- More than 145 million people—or 67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once per month.
- The number of people creating blogs in the US will reach over 35 million
But as the blogosphere grows, do we not need personal blogging standards? Tim O'Reilly caused a mild stir in the blogosphere when last year he proposed a Blogging Code of Conduct.
Note: This is entirely different to having company blogging and other social media standards.
For a good example of this, see IBM's social computing guidelines!
Now there are many reasons for this continued adoption of personal blogs (and perhaps for some, it is a kind of therapy). However, the current text/posting blogging method will not be the sole driver of this potential growth.
I believe that this rise in usage will be fuelled by:
1. Video Blogging:
This will be facilitated by:
- The ubiquitity of video cameras on mobile phones with the eventual convergence of the devices we now have.
- The availability of video sharing sites such as YouTube and their easy of use and production of online video.
- The adoption of social media by the younger generation, the same demographic who have the latest mobile phones
- The rise of celebrity video bloggers (e.g. Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom, a pioneer of video blogging or vlogging, who has recently returned to screens everywhere)
2. Other micro-blogging formats:
As I have mentioned in a previous posting on micro-blogging / micro-content, these new ways of communicating are growing in their popularity. Some are even calling this Blogging 2.0 and claiming this could be causing friction with the more established bloggers.
However, whatever the driver, blogging is here to stay in all its formats. Its strongly recommended that companies monitor the dialogue that is going on. Fail to understand this method of self-expression and you could be missing out!
4 comments:
More importantly, individuals should monitor what they say and what is being said about them in blogs or social networks sites and how that impacts what ranks against them on search engines - as this will impact your personal PR and reputation when you are going for jobs or competing for contracts and projects with companies.
Personal PR is going to be on the increase as a result of more blogging.
Elliefy
What tools would you suggest can be used to measure your personal PR?
Hayden
There are two things to consider:
1) Any communication that you make, whether it be formal on say a business blog but more importantly what you say informally on social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, etc. as what you say or post today may come back to haunt you tomorrow. So a picture of you getting totally drunk when you are in your twenties may come back to haunt you in your thirties!
2) It is worth just monitoring on a monthly basis what happens when you put your name in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Just in case there is anything that appears against your name which you are not happy with.
In this case, it is worth considering how to proactively manage results against your name (especially if your name is likely to be unique - like Hayden Sutherland :-)). And the earlier the better.
Consider setting up a business blog, a profile on LinkedIn and if you can act as a spokesperson or can comment in a press release for your business or even an organisation that you spend spare time on then this will mean that these "communications" are more likely to appear in the search results.
Elliefy
Wise words, thanks for commenting. I agree that personal branding and therefore the monitoring of that brand is going to become more important in the future. However the subject is not exactly new, see Tom Peters article from Fast Company from 11 years ago:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html
However, there are now a suite of professional social media monitoring tools out there for companies to monitor what is being said and even the sentiment behind those conversations. But as these service cost, finding the justification to monitor a personal brand is much harder.
http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/05/social-media-monitoring-analysis.html
However it is actually possible to do more than just occasionally trawl the main search engines using your own name as the keywords.
1. Setting up a Google alert in the news section is useful if you’re ever likely to appear in any press releases or white papers
2. Use tools such as http://www.blogpulse.com which are free and very useful
Note:
Having a fairly unique name (such as Hayden Sutherland) is both a help and a hindrance. People expect to find me when they type my name into Google, but imagine their surprise when they find myself and someone with almost the same name who is quite an outspoken rights activist…….
Hayden
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