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Asia Pacific bloggers speak!

We’ve just announced the results of a survey of more than 125 bloggers across eight Asia Pacific countries.  And while I’m a great believer in Chris Anderson’s first rule of the blogosphere, paraphrased as “…don't generalize about the blogosphere.” I’m afraid I’ll have to do a little generalizing when looking at the results.

First up, it is clear that APAC bloggers want to hear from PR people.

This comes as a great relief for those of us actively engaging with bloggers across Asian countries. 

But it also presents a great challenge, as the survey went on to point out that we (the PR industry) seem unable to consistently give the bloggers what they want. 

While, for example, 52% of the sample pool wanted online video, and 48% wanted charts and graphs, it appears that, instead, bloggers have been spammed with traditional press materials and other unsuitable documents.

Comments on content included: “Those who contact me should not be lost in their own jargon” and “What they talk about should be relevant to my blog”.

This is commonsense but it seems PR agencies in Asia are breaking some of the cardinal rules of communication by simply not taking the time to understand their audiences.

Another interesting finding was that bloggers were happy to hear from anyone representing a company, as long as it was the person closest to the story. In particular, they wanted to hear from active bloggers or those prominent in the blogger community.

This got me thinking about the Asian 'spokesperson of the future'. This person may not be the managing director or product manager who has traditionally spoken with mainstream media.

My advice to Asian companies looking to engage with this increasingly influential audience is to determine who's already blogging within their businesses and groom these active participants to become active company representatives.

PR folks should also consider that most Asian bloggers are part-timers, with 67% of bloggers spending fewer thatn eight hours of each working week blogging. Knowing this, it is critical for Asia Pacific PR people to plan activities outside of normal working hours.

Invitations to traditional midday press conferences will likely go unanswered while also running the risk of being posted on as worst practice PR examples.

The single biggest finding was, in essence, something I hope we already knew.  It is critical for PR people to know their audiences, know what they are interested in, offer them unique information, and know how they like to be engaged with.

Last word comes (appropriately) from one of the respondents: “Bloggers are the new media, they are not to be treated like second-class journalists or expected to behave like traditional journalists. It's a whole new landscape and PR people should learn to accept it.”

- Jeremy Woolf, Hong Kong

In a global view on social media - Asia rules

Another important study that hasn't got enough attention in the PR blogosphere. Back in May, Universal McCann issued the second wave of their global surveys tracking the impact of social media. At the time, only Neville Hobson highlighted a couple of the important findings as they had been reported by Brand Republic. He couldn't get hold of the study itself, though. Today it can be easily downloaded from Universal McCann's site.

There is substance to this report: in January and February 2007, 500 regular 16-54 Internet users were sampled in each of the following 21 markets: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Greece, Russia, USA, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Australia. 9,460 people completed the survey. Universal McCann estimates that these markets represent 75 % of the 500 m frequent Internet users worldwide.

Here is a summary of the findings I found most important:

1.) Blogging

• 339 m blog readers worldwide
• 172 m blog writers
• US still dominates blog readers with 63.9 m, China is close with 53.3 m (at an Internet penetration of only 10 %!)
• China already has the largest number of blog writers (38.63 m), with a clear lead over the US (26.75 m)
• Blogs have become mainstream: in all but 2 of the 21 markets at least 50 % of regular Internet users are reading blogs. (Pakistan and Germany are the exceptions.)
• US and Europe are showing signs of saturation (with the exception of the notorious blog laggards in Germany), the growth in South East Asia is dramatic
• Personal blogging drives usage in Asia with interactivity levels being high. Many talk to few.
• Compared to Asia interactivity levels in the US and Europe are lower and topics are not as personal. Few talk to many.
• The attitudes towards blogging have improved worldwide: 60 % see it as a positive form of expression, 40 % view it as an important social tool, 34 % trust bloggers opinions and 33 % believe that companies running blogs impact their perception positively. However, the
• attitudes vary greatly between China on the positive end and Germany, the US, the UK and Australia on the negative end (see graph).  While these differences are significant, they are differences on a high level. Even in Germany, the least enthusiastic country when it comes to blogging, 1.27 m people arewriting blogs, 1.27 m public voices that simply didn't exist only a decade ago.

