The Falling Influence of Blogs

Brian Solis has a great piece on TechCrunch in which he offers a much more researched and reasoned view of something I touched on over on the Schwartz Crossroads blog: the rise of microblogging on services like Twitter and Facebook are changing the role of the blog.

When people used to ask me about whether a blog was "for real" one measure I'd give them was comments. I can't do that any longer. Just because a blog has few comments doesn't mean people aren't commenting ABOUT it. Those comments can be scattered to the four winds of the Internet.

The story is worth a read.

Why You Won't Find Answers on Twitter and Facebook

As kids and teens, my brother and I used to occasionally accompany my dad to printing shows, as that was his industry. While there we'd grab a number of printed posters and see quite a few of my dad's colleagues. Me, being aloof, could never remember a person from one year to the next, but my brother had this wonderful inate ability to know a person's name, face and even something about them. One year, as a baby-faced teen, he asked my dad's colleague about his daughter.

"That kid's a natural salesman," my dad's colleague commented. Before you joke, he meant it as a compliment.

It wasn't that my brother understood how to sell. He didn't memorize reams of data about a particular product or have a knack for showing it off, but he could naturally relate to any individual through information.

Flash forward a few years and I'm a Resident Adviser at Brandeis when the head of Residence Life tells us her secret for making people think she knows everything. Before going in to bust a suite for illegal activity (like drinking) she would have information on the oldest person living in the suite, just their name and birth date. Then she'd say "I know no one in this dorm is legally able to drink until Bob turns 21 on March 3rd." Everyone would freeze and think she knew everything. She built a reputation for omnicience. Really, this information was readily available to administrators and she just read it before walking in. Neat trick.

This is what makes Twitter and Facebook so valuable. It gives you the information you need to make personal connections. I'm not suggesting you fake your way through these connections and feign interest in things you hate just to do your job, but these tools help you do your job better by allowing you to relate to people, not to products. The best part: people give you the information.

Too often when people ask about social media tools they want a quick fix. PR people want to know if the reporters they are following will say "today I'm writing as story about mobile media tools, can anyone help?" and then they want to be able pitch.

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. What you get is a little knowledge about someone that can help you forge a better relationship, then you can, by default, do your job better. Maybe that person is an auto entusiast and you know something about cars. Maybe they're a crafter specializing in jewelry-making and you know something about that.

Or, maybe, you can just ask how their daughter is doing.

Fundamentally, News Broke

During a recent podcast, Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen gave an overview of his recent HBR article on how companies need to change their business models to adapt to new threats. It's a very interesting concept and I plan to read the article as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

The premise, as I understand it so far, is that traditional business models don't work when new threats arrive. As an example he pointed to IBM, which focused on mainframe computers, but when mini-computers hit the market IBM opened an entirely new division in a new location with new profit and loss models to combat this. It did the same thing when PCs hit the market, opening a different office utilizing different skillsets.

During the recent podcast interview Prof. Christensen praised the Boston Globe for taking steps to change its business model to combat the new reality. Not having spoken with Prof. Christensen yet I have to assume he is referring to Boston.com and the digital arm of the publication.

The concept, as I currently understand it, lines up with something I've been thinking about for a while: the fundamental problem with the journalistic business model. Traditional journalism is built on the concept that it can be supported by advertising, but separate from it. The journalist reports on the news, the news brings readers, the advertisers then pay for access to those readers.

This model extends back to the penny newspapers of the 19th century. Why sell a newspaper for a penny when it cost more to produce? So you can get the readers and sell access to that distribution channel to advertisers. The more people who read the paper, the more you can charge for the ads. This concept has grown up over the years but it's fundamentally sound.

The New York Times, for example, earned $1,950,021,000 from advertising in 2007, compared with $889,882,000 from circulation revenue according to its financial statements. Advertising figures in 2006 and 2005 were certainly more robust, but the same calculation applies.

Today it's not just the number of people who read your publication, but the type of people. If you're the Boston Globe, for example, and have great penetration in the affluent suburbs, then you can charge more for access to those readers. Most news organizations regardless of medium use the same basic concept: gain an audience, charge for access to the audience.

A main reason this worked was the high barrier to entry for any new news organization. In order to start one you needed:

• Capital for production;
• Access to production equipment (printing press, TV cameras, etc.); and
  
• A method of distribution (broadcast license, subsribers, newsstands sales, etc).
  

Each one of these factors made starting a new publication an uphill battle. Sure, there could be a "lonely pamphleteer," but the chances of that person gaining the reach and scope of a Washington Post were remote at best.

Now flash forward to the Internet. Today instead of a printing press you can use a free and publicly available blog, Facebook page or Twitter account. Instead of capital you can simply use the computer at the public library, or the $400 computer you bought for the house. As for distribution, any blog is technically available to anyone on the globe, you just need to tap into the right search terms to attract the audience from Google.

In other words, the news organizations no longer have the monopoply on the audience, so the advertisers no longer need them to reach an audience. The fundamentals are completly broken.

So what now? More on that later.

Private Lives in the Public Age

Remember "The Truman Show"? That was the Jim Carey movie in which the main character, Truman's entire life was played out on TV. At the time people thought it was a little extreme.

But today a lot of us are playing that out in one way or another by putting more of our lives online. You can read my resume over on LinkedIn, or read this blog to find out about my media work, then scoot over to the Tanoblog to find out out my family and maybe check out a few of my pictures.

But all this openness has its limits. My blogging on my family blog has curtailed as my kids get older, and I don't put many photographs of my own face out there.

While catching up on some podcasts recently I heard Shel Holtz answer critics who said he didn't give enough of his reasons for leaving crayon. His response was simple: his personal reasons for leaving the company are, well, personal, and they're no one else's business. His readers, of course, felt a sense of entitlement to hear more about his life since he puts so much out there.

That's the catch. How do you share what you want with whom you want without sharing too much with too many? Vox and Tabblo offer some options for this by providing privacy controls and letting authors choose who sees what content, but it goes beyond blogging and photo sharing.

I was discussing this issue with a relatively young reporter at a top business publication when the discussion turned to Facebook and how she can't differentiate who sees what. She started working with Facebook in college, but as the site moves away from being just about personal connections and develops more as a business networking platform, she wants some way to keep her worlds separate but still use the service and all it offers. In other words, she wants to keep her college pictures and stories private, but make elements such as her professional connections and achievements public.

Facebook is quickly becoming an interesting social networking platform and one that could, very well, become a standard for companies looking to add a social networking component to their services. But, I still have stories and pictures that I only want to share with close friends, and other things that I'm happy to share with the world. I need a way to control that.

To survive, Facebook is going to have to find a way to address this issue, or someone else will come along who can.