Internet Marketing
The 4 Step Plan to Harnessing Youtube as a Marketing Channel
by: David Bain
The recent purchase of YouTube by Google was big news. Yet, people seem not to be surprised by Google’s move. After all, YouTube is a very promising video blogging site that is inviting more and more viewers by the minute. In the following years, YouTube definitely promises to attract more and more people and thereby become even more attractive to internet marketers and online businessmen.
You may know by now that YouTube is not just for personal, casual and out-of-this-world videos. The business industry has found a new business partner in the internet and specifically in online video blogging. Do you want to get the word out about your business online? Here’s how you can do it through YouTube and other video blogging sites like it.
— Getting Into the Tube
1. Prepare you business plan and identify your target market.
In your business plan, you must set out your objectives or what you wish to accomplish through YouTube. You may set a particular number of people becoming your subscribers in a day as your internet marketing objective. It can also be the number of people following the link to your home page and becoming your customers. It can also take the form of the number of people who reposts your video in their own blogs. It is important to set out a plan (objectives and the way to achieve them) so you will always be clear on what constitutes internet marketing success and how you can attain this success.
It is also important to identify your target market before launching an internet marketing campaign so you can be sure that YouTube is the site for you. YouTube has been mostly for teenagers and the younger set, but this is rapidly changing young professionals and middle-age people have now found their way to YouTube. If your products or services have a wide market base, then you can definitely use YouTube.
2. Accustom yourself with video making.
It is important that you know the technology behind video blogging so you can make videos that will stand out among the millions of videos in YouTube’s repository.
3. Make your video. Keep it short and do not forget to indicate that it is a short video on your business product once you upload it.
Remember to specifically indicate your product’s value to your target market and if possible have a catchy slogan at the end of your video. Don’t forget to aid your audio narration with a few subtitles to make your business goals clear and understandable to anyone who watches your video. Make it more interesting with a soundtrack that is relevant to your marketing message and that has universal appeal.
4. Upload it on YouTube and wait for results.
As much as possible make the online audience aware of your video. Send notifications through e-mails, newsletters, online blogs, groups, social networks and more.
What YouTube has to offer is the possibility and opportunity for others to view your video and become aware of your business. So stop stalling and start video blogging at YouTube!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Live Chat : Your New Online Salesperson
by Paul Sloan, Business 2.0 Magazine
Website operators are tapping the potential of instant messaging
as a new powerful sales tool.
A year or two ago, it looked like instant messaging and other forms of online chat had reached their full potential as a business tool. Millions of people were using IM to interact with corporate colleagues. Live chat had also become a fixture on websites, giving customers a way to inquire about products and receive answers in real time.
IM has continued to evolved since the Internet’s earliest days. Now some savvy website operators are finding that, when used tactfully, it can be a powerful way to boost sales – not just as a passive customer-service tool but as a way to engage customers, in the manner of a showroom salesperson. Erik Asarian, a real estate broker in Park City, Utah, installed a live chat box a year ago and credits it with adding $12 million in sales. “It’s become an amazing new profit center,” he says.
For all the advantages that come with selling on the Web, one disadvantage has constrained online merchants: They haven’t been able to approach customers as they’re shopping and pitch them on the spot. But live chat programs are beginning to change that, augmenting the IM functions with new surveillance capabilities that allow retailers to track, in real time, what pages you’re visiting and what links you’ve clicked. “It’s like having special glasses that let you see who’s serious and who’s not,” Asarian says.
To be a successful “closer,” a merchant first has to learn how to use live chat to create trust. Instead of pinging visitors with a standard greeting like “How may I help you?” – which many potential customers correctly interpret as nothing more than a sales come-on – Galper suggests a subtler alternative: “Hi, my name is Ari, sorry to interrupt… just wanted to make sure everything is making sense so far…” (Another basic IM sales rule: Never use periods; opt instead for the more conversational ellipsis.)
Next, he advises, rather than offering a sales pitch the moment the visitor expresses interest in a product, dig deeper into what he’s looking for. One possible line: “Can you tell me a little more about your situation…” The answers to such questions will also help you determine if the person is actually likely to make a purchase.