2.) Creation and consumption of multimedia content

• 330 m online video viewers worldwide. 65 m in the US, 49.7 m in China, 38 m in Japan and Korea combined, 38 m in 5 big European countries combined. The global average for watching video clips is 63 %. Video already beats audio.
• 124 m downloading podcasts. 33 m alone in China.
• Across the board the interest in the creation of multimedia content is high: music (25 %), video (23 %) and radio (16 %), but the target audience for this content is mainly family and friends.
• Live streaming is still more popular than podcasts. Video podcasts have the same reach as audio podcasts.

3.) Social Networking

• 194 m manage a social network profile. The penetration is highest in Brazil (75 %), followed by Mexico and China. The US (33 %), UK, Germany, Italy and France show less than half the penetration of Brazil.
• The US is still the largest social networking market (41 m), followed by China (30,97 m). These numbers are much lower than the ones claimed by social network owners. Possible reasons: double accounts and the Universal McCann survey only counted 16 - 54 Internet users, i.e. no teens younger than 16 and no business users.
• The emerging Internet world is driving social networks as tools to meet new people, and the space is dominated by 16-24's and students.

4.) What's next?

• Looking at the current overall global use of social media, you probably  won't be surprised to see blogging and watching online videos in the lead position. Surprising to me, RSS feeds do have a very low adoption rate.
• It's interesting to see what's next on the agenda of regular Internet users: VoIP and downloading podcasts (video ahead of audio).

Conclusions
Overall this study is rich with interesting insights.

It's great that it looked at social media beyond blogging, even if it's view on social media tools is still pretty limited. For instance, there is no mention of review portals, messaging boards, wikis, online games or virtual worlds.

It is also great that the study provided a global perspective. It has made clear how the social web is spreading globally, but with strong local characteristics determined by the respective socio-economic environment. E.g. the fact that personal blogging is so big in China reflects both the new sense of community people are getting from this tool, but also the limitation that they can't talk about politics or other general issues in public.

The data of this study confirm the reality of the social web and start to map it out in its global context. Internet users across the globe are highly interactive on a growing multitude of social media platforms. While most of the developed world has reached saturation with a couple of more established tools such as blogging or video sharing sites, the developing countries, in particular in Asia, are still driving their use at a dramatic pace. Business communicators who want to engage with today's Internet users will have to meet them there, and on the users' terms.

Georg Kolb

Technorati Tags: social media, global, Universal McCann

At the end of the blog hype - the bigger picture emerges

Do you remember that "blog" was Merriam Webster"s word of the year 2004? You will also recall that the blogosphere still got a lot of attention last year. E.g. Business Week declared on its cover in May 2005 that “Blogs Will Change Your Business”, Forbes warned of the “Attack of the Blogs” in a title story in November, and countless conferences and events on blogging were held throughout the year. It seems, however, that 2006 might be the year when the hype on blogs is finally over. A couple of weeks ago, many international blogging luminaries met for the reboot8 conference in Copenhagen. When it was over, one of them, Hugh McLeod, gratefully observed (see post on June 4th) that they hardly had spoken about blogs or the blogosphere.

Why is that? Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that blogs are now less important or that the growth of the blogosphere has slowed. It hasn’t. They are just beginning to put blogs into the larger context they deserve. Blogs are only one of many new media tools that empower a rapidly growing number of people to have a public voice and interact with their peers. For that reason we always preferred to talk about peer-to-peer media rather than blogs only. Many others call this larger context Web 2.0. It was O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International who planted this term in the public discussion with the first of the annual Web 2.0 Conferences in October 2004. They recognized that the use of the internet had reached a new phase that created a platform for innovation and new business models which clearly was bigger than blogs. Since then Web 2.0 has made a quite impressive career as a term in the public discussion and is now in a good position to become the next word of the year.

While the discussions on Web 2.0 certainly helped to put new media tools into a broader perspective, there are still many open questions. I believe there are three closely related dimensions to be explored and integrated: technology, business and society. So far, Forrester’s brief report on “Social Computing” from February 2006 is the best effort in this direction I am aware of. Forrester’s researchers realized that there is a whole host of peer-to-peer technologies like blogging, RSS, file sharing, open source software, podcasting, search engines or wikis which increasingly shape the way we socialize. They also acknowledged that social forces drive the development and adoption of these technologies. Social computing is their term to capture the way technologies and social dynamic come together creating a shift of power from institutions like governments or corporations to communities of socially connected people. Everyone is empowered to connect with others who share an interest in something. From Forrester’s perspective, these digitally powered communities of interest do have a major impact on businesses. E.g. they can be a source of innovation in product development and marketing, but they also decrease brand-loyalty.

