Shaping your digital business for 2010

What struck me most about the AOP’s forum was the gentle patter of realism.

Similar digital publishing seminars and conferences in the past have often boasted what might best be described as “digital extremists” who argue that traditional media is doomed and digital business should be built from scratch. At this event, speakers from the FT.com, Deloitte, WAN-IFRA and Auto Trader focused on the challenges for any traditional media company trying to increase the percentage of its digital business. But they also argued that this current, hybrid state was not just inevitable but appropriate.

The best parallel came from Deloitte’s Howard Davies. He pointed out that a hybrid car like the Toyota Prius was absolutely essential until cheaper rechargeable batteries or recharging points became widely available. He then argued that traditional media similarly had to “run a mixture of models for a while” because “the digital motorway still did not run everywhere in the UK” and its take-up was slowing.

I’ve copied my Twitters (and expanded some of those that are less than comprehensible!) from the event below.

FT.com’s Head of Product Management Mary Beth Christie

• All attendees to the forum were invited to draw smiley faces on a flipchart – FT realised its employees had as diverse views of the web as the variety of smiley faces drawn by the attendees of the forum.
• FT’s solution to the conflicting demands of journalists, protective of the value of their content, and management focused on revenue was pay wall for each user after 10 free stories a month.
• FT’s advice: make all those impacted by a launch (journalists, sales or operations) make the time to find out about a new launch. No one (CEO to reporter/sales exec) is too busy. Or don’t complain after launch!
• More expensive to make a traditional business digital than from new – like rewiring an old house than building new.

Deloitte’s Media Partner Howard Davies

• Don’t just push yourself into an exclusive digital space because everyone else appears to be there; the boundary between traditional and digital media is an area not a wall.
• “The digital motorway does not go everywhere.” In fact the numbers for digital conversion are slowing leaving the percentage of those using traditional media at a considerable number remains substantial (only 84% on mobile, 76% have a PC and only 62% are on broadband).
• Just as the electric hybrid car, the Prius was produced because it was just too early for pure electric cars, so media will continue to run both traditional and digital media for a while.
• Good leaders see digital’s frequent failures as part of the learning process.
• Take some breaks from your digital journey.
• Few publishers value the Long Tail any more (a reference to Chris Anderson’s book which argues that the web allows retailers to sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities), claims Davies, since who has resources to cater for the visitor who comes once a month.
• Digital forces not just a change of behaviour but also culture. And you cannot change culture, you can only build it.
• Why resistance to digital? Lack of vision, goal, structure, support, communication, information and involvement lead to a climate of fear.
• Most problems with change management occur because people are expected to implement without explanation and adopt without support.

WAN-IFRA’s Dr Dietmar Schantin

• Digital forces a change to a company’s culture, not just behaviour. Yet you cannot change culture only build it.
• Why resistance to digital? Lack of vision, goal, structure, support, communication, information and involvement from team leaders create a climate of fear.
• Most problems with change management occur because people are expected to implement without explanation and adopt without support.

Trader Media Group’s Digital Publishing Director, Edwin Ulak

• Historically, the Trade Media Group set up its digital business as a national one to compete with its existing 13 print businesses.
• When the company’s digital revenue overtook print revenue there were only 250 employed on digital and 3500 still on print.
• Incentivise and motivate sales team not just on revenue but also profitable growth.

Runcat Consulting’s Tom Turcan

• Don’t underestimate the value of a good party to help relieve stress during a period of change.

Here is the AOP’s own report on the forum.

Guest post: recombu shows how even affiliate sites are now competing with traditional media

Peter Moore’s guest post does two things: first, he shows how far affiliate marketing companies are prepared to change their business models to maintain their paid search rankings and, second, he drums home the argument that it is content, and quality content to be specific, that is the best way to survive the judgement of Google’s Quality Score.

It seems like a pretty harmless ambition until, as Peter argues, you realise that such ingredients are yet more competition for traditional media hoping to make a go of it online.

Peter’s own blog is “My Digital Notebook“.

At the start of last month, a new website called recombu was launched. It’s a publication that deserves some attention. 

Let’s look at the facts
Recombu is a commercial site that is centred on a tight niche: mobile phones. There are mobile phone reviews, comparison tables and there are links to the latest mobile phone deals. The site also features news articles – by my reckoning there are about 50 of them so far – on everything imaginable to do with mobile phones.

