Those of you who follow me on other networks will have seen that a few weeks ago my co-host on the twofootedtackle podcast, Chris Nee, and I decided to call it a day for the pod.
I posted a detailed explanation on TFT as to why we were hanging up our microphones, but the basic and overriding reason was a lack of time.
It’s also, if I’m honest, the reason why this place looks a little neglected. I could use Tumblr or Posterous (both great platforms, I hasten to add) but I quite like to take my time to explain and think about issues. And much as I love Twitter, it doesn’t allow for much in-depth analysis or nuance in 140 characters.
It’s something I’ve touched on before but it’s one of the reasons I can see for a shift in attitudes to blogging among bloggers themselves.
If you’re young, a student or unemployed or retired then blogging is relatively easy to keep up. Similarly if the blog has some relation to the job then it’s no problem.
And when blogging was relatively new, it was a mixture of the enthusiasts, who could work blogging into a job, and those who had more time on their hands who led the charge.
Now many of those who led the charge are busier or have made a reasonably good fist of trying to monetise their blog.
Certainly those who blogged for fun – and are probably still leading proponents of blogging – have less time or work on a blog that pays. It’s become more professional, that’s for sure.
So where does this leave the professional amateur, the person who takes pride in their blog but holds down a day job and possibly a relationship, maybe with kids too? There’s only so many evenings you can stay up until the wee hours blogging merrily away.
Increasingly, I suspect, those early waves of professional amateurs have either got a career out of it or got out, bar for the occasional update on a semi-dormant blog (hey, I never said I wasn’t using myself as a case study).
And although the idea of bloggers still very much prevails as the single person hammering the keyboard in the bedroom, blogs are now major players in the content and media marketplace.
It’s why AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post and Techcrunch didn’t surprise me – although it’s not as if either of these were low profile hard-up bloggers trying to make ends meet.
But they general idea that more traditional media or Internet companies will be buying up or taking over the smaller blogs is one I’ve been predicting for several years now. Blogging 2.0, if you want to call it that, is smarter and more professional. The first age of the professional amateur is, in my mind, largely over.
But this isn’t a blogging is dead post, as the medium isn’t – far from it. Blogging wouldn’t be getting more professional and commercial if it didn’t have something going for it.
And while an older, busier generation of amateurs reluctantly hang up their keyboard to spend more time on their career and family, a new generation arrives and, if anything, this bunch have the potential to be even more exciting.
Obviously you’ll get natural churn and new bloggers entering the field each year as a new generation discovers blogging. That goes without saying.
But this generation – through circumstances beyond their control – find themselves living through a very deep and damaging recession where jobs are scarce. And that means more time on their hands.
There will undoubtedly be some very smart, unemployed young bloggers out there. Bloggers and those with general web skills who have a lot of time on their hands – and are willing to innovate and play by different rules, both for blogging and the web in general.
And that’s not only exciting, to me it means blogging isn’t going anywhere just yet.
written by Gary
\\ tags: blogging, Huffington Post, social media, twofootedtackle podcast
Social media’s pretty well established now but the question of who should take ownership for activity is no closer to being answered. PR Week have recently been attempting to answer this, making an argument for a host of different disciplines, while Econsultancy have argued that social media shouldn’t be owned by a PR or ad agency. I tend to agree with them.
Social media is a multi-faceted beast. It can be used to break stories, promote campaigns and brands, deal with reputation management, drive sales, and nurture and develop an enthusiastic community of fans and followers.
Just looking at this list it’s clear that there’s a whole host of potential stakeholders all of whom could legitimately lay claim to be the right people to drive this strategy forward.
Marketing will certainly be happy to push the message or the brand but may not be the right people to respond to a crisis or issues that might arrive.
PR, meanwhile, will be perfect for this and would seem to be the most natural fit but, although you have some excellent social PRs, may not be the most naturally inclined to nurture or build a community, while the community person may not necessarily be the right person to completely get across the message on the occasions that are required, or deal with social issues out of the community.
