Journalists, make way for the…average citizen?

When I first heard about Assignment Zero, I was a little skeptical (despite the fact that I think Jay Rosen, the founder of Assignment Zero, is one of the most intelligent, forward-thinking individuals when it comes to journalism and the Web 2.0 world).  Professional journalists collaborating with citizen journalists?  Sure, you might get a good story or two out of it, but is this really a sustainable model for producing quality news?

Apparently it is.  And passive consumers of news are increasingly becoming engaged participants, wanting to contribute to the news landscape in some way.  (Rosen actually has a wonderful post about this shift on his blog, PressThink, entitled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”)  In the Assignment Zero article “News the Crowd Can Use”, Patrick Crawford writes something similar about social news sites like and Digg:  

“…the very existence of social editing indicates that a fundamental shift is occurring in [the] way people think about news.  Users of social editing sites are no longer passive media consumers.  Instead they see media as a live discussion in which the public deserves a voice equal to that of an editor.”

Because of this fundamental shift, many people have asserted that social media will one day overtake traditional journalism.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that social news sites or blogs will ever cause traditional journalism to disappear into oblivion.  The Assignment Zero team interviewed Michael Tippett, the co-founder of NowPublic.com, “one of the largest aggregators of crowdsourced news in the world.”  During the interview, Tippett was asked if the news media industry thinks of outlets like NowPublic.com as competition.  He responded by saying that, “…the news organizations are looking at this and thinking, we’ve got to embrace this or it’s going to take over the industry.” 

Although social news sites might present a slight threat to traditional news media, the two really complement one another.  Citizens need professional journalists to do the legwork for a story (after all, that’s what these journalists get paid to do) and professional journalists need citizens to challenge them, provide feedback or expert knowledge, and ultimately help these journalists create a better product that’s more aligned with the needs of the public.  But there are too many people out there – especially in the older generations – that aren’t part of the social news site or citizen journalist phenomenon.  This is why we’ll always have the New York Times and 60 Minutes. 

The media landscape is shifting, though, and professional journalism is not the “be all, end all” it once was.  There are new forces at play here – bloggers, sites like Digg, and so on – and traditional journalism has no choice but to make room for them.  It will be interesting, though, to see how all these media sources interact with one another in years to come.  Keep watching.

Come on in, the water — er, blogosphere’s — fine

For probably 9 out of 10 corporations, the blogosphere is a scary place…and understandably so. We’ve all heard our share of the “corporate blogging gone wrong” stories, the Kryptonite lock incident I wrote about previously, and so on. Even if companies don’t get it right the first time around, one thing that they should remember is that the blogosphere is, generally speaking, pretty forgiving.

But this can be easy to forget when – like L’Oreal experienced – a corporation sees commenters writing how they think the company’s blog is “foisting a fraud upon the public.” This is exactly what happened with Vichy, a blog written by fictitious author Claire to promote a new L’Oreal product. The company generated this character, an all-too-perfect looking thirtysomething, whose language resembled (a little too closely) that of the Vichy advertisements. Of course the blog’s readers saw right through this, and they made it clear to L’Oreal that the blog was, well, lame.

Although the Vichy blog got off to a bad start, Scoble and Israel use it as their “favorite case of a bad blog turning good” in chapter 10 of Naked Conversations. After being inundated with so many negative comments, L’Oreal shut down the blog but reincarnated it shortly thereafter. The company found five women bloggers who were willing to test the anti-aging cream and gave them license to write whatever they wanted about it on the blog. The public’s reaction to the blog was exactly the opposite of their reaction to the first blog: people loved it. And the blog even earned praise from the press.

This is a great example of why corporations shouldn’t be afraid of delving into and participating in the online space. It might take a company several tries to get it right, but jumping in and trying to engage those online is far better than turning a deaf ear on the conversation that’s happening.

Even though a mistake or two in the blogosphere probably won’t make or break a corporation, it would be nice to do things right the first time around. As always, Scoble and Israel offer tips on how to make this happen. Chapter 11 focuses on “doing it right”, and here are some of the highlights:

• Read a bunch of blogs before you start. “Reading other blogs should help inspire you to write your own—and should give you some ideas of what is already being said and what you might contribute.”

• Demonstrate passion. Show your authority. “A good corporate blog is both passionate and authoritative. Blog what you know.”

• Add comments. “A good blog is a conversation, not a one-way PR channel. Get over the fact that you won’t have full control.”

• Be accessible. “It’s surprising how many people start conversations with blogs but foolishly choose to make themselves unreachable through e-mail or phone.”

 

Corporations should read and re-read Scoble and Israel’s suggestions and then get into the online discussion. Yes, they might make a mistake or two, but that’s okay. Just get out there. Because, like so many social media gurus have said, the conversation is going to continue regardless of whether your company is paying attention.

Search: Algorithms and tagging and linking, oh my

The concept of search is something that’s always been a little mysterious (for lack of a better term) to me.  Sure, I understand the basic idea of it, but how does search really work?  Search Engine Watch describes how crawler-based search engines “spider” Web pages, index pages, and then rank them in the order that the search engine software thinks is most relevant.  The third part of this equation is what intrigues me the most. 

