TheWayoftheWeb

It seems that Twitter is becoming an increasingly useful barometer of buzz around products or services. (Services like Twitterbuzz could benefit if you discount Tinyurl!).

It happened recently with FriendFeed, when I noticed about 10 of my contacts on Twitter all signing up or chatting about it. And it happened again yesterday with Tumblr.

There are a load of interesting articles I can, and will, be writing about discovering products in a viral, Word-of-Mouth type way like this, so marketing/PR type people, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

But I’m going to share my first thoughts about Tumblr for the moment. Lots of people have compared it to Twitter, which in some ways is hiding the real competition. Like Twitter, it does allow you to update quickly and easily, via the Bookmarklet tool, and it has an advantage in allowing quick updates of video, pictures, chat, quotes etc. And like Twitter, it’s clean and smooth to use. Hit bookmarklet, edit anything in a pop-up window, and move on - much like bookmarking in Del.icio.us.

BUT- Twitter is all about the social. Like Del.icio.us, it didn’t really give me much value, until my follows and followers numbers reached a certain point - probably around 20 or 30. And the value has grown with each person added…(Waiting for Dave Cushman to pop over from FasterFuture to mention Reed’s Law!)

As yet, Tumblr doesn’t offer any way to easily connect with friends and contacts and follow their Tumbls easily. That’s why I think the real places it competes is with Wordpress and Blogger. I’m a fan of both (As you can tell by this blog still appearing on Blogger), and think they both do a good job of allowing non-technical people to start engaging with blogging, writing, widgets, communities etc.

But both Wordpress and Blogger do force you to develop a bit of an interest in HTML, Usability, Design etc. Adding videos can be a hassle, unless the website in question has a ‘Blog This’ function and you don’t mind sharing your username. And misplacing a bit of code in your HTML can lead to serious problems (as I’ve continually reminded myself when editing code in a hurry).

Tumblr removes all these problems, and as with the blogging platforms, it can be ftp’d to your custom domain. Essentially, it’s a stripped down, easy to use Blogger, which doesn’t require you to visit the Blogger site to log in and post. It’s ideal for anyone who uses a lot of multimedia, without wanting to cover their sites in widgets, and it’s also a great time saving device.

Personally, although I’ve signed up and played, and can see the benefits, I’m not sure how often I’ll use it. I’ve already got a working blog with a continually surprising amount of readers - and I adore the social side of Twitter to the point of declining in my use of Facebook or email. But if I was looking to start my own blog as a repository for all the things I find during my day, and without wanting to write huge long posts (Never going to happen, right?), then Tumblr is definitely worth looking at.

Aside from an exponential increase in my involvement on Twitter, and setting up FriendFeed on an experimental basis, probably my most interesting discussion at the moment is with Brendan Cooper, the creator of the PR Friendly Index.

Having submitted this blog, I was curious whether it’s non-appearance was down to performance, or definition (I promise I was curious, rather than complaining!). Which led onto an interesting and good natured discussion about the definition of blogs, bloggers, PR and influence. I doubt there will ever be an exact definition for any of those terms which won’t cause disagreement in one quarter or another, but I thought Brendan’s views were pretty interesting, and wanted to post my latest response here, to hopefully get some other feedback on my own attempts to define the indefinable.

So, here’s my own humble take on blogs, bloggers, influence and PR. Which does raise the question for me of whether marketing and PR co-exist any more, or whether it’s an artificial split in the business of building relationships and conversations around a specific brand/topic/product:

“Influence: Interestingly, I’m very deep in researching the usage of Net Promoter scores, Buzz Monitoring etc, to look at how to track influence and engagement as far as is currently possible (Nothing will ever be close to 100%!). I do know from discussions with some firms that they’ll be providing some limited free tools in the future, which may help track influence above and beyond popularity and linking. I’m influenced by a lot of things that I don’t end up linking from my blog due to time, effort etc.

Blogs: For me, it’s any site which is updated chronologically in one ‘flow’. Any news site is chronological, but articles etc will be spread across sections. A blog can cover numerous areas of interest, but everything is covered in one main stream of information which can then be split out. Rather than a homepage aggregating from the various sections. If that makes sense!

