CS2 Live

BY: Brian Sullivan

How many of you know the origin on the word “blog” ? The word is a shortened version of the term web log. There is a heavily sourced and referenced history of the term on Wikipedia, so you know it must be true. Check it out if you have 15 minutes to spare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog.

Blogging has evolved from the relatively innocent online diary to a multi-million dollar pimping business.

In the beginning, people were blogging about things they actually cared about.  Blogs were personal, allowing people to step over the proverbial too much information line with great regularity. We discovered that most people lead an existence not too dissimilar from our own, but for some reason, they enjoyed sharing details and we enjoyed reading about them. Of course, not all blogs were purely personal. There were journalists, wannabe journalists and category experts that found a home to share their thoughts. Some people gathered quite a following by sharing information online, writing about politics, travel, fashion, music, parenting, etc.

The number of followers for blogs grew organically at first, but as always, people found ways to make money off of them, and advertisers like us began to take notice. Bloggers began endorsing products, companies began soliciting content from subject matters experts to add some third party credibility to their own blogs. In my humble opinion, this intersection of followers and advertising is where we lost the essence of blogging – that authenticity and transparency that made blogs so compelling in the first place.

The average web surfer knows that bloggers and corporations are often in bed together, and if they didn’t, Congress made sure they were protected through recent legislation requiring bloggers to disclose any compensation received for their words. This isn’t the death of the advertising-influenced blog, but it does mean we have to work harder and smarter when bringing our content into the blogosphere.

Authenticity and transparency must be present in what we do. We need to be sure we are communicating with followers, not talking at them, and sharing content that is both useful and interesting. We need to be sure that our focus is on meeting the needs of our followers, not just in meeting our immediate business objectives. And like we preach with every single tactic we present to our clients, it must be strategic.

There is nothing wrong with blogging for dollars, as long as you’ve got something interesting to say.

BY: Keith Essary

I recently read an article that spoke to the enormity of information being generated each day throughout the Internet.  In addition to the thousands of articles being generated from traditional web powerhouses such as ESPN and the New York Times, the article insinuates that user generated content has pushed the information on the internet to new levels.  In fact Google CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying “Every two days, we create as much information as we did up to 2003.”

This statistic is certainly not hard to believe with all of the blog platforms, social streams, and video content uploaded every minute. It is also not surprising that many of the new apps we read about are geared towards organizing this information in order to keep the “signal-to-noise” ratio in balance for consumers (does it seem there is a new RSS reader or social portal app launched everyday?). And older technologies such as search engines are battling to keep up as is illustrated by Google integrating Twitter mentions into hot topic search results.

Like consumers, advertisers are facing a similar “signal-to-noise” problem. In other words, there are so many options and segments that advertisers have to be careful to recognize the noise – or at least prioritize it. For example, when a Facebook user declares in their profile that they like BMW, does this make them the right audience for a BMW (or Lexus) advertisement? Is that as powerful as a consumer who Googles “BMW for sale”? Today, it is not uncommon for a digital advertising campaign to include display, search, video, blogging, PR, mobile, email, and social components using numerous platforms. An obvious risk is spreading the budget too thin and not being effective on any channel. In turn, this is also one contributor to digital marketing being allocated a higher percentage of the overall budget.

There is hope for advertisers. Amidst all the clutter, new technologies are emerging and a fundamental shift is occurring. This technological shift could push advertising to the next level in terms of targeting. Consider that the line between the Internet and real life has diminished. A growing amount of collected data comes from real world actions such as social check-ins and purchases. Also consider that conversations that previously happened over closed channels like email are now happening over open platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where the information can be indexed and recorded by the platforms themselves. Therefore new options arise, such as Lexus marketing to people who have visited a BMW dealer recently or to people who have mentioned buying a BMW while conversing with their friends.

Will advertising based on real-world behavioral information (not to be confused with the internet term “behavioral advertising”) be more fruitful than advertising based on user-input data such as profiles and search phrases?

BY: Kate Metcalf

The number of blogs occupying real estate on the Internet is somewhere in the neighborhood of the hundreds of millions (give or take a few ten million). That number itself is staggering, but the importance of that number to those of us in the PR world becomes even more apparent when you consider this: 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists, according to a recent study by PR Week and PR Newswire. Continue Reading »