Technorati, the blog indexing authority, is releasing its annual “State of the Blogosphere” in 5 installments. Here’s an example of information from the first one.
Bloggers Self-Identified as Personal, Professional, or Corporate
Bloggers are not a homogenous group. One way of segmenting bloggers is by their blog type:
* Personal: blog about topics of personal interest not associated with your work
* Professional: blog about your industry and profession but not in an official capacity for your company
* Corporate: blog for your company in an official capacity
Four out of five bloggers are personal bloggers who blog about topics of personal interest. About half of bloggers are professional bloggers — blogging is not necessarily their full-time job, but they blog about their industry or profession in an unofficial capacity. 12% of bloggers blog in an official capacity for their company.
Of course, these groups are not mutually exclusive. More than half of professional and corporate bloggers are also personal bloggers. This could be on a separate blog, or they may blog about personal interests within their professional blog.
Perhaps you’re still wondering if your company or organization should be getting involved in new media. Have you started participating yourself (Facebook, LinkedIn, Blog, YouTube) to become personally familiar with it? It’s kind of hard to evaluate a medium you’re not familiar with.
I just saw some interesting new data on how Inc. 500 companies are making use of social media. Here’s a chart comparing their use in 2007 (green) with 2008 (blue). You can click on the image to see a bigger version of it. Research Highlights:
* Four out of five companies in the Inc 500 rate social media technology as important or very important;
* 21% of the companies are podcasting and 39% blogging;
* The number of companies blogging and podcasting has doubled in the last year;
* The Inc. 500 are adopting new media technologies much quicker than Fortune 500 companies.
The research suggests that companies that are using social media & new media technologies are growing faster than other companies.
While we’re still celebrating iPhone 3G release day I thought I’d point out something that may make it a more desirable choice for bloggers. If you’re a WordPress user like me then there will be an application which allows you to post directly from your iPhone.
The WordPress for iPhone App is nearly ready to go. It supports WordPress.com blogs as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs running version 2.5.1 or newer.
Timing wise, with the launch of Apple’s iTunes App store this morning, we expect to see this showing up very soon.
While we wait, here is a brief video showing the App in action. (It’s high quality, so may take a moment to kick off.)
The blogosphere continues to grow and amaze people in marketing. I remember when I first talked about it and some of my friends thought I was crazy to think that anyone would really read blogs, much less consider them as “tools” of communications. Times have changed.
My favorite place to keep up with what’s going on in my new media world is eMarketer. They’ve got a new report out, “The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement From Grass Roots,” which has some interesting information. Here’s a couple of excerpts:
More importantly, by 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month. That is up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users.
“A big factor driving the increases is the niche orientation of the blogosphere,” says Mr. Verna.
Like podcasts, blogs tend to appeal to specific audiences. Accordingly, much of the demographic targeting that marketers work so hard to achieve in the mainstream media is already done for them.
“Furthermore,” adds Mr. Verna, “the rates at which blog readers notice and click on ads suggest that they are a well-primed audience.”
Where are you placing your advertising these days? Same old, Same old or . . . . . .
Just in time for a presentation I’m giving at the Turf & Ornamental Communicators Association meeting tomorrow (Blogging and podcasting for profit. Sponsored by Ewing Irrigation and PBI Gordon) is this report from Universal McCann titled, “Power to the People, Social Media Tracker Wave 3.” (pdf-24MB) They’ve done this study globally 3 times now so it’s got some interesting comparative data in it. Basically folks, new media is where it’s at in today’s online world no matter what country you’re in or what your occupation or age demographic. So for those of you who still wonder why you should know more about this, your questions will be answered. If you still wonder then let’s just say you have gotten off the Cluetrain. Here’s some interesting points and I urge you to download the report with the link above to read the whole thing.
Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.
All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves: Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3.
57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos.
Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog.
Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.
