In 2008 Technorati added insights of individual bloggers to the report with an emphasis this year on women blogging. As a long time blogger and advocate of blogging for online marketing, I’ve always taken a lot of interest and insight from these reports.

For marketers and communications professionals seeking to better understand the changing nature of the social web and the role blogs pay within in it, here are some essential statistics from Days 1 & 2 (of 3) from the 2010 State of the Blogosphere Report:

1% of respondents blog full time and 21% blog for their own company or organization

2/3 of bloggers are male and 1/4 of bloggers have a household income of $100k or more

U.S. States with the highest concentration of bloggers: California (15%), New York (8%), Texas: (6%), Florida: (4%), Illinois (4%)

Most Bloggers update 2-3 times per week

33% of bloggers have worked as a writer, reporter, producer or on-air personality within traditional media

42% of respondents say they blog about brands they love or hate

34% of bloggers say they never talk about brands on their blog

25% of Bloggers blog from their smartphone

42% of bloggers use social media to follow brands

The primary influences on the topics covered are other blogs (25%) friends (16%) news websites (9%)

Bloggers spend more time on social media sites (9.9% computer 5.7% smart phone) each week than they do reading other blogs (9.2% computer 3% smart phone)

The Top 100 bloggers generate almost 500 times the articles as all bloggers

Facebook (49.7%) is more popular than blogs (47.1) as a top influencer of consumer purchases

For consumers, 46.1% trust traditional media less than they did 5 years ago and 36.7% think newspapers will not survive in the next 10 years

Conversely, 39% believe more people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs than traditional media in the next 5 years

28.2% believe Facebook is being taken more seriously as a source of information

Consumers trust friends/family (89.3%) and traditional media more than social media as sources of information

More consumers trust friends on Facebook (51.8%) than blogs (45.6) as a trusted information source

The top success measurements bloggers use are:

• personal satisfaction (66%)
• quantity of posts/comments (51%)
• unique visitors (50%)
• links from other sites (39%)
• blog content shared on social sites (34%)

The top ways blogging has helped individuals with a business are:

• greater industry visibility (64%)
• acquired new customers, made sales (58%)
• built thought leadership (54%)
• asked to speak at conferences (32%)
• helped recruit employees (17%)

78% of bloggers surveyed are using Twitter with the most common purpose being to promote blog content (72%) and share links to interesting content (62%)

87% of bloggers surveyed use Facebook, and the majority (66%) do not have a page for their blog separate from their personal account

The most effective social media sites to promote blog content are Facebook (28%) and Twitter (26%) followed by LinkedIn (4%) StumbleUpon (3) Flickr (2) and YouTube (2)

The most common tactics mom bloggers use to promote their blogs include:

• commenting on other blogs (and hoping for reciprocity)
• Facebook
• tagging blog posts
• Twitter
• linking to other blogs from a blogroll

Obviously there’s a lot more data in Technorati’s full State of the Blogosphere report and more information will be published in part 3. Hopefully you’ll find some of these initial statistics useful for your own blogging efforts.

Parting Question:

Do you agree with the stats above. Do your own blog marketing activities or preferences sync up with bloggers overall or will mom bloggers?

Comments

The Biggest Search Geek brings people from all walks of life together in the name of search engine marketing. Anyone can enter online (except those who work for Marin Software, and it’s affiliates of course) by simply going to “The Biggest Search Geek” website and filling out the online application and following the instructions on the website. The contest begins on December 1, 2009 and ends on February 19, 2010. The official rules are also available online, but here is a brief summary:

Participants test their skills by answering 20 amazingly tough questions about search engine marketing (the ins and outs, and everything in between). Each entry will be judged and scored based on the number of questions correctly answered in a timely fashion (so if you think you can take a month to answer one question, think again). Each question has a possible total score of 5 points, and you can get a maximum of 100 points if you answer all the questions correctly. Partial credit for multi-part questions will be given so it does help to guess, but keep in mind this contest is designed to separate the men from the boys (or the geeksters from the posseurs). The final score will be represented as a percentage of the total questions answered correctly. Last year’s winner, Keri Morgret, went up against well over 1,600 search engine marketers to score a 76.8% and claim the title of Biggest Search Geek. This year, Keri is looking to reign supreme once again – and for good reason.