How are ranking algorithms written that they can determine what site is more popular or relevant to a user versus another?  GoogleGuide explains this a little bit, noting that Google uses over 100 factors in determining a site’s PageRank, such as the position and size of the search terms on a given page.  This recent New York Times article that a colleague sent me does an even better job of explaining how Google constantly tweaks its PageRank algorithms to ensure users are quickly and easily finding what they want.  (Really, this article is a must-read if you’re even remotely interested in search.)  But for the most part, the intricacies of ranking algorithms will remain a mystery to most of us.  Like the NYT article says, employees at places like Google are barely allowed to discuss it…because these innerworkings are what give search engines their competitive edge.

For those of us in the social media world, though, it’s a good thing for us that some people do discuss what it takes to optimize a blog or social media site so that it’s highly visible in a search.  Rohit Bhargava’s “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)” and Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Technorati founder David Sifry both discuss similar ways to try and increase a blog’s ranking.  They mention a variety of ways to make a blog more visible: make tagging and bookmarking easy for users, link to other blogs, put a full-text RSS feed on your blog, post frequently, submit your content to other sites, and so on.

These are great recommendations for bloggers who are looking to optimize their blog in terms of its rank in different search engines…but I’m still a little skeptical.  With millions of blogs out there, simply following Sifry’s and Bhargava’s advice is not an automatic recipe for making it into the Technorati Top 100.  These strategies will absolutely help bloggers make themselves more visible, but putting these SMO tips into practice isn’t a surefire way to enjoy a ranking spot near DailyKos or Gawker. Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, conducted a study that offers some insight as to why certain blogs are popular and listed as top search results while the rest are not.  For you celeb gossip junkies out there, it’s kind of like Hollywood: there are the A-listers….and then there’s everyone else whose names we barely know.

This piece in New York Magazine, “Blogs to Riches: The Haves and the Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom”, is a favorite of mine.  Shirky did several experiments to examine the “disparities in the blogosphere.”  He started by counting inbound links to a sample of 433 blogs.  He found that the A-list – a very small number of blogs – had hundreds of inbound links.  Yet almost all the others had only a few sites linking to them.

“Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none.”

I’m assuming that these 433 bloggers in Shirky’s experiment certainly employed strategies to help them get noticed.  But based on these results of Shirky’s experiment, it’s an uphill battle for bloggers to increase their ranking even if they’re following the tips from Bhargava and Siftry.  Perhaps it can be done but….who can actually “make it big” in the blogosphere? 

Talk is cheap (but can be very valuable)

I was pretty excited to see Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations on the reading list for this class.  I read the book several semesters ago for another course at Johns Hopkins and, even the second time around, I think Scoble and Israel have some great (and very honest) advice for corporations that are considering stepping into the blogosphere.

I’ve found that many people – including authors who write books on subjects similar to that of Naked Conversations – tend to imply that blogging is right for everyone and is a one-size-fits-all approach to building and keeping a customer base.  Jackie Huba, author of Citizen Marketers: Where People are the Message, said “I see no reason for any company not to blog – unless they’re sleazy.  Every company needs a feedback system.”   

And while Huba is correct about corporations needing feedback from their customers, is a blog always the best medium to use to obtain that feedback?  I don’t think blogging is right for every company.  But if a corporation is going to start a blog, it’s critical that their bloggers engrain Scoble and Israel’s five success tips in their heads:

• Talk, don’t sell.  “If you talk to them, they get to know you.  If you sell to them, they’ll just leave—if you’re lucky.” 

• Post often and be interesting.  “…being interesting is what motivates others to link to you.”

• Write on issues you know and care about.  “A good blog is passionate and shows authority.” 

• Blogging saves money but costs time.  “Being a good blogger takes time.”

• You get smarter by listening to what people tell you.  “As Dan Gillmor emphasized in We the Media, ‘My readers are collectively smarter than me.’” 

These five bullet points sum up the qualities that make a good corporate blogger.  Robert Scoble was a great candidate to blog for Microsoft; he was passionate and honest about what he wrote and he talked to his audience as he would a friend instead of being a marketing mouthpiece for Microsoft.  But does every company have someone who is willing to invest their time in blogging?  Can that blogger be conversational instead of sounding mechanical when they blog?  Is that company’s blogger truly going to listen to what others are saying, not just the week the blog launches but six months or a year from now? 

Like Scoble and Israel said, blogging definitely is cheap in terms of monetary cost, but it’s a big time commitment.  The positive value in having a corporate blog can be huge.  On the flip side, though, poorly executed blogs can sometimes damage a company’s reputation. 

There are a number of great corporate blogs that exist, some which are mentioned in Scoble and Israel’s book such as the GM FastLane Blog and Jonathan’s Blog, written by the CEO of Sun Microsystems.  But speaking of poorly executed blogs, have you ever visited Google’s blog?  Why don’t users have the option to leave a comment?  Where are the author’s bios?  And maybe it’s just me but this post – while it’s a bit conversational – seems like a press release in disguise.  Of course, this blog certainly hasn’t hurt Google’s bottom line or the company’s popularity, but it’s disappointing that a corporation that’s so innovative and creative has a blog that’s just the opposite.

The bottom line is that if a company is thinking of creating a blog, they need to have someone blogging who is passionate, conversational, a good listener, and is willing to invest their time.  Every corporation can potentially have a blog…they’d just better have the right blogger.