Forrester’s report creates a framework that is sensitive to the bigger picture, but it still leaves many fundamental questions open. E.g. what does the empowerment of communities mean to our socio-economic environment? Does it even support a shift to communism? I certainly don’t think so, but a recent discussion on the site of the Edge Foundation proved that the answer is not as obvious as you might expect. In an article entitled “Digital Maoism” computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier tried to show that the empowerment of communities means “nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise”, posing a real threat to the concept of individuality. Lanier’s piece received responses from many internet celebrities such as Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson or Dan Gillmor rendering his major assertion pointless, but it clearly highlighted the need for discussion and inspired some interesting thoughts. The discussion is certainly worth a read, even if the question how community and individuality can find the right balance in peer-to-peer environments remains unanswered.

Another fundamental question that needs a lot of further investigation is how intellectual property rights will have to evolve. Peer-to-peer media environments are all about participation, intellectual property is all about exclusivity. While it presents a huge opportunity for businesses to tap into their communities driving innovation, what does that mean for their business model? Let’s take a look at a simple example. If someone writes a book in continuous exchange with his readership on a blog, does that change the concept of authorship and the respective copyright? Will we by default see more and more tasks turn into open source projects? If so, how will business models look like? And what will that mean to patents and licensing?

At the end of the blog hype, these questions on the bigger picture are emerging. We will need better answers to them than we currently have, if we want to make peer-to-peer tools successful for businesses, beneficial to society and efficient as technology.

Georg Kolb

Technorati tags: blogs, Web 2.0, reboot8.0, Forrester, social computing

Business Blogging: U.S. vs. Europe

I was directed to an interesting research report (via Micropersuasion to Neville Hobson) this morning, conducted by the UPS Europe Business Monitor - a survey of 1,459 business leaders from 15,000 companies located in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK - showing, among other findings, the level of understanding and use of blogs by responding executives.

While responses indicate that European companies are behind the U.S. in their awareness and adoption of blogs - the actual adoption of blogs by those responding is quite low; 2% responded that they write blogs; 11% said they read blogs and 37% said it wasn't something they were aware of - it's hard to compare apples to apples directly, because at the current time there's no (at least as far as I'm aware, but please enlighten me if there is) comparable study of the U.S. that asks the question in quite the same way.

However, we can at least look to sources like the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to see that still, only 4.6% of Fortune 500 companies operate a corporate blog. When compared to 2% of European executives reporting they blog, it is higher - but still not so much higher as to show that either region has truly grasped the potential blogs offer.

But I can say, at least anecdotally, that the findings of the UPS survey are generally in alignment with what we find among our clients' companies. Awareness of blogs is growing, but not yet so much among corporate executives. In fact, the conversations we have are typically being driven by PR, marketing and product groups as they seek new and powerful ways to communicate with customers. Executives are getting interested, but I'd venture a guess that some of those 15,000 executives who say they don't blog, aren't really aware etc. actually work for companies that do use blogs!

So what's the lesson here for communicators? I want to stress two things. One is that no matter where your company is, it's still very early days for peer media in the corporate environment. And if Europe is, at the moment, behind the U.S., once they grasp a concept they will quickly drive towards optimum use; especially in those markets such as Germany and the Netherlands, where interest is at fever pitch. So you're not really behind (at least not that behind), even if the statistics make it seem that way.

And second, corporate use of peer media should be holistic. Peer media understanding, a peer media culture, needs to be embraced at all levels in an organization to truly infiltrate and ring authentically in the blogosphere. So the process for public relations starts with education, not only for PR and marketing groups, but for executives as well.

Blog Balance - A Long Friday Post

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'd revisit some of the questions raised by attendees of our recent peer media event in Seattle, and here's one:

How do busy PR professionals make time for reading blogs or blogging, and how much time does it take?