This year’s grand prize will be a free trip for two people to the Search Engine Marketing Expo (SMX) West to be held in beautiful Santa Clara, CA. The grand prize also includes round-trip airfare, and hotel accommodations. The winner will also receive an award on stage from SMX West chair Danny Sullivan, who also serves as Search Engine Land’s editor in chief. Even if you don’t win the grand prize, the SMX West expo is still an awesome happening to check out for those in the search engine marketing world.

The SMX West Expo is three days of intensive seminars, and exhibits that can help just about any search engine marketing enthusiast elevate their level of game play. A plethora of companies will be on hand to demonstrate the latest in search engine marketing tech, and grandly display highly guarded secrets to dominating your niche with SEM. Some of the topics covered will include search engine optimization (SEO), paid search advertising, analytics, social media marketing, and much more. It’s amazing how much information the event coordinators and demonstrators can cram into a few days time. Industry experts, and hopefuls come from all around to learn, network and share in the experience of the expo. If you are looking for a way to improve your skills in SEM, and be around like minded people looking to do the same, this expo is the place to be.

The SMX West expo is truly a gathering of the most elite minds and offers some of the brightest ideas in technology (some of which the outside world has never seen before). Participants get treated to some amazing information, lectures, and demonstrations (plus you get a kick butt party to boot!). If you’re in the area at the beginning of March, you are NOT going to want to miss this major event. And for those with mad skills in search engine marketing that still lack the fat pocketbook for all your hard work, you might want to check out The Biggest Search Geek contest. Who knows? You and a friend might soon find yourselves on your way to Santa Barbara, CA courtesy of a free trip to the SMX West expo – THE tradeshow to end all SEM tradeshows. Carpe Diem!

Comments

The regulations seem to address the issue of disclosure: if I give you a copy of my book and you write about it, you have to let your readers know that. If I buy you dinner and then you write about my book or reference my site, you have to disclose that. And so on, and so on.

Problem is, this FTC guideline has gotten more and more onerous in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, and bloggers are getting a bit paranoid about the implications.

Luckily, it appears that this paranoia is misplaced, so you can all take a deep breath. Earlier this week – Oct 14th, 2009 – Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, had a conference call with reporters to clarify the situation and here’s what she said:

“We’re not going to be patrolling the blogosphere, we are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.”

Engle emphasized that what they’ve released are new guidelines. “They aren’t rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law. They are guidelines intended to help advertisers comply with Section 5 of the FTC Act [PDF]” which focuses on unfair or deceptive practices.

So it’s not the rebirth of the Blog Police as the Disclosure Police, as I tweeted earlier while listening to a panel on this subject here at Blogworld, but it is nonetheless a reminder that you should still be transparent anyway. If a vendor pays $200 to write about their product, don’t run away in terror, just let your readers know.

And that’s what this brouhaha is all about anyway: just be transparent and disclose what’s going on, and you’ll be in the clear from both the FTC and ethically on the right side of things too.

Comments

Much like buggy whips, assembly before the assembly line, the introduction of the steel belted radial tire, we have allowed companies to fail. This sudden and disturbing interest in bailing out companies so that they can continue on with their old business models that do not fit where technology and society is going is going to fry innovation in its tracks. Sorry, while I like the New York Times and the Seattle Times, it was not a big loss to me to lose the Seattle PI, the Rocky Mountain News or other newspapers that have shutdown or gone out of business.

This is not an assault on Journalists, this is not an assault on the free press, we need a reasoned non yellow journalism (AKA Fox News) way of getting the news. What is happening is that we are getting the news from people we trust, not necessarily the NY Times. We are following what our friends follow, we are reading blogs, we are reading the BBC, and we are reading a whole host of online content. While the ads on the internet and on those content sites might not be generating mega bucks in profits, they are reporting the news. If anything shows that the current way news is developed, promulgated, and shared is broken, look at what happened during the Green Revolution in Iran. Most people got their news from Twitter. If you want breaking news you will go to twitter, not to CNN and not to Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC.

