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I have to admit that for a long time I've been a blog skeptic.
Who actually sits down at their computer to read someone else's personal journal?
I think this has been one of the barriers I had towards blogging myself - I felt that I'd get better mileage out of talking ideas through with individuals face-to-face, or speaking at conferences, which I try to do a couple of times each year.
However I've seen decent growth in the readership of my own blog, which 'lives' within quite a niche topic in the weeks - not months - it has been live. It is already reaching 80 or more individuals each day.
The top blogs in Australia and the US are now close to rivaling the level of readership of print publication transplanted to the web.
Taking a quick look around the web, I've seen some compelling figures on the number of internet users accessing blogs, such as from Forrester, who published the following table in their Groundswell report.
If you consider that Australia is more like Britain, but has touches of the US, lets say that around 14% of our online population read blogs at least once a month.
Based on an internet using adult population of 13 million, that's roughly 1.7 million people per month, as of a year ago (Q2 2007).
Those figures may not light up your world, but I find them fairly impressive given that blogs only really became reality around 10 years ago.
More recent figures are even more impressive.
In Charlene Li's blog there's a great video interview talking more about various approaches being taken by companies. Charlene is a co-writer of Groundswell and one of Forrester's lead analysts on the topic of social media).
There's also a social media profiling tool where you can review engagement by demographic group - including for Australia. The difference between under 35 years and over is profound.
I've been so impressed with the work done by Forrester in this area that I'm buying copies of the book, Groundswell, for our senior executive team.
So are you blogging yet?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Who reads blogs anyway? | Tweet |
Social media initiatives at my agency - what is your agency doing? | Tweet |
Part of my interest in social media at the moment is related to how I'm encouraging its use within our agency.
I'm very interested in hearing about what other agencies are doing.
At work we have a team rolling out a community of practice using a wiki-based system, with an extranet to follow. I hope to replicate this for other areas of the business that could benefit from such a system.
We have a rating/comment system being implemented into our intranet to further help content authors and the intranet management team (part of my team) understand where our content requires significant improvement to meet staff needs. It's not quite social media, but it's a step towards it.
After our major 1 July deadline we will be documenting a strategy and approach for internal blogs and forums, with the support of our Internal Communications team - then hopefully introducing the enabling tools with ICT's assistance.
We are also preparing to engage more actively in public online discussions around our agency and its services, in a measured and structured manner. Around this I'm looking seriously at whether we should introduce online participation principles, as has occurred in the UK.
We have initial plans, with some buy-in from our Media group, to trial the enhancement of our media releases to make it easier to get them into Digg and Reddit, and potentially deliver them via Twitter or similar tools.
Finally I'm encouraging the members of my team (currently spread across several states) to make use of appropriate tools to aid contact and collaboration. Phone and email work reasonably well for us, however I want to explore how we can further improve engagement in a less interruptive way. Over time I'd love to extend this to other areas as appropriate - I'm already aware of more than 60 Facebook and Linkedin users in the agency, so the grassroots growth is already occurring.
If your agency has any social media initiatives underway that others could learn from, please let me know
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sneak peak at Google Ad Planner | Tweet |
Last week I discussed how Google was preparing to announce the release of it's new Ad Planner tool.
It's now available in beta with selected Google customers and an Ad Planner sneak peak is available online, with an image of the interface which demonstrates how the tool can segment site reach by demographics including gender, age, education, location and income.
The tool enables marketers and PR professionals to get a clearer picture of the demographics of different websites to aid them in effective communications and advertising targeting.
It also enables effective planning of online media buys, either through setting reach goals or media mix.
Does this remove the need for media buyers?
Certainly not yet - however I believe Google is gradually disintermediating this group as it moves further into television, radio and print advertising alongside its online search cash cow.
Useful introductory resources for social media | Tweet |
I'm on a bit of a social media kick this weekend due to all the fantastic resources I've found on the topic in the last several days.
I wanted to flag a couple of these in particular that I found useful, and may be useful for others.
My first great find was a CIO magazine article from May this year, Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for? (A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose).
This article provides a good step-by-step approach to getting your toes wet in the social media space, starting with creating a Web 2.0 strategy, getting buy-in from all Senior Management (as it's not simply a technology decision), establishing ownership, developing appropriate policies, monitoring and response times.
The seond resource was the Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd edition.
As a free online resource this is an enormously valuable tool for establishing a basic understanding of some of the social media options out there. If you're new to the area, or need to provide information to someone who is, this resource can provide a good starting point.
Anyone still going viral? | Tweet |
I remember viral advertising being the flavour of the month a few years ago.
Every ad agency out there was touting the concept - create some tool, video or website that would capture the popular imagination and create enormous online 'word-of-mouth' at a low cost.
However when it came to execution, it was very hard to create a viral ad. No-one could accurately pick what would fly and what would bomb.
These days I don't see the word tossed around very often - everyone, including me, is talking social media.
However that doesn't invalidate viral marketing.
If you can create that buzz, the approach still works. The challenge is in the buzz (which this BMW ad has managed to create).
I've not seen much in the way of innovative government advertising for some time - not since the ten-pin bowling grim reaper - The reaper can still be viewed online at YouTube and has been featured on The Chaser. The original ad was created over twenty years ago.
Does this reflect the difficulty of creating viral ads? Or the loss of creativity in government advertising?
Have you seen any online advertising lately you just had to pass on to at least one friend?
