channel (that’s what the little padlock which appears in the edge of your browser means.)
I think we are at a similar point now with other technologies and the law. Lawrence Lessig in his work Code has talked about how the way we create law to keep up with, and facilitate innovation. The approach the west seems to be taking is one of trying to hold back disruptive innovation.
Contrast this with the standpoint that the Brazilian president took against online practices which challenge our current thinking on copyright and innovation. Brazil is a developing world country, but has had biofuel-powered cars since I was a kid, has its own successful aviation industry, award winning architects and designers.
Contrast this with South Africa which hasn’t legislated around privacy and is now a world leader in areas like mobile marketing.
So will much of the innovation that the Digital Britain report pays lip service to, move south from cool Britannia to cool Brasilia?
In marketing on
5 July 2009 with no comments
Moonfruit is the web 2.0 equivalent of GeoCities or FrontPage, however due to a competition giving away a brace of Apple laptops that people entered by spamming all and sundry participating in their viral marketing campaign with #moonfruit alienating twitter followers and pushing the word moonfruit as a leading trend; the word became bigger than Michael Jackson. I blogged about it at PR Week and Moonfruit came back to me with campaign success metrics. Here is a link to some other people’s opinions about it here and here who have covered many legitimate concerns eloquently.
In pr on
4 July 2009 with no comments
Phillip Sheldrake whilst he was at Racepoint started a dialogue with the social media community about the development of an influence scoreboard. The idea is influence and reputation is the purest form of measure to capture what happens in public relations. Sheldrake is looking for a silver bullet to the measurement of online PR and social media campaigns.
At the other end of the scale is MeasurementCamp which takes a much more empirical approach, looking at individual case studies. This empirical approach is based on one of two insights:
- We are not quite sure about what the measurement criteria should be and hope to derive them by looking at commonalities in successful case studies
- There is no measurement silver bullets, the best you can hope for is by sharing best practice practitioners can work out how to measure on a case-by-case basis for campaigns
It will be interested to see how these two opposing approaches get on. Either way it is marketing which will benefit.
In culture, marketing, pr, pr2.0 on
2 July 2009 with 1 comment
Way before I was a PR person I DJ’ed. I started DJ’ing before house music was called house music in the mid-1980s whilst I was still at school. My two passions were records and casual sportswear (nothing has really changed much). One of the things that used to happen in those days was that artists would do reply records to famous club cuts of the time. I was reminded of this my some early tracks in this mix by the Druffalo Hit Squad.
The one that really sticks in my mind was a pair of records by Gwen Guthrie and Wally Jump Jr & The Criminal Element (aka Arthur Baker and Will Downing).
Guthrie was a famous session singer and worked with legends like Larry Levan (who is one of the founders of modern dance music). She went on to write and record Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent which is now steady fodder on easy-listening stations and got heavily sampled by hip-hop acts.
Producer Arthur Baker and vocalist Will Downing made an answer to the record called Ain’t Gonna Pay You One Red Cent to reply to Guthrie’s record which was widely seen as a ‘gold-digger’s anthem. The two records ran at a similar speed and in the same key so it didn’t take too much effort to cut them up into a ‘conversation’ between competitors where the verse of one record was answered by the other record’s chorus and vice-versa.
(The train-spotters amongst you will also notice the vocal riffs that Downing and Baker put in referencing Imagination and First Choice’s Dr Love).
I thought that these reply records are a good analog for an aspect of social campaigns which are usually missing: conversations with competitors.
When I came down to London to work in agency PR I was told that you never mention the competitor unless you are the underdog, it was less about being unsporting and more starving them of the oxygen of publicity.
When I moved to Yahoo!, both us and our rivals at Google and Ask used have links to each others blogs in our blog roll: though this still was more of an acknowledgement that they existed rather than a true conversation. Back in the world of agency life and I found that many of my clients didn’t want to mention their competitor. Like the client who thought that a heterogeneous environment was one that only included different versions of their product range.
At my present employer Ruder Finn, we have been thinking about how competitor conversations can be used to:
- Spike competitor campaigns
- Develop a healthy dialogue around different areas
- Promote common interests
- Highlight the real points of differentiation between the competitors
Just because you are involved in a conversation with your competitor doesn’t mean however that you shouldn’t abandon the principles of being nice, being human and being useful (to the audience eavesdropping on the conversation). There you go, a social media lesson from post-disco dance music. I have also posted this at my work blog.
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