If you want to find news information you will go right to AP (even if you disagree with their policies) because the AP has a web site. Or you will go to Yahoo news, Google News, or MSNBC. People go to the middle man, not necessarily to the core web sites that create that content. Bloggers have had to deal with this for years; it is time for newspapers to learn the same.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D). White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue. Source: The Hill

While later on in the article they do talk about the core ideas behind why this needs to happen. One of those ideas is that blogs are unreliable. When people are reading blogs like 538, or other authoritative blogs then the argument does not hold true. Blogs are not the boogey man to scare small children with, there are blogs that go back and fact check everything like Ars Techica. We do have blogs that spin the news to suit them, but this is no different than what we see in media today, information as entertainment is nothing new. The problem is that with all the choices we have to divert our attention, newspapers are but a small section of where we will spend our money on entertainment.

News is hardly news anymore, and buggy whips are a dying business. We didn’t prop up the buggy whip industry, and news is all over the internet. Some of the sponsored big box news is absolute tripe, with a large amount of demagoguery on both sides of the political fence. No one complains when average people get sucked into something that is not fact checked when it comes from big box news. The same holds true for blogs and other social media, if you look at what makes it to the top of social media and blogs; it is all from great sources with trustworthy people, at least as trustworthy as anyone else who purports to be a reporter. Newspapers do not need a tax bail out; they need to learn to work in the new environment.

Comments

My views and opinions of how the FTC is flawed in its dissection of the blogosphere and Twitterverse as compared to traditional media is reserved for a separate, but imminent post. As a matter of edification, I support the FTC’s mission of protecting the consumer. I just don’t agree with how it lumps earned mentions from meaningful and effective public relations (PR) and paid placement of content either through monetary or product exchanges. There’s a difference and we’ll talk about that later.

In the realm of sponsored posts or tweets, the FTC simply cannot delineate the differences between earned and paid postings and therefore assumes that most consumers are equally oblivious.

With Izea’s impending announcement of a new pay-per-tweet network, combined with existing ad networks and services such as TweetROI, Twittad, and Magpie, the FTC will be forced to pay attention to the paid endorsements in one of Social Media’s most promising and also elusive networks.

As you could possibly imagine, the reality of mass-sponsored tweets will raise a Tweetstorm that will immediately trigger a blogstorm, which will ultimately escalate into full-blown category 5 media hurricane.

But the reality is, whether you agree with them or not, sponsored conversations and paid tweets work when used in the correct situations as a complementary program in addition to other traditional and socially-focused engagement initiatives.

They increase awareness, expand networks, drive sales, build community, promote causes and raise money and awareness, and push traffic.

So, before the chaos and confusion ensues, I wanted to take a proactive role in steering a productive conversation to explore and introduce solutions, ethics, standards, and also reduce the possibility for consumer confusion and potential backlash.

I hosted a virtual summit on the topic via Facebook and invited pundits and industry leaders to discuss:

- The issues and options for meeting FTC guidelines

- The responsibility of brands and participants to provide consumers with information, context and intent

- The inevitable need for guidelines and standardization in disclosure practices

- And how participating in these sponsored conversations might impact the image of the sponsoring brand as well as the brand of the influential voices who lease their stature and social graph how it ultimately affects the dynamic, trust, vibrancy of their community

Disclosure certainly protects all parties involved, but it can also steer perception, which is why this discussion is so critical to the evolution of sponsored conversations.

The debate however, centralizes on the mechanisms and terminology for disclosure and whether or not they are effective when either explicit or implicit in nature.

I introduced options for consideration such as including a symbol or term in each Tweet (TM) that conveyed sponsorship or endorsement such “$,” “spon,” “paid,” “endorsement,” “sponsored” or possibly including an is.gd or bit.ly link to a landing page that could more effectively communicate the nature of the endorsement, ad, promotion, and the intention of the relationship. From the beginning, I did not purport the use of a hashtag “#” in disclosure however.

Stowe Boyd, a fellow digital anthropologist and social architect, and also the creator of Microsyntax.org, shared his views on the implied mindset associated with hashtags, “Generally, hashtags are indicators about the nature of the topic of discussion in a tweet, not the nature of the tweet itself. Note that sponsored tweets might (and often would) have other tags, which would lead to the “adness’ of an ‘#ad not standing out…’”

Credit: PaidPerTweet

As the conversation deepened, the rationale for one standard or solution unlocked a series of challenges that necessitated further exploration and discussion.