Scoble answered (paraphrased, you can download the podcast here) that it doesn't take that much time, he follows 1000 blogs on his RSS feed and makes several posts a day.

While I believe that once you've immersed yourself in the blogosphere, it becomes less time consuming because you've already filtered out the blogs that aren't relevant to your business. And if you're blogging, you've figured out the mechanics of the technology etc. Everything is already set up.

But if you're just getting started, it is time consuming. Very. And I wouldn't underestimate just how much time it does take. For perspective, and based on my personal experience, when I first started following blogs - and it happened organically - I began to follow areas of personal interest and blogs of friends etc. And sometimes not even fully distinguishing the difference between some of them and any other media property I might look at everyday. There were five or six that I followed, but I would easily spend an hour or more a day just reading those and researching others. 

Then at the height of my learning curve, I was following easily 20-30 a day - proabably spending 2-3 hours a day on all aspects of peer media. RSS is a great thing, BUT it has limitations. For some reason I actually like looking at ads on blogs, and some blogs need to be experienced in person. Gapingvoid is one of those. You really need to be there. So even if you're using RSS, you still need to a) visit some blogs personally and b) be on the lookout for new blogs. That takes time.

And then there are all the tools - several launching every week - and improvements to existing tools. Keeping abreast of that adds another layer of complexity to gaining a full understanding of what's happening online.

But I'm fortunate to have a very supportive employer who understands the value of the knowledge we gain collectively when someone focuses interest and time, and the benefit that's provided to clients when we foster an environment where people can pursue ideas.  And I spend some time on my employer's dime every day keeping myself informed. It's like following your key traditional media channels, understanding what someone like Walt Mossberg writes about. Same with blogs.

But communications people are trying to find balance - balance between the demands of the traditional expectations of their roles and getting up to speed on social media and everything it means for public relations. And shifting some focus. How do you economize?

Start by listening. Use Technorati, Blogpulse or IceRocket to find a few bloggers that write about your business or technology. No matter what your company does, someone else is paying attention. Read those blogs and let them lead you to others. Your understanding will grow incrementally over time, but getting started is the key.

Cathy

God bless India, my home sweet home

Mumbai: I don't know which is the lucky break. The fact that I was born when I was, the fact that I chose to be a communications professional or the fact that I was born with the right interests or inclination for a communications professional! I just know I feel incredibly lucky being a communications professional. And I am a megalomaniac enough to think that the world should feel lucky I was born.

Why all this gush and mush about luck? Simple! It's budget day in India today, the day to contemplate about regress, progress and all such economic things and movements. It's amazing for me to have grown up in India at the time it has been (and continues to be) one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

This meant that I have seen the time when buying a car (read only either a Fiat or Ambassador) meant booking one and waiting for it to come seven years later, to now when you can walk into a showroom and choose the color you want from the line up from almost every car maker worldwide. It also means having watched the incredible communication revolution that hit globally, and progressively at the same speed in India as elsewhere in the world. I remember us getting the first B&W TV in the entire neighbourhood when I was about 3 years old, VCRs when about 10, cable and satellite TV when about 14, used my first PC at 16, logged on to the internet first when 21 and got my yahoo and hotmail ids when 23, became a chat addict for a while at 25 and turned blogger at 28. My son learned to navigate with a mouse when he was one and at six now surfs his way in and out of the cartoonnetwork.coms and disney.coms that offer various child activity and entertainment.

Oof!! If you find that a very long winded, self-centred way to express my amazement at the progress of India and communication, think of it as an incredibly short autobiography. And I've left out the deluge of broadband, opening up of long distance telephony, wi-fi, prolifiration of mobile phones, WLL et al.....in the interest of keeping the yawns short.

The result of all this is the 24x7 individual, a 24x7 nation. And I am living in it at the right time, surfing the communication revolution at the heart of it being in the right profession. We are going places and the world is coming with us!

Madhuri

Hanging out with Robert Scoble and Joe Trippi

In advance of our peer media event yesterday in Seattle, I spent Tuesday evening hanging out with Robert Scoble, Joe Trippi, Joel Dreyfuss and Shel Israel. Text 100 sponsored the dinner to give each of the panelists an opportunity to meet before the event to sort out where each other stood on certain issues with respect to corporate blogging.

