Since the birth of the web browser touched off the commercial Internet land rush in the early 1990s, there has been a simmering range war between the "cowboys," who prefer their digital experience free, adventuresome and unbranded in the best don't-fence-me-in tradition and the "homesteaders," those stodgy merchants and shopkeepers and farmers who want to build fences and roads and grow things.
In the early days of social media--say, three or four years ago--blogging was the most fun a cowboy could have with his boots on. Thanks to WordPress and Blogger, you didn't have to accept what some stuffy newspaper said was the news any more; you could create your own version of reality and--if you were lucky and good--find an audience among people who shared that vision. A handful of lone gunmen--people like Markos Moulitis, Andrew Sullivan, Michele Malkin, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and the under-the-radar Microsoft junior executive Robert Scoble--built enormous reputations and attracted millions of readers. Blogging was way cowboy cool.
But, a funny thing happened to most bloggers--the ones who didn't hit it big. They quickly discovered some discouraging realities; producing a well-thought out essay every day is a lot like work; it takes an enormous amount of effort and self-promotion to attract even 500 readers a day and, finally, the chances of making money at blogging are nil. The cowboys grew restless.
Sensing an opportunity, the homesteaders swooped in and started aggregating focused blog posts from many different bloggers and adding community features. Marketing Profs, The Huffington Post, even the old-line business magazines like Forbes and BusinessWeek, discovered that most bloggers were willing to produce good content for free as long they could write about what they wanted to write about, reach a bigger audience and build their personal and professional brand.
There is nothing new about this model, by the way; throw in Craigslist before there was a Craig and it is precisely the way the
Village Voice first built a national newspaper beginning in the 1950s. Aggregated blogging networks + plus interactive community features are simply a new form of community newspaper or trade magazine. They provide a content platform around which companies can reach the people they want to influence more effectively, and cheaper, than they can through traditional advertising and PR.
The BtoB angle is where we come in; we, in this case, being Social Media Today LLC--a company started a little more than a year ago by Robin Carey, Mark Lazen and me. We were among the first firms to begin building business communities around focused, aggregated content with the idea of achieving specific, measurable corporate goals. Our short pitch is that we help large companies leverage the enormous power of social media to build deeper relationships with potential customers and other constituencies that influence the development of new business. We have found that our primary metrics of success are levels of engagement and business leads. Our least important metric is traffic. One thousand people who come regularly and might buy an SAP, Oracle or Teradata system some day is better than a million people who definitely won't.
Thanks to the incredible support we've gotten from our customers and our bloggers, we've had a very good first year. The chart below will give you an idea of how dramatically our communities have grown.
We've learned a lot over the past year, not least of which is that nothing is more important than the care and feeding of bloggers. Quality content is the ultimate differentiator in group blogs so it's essential that the people who contribute feel that they are not being taken advantage of and that they are getting fair value and recognition for their efforts. Like most group blogs, we don't pay bloggers but we have developed--and expect to grow--an active blogger outreach program that involves more of our contributors in webinars, special writing projects, surveys and special paid promotions.
Recognition is important, too. Each of the bloggers in this list had 30,000 to 60,000 page views on SMT last year.
2008 Top Bloggers
- Daniel Schawbel
- Augie Ray
- Nick ONeill
- Angelo Fernando
- Jacob Morgan
- Jim Tobin
- Peter Kim
- Brian Solis
- Josh Bernoff
We thank them for their efforts and we thank all of you who participate and help bring our communities to life. Our fervent hope is that we provide you with the platform and support you need to reach your goals.
As we enter a new year, the homesteaders (remember them?) are winning the battle of the blogs and many of the cowboys have moved on to Twitter, and other forms of micro-blogging which provide a more immediate form of networking gratification and presumably require less time and effort than banging out a decent blog post. (I say, presumably, because many of my friends have become so compulsive that they actually spend more time tweeting than they did blogging.)
The big stories of 2009 in social media are likely to be: Will Twitter kill traditional blogging? Will the cowboys dump Twitter and move on to new pastures when the next big thing comes along? Will the homesteaders find a way to rope in the micro-blogging phenonenon like they rounded up the quality bloggers?
Stay tuned for our next exciting episode.