By Jeff Jarvis - Advance.net, Buzzmachine.com
For Daimler Chrysler, Organic, BBDO
July 2004
Thanks to history’s easiest, cheapest publishing tools – weblogging -- connected to history’s best distribution network – the internet – the people now own the printing press and the broadcast tower.
The barrier to entry to media has been blown away.
Now the people you are trying to reach through media are creating media.
As with all headaches caused by change, this one presents opportunities.
Why do citizens create content? Why do they consume the content fellow citizens create?
First, it’s about control. That is the watchword for media in this generation. I say the most revolutionary invention in media was not the printing press; it was the remote control, for it gave the audience control of media. Add the VCR, cable, TiVo, iPods, the Internet.
Now add tools that let the audience not just control but create and distribute content.
These tools give the people formerly known as the audience a voice -- and if media are smart, we will listen.
Citizens’ media tears down the authority of big media and establishes the authority of the audience: We tell you what we care about; we tell you what really matters; and if we don’t like established media, we’ll establish our own.
Citizens’ media is about community. Bloggers trust each other. They love to get together in person after meeting online just so they can say, “You’re just like I thought you’d be.” They hold MeetUps and conferences in the U.S. and in Vienna and even in Tehran. Bloggers are not loners. They are inherently social.
Citizens’ media is about convenience: Your friends tell you what matters: They read so you don’t have to.
Citizens’ media is about passion, which fueled most of millions of weblogs until now.
Now, these citizen practitioners have visions of making a living out of this. You will help them do that. And they will be grateful. It’s the beginning of a beautiful, new relationship.
The tremendous opportunity for marketers using citizens’ media is to build new, strong, direct, engaged, trusting relationships with consumers.
You can reach influencers. IBM and the MIT Media Lab each performed studies last year tracking the influence of the discussion about music on forums and weblogs and each found that the chatter of these online influencers exactly predicted sales of music up and down by two weeks. Webloggers influence pop culture, politics, commerce. They are the alpha consumers you want to reach.
This new medium gives you extreme targeting: You know exactly what people care about because they’re writing about it and choosing to read it. The mass market is dead. Welcome to the mass of niche markets.
Weblogs and citizens’ media also give you incredible value. When you hear what it takes to support – and delight – the practitioners of citizens’ media, you will be amazed. This is nothing like producing a magazine or newspaper or TV show. It is still cheap. It will get more expensive. But then it will still be cheap. That is the real hallmark of this new medium with no barrier to entry and no cost infrastructure – and, importantly, no scarcity: It’s cheap.
But again, I must emphasize that the reason to market via citizens’ media is that you build new, strong, direct, credible, intimate, valued relationships with the people we used to call the “audience” and you used to call “consumers.”
I’m going to quickly give you some words of wisdom. First from blogger and author Doc Searls, who says…
Welcome to a new, two-way, transparent world. You don’t just talk. You listen.
As a newsman, I’ll add that news must also be a conversation. We in media are trying to figure out this new world as you, the marketers, are.
Note what this quote from Chris Locke really means: The proper marketing relationship with weblogs and citizens media is not just advertising. It’s not just sponsorship. It’s about underwriting, about supporting this thing we all love: “We share your interests.”
Nevermind the tools. You’ll hear many brand names, much jargon. It will all keep changing overnight. The only thing to remember is that the tools will continue to get easier and cheaper and the distribution networks more efficient.
No, these numbers don’t make a lot of sense together. The medium is new. Hell, the word is new. The only moral to the story: It’s already big and still growing rapidly. Citizens want to create and consume content. And we don’t want to be left behind.
Technorati catalogues all the links on all the weblogs. It really creates conversations. And that is, for me, a better indication of what is happening in this medium: How many conversations are going on and who’s starting them; who are the influencers?
I look at Technorati compulsively, for it is how I see what other webloggers – 1,695 of them – are saying as they link to something I say: agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, correcting me. This is the conversation. (You can see this page here.)
Nick Denton was a founder of First Tuesday and Moreover (full disclosure: I arranged my company’s investment in Moreover and I sit on its board). Nick also introduced me to blogging.
Now he has created the first high-end professional weblog company with Gawker.com about New York gossip and media, Gizmodo about gadgets, Wonkette about Washington gossip, Defamer about Hollywood gossip, and Fleshbot about… flesh. He has more coming soon, including travel and video games.