Here’s the percentage of respondents who agreed with these statements:
56% Blogging is a good way to express yourself
36% I think more positively about companies that have blogs
33% I have a favorite blog that I read regularly
32% I trust bloggers opinions on products and services
31% Blogging is an important way to socialize with friends
There’s so much information in this report that I can’t even begin to point it all out. It’s all good. Just take some time, take a deep breath and say, “I will read it and I will try to “get it.”
I am hoping to attend the New Media Expo again this year and have been keeping up with Tim Bourquin, founder, via his emails and now I’m subscribed to his blog, Webernetting.
His most recent post struck a nerve and I posted a comment on it. I thought I’d point you to it and won’t post it here. One sentence in his post struck a real nerve with me and is probably what most prompted me to write a comment.
Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfully, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience.
That couldn’t be less true as Tim knows. I am very happy and thankful for the success we’ve had. It has allowed ZimmComm to continue to develop and help a growing number of companies who want to make use of new media tools to communicate with their customers.
This week you can see both Zimmermans in action road blogging for two of our clients, National Biodiesel Board and Cattlemen’s Beef Board. You’ll be able to see the posts we’re doing on the National Biodiesel Conference Blog and Beef Board Meeting.com. They both represent an excellent and effective use of this new medium. Both are focused on annual events and essentially provide a frequently updated multimedia newsletter on the web.
Imagine having this done for your event or company.
Besides posting on these clients blog sites we’ll also be posting on our own, Domestic Fuel, AgWired and World Dairy Diary. These ZimmComm-owned sites provide you with a “sponsorship” opportunity to have online exposure even if you don’t have your own site to provide this kind of event coverage.
Let’s face it, there’s no more interactive, up to the minute, interesting, search engine optimized way to showcase your activities than with online coverage on the websites we create. Let me know if you’d like to discuss doing this for your company or group.
The blogosphere has mushroomed since the last time I heard an update from David Sifry. According to a post on Blogspotting, he says that the blog search engine is now indexing 112 million blogs. They rank them too.
A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking.
Another new group has been formed called The Blog Council. I’ve submitted my membership app but am doubting I qualify as defined by their rules. I fully understand the need for large corporations to have a place to learn how blogging can help them but a closed looking organization isn’t probably the best idea in my mind. There are lots of resources already available. In fact, since we have built and manage blogs for some major corporations I’m not sure how they can exclude “vendors” or small companies. It’ll be interesting to see they interpret their own rules and if this gets off the ground.
The Blog Council, a professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging, officially launched today. Founding members include the leading companies from a diverse range of business sectors: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.
The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.
“Major corporations use blogs differently while abiding by the same rules and etiquette,” said Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz. “Individual and small-business bloggers don’t face the same issues. For example, we still need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound ‘corporate.’ And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time.”
The folks at Common Craft are wizards at simplifying things. ” We use a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas. We’re interpreters. We present your products and services in plain English using short, unique and understandable videos in a format we call Paperworks.”
Earlier this week I participated in Blog Action Day through our AgWired site. Now that’s it’s past the organizers have a pretty comprehensive summary of what they accomplished. The theme was “environment.”
For example:
20,603 Blog Participated
23,327 Blog Posts (Google Blog Search)
14,631,038 RSS Readers
That RSS Readers number doesn’t count visitors to the respective websites which is a much bigger number generally speaking!
The graph below shows the frequency of terms appearing in the blogosphere courtesy of BlogTrends. Additionally “Blog Action Day” was the top Technorati search term AND tag for the day.
Pretty impressive showing for the blogging community if you ask me. That’s what I call a viral campaign.
Now playing roxette mp3 (by RealPlayer Windows Plugin)
I thought this was interesting. According to a survey by BIGResearch bloggers are trusted more than media.
You can request a complimentary Top Line report from the most recent survey online.
BIGresearch’s American Pulse™ Survey is collected online every month, utilizing Survey Sampling International’s (SSI) U.S. Panel exclusively. BIGresearch conducts this survey to find out what Americans really think and feel about topics like politics, religion, pop culture and the economy…just to name a few. American Pulse™ provides a platform for participants to voice their true opinions about real and timely issues in our society.
