Will blogging change everything?

The Netimperative roundtable on blogging featured contributions from some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the UK blogging and online business world today.

The participants were:

Alistair Shrimpton (Six Apart UK)
Chris Price (Shiny Media)
Mike Hales (m4music.info)
Sasha Frieze (Sashinka)
Julian Swallow (Mobrio ltd)
Andrew Gerrard (d-marketing)
Noreen Mastellon (consultant)
Gareth Thomas (Brands2life.com PR)
Helen Copnall (MSN Spaces)
Adriana Cronin-Lukas (Big Blog Company)
Katy Howell (Immediatefuture.co.uk)
The roundtable was chaired by Mike Butcher, Editor, Netimperative.


At the outset the discussion started off with the opening question of whether blogs represented a threat to traditional media companies or an opportunity. Indeed, in both cases, even the likes of Rupert Murdoch seems to think this is the case.

Sasha Frieze said "Blogs are both a threat to and an opportunity for media companies." She gets a lot of newspaper journalists emailing her after watching her blog. Or she finds her stories often re-hashed later on by a journalist without acknowledgement. The media and journalists are definitely "watching" blogs.

Katy Howell of Immediate Future  said readership of blogs are still no where near traditional media levels.  But "Blogs are not a threat to news but to columnists" because blogs are so much about opinion.

Mike Hales, of m4music.info, said blogs are a "threat from the point of view that they draw people's time drawn away from other media. I spend more time reading blogs than the papers now. It's more interacive and personal to me, and relevant. Most other media is one way, broadcast."

Chris Price, of Shiny Media said "A blog is are no more a threat to the media than any other web site." As a freelance journalist he sees blogs as a compliment to freelance journalism. There are good bloggers and good journalist. There are bad journalists and bad bloggers Good and bad. Talk of it being a threat is sticking your head in the sand."

Alistair Shrimpton of Six Apart said when we talk about blogging there's a tendency to talk about conflict, and replacing what came before. "I don't think will be losers - it's just an advancement on exiting technology. The Guardian and The Times newspapers are encouraging journalists to blog. They are both excited about the medium. It's not conflicting with what they do normally."

Gareth Thomas, of the Brands2life.com PR consultancy said he believed aggregated, group blogs have more "legs" than ones driven by lone individuals.

Howell pointed out that recent Association of Online Publishing research said online is great for business information whereas magazines were more for pleasure, so it's unlikely that blogs will be of much threat to the magazine market.

However, Sashinka pointed out that research like this is probably skewed by age - that young people increasingly don't bother at all with magazines and newspapers and live their entire lives online and on mobile phones, consuming and communicating using digital media alone.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas of Samizdata and the Big Blog Company pointed out that "Blogging undermines any industry that comes between the originator of the message and the audience. Blogging is eating away at those audiences. Blogging could replace those premium columnists. Secondly, the blogosphere appeared because of the bad reporting of 9/11 by mainstream media. The media didn't serve the audience so they went elsewhere."

Admittedly the most recent Pew Internet Research fond that there was negligible influence on the US election by blogs. But, "Do I care? Just because a blog is not influential it doesn’t mean you don't want to consume it."

Should we be courting bloggers?

Murdoch seems to think so, given his recent speech to editors. "That was an incredible turnaround" said Shrimpton.

Adding to this, Price said Shiny Media blogs have had great response from The Sun's web site. "Less so the Guardian."

But traditional publishers could still be wrong-footed.

Price said it makes sense to blog in niches. "We can't pretend to beat big media companies. But our smaller audiences in niches can equal what might be a bigger audience for a single media brand." The technology of course is key: "Without blogging we couldn’t have built a site with the same capabilities. Yes, the barriers to entry are low, but to produce decent material you need to spend money."

Julian Swallow, of Mobrio said: "There are lots of nano-publishing opportunities. Smaller publishing models have suddenly become viable."

The point was made that perhaps one example of this might be the Drudge Report which is known to be profitable because of his low costs, but, as Adriana pointed out, "Matt Drudge is not a blogger. He doesn't figure in the blogosphere."

Shrimpton talked about how the PR war in the press between Gawker.com and Weblogs Inc is "almost creating their own buzz and marketing, profits or not."

Cronin-Lukas flagged up Treonauts.com - a blog about Treos aimed Purely at the US market  - "he is doing very well. He is making a lot of money and far more than blogs directed at a UK audience."

Sashinka said that it is the savvy, commercially minded blogger like Gawker's Nick Denton who can make money. "Look at BoingBoing - they have hired John Battelle, a former publisher of Wired and The Industry Standard - he is someone who knows how to commercialise online publishing."

Moving onto the opportunities available to pure internet companies:

Helen Copnall, head of MSN Spaces in the UK (which launched globally a month ago) said it has seen explosive growth in the US and Japan. There are 2.5m unique users looking at it so far. "We are just exploring business models that can work. It's inextricably linked in with the MSN messenger environment, so it's a rich environment for advertisers. Users are able to see when people update their blog via their MSN messenger. There's huge growth in photo sharing. Ultimately it could be a sophisticated social networking environment."

"We are conscious about moderation and have a safety policy. This is to protect users, not brand owners advertising there. Some 6% of the 850,000 users have changed their security preferences so that only their messenger contacts can see their space. The settings are Pubic, Messenger and Private."

Shrimpton added that Six Apart has found that "30% of our blogs are password protected." The Live Journal audience peaks at 17 years old he added.

"This adoption of blogging by young people is clearly feeding through up into their lives as they get older."