You can get RSS updates of these latest articles, become a fan on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

The name ‘recombu’ is an amalgam of the words ‘recommend’, ‘compare’ and ‘buy’. Andrew Lim, who was formerly the mobile phones editor at CNET, has been appointed recombu’s editorial director and he has added various other notable journalists to the pack, including Susi Weaser – the former ‘editrix’ of Shiny Shiny.

A new business model
Nothing out of the ordinary so far, but when you dig into recombu’s business model, then things get a little more interesting. Recombu has been built by UK Web Media, one of the UK’s leading affiliate marketing companies. Jamie Harwood, UK Web Media’s managing director, is one of the country’s wealthiest Internet entrepreneurs. Therefore, the site follows the old affiliate model of driving its traffic to various different merchants – in this case Apple, Nokia, Blackberry and so on – but it differs from many other affiliate sites in one key point: recombu is one of the first clear attempt to create a brand, a true publication that can rival established websites for market share.

The high profile writers and emphasis on content will bring fast SEO rankings – the area where affiliates have usually performed poorly – and with Facebook and Twitter there is evidence that recombu is planning to build an online community through social media marketing. All of this is backed up, of course, by paid search. But what business do affiliates have stepping on the toes of specialist online publications, stealing their journalists and competing with them for readership? What is the point and what are the implications for online publishing? Let’s go back to the beginning

Affiliate Marketing – a (very) quick history
Affiliate marketing is almost as old the modern Internet. It is based on a simple commercial chain: that one website (the affiliate) will drive traffic to another (the merchant).  The merchant will then reward the affiliate with a percentage of the profits of any subsequent sale. Affiliate marketing is best explained as an application of online crowdsourcing. It was pioneered by the adult entertainment industry in the early 1990s before being adopted with great success by emerging e-commerce sites such as Amazon and CDNOW a few years later.

When Google launched AdWords in 2000, affiliate marketing became more widely accessible – affiliates were able to bid on keyword searches, amass traffic and direct it in great numbers towards a merchant’s store page. AdWords was to affiliate marketing what the steam engine was to the industrial revolution – it allowed the affiliate model to work on a vast scale.

In the years since AdWords’ introduction, the affiliate marketing sector has grown sharply. It is Google’s primary source of income (it made the company $21bn in 2008) and in the UK econsultany estimated that the industry would be worth more than £4bn in online sales in 2009. 

The Google Quality Score – (In the beginning)
In the early days of AdWords, anyone could drive paid search traffic. All you needed was knowledge of the relevant keywords and a well-written advert that appeared at the top of the Google search results. This changed in around 2004, when Google demanded that its advertisers create landing pages, to give consumers more information about a product before they clicked through to the merchant’s page. These landing pages were often very basic and of poor quality: loaded with keywords and stuffed with outbound links.

It was not important for affiliate sites to rank highly in organic search results or to tempt their visitors back. With Google AdWords they could ensure that their page featured at the top of the search results every time. Their aim was to get visitors to click through as quickly as possible and hope that they completed a sale so that they could collect their slice. It was a numbers game. A gigantic scientific experiment.

Between 2000 and 2005 were the boom years for affiliate marketing. Hundreds of landing pages were created for almost every conceivable product. To counter to spam and to raise the quality of their sponsored links, in August 2005 Google introduced the Google Quality Score, an algorithm that rated each paid search landing page individually. In a blog post later that year Google explained its intentions:

Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It’s not a great experience.

Quality Score attacked poor quality affiliate landing pages. It awarded these landing pages with a score between 1 -10. The lower the score, the more expensive it was for a marketer to bid on a particular keyword term. Sites that only achieved a Quality Score of 1 for specific terms found that their cost per click (CPCs) rose massively – sometimes to as much as £5. Entire business models were wrecked in an instant. It was the start of a slow death for the first wave of link-heavy, keyword rich, and hastily assembled affiliate landing pages.

Quality Score and Online Publishing
From the start, Google was clear about what it wanted to see, demanding that their advertisers produce (1) relevant content that was (2) transparent and (3) easy to navigate. Although a list of these requirements was published on their website  – the exact components of Quality Score were never revealed and inevitably it became the subject of endless speculation. It was the digital equivalent of the recipe for Coca Cola.