This might all sound obvious, but plenty of people still blow it. Ricky Breslin, who sells DVDs featuring hair-styling techniques at Braidsbybreslin.com, says he used to send messages to visitors too soon after they arrived, only to watch them flee within seconds. “It’s so easy to scare people away,” says Breslin, who runs the business from an office in Summerville, S.C. Lately he’s adopted a lower-key approach. The result: a 10 percent increase in sales, which average $50,000 a month. Now that’s money worth chatting about
Click here for more information>>
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )How to Bring Brand Recognition by Means of the Curiosity Factor
It’s easy to over-think a marketing campaign. A successful campaign does not have to be expensive, nor should it take years to plan.
Find out how thinking out of the box pays off…literally.
Challenge
Deciding on which marketing campaign to execute can be a daunting decision. Emmi felt the same decision weighing about the launch of the brand in the United States. How can we inform customers of the Emmi brand and how can we allow users to drive the content of our product? How can we generate curiosity around the Emmi brand name by means of a very simple marketing strategy – a strategy of planned curiosity? This is challenging task in a world of continual distractions. A billboard in Savannah, GA created by Titan, a local advertising group reads, “Tough times require fearless marketing.” This campaign proved that maxim true.
Campaign
Emmi is the second largest dairy producer in the world. In the Fall of 2007 a small team of marketers set out to promote Emmi Café Latte. In the competitive market of coffee and frozen lattes, changing customer loyal from one brand of coffee to another great poses a tremendous challenge. Consumers are creatures of habit. To ask someone to step out of their normal patterns
is near impossible. Due to the immediate nature of the Emmi marketing request, there was no time or money for a long research project to gauge customer intent. Instead, the marketing team was asked to do the near impossible: steal customers!
How do you tempt a prospective customer to try something new…something outside of the box? It was decided that Emmi’s motto, “Keep you going when you’re on the go” would need a swift kick and a loud introduction.
Step #1: Come up with a hook: it will bring them back.
To set the stage, several vintage refrigerators, referred to as “coolers”, were strategically placed on the streets of Downtown Chicago. These coolers were painted by local artists using bright, funky colors with the question, “What’s in the cooler?” painted on the front. To add even more personality, the coolers were equipped with speakers. When a casual passerby crossed the path of a cooler, it mysteriously spoke to the consumers! The key was local actors were hired and hidden in nearby locations to gently prod the passersby.
“What’s in the cooler?” A question that is far from complex, but intriguing; intriguing enough to spark the interest of 15,000 plus Chicagoans last October. “What’s in the cooler” sparked curiosity and raised eyebrows. This question would soon grab the attention of college students, young professionals, families, and senior citizens as they walked the streets of Chicago.
Chicagoans played along heroically with the bit and added local color by responding to the talking cooler as it harassed the walking public. Eventually the curiosity factor of what was in the talking fridge out-weighed the folly of participating in a conversation with a highly decorated, antique refrigerator!
Video taped conversations between the cooler and the Chicagoan went something like this:
Fridge: “Hi, how are you today? I’m doing fine, you know, just a talking fridge.”
Participant: “Can I open you?”
Fridge: I’d rather not – we just met. You guys ever talked to a fridge before? I have a question to ask you. What’s in the cooler? What do you think is inside of me? I’m not ready to open. October 5th I’m going to open up.
Step #2: Market, market, and then market some more.
The following methods were used to market Emmi to the public:
MySpace blogging and advertisements
Billboard signs
YouTube
Traditional media is established, but why not use the fastest growing marketing machine available on the planet today? The Internet and social networks provide segmented markets that are interested in your product, all one must do is utilize it to your benefit.
Using MySpace, blogs, texting and videos Emmi was able to flood the Internet with their brand and, at a minimum, influence the market to “check them out.” The curiosity factor was intense. Emmi corporate was just as excited as the marketing community as the launch date approached; they had no idea what to expect for the unveiling.
Step #3: The Revealing of “What’s in the cooler?”
On October 5th, 2007, in Chicago’s upscale Lincoln Park, Emmi was ready to reveal its Café Latte product and show the world what exactly was in the cooler. Emmi’s marketing team prepared for less than 1,000 guests to attend this event. Emmi’s product was handed out at the event to any and all attendees. Hundreds of the frozen lattes “specially, carefully roasted and then made into espresso coffee” would be distributed. Café Latte Cappuccino, Macchiato, Light, and Choco Latte would be sampled after the revealing. Customers would experience the “Espresso + Milk = Drink Different” taste.