Then there’s the analytics, something that those on the media side of things are generally less inclined towards. Then there’s always the temptation for some companies to give it to “the web guy” or the most enthusiastic member of the team. But if they’re doing this on top of their normal work and don’t get the support from the rest of the organisation then this negates any savyness they bring to the table.
I realise this is a somewhat simplistic overview of the whole area – some companies have very evolved social practices and are happy to work in the grey areas – but it still shows the dilemmas and issues ownership of social projects.
It’s why, increasingly, I strongly believe that any company, organisation or group that has genuine aspirations of working successfully in a social space should be employing somebody whose brief is solely social media and is comfortable with all these disciplines (and, in fairness, a lot of companies are moving in this direction).
Ideally this person will have some form of media background or knowledge – they’d need to be able to communicate with the PR and marketing sides, and also comfortable writing and commissioning blog posts. They’d also have the time to integrate with a community, appreciate the sensitivities and, if they’re really good, use this to feed back and potentially help their employers produce something cool and well-received.
The other aspect of this is the social person being happy to delegate social responsibility elsewhere in the organisation. One of the temptations for social media is to give it all to one person.
But if you’re going to have one person overseeing social media then they will need to facilitate and delegate. There will inevitably be co-workers who are better placed to run Twitter feeds or answer questions on this topic, and, most importantly provide guidance.
I’ve worked in plenty of places and heard tales from elsewhere where social strategy and cool ideas were held up because several different departments wanted to make a land-grab for the social media rights and this internal jostling often ended up slowing the whole process down.
And, as we all know, social media isn’t exactly an area that’s inclined to hang around.
It’s all to easy to have assorted departments squabbling over who should take charge of social media. Instead, treat is as a separate discipline and hopefully you’ll see the benefits.
written by Gary
\\ tags: advertising agencies, PR, PR agencies, PR Week, social media, Twitter
A couple of weeks ago Chris Lee from Run Marketing kindly invited me to speak at an event he was running at Speed Communications on podcasting. It was a fascinating evening and I learned a fair bit from Chris, Kelvin Newman and Andy White, the other speakers. I focused more on the editorial side of what makes a good podcast. You can see my slides below.
On the night Chris suggested podcasting is something of a forgotten or neglected medium and I’d go along with this. Video is easier to produce than it’s ever been but it still demands your eyeballs, which is a crucial difference.
Audio – and this may be my radio bias coming out here is still a wonderfully creative medium to play with, and convenient as well. You can listen to it on your daily commute, at work or while doing the washing up. It’s also a great companion.
It may not be as sexy or as arresting as video either, but there is a huge capacity for growth, especially with the rise of smartphones. The potential users with the right delivery platform is growing and the software is easier to use than ever before.
Podcasting has also given radio a new lease of life. Many traditional media outlets offer their shows as a podcast, or as an extra to their more linear offering. In some respects, as with Radio Four’s excellent History Of The World In 100 Objects, it becomes almost the primary method of consumption.
And the chances are that the majority of the listeners to these podcasts aren’t really aware that they’re engaging with social media – to them, it’s just another way of listening that just happens to be more convenient for them. As one of my non-media friends told me, he now listens to his favourite shows on his phone rather than tuning in his radio.
We’ve seen how on demand services have transformed – and will continue to transform – television. With audio, the potential is even greater, in my view, due to the flexibility of the medium. As my fellow speakers all said, podcasting is currently an underpopulated medium. I don’t see it staying this way for long.
written by Gary
\\ tags: audio, podcasting, podcasts, radio
I’ve never wished to be particularly down on one paper, so apologies to the paper of my hometown, the Express and Echo, but because I probably visit their website more than most, they probably get a lot of criticism. And a couple of days ago they provided another example of why local newspapers are in all sorts of trouble.
On Tuesday, Exeter City met Plymouth Argyle in their first competitive meeting in eight years. Not the most significant fixture in a busy evening of football, but in local sport terms this was as big as it’s likely to get.