Many of the poorest quality landing pages were hit continuously in merciless attacks. These assaults, in the vivid vocabulary of the Internet, became known as the ‘Google Slap’. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Quality Score became a catalyst for development. Affiliates developed from one-man operations to full-sized companies: with custom-built technology supporting complete websites that included news, features, product reviews, comparison tables, blogs and photo galleries. To run these sites, affiliates hired copywriting specialists, talented designers and technological wizards in an attempt to make their sites Quality Score proof. It wasn’t necessarily important that people read them; it was important that Google granted a high Quality Score and left them alone.

It was (almost) journalism by (complete) accident
It was worth it. At this point the industry was growing by around a billion pounds each year in the UK alone; more and more brands were investing vast budgets in digital strategies, and, in 2006, the power of the Internet was reflected when Google overtook British television channels as the largest recipient of advertising in the country. All the time the Quality Score was being strengthened. In July 2009, Google increased its power yet again. It hit almost every affiliate in the country. Perry Marshall, an author who has published a book about Google AdWords, wrote on his personal blog:

I got word from several affiliate marketers that Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages.   Many pages went from quality scores of 10 —> 1 overnight. And these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build [sic] out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page  … everything else Google loves. 

The Future – blurred digital boundaries
There is far too much money in affiliate marketing for publishers to abandon the whole business model altogether. But while the boom years may be over, the industry is far from dead. If the choice is ‘evolve or die’, affiliate websites will evolve, and this will have consequences for other online publishers.

Recombu is not alone. There are many such affiliate sites currently appearing in all corners of the web, and their emergence is reflective of the growing power and evolving strategies of a number of the top affiliate and search marketing agencies. Whether or not recombu is a success is yet to be seen, but observers in traditional media should treat the development of these emerging affiliate websites with interest. By creating brands, hiring notable journalists and investing time in developing online communities, affiliates are taking a bold step into marketplaces that are typically the fiefdoms of specialist publications from the traditional media.

And while recombu has claimed the mobile phone sector, equal opportunities exist in any other vertical in which affiliates typically perform well: travel, computing, insurance and digital television are just a few. Publishers in these sectors would do well to take note. Affiliates are inexperienced at developing vibrant publications, they have little history of generating journalistic content or forming online communities and they have none of the authority or objectivity of traditional media. But they do have a tried and tested business model.

And, as I write, that is something that many of their competitors don’t.
—
Also of interest might be:
Jeff Jarvis on The Link Economy  and The Ethic of the Link

A list of eight answers to the most commonly-used excuses for not using the web

Have you noticed how people come up with excuses for not using the web? The strange thing is how the excuses follow the same patterns – time/privacy/demographics – and are repeated, almost word for word, by quite different people (particularly no 2).

So here’s a list of the most commonly-heard excuses and how I would answer them (if I no longer just let them fly over my head).

Let me know the best excuse you’ve heard.

1 “How do you have the time to do all that social media stuff?”

Did you ask people if they had time to make calls or write messages before the explosion of mobile/cell phones in 1994 or the spread of emails in 1997?

2 “I leave social media to a younger generation. I’m too old.”

Mmmmm. I find the opposite true – that some younger people have been brought up using Facebook as a social networking tool between mates (pictures of themselves mooning in Magaluf, for example) whereas an older generation come to the professional use of social networking unpolluted.

3 “I cannot bear the invasion of my privacy.”

No one forces you to put up embarassing pictures so you have only yourself to blame. And, if you are tagged inappropriately on Facebook or Flickr, ask to be removed. Or change your friends.

4 “None of my real friends are on social networks.”

Neither are many of mine but many of my existing and future networks of contacts are. Are they friends? Are they professional contacts? They are, rather excitingly, something in between.

5 “I just don’t get technology.”

Who said it was about technology? Are you good at networking? Are you good at media? Then you will be good at this stuff!

6 “I’m not going to give away secrets about my company.”

But when you get to sit on that conference panel, I bet you talk a little more indiscreetly about your company than you would if you were sitting in the privacy of your own office. I set my own online openess at about that level, see an AOP report on a recent video webinar.