I think it’s interesting that they’re separating bloggers from media. How do you do that today? We publish several news sites that use the blog format and consider ourselves bloggers. However, we register as media at events we cover and are considered media by most people I know and work with. I know many mainstream media reporters who have their own news blog.
Maybe it’s the fact that blogging is more personal generally speaking and that creates more of a trusting atmosphere for the blog reader? I’m betting that’s part of it. It’s one of the reasons we encourage blogging. Put a more personal face on you and your company!
Okay. I let Blog Day 2007 pass by without even recognizing it. I admit it. But does it count that I probably posted onto 6 different blogs on blog day?
One of the things we’re supposed to do is point you to 5 other blogs you may not be aware of. Although I do this regularly on many of our sites and we’ve got blog rolls on some of them I’ll point you to 5 here. Why these? Because they’ve got some good resources for you if you’re wanting to become a better blogger or podcaster.
ProBlogger Smays.com Podcasting News iLounge Engadget
BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
If you’re going to blog then get ready for comment spam.
Comment spam wasn’t something I knew much about until about a year ago when AgWired, my main agricultural communications blog started to get hit hard. That’s when we made a decision to install Akismet on all our sites and all of our client’s sites as well. In fact, Akismet is a standard feature of any site we build today.
As a total of all the sites Akismet is being used on they’ve captured 2,412,431,831 spam comments. In that same time frame they allowed 178,927,948 total hams. This was as of early July btw.
Going on 3 billion. That’s ridiculous. Just think about the fact that Akismet is only one of the options you have to capture and manage comment spam!
As we continue to develop and refine our event blogging services I just thought I’d look at how many days I’ve spent on the road doing this so far this year.
As of right now I’ve spent 67 days on the road doing event blogging and Cindy has spent about another dozen. That’s quite a few and I think shows how interested companies and organizations are to have the story of their event unfold as it happens on their website or on one of ours.
I can go into so many reasons why this makes sense but I think I’ve done that before (search engine optimization, multi-media content, direct customer/member communication).
You can see examples of my most recent trip on Appaloosa Blog Spot from their National Show that just concluded in Oklahoma City. In 3 days I post 22 times on their site. Those posts contained 18 audio interviews, 1 YouTube video and an online photo album containing 155 high quality digital photos.
When it comes to Web 2.0 tools I know it’s easy to get confused with all the choices out there. Early on I picked WordPress as the online personal publishing platform of choice and apparently I made a decision a lot of people agree with. All our sites so far, either owned or for clients, have been built using this great tool. WordPress just came in first in the publishing category in Webware’s Top 100 Awards.
These are the best Web applications there are. We know because you told us. Over the course of 20 days in May and June, the community of Webware.com users voted for its favorite Web applications. These are the results: the top 100 Web apps, 10 in each of 10 categories, determined by Webware readers and the fans of the sites that made the final cut.There were more than 5,000 nominations for sites to be included in this awards program, which Webware’s editors pruned to a list of 250 finalists. Users then voted on those finalists–there were 489,467 votes cast.
In the media category two of my favorites came in at the top, YouTube and Flickr. Here’s where you can see all of the top 100.
Hello from the Canadian Animal Health Institute annual meeting in Niagra-On-The-Lake, Ontario. I’m here to make a presentation to the group on blogging and podcasting as new media tools to reach out to customers and members.
At last night’s dinner one of the participants wanted to use my camera so I let her and she took a picture of the photographer (me). Her name is Fran Doig and her husband, Paul received one of the CAHI “Recognizing Its Leaders” awards last night. You can read more about this on AgWired.
I thought I’d post some of the resources I’m using here and later I might add the audio recording of my presentation too just in case you’re interested and only if I think I sound okay. So linked to here are the agenda for my presentation (Word doc), my Power Point slides (PPT file) and a little resources handout (Word doc).