Exeter ended up defeating Argyle 2-1 with a dramatic late winner and, like any other exiled Grecian, I spent much of the immediate aftermath reading forums, Tweeting, on Facebook and even on the phone.
I’ve long since given up on expecting any kind of immediate update on the Echo’s website, so didn’t bother checking it after the game, but the next morning I checked. Nothing. The lead football story was how the club’s back-up goalkeeper was hoping to establish himself with a run in the team.
At 11am the next day, a full 13 and a half hours after the game had been played, the match report finally made it to the site. I only found out through an unofficial Exeter City Twitter feed that aggregates City content from all over the web that the report was up.
By that time, the story had moved on massively to the violence in the aftermath of the game, the reaction to the violence from both clubs, and the team looking ahead to the weekend’s game. Anybody with access to the internet could have already read match reports and reaction on the official site, the Western Morning News, the BBC, Facebook conversations and on the unofficial forum, Exeweb. There was no need to read a now out-of-date report at 11am.
The only people who, realistically, would have any cause to buy the paper would be people who didn’t have access to the internet, hadn’t been at the game, hadn’t listened to it on the radio, and hadn’t phoned a friend at the game for a match report. I can’t imagine this number being particularly high.
Sport is a fast-moving commodity that can deliver very good hits if the timing of publication and the SEO is any good. A report over twelve hours after the game had been played – when this was easily a huge sporting story – on a major media outlet fails in just about every sense.
Increasingly, sports fans, with their own community, don’t need their local papers for sport, if the effort put in doesn’t result in a compelling offering. The huge saturation in sports coverage coupled with advances in social media, and the good old-fashioned forums, mean local papers are increasingly becoming irrelevant on an area they should have sown up, given their exclusive access.
At the moment, it feels like the Echo’s site has regressed (and I’d imagine they’ve had budget cuts) and is an afterthought. They will bring in no new readers through the web, as internet savvy news junkies will already have the news from elsewhere. The readership of their print paper is declining. This does not bode well for their future.
(And I don’t say this with any pleasure at all. I would be genuinely sad if the area lost its paper. Even an out of date paper is better than no paper.)
written by Gary
\\ tags: Exeter City, Express and Echo, local media, local newspapers
Who would have thought bath screens could start a good discussion on social media? On a National Union of Journalists mailing list, of the reasonably high-up members shared with us an email he’d rather mischievously sent to a DIY store asking for their review rates after they invited him to write a customer review of his purchases.
Although done in semi-seriousness, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s an area where the NUJ should be getting involved in. For me, although the quality of reviews can be variable to say the least, they are still a useful service and the company should be congratulated for trying to engage in a form of a two way conversation and even create a community, of sorts.
From a customer point of view, these visible levels of feedback are useful. Pre-web, any feedback would go deep into the company’s filing system. Even the small step of allowing reviews and comments opens this up to a new level of conversation (although the really good ones don’t just leave it at comments, they host and curate and foster a community as well).
I’m probably doing my manly image little good here by confessing DIY is something I know precious little about. To me, customer reviews from the similarly uninitiated are highly useful. A while ago a friend purchased a cabinet of sorts – several of the reviews on the site said it was a nice item but very fiddly to put together. She ignored the reviews and several hours after the delivery was cursing ignoring the reviews, and talking about adding a review herself.
This is, in my mind, hugely different from a journalistic review. I’d probably look at customer reviews first and, if still unsure, then search out a more professional view. Although whether there’s a publication that has a specific section on bath screens, I have no idea. Does that level of depth exist? I suspect the SEO for the professional publication would be much worse, and harder to find than on-site reviews.
To go further, there’s a strong argument for saying if there are paid reviews, they should be kept very separate from customer reviews on the site. At the very least they should be flagged as such. An unflagged paid review nestling among a group of unpaid customer reviews raises all sorts of questions, none of them good.