Results
The results were unexpected and much more exciting than Emmi could have ever predicted. A campaign of such simplicity and using curiosity (and as before little used marketing avenues) could prove a talking, painted cooler a genius? 15,000 people witnessed the Emmi Café Latte reveal and all just to ease their troubled minds.
Emmi was not prepared for such success, but is confident that the marketing efforts and success points towards what has been known to be called the “Google killer”… MySpace.
Measuring Social Media
by: Nelson Bruton, Research Analyst, Interchanges.com
You can measure a social media campaign only after you determine the objective for the social media campaign. Influence and interaction and results are the ways in which a social media campaign can be measured. Each has quantitative and qualitative elements. Below are my initial thoughts on this subject. Please bear in mind that over time, there should be more to add to each category.
But for now:
INFLUENCE
Quantitative –
- Number of people in the network
- Number of networks/social communities/platforms
- Growth rate of your network
Qualitative –
- Who is in the network?
- What is the motivation for people joining the network?
- What ideas are discussed in the networks?
INTERACTION
Quantitative –
- Number of communication methods within a platform
- Number of scheduled tasks (e.g. messages, replies, comments, bulletins,
blogs, etc)
Qualitative –
- Types of communication being sent out
- Who are you targeting with a particular message?
RESULTS
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Quantitative –
- Number of leads generated
- Number of sales generated
- Number of new contacts made
- Revenue generated
Qualitative –
- Types of leads generated
- Types of contacts made
Social Networkers reach out more with cellphones
By Edward C. Baig, USA Today
Bree Warner frequents MySpace to connect with old friends, make new ones and drum up jobs. More often than not, the 27-year-old Los Angeles actress/photographer isn’t in front of a computer. Instead, she uploads pictures and taps into the celebrated social network from her Helio cellphone.
Between photo shoots or on the set, the phone “is really convenient because I use MySpace so much for networking,” she says.
So do her peers. “Almost everyone I know has a Sidekick or a BlackBerry, and I can only imagine how much they use it to check their MySpace/Facebook messages,” says Long Island graphics designer Liz Degen, 21.
The cellphone in your pocket or purse is becoming fertile territory for the hugely popular — some say over hyped — social-networking trend. Though social networks take different forms, they typically link folks with common interests and values. The mobile variety tends to appeal to the throngs of young people who have an insatiable desire to stay connected at all times.
Just as you receive e-mail and instant messages on your cell, you can now access the “status updates” and buddy profiles that are a fixture on social networks. Some start-ups are using location-based technologies to let cellular subscribers keep tabs on pals close by. Yet wireless carriers, handset makers and social-networking upstarts confront a challenge: turning mobile networking into a profitable venture.
Senior analyst Jill Aldort of the Yankee Group calls “mobile social networking a hot market with lukewarm potential.” She says just 8% of adult mobile phone owners in the USA regularly access mobile social-networking services and sees that rising to 20% in 2011. From subscription, browsing and messaging fees, Aldort says, U.S. carriers will take in about $1.5 billion in 2011, up from about $560 million this year. “That’s not a big number.”
For all its promise, mobile social networking “is where the Internet was in 1994,” says Tristan Louis, an analyst at TNL.net.
In many respects, mobile is a natural extension of the PC social-networking experience. Phones provide an immediacy not typically possible on a PC. “I think it’s going to be more pre-emptive, more spontaneous,” says Padmasree Warrior, Motorola’s chief technology officer.
Folks can comment on a restaurant, concert or dinner date during the activity. “People don’t want to wait until they get home to read about the latest exploits of their friends,” says Roger Entner, senior vice president at IAG Research. “And friends may not wait until they get home to tell them how the date went.”
Jyri Engeström, co-founder of mobile blogging site Jaiku, says, “Mobile social networking is more like ‘social peripheral vision.’ You have an idea what people who somehow matter to you are up to.”
Some networkers don’t even have a computer. Frederick Ghahramani, co-founder of AirG, which manages social-networking communities on Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile and other carriers, says 59% of its 20 million unique users around the world don’t own or share a PC.
Of course, mobile networkers encounter different obstacles than their PC comrades do. Typing on many handsets is a hassle. Many devices lack keyboards. Screens are small, coverage spotty.