Gawker Media’s sites attract between 300 and 600 thousand unique visitors and between 1.5 and 5 million page views per month. That is as much as some well-known media brands.
In other words: These are significant media properties. And what sets them apart is simply that they were inexpensive to launch. I founded Entertainment Weekly and – through little fault of my own – it went through $200 million before turning a profit. Gawker Media went through a few thousand before becoming profitable.
Nick is getting incredible press in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Everywhere.
Gawker Media is also a proving ground for new media talent. The first Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers, is now an editor at New York Magazine; the first Gizmodo blogger; Peter Rojas, just split off to create the successful Engadget at WeblogsInc.com (yet Gizmodo traffic continues to grow); and Ana Marie Cox, the Wonkette, has been hired by MTV to cover the political conventions.
Most important, advertisers are flocking to Gawker Media. Nike came to him to create a campaign for its Art of Speed film festival; Gawker Media created a blog covering the event.
The Dodge Magnum was advertised on Gawker last week. Congratulations!
Other advertisers include: Jose Cuervo, British Airways, Playboy, Voom (Cablevision), John Kerry Campaign, CNET, Comedy Central, Amazon, Warner Brothers, Absolut Vodka, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Intuit.
And that’s before hiring a sales staff.
Blogads is a small, growing operation run by Henry Copeland that enables advertising on a score of popular blogs, which can pull in anywhere from 200 to 600 to 5,000 to 10,000 dollars per month.
One congressional campaign invested $2,000 in Blogads weeks before a primary and received $80,000 in donations as a result. Blogads work.
The system is not yet as sophisticated as Doubleclick or 24/7. But it’s the only game in town today and it is growing.
I know of one political blogger who stands to make $150,000 this year from advertising.
For this talk, I asked on Buzzmachine.com for success stories and one blogger came forward to report that he will make $35-40,000 this year from three blogs: one about a hobby, one about a sporting event, and one his personal blog. He gets half his revenue from Google AdSense, the rest from an Amazon affiliation, BlogAds and Market Banker ads
To bloggers, this is real money. I spoke with a magazine writer recently who wanted to get into blogging … until he heard that he couldn’t just write a column and wouldn’t get a meaty paycheck. “You mean,” he whined, “I’ve spent my life building my reputation and now I’m competing with people who are earning a thousand a month at this?”
“It’s worse that that,” I said: “You’re competing with people who are doing it for free because they love doing it.”
I told you that bloggers love to get together. At the most recent Bloggercon at Harvard, I ran a session on making blogs make money and the room was packed to the hilt with bloggers dying to make a few bucks doing what they love to do. When you help support their passion, they will be grateful.
At Advance, which is one of America’s top 5 newspaper companies, we see citizens’ media as a means of reaching newspaper nirvana: Hyperlocal coverage.
At a time when classified and retail revenue are shrinking, it’s hard to see how we can expand our newsrooms yet we need to do something to face growing competition from new media.
I believe that we can enlist our own audience to help. We are creating hyperlocal weblogs with readers in test markets in Massachusetts and New Jersey. We are holding MeetUps to try to encourage others to blog and tying this to our wildly successful forums, where we now serve 100 million page views a month in pure conversation.
If this works, we will end up with a critical mass of local content we could never have afforded to gather: new news, information, and diverse viewpoints. We will attract a critical mass of local audience. And then – because we will be hypertargeted and because we are using automated advertising with no cost of sale or production – we can offer extremely affordable advertising to local merchants and, we hope, capture the holy grail of local advertising: the pizzeria who never could afford to advertiser in any of our products before. Will it work? We don’t know yet.
I recently worked with students at Northwestern University to create town weblogs by any local citizens. See the fruit of their good labor at GoSkokie.com. We will be creating such weblogs in our markets in a few weeks.
And also see an independent blogger in Debra Galant, a former New York Times writer now creating a New Jersey hyperlocal weblog at Baristanet.com. Is she a competitor? We don’t think so. We hope to work closely with her. We can share promotion with her, linking both ways. We can share content with her, giving her feeds of headlines from the paper (via RSS) and promoting her headlines on our town pages (also via RSS). And we can make her part of our ad network, helping to extend our reach and to underwrite her good work. This is citizens’ media heaven… if it works.