This isn’t to say companies shouldn’t include paid reviews on the site. It’s quite useful to have a neutral assessment of the product, especially for more subjective things, such as music. Whether the company wants a neutral, even critical, review of a product is another matter.
User-generated content hasn’t killed journalism, and neither will customer reviews either (you might as well argue that the BBC’s Have Your Say boards constitute opinion columns and should be paid as such). And if a company takes it on itself to create and curate a community of, say, DIY lovers that’s well-taken for the initiative (providing there is a genuine commitment to curating and keeping the community well-managed).
There’s undoubtedly an issue with profitable websites that will happily commission reviews for free when the cash is there to pay the journalist. And you can argue where the line should be drawn. I also appreciate the NUJ needs to protect the interests of its members, but I’m not convinced replacing customer reviews with professional paid-for reviews on every subject would be a particularly good way to go about it.
Others may argue this is just another way of letting amateurs into do reviews for free. I disagree. Although this skirts on area that touches on journalism, communities and the general sociability features of Web 2.0, there feels a world of difference – for the reason outlined above – between getting amateurs to fill in for journalists and getting customers to give feedback and nurture a community that can contribute positively.
The one area I’d definitely agree with the NUJ member on is the original email should have a proper contact (his reply just bounced back). I’d also be curious to see what the response would be, although I suspect we’d differ on agreement of the any reply. There are plenty of good battles for the NUJ to pick to protect the future of journalism. I don’t think this should be one of them, even if was done in semi-seriousness.
UPDATE: Comment from Sian below. I showed her the email, just to get things straight in my own head. I think she makes a reasonable point.
“The thing that bugs me about this, is that it doesn’t appear to be an NUJ stance, yet the guy who sent the email (the NUJ vice president no less) has decided that he’s going to use the weighting of his position to make trouble. “
written by Gary
\\ tags: communities, feedback, journalism, NUJ, reviews
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read an article proclaiming the death of blogging, for reasons too numerous to mention. But while the independent blogging arena is constantly in a state of flux as it defines itself (mixing Heraclitus and Sartre, if you will), these last couple of weeks have shown how vital and how vibrant blogging can be when applied by the mainstream media.
Over at the Guardian, Steve Busfield’s three days of live blogging the unfolding Liverpool court drama was as good an appraisal and ongoing update of a topsy-turvy ongoing story as you’ll find anywhere, while today’s best coverage and analysis of the government spending cuts has been on assorted live blogs across the mainstream media. And earlier in the year, the G20 protests were well covered by live blogs.
In many respects, this is no different from Nosemonkey’s live blog on the London 7/7 bombings from five years ago, but, as the internet moves in circles, a little, live blogs have come back round into fashion and some. And with and even bigger wealth of sources to gather information from, they’ve become even more comprehensive in the information they provide.
This isn’t dismissing other mediums, both online and off, but none are able to tie all ends together quite like a well-written and curated live blog.
Twitter is still the best place for breaking news and developing stories that are unplanned, but when the story is expected, even if the outcome is not, then a liveblog often trumps Twitter (while drawing heavily from information on it), simply because journalistic resources have already been allocated in that direction.
Live chats, using Cover It Live and similar tools, are a fun and interesting alternative, but, having curated many myself, if the chat is successful then much of the time is spent managing the room rather than searching for extra information. It’s also quite reactive and doesn’t leave much space for analysis.
Broadcast media is still excellent in places. TV is both a fantastic medium for breaking news – after all, nothing quite hammers home a story like seeing it live – but can often be let own by the need to constantly be showing something on screen, hence the hours of filling by reporters at a scene where nothing much is happening (and is one of the reasons I tend to prefer radio at times like these).
But a liveblog can bring in all of the above. It can embed video and audio, it can tap into Tweets, it can easily flag up other relevant blogs and analysis on the subject, and the very best ones use the comments to both flag up points that the writer hasn’t already made, and steer the conversation. They also allow time for reflection and analysis during lulls.