7 “I can’t keep up because I never remember my passwords.”

You remember the PIN for your bank card, why not for the username/password for you Facebook profile?

8 “How do you manage your social media over your holiday?”

Just turn it all off and take a break. It’s a job not a hobby.

Photo credit: Andreanna

Seth Grimes on the semantic web – but is B2B media ready to benefit?

Seth Grimes, an analyst specialising in business intelligence and text analysis, gave a fascinating presentation – “an introduction to the semantic web and text-mining” – last week in London.

I will try and give you a flavour of his presentation and Peter Thomas wrote it up. But he certainly got me thinking about whether B2B media is ready to benefit from the semantic web.

What is “the semantic web”
When you look up a key word or phrase on Google, the search engine returns content on the basis of the frequency of those words within the text and the links to it from other sites, among other things. The semantic web takes that concept further, returning content by recognising not only the frequency of the words and calibre of the links, but also the context of the request. In short, the semantic web aims to understand user searches in a more human way, adding context to queries.

Seth kicked off with an article by Hans Peter Luhnin the IBM Journal of 1958 which has Luhn, the pioneer of information services, complaining that “no attention is paid to the logical and semantic relationship the author has established”.

Hans Peter Luhn, “The Automatic Creation of Literature Abstracts,” IBM Journal, April 1958

Seth argues that even then Luhn was perceiving a time when “sense making” would matter:-

Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance

Today that need for sense among all the disorder of content is even greater with the “unstructured data challenge”, as Seth called it, of blogs, emails, surveys and office documents.

Ever more relevant today

Seth used, as an example, a Twitter application called twitrratr which assesses Tweets for “sentiment analysis”. But, using the word “kind” as an example, he showed how difficult it is to do that with the multiple-meaning English language.

Sentiment analysis by twitrratr of the word "kind" by Seth Grimes

“Is seach up to the job?” he asked.

Only if it provides content semantically enriched with linked data, that is context sensitive and location aware.

And the sooner media companies get in on the act, the better.

The digital universe by industry 2007 from "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe” IDC, 2008

Seth quoted from a survey  by IDC to show just how little those who are responsible for content benefit from it.

The broadcast, media and entertainment industries garner about 4% of the world’s revenues but already generate, manage, or otherwise oversee 50% of the digital universe

Finally Seth went to push textmining on sites using automatic content categorization, text augmentation and information extraction (disclosure the presentation was sponsored by text mining platform Nstein). The market, he argued, from a study (partly funded by Nstein) he had published “Text Analytics 2009: user perspective on solutions and providers”,  was worth $350 in 2008 and due to increase by 25% in 2009.

Seth’s own research showed…

Yet, surprisingly, when clients were asked about relative importance of several online qualities, clients placed content management a lowly fifth below brand values.

"What are the primary applications where text comes into play?" survey by Seth Grimes

But, interestingly, clients were more likely now to analyse social media content than traditional news articles.

Is B2B media ready to exploit the semantic web?

B2B media is the opposite of mass media, the former a mass of sites for small but very well defined communities rather than the latter with its few big sites for millions of people. Indeed B2B sites do not want millions of the wrong people coming to their sites but rather few of the right people. Users’ familiarity with an existing print brand, social media activity, all help to refine those who get to the sites. But key to this refinement is search.

Take SHP, a B2B site for the safety and health professionals, as an example. It boasts articles on stress. We do not want millions of people finding the site because they are Googling the word “stress”. What we do want is for safety and health practitioners who are looking for such phrases as “stress in factories in northern England” to find the site. The more complex the keyword phrase used to get to a B2B site is, the more qualified the user.

And, finally…

The issue for us, therefore, is that our more qualified readers have been making choices informed by Seth’s linked data, context and even “location aware” for years. How then will the semantic web benefit them? In fact, does the semantic web have something to learn from B2B?

Photo credit:dullhunk

These Digital Times is one year old today!

Guest post: what do traditional print and broadcast media have to learn from the music industry?

I attended Music Week’s ‘Making online music pay’ conference last week (run by colleagues from UBM) and got into conversation with Mark Muggeridge. He argued that some of the lessons learnt by the music business might apply to the some of the traditional and broadcast media landscape.