“Plenty of times, and usually times I need it, service goes down and leaves me with nothing,” complains Anthony Dobrini. The junior at Stony Brook University in Long Island spends hours on his Sidekick promoting concerts part time through MySpace.
Tech giants push mobile
Through it all, name-brand tech companies are focusing on mobile. This summer, Nokia bought Seattle-area start-up Twango, a service that lets consumers share pictures and video captured over the phone.
After months of speculation about a Google Phone, Google last week showcased Android, an open platform for mobile devices that may well spur social applications. It came days after the release of OpenSocial in which Google teamed with MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks on a platform to spread social software applications across cyberspace.
Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, imagines, among other things, an instant-messaging-like buddy list that is “sorted by how close they are to me no matter where I am. That can be pretty cool.”
Google already owns Dodgeball.com, which keeps cellphone users in touch with friends in the same location. It also snapped up Jaiku and another start-up, Zingku, which lets people send “mobile fliers” and pictures to trusted friends.
Last month, Facebook unveiled a mobile platform to encourage its 80,000 developers to extend applications to phones. It also teamed with Research In Motion to put its service on BlackBerry smartphones. People can tag and upload photos and send Facebook invitations from their BlackBerry’s address book.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz says its mobile user base is growing faster than the website. As of the end of October, Facebook’s 4 million distinct active users across its mobile lineup generated more than 300 million page views. “Things that are inherently social are inherently mobile,” Moskovitz says.
Verizon Wireless is among the advertising partners Facebook announced last week. “We believe that there is an opportunity in social networking for consumers and businesses that mobility may uniquely provide,” Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson says. “All the ingredients for the stew seem to be there. What’s the secret sauce that makes it tremendous?”
Helio CEO Sky Dayton refers to mobile as “social networking 2.0.” The upstart carrier, jointly owned by EarthLink and South Korea’s SK Telecom, recognized the potential early on: MySpace was a core feature the moment Helio handsets became available in 2006.
Dayton says Helio’s average revenue per user is nearly $90, compared with the industry average of about $50. With only $200 million in annualized revenue and 140,000 members, Helio is tiny compared with rivals. Versions of MySpace are also on AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.
“Mobile is an important strategic growth initiative,” says Amit Kapur, vice president for business development at MySpace.
T-Mobile noticed that 85% of the Web page views on its youth-oriented Sidekick devices went to MySpace. Its new MySpace Mobile application, with a custom interface and real-time alerts, will be free until the end of the year, after which the carrier is expected to charge $1.99 a month.
Still, the path to profitability for mobile social-networking ventures is muddy.
Biz Stone, the co-founder of “microblogging” company Twitter, admits the company is spending more than it’s making. “We’re approaching this with restraint,” he says. Twitter hasn’t publicly committed to a business model for its mobile service, which is based around short, frequent messages that keep friends and family updated on what you are doing.
The Yankee Group’s revenue projections do not include potential advertising revenue, which Engeström of Jaiku believes is the most promising way for social-networking companies to strike gold: “If you get millions of users, that trumps other business models.”
Motorola’s Warrior says it could make money by selling devices that allow people with common interests to share information over “peer-to-peer” networks that bypass the traditional carriers. Kids on a school bus, for example, might share music, with content providers getting a portion of revenue.
Other opportunities:
•Business. You’re attending a conference and want to know if anyone in your network is close by. Or you want to get the skinny on a sales prospect. Lucian Beebe, director of product management at business-oriented social networker LinkedIn, says you shouldn’t have to go through several screens on a phone to find the answers.
Beebe says a mobile LinkedIn is likely to look very different from services that tend to be more socially or entertainment-oriented. “We’re not trying to create an application where people spend (a lot of) time,” he says. “We want to get you in, solve your problem and get you out as fast as possible.”
•Where are you? The chatter about mobile networking inevitably leads to a discussion of location-based technologies. Helio devices include Buddy Beacon, a service that can broadcast your whereabouts to friends.
“I may want to go for a burger tonight — are there any friends around?” asks Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing at uLocate in Boston, which powers the application for Helio.
The goal of MeetMoi, another service, is to turn the phone into Cupid. You upload your address, and it buzzes other singles in the area. Members can swap flirty text messages and arrange a rendezvous. It typically costs about $10 a month on top of your carrier’s messaging charges.
