The Evolution of the Blog

As a social intelligence firm, we do a lot of research; that’s our life blood. So naturally, we look at trends and broader “uses” of Social Media technologies. Blogs are a key element in our research and here’s what we noticed this past year in how blogs have evolved.

A recent study by PEW Internet suggests about 11% of online people in the U.S. actively blog and of that only about 23% actually read blogs. Our findings are similar though we note Canada has a higher % of bloggers active. What we wanted to look at however, was the least and most successful blogs; how they have evolved in terms of architecture and usage.

Length: We found that of the most successful blogs, 87% tended to be 250 words or less in length for each posting. The longer the paragraphs, the less successful the blog.

Links: Blogs with higher search engine rankings have more outbound links with an average of 3.5 outbound links per blog post.

Video Blogs: Video blogs (vlogs) over 3 minutes in length tend to be viewed less. Our study group reported they  would view a video blog an average of 64 seconds.

Comments: The top blogs in our research saw an average of 10 comments per posting across the board. We noted that 75% of the time these were simple statements of agreement and 8% of the time a form of conversation would take place in the comment sections. We also noted that 22% of the time in comments, they would go off topic. With video blogs, comments tended to be shorter (4-8 words 92% of the time) than on text blogs.

Media Mix: We noted that bloggers who mix images, video and text had a higher rate of comments (31.4% of the time) than plain text.

Business Blogs: Here we looked at blogs written “by” a business, that is, not an individual who is a consultant, but a business with multiple employees, even an enterprise. They averaged less outbound links (1.5) per post and had an average of 3 comments per post and less engagement. We distinctly separated business blogs because they skewed our findings. We also found businesses tended to be less frequent in posting (62% less) than individuals and only 14% of business blogs ever had the author respond to comment strings after a post.

Our summary is that blogs have become shorter and “snappier” as our online attention span seems to be getting shorter as well. The comprehensive data is for clients, but we wanted to share the highlights of our findings.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Social Media & The Impact on Corporate Governance

In 2001, market regulators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. required public companies to simultaneously issue press releases to the Web and the newswire. In addition, any public meetings were to be broadcast to the Web via video feeds. All this before the rise of Social Media in a significant way. The bulletin boards (newsgroups) for discussion on public companies have been rampant for years, Stockhouse being among the pioneers.

My days running communications for a public company at the turn of the century saw us monitoring those newsgroups every day. Some days it was hard to not tap a condemning response to the idiocy of some of the comments and speculations made there. But other issues became apparent, among them was the damage that could happen when an employee spoke of something to a friend who then posted to the BullBoard on that company – this could wreak havoc on a stockprice; and nearly ended up in a line employee being fired once.

This was several years ago. It’s not about to get better. Public companies will face even greater challenges with Social Media in the years to come. Regulators may eventually require public companies to also post information to Social Networks, the same time they issue a press release. Video’s might have to be posted to several video networks and across mobile platforms as well.

Given how the content is both consumed, shared and managed across these channels, public companies are going to face complexities in shaping, distributing and monitoring those messages. What if the company must also issue notices across microblogging platforms like Twitter?

What will public relations and investor relations practitioners have to to consider if such issues arise? Increasingly, companies that thought they didn’t really have to concern themselves with the Web beyond marketing, will soon find out differently.

2010 will, I think, see some interesting changes to governance on communications issues for public companies.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Ethnography in Social Media: Language

From Ebonics to Standard English (SE) to regional dialects, accents and contractions – all are elements of our daily lives in an urban setting.The larger the city you live in, whether it’s the U.S., Canada or Europe, the more ethnic groups we find and the bigger the challenge in Social Media engagement. Executing a Social Media campaign in one language is hard enough, crossing multiple cultures in one urban area is another. Continue reading »

The Echo Ratio for Social Media Analysis

Today we’ve added a new metric to our mediasphere360 Social Media monitoring and analysis tool; we call it the Echo Ratio. So what’s that? Quite simply, we look at Social Media marketing campaigns or activity that we monitor for clients and can measure the viral uptake of a campaign, meme or discussion topic being monitored.

In Social Media marketing campaigns and with any meme or hot topic, the content delivered starts somewhere; someone “tweets” it out, posts to YouTube or similar and then finds Conversation Igniters to start the spread. In some cases it’s just a blog that someone posts and it takes off like wildfire. This often happens with high profile bloggers/thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Godin or Beth Harte. Continue reading »

Social Networking & The Enterprise: The Biggest Challenge

The biggest challenge on implementing Social Networking technologies in larger organizations is not the technology; it’s the people and the communications processes they use. We’ve found this in several instances now on consulting projects. Social Technologies are disruptive to current organizational communications. I’ve already posited about the potential decrease in the need for middle management earlier this year. Continue reading »