I’ll also be giving away a few sets of ZimmComm retractable ear buds to some lucky winners too.
If you’re looking for reasons why you might consider blogging then you might want to read this post on Online Spin by Max Kalehoff, VP of Marketing for Nielsen BuzzMetrics. In it he makes a case for anyone involved in marketing to blog. Well that would be most of us since we’re all trying to sell something aren’t we?
Here’s an excerpt from his post that I really like. This is what so many people have trouble understanding.
I also received a great education in syndication. While publishers, advertisers and agencies get caught up in site visitors, I found it interesting that I have roughly five times as many active RSS and email subscribers. And I now can understand why; I’m making it easy for others to discover and regularly consume my content, on their terms.
If you’re not a regular reader of eMarketer I highly recommend it. Theirs is one of the only daily e-newsletters I subscribe to and actually read. They also send out an eMarketer FYI on timely subjects. The latest is on a GoToMeeting webinar on the Top Ten Webinar Best Practices. I’ve had a number of clients asking about webinars lately and thought you might want to check this out if you’re thinking about conducting one for your company or client.
Webinars are an increasingly important channel for sharing a wide variety of useful content and broadening the reach of any size organization. Learn how leading innovators have mastered the key aspects of Webinar planning, delivery and analysis to boost revenue, reduce costs and drive productivity in their organizations.
This webinar will take place on April 11 at 10am-pdt or 1pm-edt. The speakers will be Michael Osterman, Founder, Osterman Research and Eric Choi, Product Marketing Manager, Citrix Online. Here’s where you register.
Another webinar you might want to check out is on blogging and being offered by PR Newswire. It’s called “Blogging: Get in? Get out? or Get out of the way?” You can probably guess what my answer is.
PR Newswire has brought together a panel of online veterans to discuss blogging as it pertains to the PR professional and the news reporter. Learn how blogging has changed journalism, how it has opened new lines of communication outside the traditional press and how PR professionals should (or shouldn’t) react to the trend.
This webinar takes place on April 12 at 2pm-edt. Here’s where you register.
Creating and using blogs as communications channels is no longer considered to be something out of the ordinary. We’ve created some great websites for our clients and I’m listing them here for you. You can also find links to them on the website sidebar. Hopefully these will give you some ideas for your own organization.
Besides designing and building these websites we also host and continue to maintain several of them:
I think we may need to get beyond the fact that these are blogs and just consider them websites that can be updated easily and frequently, are highly search engine optimized, can be subscribed to and provide a direct channel of communication to customers who are searching for information and probably the thought leaders in their business.
Technorati, the blog indexing authority, is releasing its annual “State of the Blogosphere” in 5 installments. Here’s an example of information from the first one.
Bloggers Self-Identified as Personal, Professional, or Corporate
While we’re still celebrating 
The blogosphere continues to grow and amaze people in marketing. I remember when I first talked about it and some of my friends thought I was crazy to think that anyone would really read blogs, much less consider them as “tools” of communications. Times have changed.
Just in time for a presentation I’m giving at the Turf & Ornamental Communicators Association meeting tomorrow (Blogging and podcasting for profit. Sponsored by Ewing Irrigation and PBI Gordon) is this report from 
Another new group has been formed called 
Earlier this week I participated in 
I thought this was interesting. According to a survey by 
If you’re going to blog then get ready for comment spam.
When it comes to Web 2.0 tools I know it’s easy to get confused with all the choices out there. Early on I picked 
Hello from the Canadian Animal Health Institute annual meeting in Niagra-On-The-Lake, Ontario. I’m here to make a presentation to the group on blogging and podcasting as new media tools to reach out to customers and members.
If you’re not a regular reader of 
Another webinar you might want to check out is on blogging and being offered by PR Newswire. It’s called “Blogging: Get in? Get out? or Get out of the way?” You can probably guess what my answer is.