blending the mix

So, as some of you know, Friday 11th April was the first of our Blogging for Business seminars, held at the MDDA offices in Manchester.

The idea of the event was (and remains to be for the London event on the 25th April!) to de-mistify blogging as a niche, early adopter tool and show it to be the essential business communication it is.

The speakers

To get this message across, alongside me (Paul!) giving an overview of why blogging has become something you can no longer ignore, we were delighted to have with us Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel and Chris Bland, Senior Account Manager of our search partner Greenlight.

Mark spoke about the importance of understanding the blogosphere and the nature or tone of the conversations taking place on it. The benefit being that once you understand the conversations and the people holding them, you know the correct way to talk back to these people but also, what it is that they are interested in talking to you about!

Chris covered the increasingly important area of how blogs can enhance (in some cases dramatically) your SEO strategy.

The Feedback

It is always a challenge to set these events at just the right tone, to strike a balance between providing enough detail to add to the knowledge of those people who are already know something and not being so detailed so as to alienate those people who know very little.

With some significant brands such as Bentley Motors, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Liver, dabs.com and SSL International already attending, it was essential to get the balance right. Looking at the feedback , I think we have managed to do just that!

Experienced digital professionals from these and many other businesses left us glowing feedback about the speakers and the event itself.

This with some understanding of blogs felt that they learnt a lot, whilst others who simply came to find out more felt that they had a significantly better grasp of blogging than when they first came!

We will be taking the seminar to London on the 25th April, so if you were unable to attend the Manchester event, there are still (a few) tickets available.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Tags: kmp, blogging for business, seminar, marketing events, paul fabretti, market sentinel, greenlight

Courtesy of Neville via Twitter (and here), I am intrigued to see an analysis of the blogging platforms used by the Top 100 Technorati blogs. There is clearly only one winner - WordPress. Of the Top 100 blogs:

* WordPress is used by 34%

* Movable Type is used by 16%

Phew…looks like I backed the right horse

The image below gives you some idea of the diversity of platforms available to bloggers although what this doesn’t say is how many people are self-hosting their WordPress blogs and how many are using wordpress.com blogs.

Free blogs are one thing, self-hosting is quite another. One is as free as the air we breathe, the other is a touch more complicated to adopt.

Blogger is free so why doesn’t IT have the same penetration as WP in the list? My guess is that given the Top 100 platforms being high-volume, professional publications, they are likely to be self-hosted.

What would be more interesting is the split of WP, Blogger and MT over say the next 1000 - 2000 range. I think this would give a much more realistic view of the actual platform penetration amongst "normal" bloggers.

Almost a year to the day, I was sat at home contemplating having to sell our family home because of actions by my former employer (who were soooo breaking the law and they know it).

To cut a very long story short, I lost my job in May 2007, 2 weeks before moving house - we were on our knees.

In July 2007 though, thanks to Facebook, I found my current employer and things have looked up ever since.

Within 4 weeks I was working on developing blogs and blogging strategies and social media ideas for some of the UK’s biggest brands. We held 2 extremely successful (and popular I might add!) Social Network Marketing Seminars and I am living the dream…blogging, blogging and more blogging.

In addition to that, the BIMA’s Great Facebook Debate provided me with the opportunity to meet some really great people, as well as expand my awareness of so many other things.

To top off a great year, I now find myself included in a list of Ones to Watch in 2008. To be included in the list of Damien Mulley’s list of some great Irish folk who are blazing a trail in this crayzee new world is a) surprising (but my grandmother was Irish!) b) an honour - you should see who else is in there.

I go about my occasional blogging as I guess many others do, but for someone of Damien’s stature (Paul Walsh says it best here) to recognise my occasional rants as worthy of note is truly humbling.

In itself, this is motivation to ensure that not only do I start 2008 where I left 2007, but accelerate my efforts to publish content that is genuinely of interest and adds value to people’s lives - more often

To that end, I hope to be more active than ever with Twitter, this blog, Facebook, Seesmic and whatever else comes my way in 2008.

So Google’s purchase of Jaiku has happened and I am delighted.

It is a bit of the VHS versus Betamax battle - but where the better format wins!

Jaiku is a much more accomplished, micro-blogging tool. It offers post comments/threads, groups, post/comment rss feed, external feed importing, embedable post icons, groups and fantastic mobile functionality (there’s probably a load more too!).

The one thing it has always lacked is a vast user-base, which Twitter has in abundance. Yet Twitter has almost NO functionality other than erm…search and rss.

As a predominantly mobile application, with a larger customer base, one can’t help wonder why Google hasn’t bought Twitter instead (to go with the Gphone no doubt!)

I sincerely hope that Google’s purchase of Jaiku really opens the application up to the users it deserves - it is significantly better than Twitter and the more users it gets, the better.