Mark is Creative Director at Evil Genius Media.  He Tweets @MM_EGM. The company works with clients to create and deliver events and communications via an Event Management Division, and Create Music Strategies via their Music Consultancy Division. Mark organised the recent visit of Seth Godin to London.

This is what he had to say.

The online and mobile space is arguably more developed for music than it is for other media, with a few notable exceptions. It’s too complex to discuss in one blog post here, however here are a few brief thoughts.

When Shawn Fanning launched Napster in 1999 the game changed forever.  The creativity of artists and the fight-or-flight instinct for survival, of the commercial music business has seen music delivery develop on numerous fronts ever since. These being:-

• Music Discovery – MySpace and it’s imitators have delivered a platform to artists that allows them to give listeners access to their work and build communities of fans.
• Access to Music – The ‘always on’  generation of music consumers born 1988 onward who take technology for granted don’t need to own music but just want access to it. Think ‘Comes with Music’, other subscription services etc.
• Legal Download – iTunes, Amazon etc.

These developments and others have fuelled changes in the music industry such as the current trend for artists to self release and market their own material, sell merchandise retaining 100% of the margin and perversely, focus on live performance as a primary source of income until the industry settles on a way to financially revalue music on line.
So what about other media ? How does the situation in, music compare with them?

Photo credit: James Cumpsty

• Book Publishers – Are only just coming to terms with the problems faced by the music business.  With electronic book readers now becoming more ubiquitous both publishers and retailers are waiting to find out if sales plummet via piracy and users distributing titles between themselves. They know that Digital Rights Management layers are got around easily. However the purchasers of expensive book readers tend to be older and the owners of publishing rights are hoping that this older generation will respect copyright.
• Newspapers – Have taken a range of approaches, from putting part of their publications on line, to placing valued content in the ‘Walled Garden’. However some, are beginning to take a distributed approach such as the UK Guardian Newspaper which recently began offering an API which will allow third-party developers to access and reuse the Guardian’s content database in their own applications
• Television – Is finally beginning to deal with the challenge of lower viewing numbers by allowing us to time shift via the use of products such as the BBC’s iplayer and Chanel 4’s On Demand Service.

Conclusion

‘Other’ media is beginning to see that by distributing it’s media, they can distribute their brand and make it stronger; that trying to ignore the digital space won’t work in a world  where digital touch points are accessible and intertwined into our lives, via phones, computers, game platforms etc.

Some of the speakers from print and publishing media were pretty confident that they had found a successful way forward at the conference.  Perhaps they need to acknowledge that the growing pains of the music business has been of benefit to them too.

Why it matters that I successfully bagged my Facebook username

It’s 4.58 am this morning in the UK and the alarm kicks off. I’ve set it to bag my Facebook username. What this means is that whenever I direct people to Facebook, I will no longer send them to a URL ending in a strange collection of numbers but rather to my name. Facebook only let us know about this around four days ago.

It’s 4.59 am and as the laptop boots up, I’m thinking that I must me mad. Or, worse still, is this yet another sign that I am addicted to the web? My friend Peter Moore seems to give the theory substance with a Tweet saying “Working with social media can be like having a serious drug problem“.

Facebook’s username selection page loads up and is now counting down the seconds. I am actually shaking.

It’s 5.00 am I begin to remember why it is I am doing this. Try having a pretty average name like “John Welsh”. Google Alerts make it clear just how widespread it is. In one week, all these John Welshes are mentioned:

• John Welsh, of the Hibernian Society of Utah
• John Welsh, the photographer
• John Welsh, principal of Key West High School
• John Welsh, a US trader
• John Welsh of the Riverside County Department of Animal Services, CA
• John Welsh, an English actor in the Duchess of Duke Street
• John Welsh, an English footballer
• John Welsh will sell you tickets to the John O’Leary band
• John Welsh, a Liberal Democrat councillor came second in a recent election in Sudbury, England

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of us.

It’s 5.01 am and the countdown reaches zero. I am just about to claim my name and deep peace settles in. I am almost in a state of Zen-like kama. If you, like me, came late to social media, you will have a ragbag of names on your social media profiles. Yes, I’ve managed to bag

• John Welsh on Twitter
• John Welsh on WordPress

But I don’t own John Welsh dot com, taken quite sensibly years ago. And, as for the majority of my social media profiles, they boast a confusion of letters and numbers attached to my name, all of which seem pretty straightforward when compared to my utterly ridiculous Gmail address – johnchriswelsh@googlemail.com. It’s very length and complexity seems to deny the very purpose of social media.