There’s nothing new or revolutionary about live blogs but, as with so many mediums, some times all it takes is a slight improvement on what you’ve already got, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. And the fact the mainstream media live blogs attract so many hits and comments suggests they’re far from the dying industry some may suggest (although this doesn’t mean it’s an industry that’s overly secure in its future).
If anybody asks about the future of journalism, it’s hard not to get excited about what you can do with a live blog. The medium may have been around for ages but it doesn’t mean the technique is any less fresh.
written by Gary
\\ tags: live blogs, livebogging, Liverpool, Liverpool ownership, spending cuts review
Like an ageing celebrity, some web companies, startup or otherwise, feel like they’ve been around forever and you assume they’re in rude health until you see a news story flash up that they’ve died.
And then you remember they exist, feel a bit sad, relive the happy memories and move on.
12seconds.tv, sadly, is that aging celebrity.
At that start of the week, the video microblogging (or microvlogging, I suppose) site announced it was to close later this month. It It was lacking: Lack of a revenue model, lack of time, lack of interest all seemed to conspire to kill it off.
Which is a shame in many ways, as every now and then you’d see a nicely worked PR campaign, or piece of community growth around the site, usually from people who knew what they were doing when it came to social media. It mark spark a bit of extra interest or a mental note to re-explore the possibilities, but then it’d usually get put to one side.
And that was probably the biggest problem – lots of people who liked the site, could see what it was for, and liked what 12seconds was doing, but never actually used the thing.
Jemima Kiss wrote a very good analysis of why video chat communities suffer – they’re high cost, the communities are often small and video chat or video microblogging still feels a bit weird. I agree – it’s one thing to type a 140 witty retort on Twitter. It’s much harder to do that well with a camera pointing at your face.
I’ll confess, I don’t think I’d even considered using one of the several vlogging sites in any kind of professional capacity or brief for about nine months now, if not longer. I don’t think I’ve heard too many people in my field mention 12seconds or Seesmic for a good while either. And I played with it a bit a few years ago but never really used any of the communities much on a personal basis.
About two or three years ago, video microblogging or live streaming felt genuinely exciting. Certainly, there was a fair bit of buzz, even from the technophobes in my then office, when the people promoting the fourth Indiana Jones film got Steven Spielberg and the stars to do a Q&A via Seesmic.
I remember looking into the possibilities of Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds, and others, for work purposes (chiefly PR at that point in time), but gradually it seemed to become less relevant to the brief. There were people using these sites but it seemed to make more sense to focus activities elsewhere.
Journalism-wise, as well, 12seconds was an interesting tool. But then, although there wasn’t the immediacy, YouTube was still the daddy (with Vimeo clinging onto the coat tails) and, for a variety of reasons, it made more sense to post elsewhere, especially if you wanted something longer than 12 seconds.
And then Audioboo was doing a nice job for the audio side of things – and you felt a lot less self conscious using this. Plus, the quality on Audioboo is generally good no matter where or what you’re using. Making good video is a lot more time consuming.
But I genuinely don’t think video blogging sites like 12seconds are completely on the way out. The innovative campaigns that were run using 12seconds and the felt the technology is getting a lot more mobile and easier to use, while increasing in quality, means you’ll always get a steady number of people working in the area.
There’s definitely a niche for a more intimate, immediate, community vlogging site that isn’t directly competing with YouTube or Twitter, although if I knew what that was, I wouldn’t be writing that now.
Certainly from both a PR and journalism perspective, there are wonderful chances to get very creative with video and some portable tools. It might even be good for the health of this particular area if it was written off – it would give those who are genuinely passionate about it the chance to build something away from the limelight a little.
Video’s such a ubiquitous medium that I’ve no doubt someone, somewhere will come up with a great idea. In the meantime, there’ll be one less place to experiment with. 12seconds.tv will be missed, but probably not for much longer than that length of time.
written by Gary
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