Here’s my presentation from the CIPR Reputation Management conference which took place at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester today.
I led a workshop on corporate blogging that examined why blogging was broken amongst UK corporate organisations, looked at examples of good corporate UK blogs, examined how to generate authentic content and the process required to kick start a corporate blog.
Many thanks to Ged Carroll, Stephen Davies and Rob Fenwick for their help in putting the session together. And to Speed’s Caroline Allen and Clare English.
Anthropologists and historians in the future looking back on the 21st century will have an easy job. A cross section of life is laid out in blogs, Flickr Twitter, Facebook and forums.
We’re micro-blogging more than ever but are blogging less.Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are among the A list bloggers that have switched from blogging to so-called lifestreaming.
Ged Carroll notes that Robert Scoble has seen a dramatic drop in readership since his move towards lifestreaming.
Little wonder. Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point.
My use of Flickr is the closest I get to lifestreaming. To anyone outside my immediate network of family and friends my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.
Ged reckons that blogging has passed through the hype cycle and is maturing. He’s spot on.
“Over the past ten years or so, we have seen blogging climb to what can be reasonably considered to be a peak of unrealistic expectations and it could be considered to heading towards a trough of disillusionment.”
Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging – not lifestreaming – is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.
Chris Anderson has been in town this week to promote his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I was in the audience at the ICA this lunchtime with my old pal Ged Carroll (@r_c) to hear him speak.
Anderson denied that his spat with Malcolm Gladwell in response to a dodgy review in The New Yorker on Monday and conducted via the blogosphere was a PR exercise, (both work for Conde Nast) but there’s no doubt that the attention will help drive book sales.
Anderson was keen to get one thing straight from the outset: free isn’t an economic model without money. Instead it describes a transactional relationship where some element is free.
Anderson said that the internet has driven distribution costs down and continues to do so as the cost of storage, processing power and bandwidth halves every 12 months or so. He said that this had led to the freemium model whereby content producers or product developers give away an element of their product for free and charge for a premium version.
He contrasted this with the pre-internet version of free where products are packaged as part of a marketing offer such as buy one get one free (BOGOF), or given away as free gifts.
That there are two distinct models for free and that the internet is a driver for the freemium business model there can be no doubt, but I don’t believe that freemium is as original as Anderson claims.
It’s a technique favoured by drug dealers who hook in victims with cheap deals, the airline industry which discounts flights and then charges premium prices for additional services and retailers who give away samples.
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