Addicted to the web maybe, but desperate to unclutter my social media footprint, yes! Chuffed to be sufficiently up to speed with social media nowadays that I can do today what many people have been doing for years and lay claim to my name first, yes! Keen to take control of my username for any eventuality the future might throw up, yes!

It’s 5.02 am my name sits there beside a radio button, I press enter and that is it, I’ve nabbed www.Facebook.com/johnwelsh. Back to bed.

It’s 9.00am and I follow a Tweet by Louis Gray to his blog post and realise quite how lucky I have been.

The Knowledge-time Continuum

When I kicked off this blog almost a year ago, I found it really easy to think of topics about which to write. I was new to social media and what I discovered, I wrote about, as I learnt, I explained how to. There was a sort of innocence in the approach and subject matter as if it was the first time anyone had noticed this stuff. That’s probably why it was so popular. Those even newer to the subject than me did not feel intimidated!

Don’t get me wrong. I went in to blogging the right way round, listening to the conversation before tapping out my posts. If that were not enough, my links alone showed that I was aware of what had been written before. But you could not keep me down. The sheer thrill of those early months made me so excited I just had to add my pennyworth to the blogosphere. The strange thing is that, however unoriginal my subject matter might have been, people found my blog and read it in increasing numbers.  

One year on

But that period has come to an end. Today I am in the midst of “blogger’s block”, a period when the ideas for new posts has deserted me. It is more unsettling than I imagined though very much more rationale. For the simple fact is that having learnt so much, I have stopped coming across facets of social media that are new to me. My source of posts, therefore, has dried up. New subject material is going to have to come from a much more original source within me. Or will it?

I spent over 20 years in traditional print journalism and a year in the blogosphere. You’ve heard it said many times that old media had a monopoly on content – if you did not like the local paper you read or B2B magazine, you did not really have much choice to go elsewhere. But what old media also had was a monopoly on the timeliness and longevity of that content – a story did not exist until the editor published it and the same story remained active only as long as the editor chose to do so. 

The blogosphere has changed all that.

Content no longer belongs to one medium. And the timeliness and longevity of content has now stretched to be as long as anyone person is interested in it. And people are interested in subjects at very different times from each other depending on their experience and exposure. So if you had only stumbled upon the blogosphere within the last year, you would find many of the posts in this blog essential reading. But if you had been blogging for anything more, you would probably find many of the posts in this blog somewhat familiar. “A list of Google Reader Shared Items,” you might say. “Are people only just discovering them?”Or “Six types of Tweets if you Twitter everyday. Mmmm, does Twitter really need such analysis?”

The Law of the Blogativity

Just like Space-time Continuum, the Law of Physics that describes time being relative to an object’s speed, so Knowledge-time Continuum is the Law of the Blogosphere which describes this phenomenon. In essence, it states that:

however many people are in front of you in knowledge or understanding of social media, there will be some, if not more, people behind you relative to your knowledge.  

And:

since the number of people within social media is only every going to grow, there will always be more people needing to read what you write.  

So for some, what you write will always be tiresomely unoriginal. But for others, those who are only starting to make a step into the future, you will always be dashingly and seductively interesting.

Indeed Knowledge-time Continuum is not just a law relating to blogs but one also for social media. Take this example. You start following really useful people on Twitter who introduce you to new ideas and teach you what to do. The faster you learn, the more followers you attract who are a week, a month a year behind you. And if the people you once followed on Twitter are not learning as fast as you and continue to Tweet out links to the ABC, then you find yourself looking for fresh Twitterers. 

How do I prove all this? Follow the analytics on your blog. My most popular posts (Five people to follow on Twitter in 2009, Six types of Tweets if you Twitter everyday and A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately) become not just more visited but visited by more people more frequently as time goes by. It is not that the posts get any better or my arguments any more intelligent (far from it, I wince a little on rereading them!). But rather the longer life they have, the more Google shoves them up the search engines and more people find them. Indeed the more people discover just how much they don’t know about social media (and remember a lot more people than that don’t even know what they don’t know), the more people will end up on my blog.