Mobile games producer Digital Chocolate is developing a social game called AvaPeeps FlirtNation on Boost Mobile. You create an avatar, or “Peep,” and flirt with other Peeps on MySpace, Facebook and your phone. The cost is about $5 a month after a free trial.
Sometimes you just want the advice of a friend. The Yelp service is built around real people writing restaurant, shopping and other reviews. “For us, the marriage of local content on the go is the holy grail,” says CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.
Instant gratification
Seattle start-up Pelago is in beta, or test mode, for its Whrrl “social discovery” service. When Whrrl members go to a new restaurant, for example, they can write an instant review and post pictures. The information is mapped and made available in real time to network friends.
“Knowing something about the person who knows something about a place is ridiculously valuable,” says Pelago co-founder and CEO Jeff Holden.
Early Whrrl user Joan Jablonski of Chicago hasn’t tried the mobile application. But she sees Whrrl as “the future of socializing or at least going out and finding a place to meet.” If a restaurant is too smoky or crowded, she says, you can text everyone in your network on the fly.
But location-based networking has Big Brother implications.
“It’s really cool, but it’s also possibly the creepiest thing happening,” says Facebook’s Moskovitz. Privacy controls are crucial. Buddy Beacon, for one, lets you switch to a “cloak” mode to stay under the radar.
“Your friends are following your life as it is happening and, obviously, you control how much of that you want to share,” Dayton says.
Gina Reno, 37, an AirG customer on Boost and a Chicago waitress, typifies skittish consumers. “I have a GPS locator on my phone. I don’t feel comfortable with that yet.”
Mobile social networking of one sort or another appears inevitable. Is it over hyped? Is there money to be made? Says Mark Bole, CEO of social media start-up ShoZu: “The answer to both is categorically yes.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Stop Steampunk SEO, Start Being Friendly to Your Peers
Steampunk laptop by Datamancer.net
Some people are hopelessly late. Are you one of them? Many people still think that
- search engine submission
- meta tag optimization
- keyword stuffing
- PageRank
- link exchange
and similar SEO anachronisms straight out of the nineteenth century will get them website traffic and make it an authority. Wake up, you have been asleep for more than a century. Stop practicing steampunk SEO tactics and start dealing with the future or rather the current web, web 2.0
In web 2.0 we also speak of the social web. The social web is not a web of spiders anymore, it’s a web of humans. Yes, people like you and me. Webmasters, bloggers, social media users, readers, people who seemingly do not contribute anything but click.
Something radically changed. And you were asleep. You didn’t notice it while you were exchanging links in your footer, watching your pagerank bar and adding three different synonyms of the same word into your page title.
Maybe you have been on Digg, Flickr or YouTube already and you read some blogs like Boing Boing.
If you want to succeed in today’s web memorize some more of these names:
- WordPress, Drupal
- MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog
- StumbleUpon, Yoono
- BlogRush, CLIQ
- Mixx, BloggingZoom
- Facebook, LinkedIn
- Twitter, Pownce
Just to name some of my favorites and some sites you just can’t ignore anymore…
But it’s not just about the sites, the brands, the latest hypes.
It’s about you. But it’s not only about you. It’s also about your peers, about your neighbours, your friends or even your competitors!
While you depended on the new deity, Google, the world has moved on.
While you removed links to other sites so that you do not loose PageRank others have been linking generously. While you did not sleep at night watching your PageRank bar in anxiety others uninstalled the Google toolbar. While you were determining the ideal keyword density others were socializing with their peers. They were creating relationships, building up power profiles, connecting with their colleagues around the globe.
They rank in Google above you, as a side effect, some of them do not even have PageRank but they not only outrank you but their traffic is ten or hundred times bigger than yours. They even link their own competition as you call it. Either you do it too or you’ll be forgotten and marginalized. Start now. Read on. It’s not too late yet. Be friendly to your peers. You depend on them.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Using Myspace to Market Locally
Source: unknown
The Galveston Daily News (reg required) had an interesting article recently about Island Bicycle Co. was using MySpace to market to its customers locally. Kudos to Kevin at Buzznetworker for finding this story.
I often hear people complain that MySpace traffic is bad traffic as it doesn’t convert, and you cannot use it to effectively market to locally. Well the Island Bicycle Co. debunks both of those myths.