"I get at least one university calling me a week saying they'd like to buy Movable Type for their university. In a few years all these people will want this at their workplace. 14-19 - year olds are on Live Journal. We have 30 million users, and will have 60 million next year. When they get to the workplace and they have used it for their social life and the workplace they will want it for their work. I recently saw BaseCamp, the project management blog - which is a fantastic internal project management blog system.

Cronin-Lukas "Blogging is not mass media and never tried to be. I'm more interested in the long-tail aspects. The idea that online distribution that allow things to be around for a long time." Chris Andersen of Wired coined the concept about the Long Tail of content generating more income than daily hits on a site alone. This is along the same lines as Hollywood making more out of their archive of DVDs than the initial release of a big film.

"It's about Blogs as part of a network, as a distribution and a discovery tool. If you understand the network and use that network it's very powerful if you know how to use it," she added.

Howell (who is a PR consultant) added: "Over the last three months I have had endless calls about blogs. It falls into subjects such as companies worrying about employees blogging, monitoring their brands, corporate blogging and internal/intranet blogging. All have very different issues and strategies. ironically, PR is a conversation just as blogging is. PR is about changing hearts and minds, and so blogging is of great interest to PRs."

Thomas  of Brands2life: "Technorati is a very revelation to clients. Clients are panicking. They have no sense of how important a blog is or of which bloggers to watch. We are saying just as we look at what journalists do, we should look at bloggers."

Howell: "So far there's no real common ground tool to do that."

In answer to a question about firms paying bloggers to blog, Howell said "There's lots of chatter about playing bloggers. But firms that do that will get caught."

Price: "Any journalist who takes a press trip is open to suggestion. It might be implied and subtle, but it's there. The same thing applies to bloggers."

Cronin-Lukas: "Blogging has to be transparent or you'll get found out."

Shrimpton: "General motors has created the FastLane blog. They developed it by themselves It's a PR vehicle. It's making the internal conversation an external conversation. Blogging is a very low cost way for firms to do PR."

Howell: "Yes but most firms are scared of that idea. They are scared of journalists. PRs just need to learn about being hands off when it comes to dealing with blogging and bloggers. We should media train and coach. You can't get involved. A lot of PRs try to cleanse a blog."

Micropersuasion was referenced as a blog by a PR consultant that seems to be working - up to a point.

One thought: "The Body Shop blog was crap."

Frieze noted that the New York Times has just announced it will charge for opinion pieces, despite the fact that freely accessible bloggers could in some way fill that desire for opinion very easily. How is it possible to charge for opinion in this environment?

On the issue of blogging form mobile phones, Shrimpton said: "We developed live blogging with Nokia - In 10 seconds I can get a blog running from my phone."

A recent example is the Glastonbury blog done by Q Magazine. Their users post to the blog direct from mobiles. EMI did it last year , and the BBC has a lot of experience in getting pictures from viewers.

Reading blogs is going mobile too: Mobrio has a java system where you can read blog on any phone.

Swallow: "This Java client. I read news feeds on my mobile. They are not filtered by Vodafone. I read all my news on my phone. We designed this because we didn't want the operators involved in the value chain."

Price: "This is why traditional publishers need to be worried as, in the case of print titles, they have had the monopoly on the London Underground and on the toilet. But smart devices can look at content and when they do it's seems a no-brainer to develop content for them. Why buy a newspaper?"

Frieze said: "The real question is what happens in 5 years time. A remember seeing a gaggle of teenagers once who all parted with the words, see you online. Smart content on nice toys is where it's going to be. When they get to work they'll be working collaboratively too. Traditional companies have a hierarchy, but the future of work, like play, is more collaborative."

Shrimpton: "The founders of Six Apart are in their 20s, so they understand where it's going. For example they have added an Amazon affiliate scheme where their users get paid. Ok, so maybe it's salesy, but the users like us giving them something back. Mina Trott said a blog is like being in a coffee shop and someone saying they like a book, so there's a better relationship."

Mention was made of Treonaut. This is a blog which is not authorised by PalmOne, but Palm has said it has become one of the most important outlets. His recommendations, are very powerful, and he even gets commissions and tips from grateful readers. To the point where one month's earnings earned him a car.

"People know he's truly obsessed with Treo. It's about the context," said Cronin-Lukas.

Frieze: "In this world, marketing is dead because it's a world of total transparency. But there's an opportunity for people who can enable corporations to genuinely and transparently communicate with their consumers. Look at how advertising sales are down across all media."

Cronin-Lukas: "But it doesn’t cut out PR agencies and ad agencies."

Howell: "Because ad agencies can still drive mass markets. There's still a place for branding."

Thomas: "Advertising is about controlling the message."

Cronin-Lukas: "But they can't do that any more."

Frieze: "Look at Nike - if they don't join in the conversation they'll be the mute person standing on the sidelines."

Howell: "One area that I can’t see being touched by blogs much is financial advisers. Online conversations about the mortgage market, for instance, might not be so open."

Cronin-Lukas: "I won't say blogging replaces everything, but images and branding is expensive. People won't do that much anymore. Look at the Beauty blog - she writes about perfume and people listen to her opinion."

Mastellon: "Sure, but the latest Channel No 5 advert with Nicole Kidman is a case study in how a two minute advert can create a massive market. All other advertising in print and online came from that one ad."

Frieze: "Sure, you might see the advertising, but you look at the web when you get home and see what people are saying about that brand."

Shrimpton: "Blogs will be an extremely important part of the marketing mix in next few years."

Howell: "Blogging will drive conversations with consumers, and most firms are utterly terrified of that."

Frieze: "Google does give a lot of power to blogs. Who knows what happens if that changes."