In the media space, there tons of wonderful media weblogs that are read in the halls of power. I list just a few of my favorites here and I’ll highlight one: PaidContent.org, run by one man, Rafat Ali, who is linking to the latest top news, reporting news himself, and creating reports. Oh, and he handles the advertising himself, getting six figures over the transom.
I see this happening in every trade, including auto. When Ford canceled publication subscriptions companywide, I damned near wanted to quit my job to start the Ford News Weblog. But I didn’t….
Christopher Locke says one of the best things you can do is encourage employees to blog and build direct relationships with your consumers. Sound frightening? Well, if control-freak company Disney can do it, so can you.
And Microsoft, of all companies, has 800 employee blogs. The best is Robert Scoble’s Scobelizer. They humanize the company, which in this case is damned hard to do.
Sun’s CEO just started blogging and his employees are all allowed to.
All this is working so well that a Seattle newspaper says Bill Gates is considering blogging.
We can only hope that his blog will be as lively as Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s, who now refuses to deal with the press and answers their questions only in public, on his blog.
This isn’t all about blogs and all about advertising. It’s also about relating to consumers in a new way and listening to them. Repeat: listening to them.
There’s a blogger who writes about nothing but Netflix. You’d think that would make the company deliriously happy. But some company bureacrat didn’t like it when the guy tried to get press releases out of Netflix. Get that: He was begging for puffery and they wouldn’t give it to him. So he did what any red-blooded blogger would do: He blogged about it. Other bloggers linked to it and protested. Netflix quickly gave in and now sends him PR. Smart.
Look at TreoCentral.com, a forum – not a blog – devoted entirely to my phone. If Palm has any sense, they should be monitoring the forum for every complaint and every suggestion and every love letter to their product to improve both their product and their marketing.
I posted about the Dodge Magnum about a week ago because – honest! – I admired it on the road without even knowing the brand (and it was before I was called here). People responded with a few comments on my blog. People are talking about your products. Listen to them.
That means you should listen to the bad as well as the good. I had a bad experience with a technology company and only afterwards did I think to go to Google and type in the company’s brand followed by the word “sucks.” Up came hundreds of complaints about them. In this gift economy, my fellow consumers gave me the gift of advice if only I had listened. Try it with any brand and you will devise Jarvis’ Sucks Index. (Oh, that doesn’t sound too good, does it?)
It’s possible to use a blog for a product. In a moment, I’ll tell you how not to do this. But here’s a recent example that looks promising: Maytag created a blog to give its SkyBox home beverage dispenser a hip personality. No, the dispenser is not blogging. People are blogging about the product, the press it’s getting – good and bad, and product developments. I can certainly see blogs not only from your product teams but also about your products: Link to press about them; preview what’s coming next; engage your consumers to get their suggestions about product and marketing….
You’ve all heard about the power of blogs in politics, from the Dean campaign to the Democratic National Convention. So I won’t dwell on that today.
Hell, blogs are big even in Iranian politics. Seriously. One Johnny Appleseed blogger, an expat Iranian in Toronto named Hossein Derakhshan at Hoder.com, told Persian-speakers how to blog two years ago and today there are more than 100,000 Iranian blogs. The mullahs have arrested some bloggers but they have also sponsored weblog festivals and now Iran’s vice-president blogs; it’s a force too big to stop.
If our politicians and Iranian politicians know the power of blogs, how can we be behind them?
This isn’t just about blogs and advertising and forums. It’s also about people getting together offline. MeetUp allows citizens to create their own clubs and get-togethers. It was terribly successful for political campaigns in the primaries. But it’s about more than politics. Pug owners and Mini Cooper owners also have MeetUps, which wise brands could underwrite to meet their best consumers and listen to them. Buy these nice folks a beer, willya?
And it isn’t just about blogs and forums and advertising and MeetUps.
It’s about photos. With the sudden ubiquity of camera phones, moblogs – mobile blogs with photos – are huge. They will present another way to present eyewitness news. Fotolog, started by the founder of MeetUp, gets 10 million page views a DAY. What you see here is my friend and fellow blogger Matt Welch using his camera phone and moblog to sell his Lincoln.