As I noted in the forum, the use of “paid” for example, precipitates psychological connotations that will evoke a completely different emotional response as compared to endorsement or sponsorship.

Anders Abrahamsson shared an interesting perspective, “Paid is coming close to that you sold out your integrity – some might call it prostitution.”

In response, Stowe offered a general resolution that resonated with many participants, “My recommendation would be to concoct a new indicator, perhaps ‘AD’, to place at the start of any sponsored Tweet. This has several benefits since anyone would immediately know, at the outset of reading the tweet, that it is sponsored. It stands apart from the tags, which usually appear in a cluster at the end. Also, this would make it easy for tools to build filters to block ADs or to easily find them, depending on your leanings.”

I believe there’s a difference however, between sponsored and paid tweets, one defined by purpose and objective. For example, I enjoy the tweets published by Gary Vaynerchuck and I observe that he has a tremendous following of developing wine enthusiasts, I may choose to either sponsor his Twitter wallpaper and/or his tweet stream. In this case, I don’t necessarily influence his tweets, I simply sponsor them.
This introduces another alternative through the disclosure of relationships directly on Twitter backgrounds.

However, if I pay for tweets specifically, then I expect to dictate the content related to each paid tweet.

Unfortunately, in the eyes of the FTC, they are the same. So, as Stowe says, “I think we should go with the FTC interpretation until the FTC changes it, and lump them all into AD. Note: if people disagree with this convention, they can do what they want. But I feel that biases should be as transparent as possible: as Weinberger wrote, Transparency is the new Objectivity.”

He’s right. However, I disagree with Weinberger. I don’t believe transparency is not the new objectivity at all. Objectivity was compromised the minute that links became the currency of the social Web.

We are biased one way or another when we publish information online. Whether we’re seeking attention, linkbacks, RTs, comments, traffic, feedback, etc. Transparency begets nothing. It is simply a buzzword associated with Social Media. Openness and candor are not substitutes for value, direction, education, or insight.

Brian Carter of TweetROI shared his perspective on sponsored conversations versus ads, “I still haven’t heard a good reason from those who champion transparency why we must disclose only financial motives, not all of them. SP and AD make sense. Surprisingly, even some quality Twitterers, don’t want to change the advertiser’s text. That’s where the concept breaks down-  they agree with the sentiment as written. Everyone interprets payment/ sponsorship differently….”

Ted Murphy of Izea responded with support and support for collaboration, “I am not sure there is one specific answer to this question. The only thing that everyone seems to agree on is there should be some form of clear disclosure required for any tweet where value exchanges hands. I 100% agree.”

Source

At this point, SP and AD become potential preambles for sponsored and paid tweets respectively.

But, Jeremiah Owyang, social technology analyst with Forrester Research, believes that they are not enough, “People won’t understand that ‘AD’ and ‘SP’ imply that those tweets are paid for. We need to be explicit, even if it occupies more characters in the tweet. The only solution is to specifically state, ‘sponsored’ in each…”

Again, I suggest that an included (shortened) URL that directs to a pre-defined page that explains the sponsorship and further clarifies the intentions and benefits of the program is another option to consider. While it’s implicit in nature, it communicates disclosure in a mutually beneficial way that serves the twitterer, the brand, and the reader.

If the leaked Twitter documents, also know as Twittergate, are anything to consider seriously as they relate to this topic, there’s reason to believe Twitter is already thinking about this as a form of revenue generation.

As Jeremiah explained, “Twitter may soon implement color coding or introduce different fonts for sponsored and paid tweets.”

James Eliason of Twittad believes that Twitter should release an API to support color coding as not only a form of disclosure, but also as a measure of preventing spam, “I can tell you from meeting with several Fortune 500 companies over the last several months they are intrigued about this new form of influence marketing if it is done correctly. What many do not want to have happen is the “high-jacking” of a hashtag or ‘ad’ format within this space. Imagine a situation where a large group of users begin doing their own false advertising on behalf of a brand, and simply throw in a #ad, #spon, AD, or SP.  This can not occur.”

Eliason took the case to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams where he recommended that Twitter begin the process of selecting specific ad partner providers to prevent dilution from spam marketers and ensure that the advertising comes from the source through the API. His idea is to assign the API calls from each ad partner through Twitter.com and also third party apps such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowsr. He also believes this introduced a new subscription model for users to pay a small fee for a non-ad model across all platforms.