Tags: jaiku, twitter, gphone

Update: The irony of Robert launching a conversation about Jaiku on Twitter was not lost on me, nor was the use of Friendfeed to carry out the conversation . Robert used FF to discuss why Jaiku has not taken off as a Micro-blogging tool, when the always-down and featureless Twitter remains so popular.

The discussion ranges from “horrible green colour” to “closed network” (but surely on this basis, any network that requires a login is closed?” but I see so many compelling reasons FOR Jaiku, namely and not exclusive to:

Fantastic mobile client
Location-awareness
Groups
Feeds (image and text)
Great UI (for threaded conversations)

As I suggested earlier this week, FF’s room feature may in fact spell the end for Jaiku (although many would argue that Google was the end for them!) but the direction of the conversation is absolutely turning towards FF as the bridge between the gap.

Twitter = Frequently down, featureless, massive user base
Jaiku = Occasionally slow, feature-rich, few users
Friendfeed = Always-up, good speed, growing (quickly) community, feature-rich

Proof, if proof were ever required, that Robert Scoble has a bigger brain than the rest of us:

Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.

source:
(Guardianonline)
With 4,999 facebook friends, it is obvious that Robert is able to process many more relationships that most normal human beings. Robert, I salute you! On a more sensible note, I find it interesting how important this 150:5 ratio is when you consider that Facebook adapts your friend list according to the frequency of contact and similarities between, groups of friends. Does this enhance or reduce our ability to carry out relationships with a greater number of people? Is it better to have fleeting relationships with more people or closer relationships with fewer people? I don’t think Facebook necessarily solves this problem, but with its adaptive friendship algorithm (where you see less news from people you don’t contact regularly), it certainly helps meaning we can all be a bit more like Robert!

Update 129/07/: Robert has published that Facebook now helps him decide which friends are worth adding by indicating how many friends he already has in common withe the person looking to be added! Cool. More reason again for Robert to be able to manage more contacts than anyh other human being!

Admit it, since the outing of Fake Steve, it just isn’t the same is it?

E-consultancy reports on a Quantcast report which shows that some facebook widget-developers are seeing three-fold increases in traffic to their websites.

THREE TIMES THE TRAFFIC

• In the this period Slide has seen its global reach triple, while daily global unique visitors have grown from 753,000 to more than 2.3m, an increase of 207%.

• HotorNot has doubled its global reach, boosting daily traffic by 152%, from 289,000 to more than 722,000.
• RockYou has also tripled its reach, and daily visitor numbers have risen by 339%, from 286,000 to more than 1.3m.
• The FT reports that Bay Partners is looking to make up to 50 investments of between $25,000 to $250,000 (£12,000 to £120,000) to help developers build Facebook applications.
• The online payments service Paypal is asking for developers to create a Facebook application that uses PayPal, with a $10,000 prize for the winner.

HotorNot, Slide and RockYou are all enjoying the facebook effect (March ’07 saw 18 million users. July 07 saw numbers increase to 35 million!).

Just because you may not be a developer, don’t think you can’t compete. Coming up with the idea is what makes this work. People who get “it” are essential.

Maybe you are an online clothing retailer. Think outside the box. Think like your customers, what do they enjoy? What do they like talking about? Who do they speak to? What is on their profiles? What other applications do they use? What are their aspirations? Think how you can meet all or most of these needs and help them communicate your product or service in ways they already communicate and you’re halfway there.

Tags: facebook, widgets, growth, online, littlewoods, shop direct

The Twitter blog is reporting that US Senator, John Edwards will be answering questions in a webcast on his own site. He has asked Twitter users to post questions to @johnedwards in advance.

Whilst not exactly a commercial idea, it demonstrates the usefulness of Twitter as an engagement tool in an environment largely domniated by blogs and press releases.

As the discussion over twitter/micro-blogging/moblogging grows, this looks to be a great way to reach audiences wherever and whenever they are.

Steve Rubel’s recent monkey and blogging post as well as a recent topic on the Strumpette facebook group has got me thinking about blogging, where we are with it and what, if anything is next.

For me, blogging in its present "web log" format is definitely on the decline. From memory the last Dave Sifry State of The Blogosphere demonstrated that blogging had reached a plateau.

With the emergence of facebook and twitter though, blogging as a term to describe conversations between people is on the increase.

What I find really exciting is the whole moblogging scene. I think that with the mass proliferation of mobile internet worldwide, not just in the US, moblogging as a way of communicating your thoughts, ideas, experience, sights and sounds in a flash is going to explode.

Mobile internet will allow a whole new way of communicating everything we see and hear…I am willing to share my ideas with anyone who has a nice office and a few hundred grand to spend developing it!!!

Tags: blogs, blogging, twitter, facebook, moblogging, strumpette