Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”

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I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).

Blogging NAMA

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My buddy Chuck has only been blogging for a few months but he caught on fast. This week he was at the annual meeting of the National Agri Marketing Association (NAMA) and blogged everything that moved and handed out a bunch of “You’ve been blogged by ZimmComm” T-shirts.

The folks that knew about blogging we’re impressed he was covering. Those that had never heard the term (Don’t ask me how that’s possible) will remember they heard it from him first. I kept checking the official NAMA website for news from their meeting. Yawn. The days of posting a few pix and a news release a week after the event are over. And out.

Not podcasting.

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Mark Ramsey (Radio Marketing Nexus) explains the difference between posting mp3’s for download and podcasting:

“…podcasting represents the passive movement of audio to your iPod without having to download it yourself. If you think that’s not different then consider the difference between going out to a restaurant and having your meal delivered to you at home.”

Another one of those things you have to experience to understand.

Archos PMA430

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“The new Archos PMA430 is a 30GB multimedia player (music, photos, videos), an audio and video recorder, a PDA, a wireless Web browser, and a game machine. In fact, it’s everything but a cell phone and camera. At $750 street, the PMA430 costs as much as a notebook computer. But it does just about everything you’d want a multimedia computer to do, and you can slip it into a jacket pocket.”

–PC Magazine review

XM’s America Left now Air America Radio.

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XM Satellite Radio announced Monday it has signed a multi-year content agreement with Air America Radio, making XM the exclusive satellite radio network for the left-leaning radio network. Financial terms were not disclosed. When the deal begins in May, Air America Radio will no longer air on Sirius Satellite Radio, which has 1.2 million subscribers to XM’s nearly 3.8 million.

Have you seen Left of the Dial, the excellent HBO documentary about the start-up of Air America? Painful but I could not look away.

Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario

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“In the April 4 print edition of Advertising Age, columnist Bob Garfield laid out a sweeping vision of an advertising industry caroming toward chaos and disruption wrought by the digital media revolution. Boiled down, his theory goes something like this:

The marketing industry is currently whistling past the graveyard and largely ignoring signs of massive, fundamental changes in how the business of mass marketing will be conducted in the near future. The broadcast TV model is working less well each year and will eventually cave in on itself as it reaches ever-fewer viewers with a fare of low-quality programming and mind-numbing clutter. Marketers will increasingly abandon it. But despite their glitzy promise, the aggregate of new digital technologies — from Web sites and e-mail to cell phone content and video on demand — lack the infrastructure or scale to support the minimum amount of mainstream marketing required to smoothly sustain the U.S. economy. The result, as the old systems are abandoned and the insufficient new systems struggle to carry an impossible advertising load, is what Garfield calls “The Chaos Scenario” — a period of serious disruption moving like a tsunami through the marketing business as well as the economy and the broader society itself.”

I’ve been unable to find the full article but did find a report about the article (audio – transcript) at OntheMedia.org.

I might have mentioned this before but it bears repeating. My dad was a radio guy for 30+ years and I’ve been at it –in one form or another– for 33 years. Radio has been “berry, berry good to me.” And during the dozen years I worked in local radio, I estimate I wrote and/or produced 60,000 commercials. And I believed they “worked” for the advertisers who paid for them. And they believed they worked. And many of them did work. But I now wonder if wasn’t a little like believing the wine turned into blood. A matter of faith, based on… faith. Commercial transubstantiation.

Word of mouth was probably always more effective than radio or TV or newspaper ads. But how many people can one person talk to in a day? Not so many in 1955. In 2005… with a website… you can reach a lot of folks. And when Doc Searls says he likes this IBM Thinkpad, I believe him. Or Halley Suitt recommends an author. Or Chris Pirillo tells me he likes his iRiver mp3 player… I believe them. Because I “know” and trust them.

When I’m shopping for a (fill in the blank), I go online and read the reviews of real people. And yes, some shrewd marketing type could spoof me with a bogus review, but a hundred (a thousand!) others would have a different opinion. It’s getting hard to lie/exagerate/bullshit your way to a sale. Bob Garfield said it much better:

“The total democratization of media, combined with ultra-targeted ads consumers actually opt to see. We, the people, cease to be demographics. We become individuals again.”

Practical Living Will

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I, Steve Mays, being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by any artificial means. Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of peckerhead politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it.

If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and ask for a cold beer, it should be presumed that I won’t do so ever again. When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my spouse, children and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day. Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn business, and pay attention instead to the health, education and future of the millions of Americans who aren’t in a permanent coma and who nonetheless may be in need of nourishment.

Under no circumstances shall any politicians butt into this case. I don’t care how many fundamentalist votes they’re trying to scrounge for their run for the presidency in 2008, it is my wish that they play politics with someone else’s life and leave me alone to die in peace. I couldn’t care less if a hundred religious zealots send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me. I don’t know these people, and I certainly haven’t authorized them to preach and/or crusade on my behalf. They should mind their own damn business,too.

If any of my family goes against my wishes and turns my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back from the grave and make his or her existence a living hell.

— Author unknown