Izea’s Ted Murphy is proactively contributing his ideas towards developing standards and also collaborating directly with the FTC on the establishment of fair guidelines, “They [The FTC] invited me to Washington discuss my thoughts about Universal Disclosure and the current loop holes in the guidelines that need to be closed. Soft-money transactions like free products and trips as well as the definition of experts and celebrities were also discussed. The bottom line is everything should be disclosed.”

He continued, “The biggest hurdle to disclosure standards in social media is not platforms like Sponsored Tweets or TweetROI. It is the PR Practitioners, Social Media Consultants and Brands that don’t enforce disclosure or disclose in different ways. If a tweet from a platform needs to be in different color but a tweet from a tweeter that just got a free trip or video game doesn’t it puts the platforms at a disadvantage. It’s unfortunate, but even organizations like WOMMA don’t have standardized methods of disclosure among members. The only way you will see standardized disclosure in Twitter and all of social media is if the government mandates it (which I am for).”

Indeed. Our challenge isn’t only to unite the industry of sponsored conversation providers around common standards and ethics, we must also encourage marketers to put them into practice.

Whether it’s on Twitter, in blog posts, or in television commercials, paid tweets are technically no different than the array of commercials and advertisements that are available to marketers already. However, they are compartmentalized in function, impression, perception and level of appreciation. And, there are undertones associated with each word that exude contrasting reactions. It all starts with the intention of the campaign and the calculated brand traits/characteristics, values, and sketch of the picture you desire to paint. These steps and measures guide sentiment and activity.

For instance, what comes to mind when I mention:

- Advertisement or ad
- Commercial
- Informercial
- Endorsement
- Sponsored or “brought to you by…”

- Paid placement
- Advertorial

My point is that each one of those words carry hidden meaning and nuances that will not receive due justice or rally support for standardization if represented by a one-word tag within a tweet. This is further complicated by the nature of the disclosure in relation to the essence of the promotion and whether or not it is implicit and explicit in the tweet.

While everyone agrees on the need for standards, and it’s clear that competitors will actually collaborate to help define them, there’s merit and promise in top-down regulation from the FTC and/or Twitter itself. In the meantime, I still believe that including “sponsored” as Jeremiah suggests, providing disclosure on individual wallpaper, or including a link to a page that offers context and clarity (using a custom URL shortener that includes “disclosure” in the construct – for example, disclosure/hgt7), represent credible alternatives in the interim.

However, as Eliason and Murphy note, the FTC and Twitter itself may have to step in to dictate a solution.

Integrity is a priceless commodity...

Comments

In addition to the WordPress plugin, Chat Catcher works on any blog via a PHP script you can get from the Chat Catcher website. There’s also a module for Drupal.

However, Chat Catcher became a victim of its own success when, earlier this month, Shannon announced that he didn’t have the resources to keep up with it any longer and so could no longer continue supporting it.

Happily, others believed it was worth supporting as Shannon noted in an announcement email last Thursday.

Community spirit in action.

Even better news from Shannon over the weekend shows that Chat Catcher is here to stay:

Chat Catcher is pleased to announce the completion of an investment round with Ocasta Labs, an early stage technology investment group. Ocasta Labs have injected both funds and resources to extend the Chat Catcher team and to accelerate development of the service.

Terrific and many congrats, Shannon!

Comments

While the idea of being able to build a social network is certainly not new (Ning has found some considerable success here) the ability to do it around existing WordPress sites certainly deserves notice. With millions of blogs and sites using WordPress the impact could be significant.
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic lays it out in his blog saying

“There’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. I don’t think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks… but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework.”

Pretty smart approach considering that while there are a lot of social networks there are more to come as users get more sophisticated and want more opportunity. With the existing user base for WordPress the opportunity exists to make a substantial impact in the marketplace in short order.

This latest addition follows other purchases by Automattic which includes PollDaddy. That, coupled with $30 million in investment, makes Automattic a real force. Mullenweg continues in his blog saying

In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.

While building a social network is not quite as easy as “if you build it they will come” having a tool like this could move the idea along in many peoples’ minds more quickly than they might have imagined.

Comments