Rohit Bhargava offers more sound advice based for working with bloggers http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2007/02/read_this_befor.html. His five principles for marketers interested in getting a product into the hands of bloggers to talk about:
- Be selective and choose bloggers for a reason (industry, subject matter, previous posts, etc.).
- Tell bloggers why you chose them – and help them understand that it was exclusive.
- Require full disclosure from the blogger about what you have given them.
- Don’t be afraid to ask them to write about their experience with it (positive or negative).
- If they don’t write about it, there is probably a reason – so just let it go.
And PodTech’s Marketing Voices — host Jennifer Jones is the Terry Gross of Social Media — has an interesting interview with David Hornik, general partner at August Capital. As early-stage investors in companies like Microsoft, August knows what makes great companies, and Hornik serves as its social media expert.
[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/02/PID_002021/Podtech_MV_Hornik.mp3&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/marketingvoices/technology/1253/august-capitals-david-hornik-on-social-media&totalTime=1147000&breadcrumb=3F34K2L1]
Long Tail author Chris Anderson blogs “Don’t Confuse Media With Media Institutions” http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/the_one_thing_e.html.
“First, let’s agree that “media” is anything that people want to read, watch or listen to, amateur or professional. The difference between the “old” media and the “new” is that old media packages content and new media atomizes it. Old media is all about building businesses around content. New media is about the content, period. Old media is about platforms. New media is about individual people. (Note: “old” does not mean bad and “new” good–I do, after all, run a very nicely growing magazine/old media business.)
The problem with most of the companies Skrenta lists is that they were/are trying to be a “news aggregators”. Just as one size of news doesn’t fit all, one size of news aggregator doesn’t either.
Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don’t visit “news sites” or use a “news aggregator”. I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or “help” me by defining what’s news and what isn’t. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn’t call most of it news at all. I will probably never visit any of the sites Skrenta mentions, and never did visit the ones that are now defunct.
In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomena is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomena.”
Movin' Ahead 