Very soon you’ll be able to read the Jefferson City Business Times online. I’d wait to post this until then but I don’t know the exact date yet. That and I’m too excited about my first column for the publication.
The JCBT now has a regular column on new media authored by yours truly. In the August issue I got started by defining blogs, podcasts and RSS. In the coming months I’m going to be focusing on each of these new media tools separately and I hope to provide links to those stories when available.
Blogging an event. How many of you have heard of this? Probably not many. We’re pioneering a whole new concept in journalism. What do we call it? Online journalism? What do you call it when I attend an event and post numerous pictures, audio and even video files which are usually posted while the event is happening or immediately after it’s over?
To get an idea of how extensive this coverage can be check out the posts I did at the recent Syngenta Media Day in Raleigh, NC. Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc., through their public relations agency, Gibbs & Soell, sponsored my trip. That is, they paid me to attend and write about what I saw and heard. I took photos, used some they supplied me and interviewed some of their people. This event started around 8am and was finished around 3pm. I posted 20 times including over 20 pictures and 5 audio interviews and they were all on AgWired before the end of the day (same day). Many of the posts were done during the actual presentations.
I just did a Google search for the words, Syngenta Media Day. Of 256,000 results, AgWired was the #1 result above Syngenta’s own website! Not too shabby for a little old “new media” outlet, eh?
Syngenta can now point anyone they want, including customers or media representatives who didn’t attend, to go to AgWired and view the content and download audio or images. If someone needs hi-res pictures all they have to do is email me and I’ll return one to them immediately.
At the end of the event I burned all the pictures and audio to a CD and left it with them. They can post them onto their own website and it’s my understanding that is exactly what they plan to do. Their investment in this is minimal and yet they have immediate multimedia content that’s online before the other media attending even get home to their offices.
Here’s a new tool in the road warrior kit. A mobile broadband connection card. I’m a Sprint guy and I finally got one of their new Connection Card for my notebook. Sprint now has their EV-DO broadband working in most major cities and to get that high speed internet connection you need a card like this. My old one just won’t cut it. However, with a 2 year agreement these are cheap. Then I’ve got an unlimited data account for $59.00/mo. I am usually in Sprint service just about everywhere so I’m hoping this will save on those $5 to $11/day connections you get hit with everywhere (airports, hotels, etc.). I’ll bet I’ve spent twice this monthly fee in the last month for example. So . . . we’ll see how it works. They promise great high speed connections and I’ve heard good things about it.
The answer is no. Businesses don’t blog, people do. Businesses may have someone create a blog and post to it but it still takes a real live person to do it. So a better question is, are businesses allowing employees to blog and especially about the business? The answer is yes and increasingly.
There is some conflicting research on this subject. Take a new survey reported by eMarketer.com. Conducted by Jupiter Research in June, it says that 34% of large U. S. corporations have a blog and that 35% plan to by year end. That’s far higher than the 5.8% reported on Socialtext.
It looks like there may be some confusion about what a blog is. I’ve found that to be very true. Some people consider anything that contains personally written material or a way for the recipient to respond to be a blog. Or what I find very often, people consider what they post onto a blog to be a “blog.” For example, I just travelled with a group of people and several of them were writing about their experience on a blog. A couple of them would say, “Here’s my blog,” when referring to the post they had just written. Actually they should have said, “Here’s my post for my blog.” So even bloggers can be confused and that compounds the problem.
I think the reality is somewhere in between what these two pieces of research say. And looking to the future, more and more companies will realize the value of having a personal voice on the internet that talks about their company, openly and honestly and allows the consuming public the opportunity to provide their feedback, good and bad.
That is, if the corporate attorneys don’t throw a fit and feel like they have to stifle the internal creativity of the people willing to take on this task.
We wish you and your family a very happy 4th of July celebration.
Stay safe and enjoy the fireworks wherever you are.
It’s been a long month of road blogging so I haven’t posted much here. You can see how a blog can become a great daily online window into your organization or event by checking out either Domestic Fuel or AgWired. Several different organizations have been employing our services to blog their event. There’s more to come on both these websites over the coming months as well.
I’ll continue to draw your attention to new media ideas here as we work on developing them ourselves.