It’s also about books. Blog brands are turning into books. The Julie/Julia project, a tribute to Julia Child, is about to become a book. And two bloggers who kept on Michael Moore’s case with their blogs just wrote a book that quickly became a New York Times best-seller – promoted by bloggers.
And it’s about video. I’ve used simple tools – an $80 camera and $99 software called Visual Communicator – to create crude video commentaries that merely show the potential. There are new tools coming out every day, many of them free, to both create and distribute video: One, called Broadcatching, combines RSS, a transport mechanism, with Bitttorent, a peer-to-peer distribution standard.
I’m frankly giving short shrift to video because it’s a big enough topic to warrant another entire presentation (so you should invite me back). But I firmly believe that video will take off and TV will explode before our eyes. Everything is coming together at once:
+ The equipment is cheap.
+ The tools are cheap and easy.
+ Distribution is finally cheap and ubiquitous.
+ The cost differential between publishing and weblogs was huge and that sparked the development of blogging as a medium and a business. But that’s nothing compared with the cost differential in video production for news, entertainment, and advertising. It will take nothing for an individual to create, for example, a credible home-repair show, for example. Instead of $500,000 a half-hour it could be done for hundreds of dollars a half-hour.
+ The rest of TV is exploding as cable networks break down and start broadband channels and new channels emerge on VOD.
TV will explode. But weblogs will explode first.
[Note: The full PowerPoint included a video example. You can see it by going to www.buzzmachine.com/vlogs and click on fast food.
OK, so now, finally, to the Don’ts and Dos of citizens’ media. First, don’t do what Dr. Pepper did with it’s “milk-based soft drink,” Raging Cow. And then don’t create a weblog as if it were written by the product or by the cow.
Weblogs are a human enterprise. Don’t create a blog called, “My Mother, The Car.” Please.
Bloggers lampooned this effort and for good reason.
It’s heresy, I know. But my next don’t is: Don’t get your knickers in knots about ROI and detailed statistics… or the train will pass you by and other smarter, more adventuresome, more visionary marketers with bigger ears will take all the early wins in this medium.
But at the same time, let me confess to you that as much as I love citizens’ media and promote it as a superb vehicle for new kinds of marketing, it does have a weakness: Namely, no data and ad infrastructure… yet.
This medium needs three things:
+ First, we need metrics on the creators and audience: demographics, size, behavior. There are a few very small studies but they are far from conclusive. There will soon be a bigger audience studay. It’s a start. We need to give you standard metrics media buyers can match to other media; we learned that lesson online. But we also need to measure what sets this new medium apart: influence. Technorati begins to measure that by counting conversations.
+ Second, we need a means of targeting and serving ads across networks. You can buy on one blog at a time at Blogads. But you should be able to identify and buy the top 10 auto blogs, or top blogs with a young male audience, or top food blogs. BlogAds is starting to put together such networks (including one for gay and lesbian blogs). And imageine if you could target not just on the demos of the audience but on the demos of the authors: Want to sell the latest Avril Lavigne CD? Then underwrite blogs by 17-year-old girls.
+ Third, we need stats on performance: ROI.
These things will come because a smart entrepreneur will do it (I considered it but decided it’s not my business) or a smart ad serving company will take it on or a smart agency and client will demand that it happens.
But if you wait for all this to be in place before you jump in, then the Nikes will get there first. Nate Tobecksen, communications manager at Nike, told Ad Age regarding Nike’s buy on Gawker.com that they aren’t measuring response because they don’t think there is a precise way of doing it.
Bottom line: This medium is growing so fast, you can’t afford not to get in now. It is also so cheap you really can’t afford to get in now.
As Denton says to Nike, 100,000 blog readers are far more valuable than 100,000 TV viewers because those blog readers are broadcasters in their own right.
Now the Dos.
+ Do create advocates for citizens media – or, if you prefer, consumers’ media – in your companies.
+ Do underwrite (read: advertise on) weblogs. You will learn. You will build relationships. You will gain cool points. You will be amazed at how cost-effective it is even if you can’t measure to the penny.
+ Do read blogs and forums and respond to them. Get in the conversation. Create structure to do it in your companies.
+ Do create appropriate product blogs and forums to involve and engage your consumers. Invite them to suggest improvements. Who knows: They might even start selling your products for you. Make your car viral.
+ Do treat bloggers with respect. Think of them as journalists. Give them test drives.