Bloggers: Anyone publishing a blog, whether paid/unpaid, corporate or not. And certainly a journalist can also be a blogger and vice versa. For me, the definition seems to come from what, where and how their content is displayed. Again, going back to my definition of a blog (which is very much a work in progress). I’d hesitate to define it by technical functionality, such as RSS, and certainly look to define it more by form (Any definition of over 100 million examples is going to be fuzzy in some way…)

PR: Definitely the trickiest one. Should it be classed with Marketing/Customer Retention? Is there even a place for it now? I’d argue that to define a discipline by the fact it doesn’t analyse as deeply as another is probably doing it a disservice, but it’s difficult not to. Certainly journalism, PR, marketing, advertising etc are all increasingly about relationships and conversations rather than purely broadcasting. I’m still stunned by at least one PR company I deal with banning employees from using Facebook for example, rather than encouraging the use of every tool to target press releases as accurately and individually as possible. But where the line comes between targetting press releases to journalists and bloggers, and marketing something to bloggers and consumers, for example, is very, very fuzzy. Maybe the terms for PR and Marketing should be merged and then discarded. Engagement and communication? Enunication? Communigagement?“

I’m expecting some Entrecarders (I know you’re out there) to weigh in on Blogs and Blogging! And I hope Communigagement and the like don’t take off…but if they do, I want credit! Engagication?

Any comments I do get, I’ll aggregate and combine with the conversation with Brendan.

Just a short update, due to my need to finish decorating a nursery and cooking the evening meal. But I had to share one of the best examples of crowdsourcing I’ve seen, and by newspaper and website. (I picked this up via Jeff Jarvis)

Documents relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy have been discovered in a vault by the Dallas Country District Attorney, and he’s made them available to the Dallas News. So what did the Dallas News due with the huge amount of documents, which had been compiled by the District Attorney at the time of the assassination, and never made public?

They’ve started making huge chunks of the documents available as PDFs and available for public download. And they’re asking their readers to look through these amazing documents, and let the Dallas News know if they find anything interesting.

In the old days, such a huge amount of documents would probably have ended up with a junior staff member or similar spending weeks looking through them, and despite their best efforts, missing important news.

Now, though, staff and the public can look through. And with a topic like this, you can bet there are plenty of interested academic and amateur experts rushing to read through all this new info, and who are probably better placed to judge if something is new or ground-breaking than a Junior Reporter who might have never covered the subject before.

I’m certainly intrigued enough to download some of the PDFs and have a read when I get five minutes…

It’s not surprising there’s been a lot of response to the Nielsen Online findings that both Facebook and Myspace have dropped around 5% in UK audience figures for January 2008, month-on-month. Bebo also dropped 2% for UK users MoM for January.

It’s worth noting that the findings come from monitoring UK usage at home and at work, meaning schools, universities and internet cafes are not included. (Would the drop be contributed to by the fact school pupils and students were home more during December)

Interestingly it also coincides with a presentation I attended which claimed a significant portion of people will stick with whatever social network site they first got involved in - and those that do migrate tend to still visit their former social network home, but in less and less frequency.

And the final interesting facet to this is the continued growth of Twitter.

This all fits somewhat with my own habits recently, as I’ve reached a critical mass on Twitter, and I find myself constantly wanting to check the conversations and links being added. Meanwhile there is slightly less relevant and interesting content surfacing on Facebook in relation to annoying application invites for novelty items.

A number of reasons for this spring to mind. Twitter is used incredibly easily on mobile, and strips out anything extraneous to ‘the conversation’. The publicity of a supposed paedophile threat and more realistic concerns over employers checking profiles could have affected sign-ups/usage. Possibly some people have simply decided the profile led social networks aren’t for them, or didn’t see how it can be useful. Or perhaps a time of possible recession has meant people are more conscious of how they spend their time at work - if social networking hasn’t been blocked or banned.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, but some things I do know:

• Facebook dropped 5% MoM, but was up 712% YoY (UK)
• Myspace fell 9% YoY (UK). Bebo was up 53% YoY
• None of those figures mean you can ignore those sites.
• Those who interact the most, who give and receive the biggest value in terms of interaction, will continue.
• The niche networks are where growth is predicted.
• Even with a 5% drop, the market leaders still have a huge potential crowd, as long as they are interacted with in the right way.
• Twitter will continue to grow for a while yet, as it’ll start moving past the techy early adopters. Particularly around quick and easy mobile updates, which can then appear on Facebook/Myspace/Blogs etc.
• If the social networks develop again, users will be drawn back. It’s all about developments and friends as reasons to visit.