The discourse ranged from politics (Robert blogged about it here) to whether or not 'publicists' are obsolete, to the potential demise of traditional media (staunchly defended by Joel Dreyfuss). While there was some heated debated initially, (which in this case is a good thing) that quickly dissipated, giving way to consensus around a very important issue to our business: if you or your company view PR as being only about media relations, then you need to change your ways, because peer media has redistributed the power of influence.

And we could clearly see that this fact, and how to respond to it, was on the minds of the event attendees as comments and questions indicated that they were grappling with issues related to this power shift: how to identify who has influence in the blogosphere, how to measure ROI, how much resource to dedicate to following blogs, (an issue on which Scoble and I were split - which I'll address in a seperate post), and how to convince senior management that PR should not be (as if it ever really was) only about media relations.

And these questions can impact larger companies (only 4% of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs), because they have become highly specialized in their approaches to communications - for example, people (and budgets) are sometimes dedicated only to media relations, and this fact makes it harder to redistribute both dollars and human activity to peer media.  This is where we see smaller companies having some advantage (but only at the moment, and certainly not in all cases) because they tend to be able to take a more fluid approach to moving both dollars and activity around to match the opportunity peer media presents. For example, all of marketing can be just one or two people who realize starting a blog is a much more time and cost efficient channel to talk with customers than a printed newsletter.

But I think it's important - as all the panelists pointed out - to understand that peer media is not an all or nothing proposition right now. At this point, if you and your company aren't involved, you can begin easily by listening - reading blogs to learn what is being said about your company by bloggers. Once you understand the conversation, you see where you can make a contribution. And that only takes a little bit of time, and committment.

But enough for the moment - over the coming days I'll take a look at some of the other topics we discussed and also get the podcast up.

I can't thank our panelists enough for their contribution, it truly was an honor to be involved in this event.

Cathy

Text 100 CEO Blog

Our CEO, Aedhmar Hynes, launched her blog today. Aptly titled Monday Morning, it will be a representation of her thoughts taken after a weekend of catching up on worldwide business, PR industry and client news. Her first post, 'Getting It' explores the similarities between the dot com era and the rise of the influence of the blogosphere, and makes her statement on the state of the PR industry in response to continued cynicism from noted bloggers and conventional media.

Initially she plans to post once a week, on Monday. And maybe sometimes on Tuesday......;)

Cathy

Seattle Peer Media Event - Filling Up

The Seattle peer media event is filling up quickly, but we still have a few spaces open for those who respond in the next couple of days.  See our original post about it here.

Also, on a related note, I submitted a request for free wine to the Stormhoek 100 Geek Dinners effort to launch Stormhoek in the US by giving away wine to bloggers for events they are holding. If we do manage to get some, we'll probably drink it all at the dinner the night before with Scoble, Trippi, Shel and Joel Dreyfuss. But if there's any left we'll send it to our San Francisco event that happens on the evening of the 23rd - because the Seattle event is a morning event, and well, most people drink mimosas and bloody marys at breakfast, but not wine....

English version of previous post

I wanted to bring your attention to an interesting article recently published in Germany's PRReport (the equivalent of PRWeek in Germany) and featuring some contribution from our own Georg Kolb) highlighting how weblogs have grown into serious online media in Europe.  Although the author is not precisely clear whether the statistics apply to only Germany or Europe overall, 89 percent of the overall communications managers haven't got a weblog strategy in place though 43 percent of them perceive weblogs as interesting. It is obvious that in Germany/in Europe many PR experts are unsure about weblogs and how they can make the best out of them.

At this point there is a huge difference between Europe and the United States in the adoption of blogs and other forms of peer media. In Europe we are still asking ourselves what weblogs are, but over in the United States, it is all about the management of weblogs and their usage. Beyond that, the question is to what extent weblogs compete with traditional media. Are they a risk for critical journalism? With regard to these questions it is interesting that, on the one hand, traditional media representatives are discussing the impact weblogs have on them. On the other hand, publishing houses invite their staff / editors to weblog. The editor also examined the commercial aspects of blogs, for example, how can companies make money blogging? Finally, the writer comes to the conclusion that corporate communications will be changing dramatically in future and that weblogs definitely will have an impact on this change.

Christine Vogl-Kordick, Text 100 Munich