Which type are you?

Indeed I would go so far as to posit three types of people within the blogosphere.

• The latecomers (0-12 months). They’ve just discovered how much they don’t know. 
• The late early adopters (1-3 yrs). They’re already hardened by a few knocks but they’ve stayed the game.
• The early adopters (4-10 yrs). Way out front with great analysis of what’s happening to us all.

All three overlap- the linked in, connected blogosphere could do nothing else – but I would go further. All three are like cogs, one pushing the other on, and sometimes pulling it back. But none operating without the other.

Of course none of this helps my blogger’s block! But I have come up with a list of ideas for my next posts. They are not going to be about the actual kit of social media, as I have done in the past, but rather how you can measure and assess its success.

Photo credit: As you said

Have I become an Instant Message junky?

I can scarcely hold myself back. If I see someone online, I just have to start Instant Messaging them.

For someone who never clicked on that “chat” icon in his life before, I now find it my latest addiction on the web. 

Whether it is Facebook, GMail, Skype or, rather surprisingly, my Blackberry Storm, I cannot keep away from it. 

Have I become an Instant Message junky?

I hope not.

Social media is, in essence, about the conversation. If not, it is traditional broadcast media.

So it would seem a contradiction in terms to interact with “friends” on Facebook and NOT occasionally Instant Message them. It would be like looking at all their vacation shots but NEVER commenting on them.

It would seem rather snooty to give contacts access to your Skype account and NOT Instant Message them. Are you waiting for them to make the first move?

It would seem a waste of effort to upload a portrait of yourself to your GMail account and NOT Instant Message contacts, particularly since you can now video chat.

And, if you really do not want an interruption, click the “busy” icon on Skye and GMail

But key to Instant Messaging, like any other social media, is to follow a few rules.

• If someone’s icon says they are offline, they probably are offline.
• Don’t even think about that chat icon, if you do not have something to say (how often do you Tweet when you have nothing to say?).
• Always give the other person time to type their response before you do.
• Provide an exit route at the end of each subject. Better still, why not provide one at the end of each paragraph?
• Just do it!

Photo credit: Rodrigo Senna

On Being John Welsh: why you need to change your social media identity to remain authentic

I’ve done it. I’ve changed the design of my blog. Out has gone the masthead that has loyally followed me for the first tempestuous 11 months in the blogosphere. And in comes a new one by Claudia Moeller (who Tweets @ludg8cre8ive).

Why did I do it? 

I loved my original social media identity, used on my blog’s masthead (above) and as an avatar. The photograph that I used was taken during UBM Live’s first ever Digital Achievement Day.  I got a call to go down to another floor of our office and everyone (I mean everyone!) was wearing a paper mask of my face. I am the digital director so it showed that “we are all digital now”.

Very On Being John Malkovich.

I loved that photo. My reason for plunging into the social web in the first place was to find out what our company needed to know and work with my colleagues to make the social web fun and profitable. The photo made me feel that my colleagues were holding my hand in what was, at first a pretty, lonely place.

Then a month ago, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was the first time I had had the opportunity to transform many online relationships into face-to-face. One of the people I met up with was Hollis Thomases (who Tweets @hollisthomases) who just could not see the similarity between my social media identity and myself in person. Peter Kim has recently given this phenomenon a name and a definition:

Headfake, noun.  A situation in which you are familiar with a person’s avatar picture, which gives you an inaccurate idea of how that person appears in real life.

Luckily Hollis grabbed her iPhone, took a picture and my new social media identity was formed. My social media avatars now look like me and, finally, so does the masthead of this blog.

The strange this is, I should have worked this out for myself. I have spent 14 years as an editor of three different B2B magazines. Each one bore a photo of myself as editor. Every time I attended an industry event people would come up and start speaking as if they had known me for years. In a way, they did know me. For, just like social media, the repetition of my photo and my weekly or monthly leader plus personable, if not personal, words made them own a little of me. 

So why should you change your design? Not because it might attract more readers (they probably read you in RSS). Certainly not for vanity. But for what we are all looking for on the social web – authenticity.

I must just make sure I do not have a haircut anytime soon.