MySpace offers a lot of potential for small businesses according to Carlon Haas, Austin-based Internet marketing expert and president of Brave New Marketing:
“Marketing through MySpace is becoming one of the best ways to guerrilla market these days…“Using the search tool on MySpace, you can get demographic information by ZIP code. It has all the targeting of an expensive direct mail campaign at zero the cost.”
Jeff Neilson, who is the owner of Island Bicycle Co. first thought of using MySpace just as a guerrilla marketing tool. But after a MySpace search and found that 22,000 people that used MySpace lived within 10 miles of his store, Jeff realized that he had a great marketing opportunity.
The Island Bicycle Co. MySpace strategy is simple according to Jeff:
“Every day I send out 20 friend requests. With the kids’ market, because of our logo, they tend to grab it quick. They like it, they want a bike and (the logo) looks good on their front page Once a week I’ll send out a blurb announcing a bike special or telling people that new bikes have come in. That goes out to all my friends.”
The success of the marketing campaign can be seen in the bottom line. Last week Island Bicycle Co. sold three bikes to people who said they found the shop through MySpace. For a small business, that is a lot of sales.
As Harish Rao, CEO of online community building firm EchoDitto puts it:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“As business owners, we look for any way in which we can connect with our prospects and our clients. The beauty about MySpace is that it allows businesses to be able to do that kind of thing. People feel like they have a personal relationship with you or your company.
The Art of Blogging
Written by The Great Ganesha
Published January 31, 2007
For the last half-decade or so, a slow but steady transition has been taking place as web pages on the Internet move from the confines of the static page to a dynamic, interactive medium. Blogging has been at the forefront of these changes. Bloggers catalogue the changes and blogs showcase them as they venture into a heretofore unknown medium.
Blogging is in its embryonic stages and has not completely defined itself. It is also the case that it is several things all at once and so defies categorization. Its etymological roots are easy to explain — it is short for weblog. Some early bloggers split the word ‘weblog’ unconventionally into ‘we blog’, and a new word entered into the English language lexicon — a word, incidentally, that was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2004. So by definition, a blog is an online log, a diary, a catalogue of one’s thoughts. Not unlike our thoughts, the types of blogs run the gamut from the political to the poetic; from the perverse to the picturesque.
Andrew Sullivan – a now-famous political blogger and journalist for Time magazine – describes a blog as “somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.” A blog could be as base as daytime television or as stimulating as an in-depth PBS documentary. A blog is a journalistic report of an event, a well-thought-out opinion piece, the errant ramblings of an old man, or the dull journaling of a teenager’s daily activities.
While it is easy to label blogs as extensions of newspaper or other journalistic media, this falls prey to shaping the unknown into what is familiar. Yes, there are several similarities, but there are more differences. This categorization also partly follows from the fact that it is mainly the political blogs which have ascended from the underground into the mainstream media. But it is the ones that go unnoticed by the mainstream that are the most intriguing.
There are photo blogs, on which amateur photographers post some of the most beautiful images; there are audio blogs where people post audio (also known as podcasts); there are blogs in which people who can barely speak English write the most lyrical prose, in English no less; and there are blogs focused on particular topics, usually started by people who are experts (sometimes real, at other times, self-imagined) in the field. The only universal statement that one can make about blogs is about their format: dated entries which are reverse-chronologically ordered and have a space for readers to comment on them.
At its best, blogging is an art. And just like any work of art, be it Nabokov’s Lolita or Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, it can be subtle and expressive at once. A good blog post can stir up anger, elation, and grief. It appeals to everyone and can incite passionate discussion. Blogs can create trends or destroy them. Like art, a blog post has its roots in the banalities of everyday existence.
A good blogger can elevate the mundane, or debase the divine. A good blogger creates his own personal villains, orchestrates conflict, thus creating drama. A good blog post can be fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between, like a well-written op-ed piece, but written in less time and with less thought. No, that’s not a typo – less thinking is one of the things that sets blogging apart from any of the traditional media. The technology-enabled facility of quick publishing gives blog posts (and their responses) what can be loosely described as a stream of consciousness style. The immediacy creates a sense of intimacy with the audience, and motivates them to interact with the blogger.
This interactive aspect of a blog is what separates it from traditional writing. A blog post is incomplete without its comments – they are an integral part of it. Comments allow a blogger to clarify, argue, converse or just observe his audience. Unlike traditional works of art, comments enable a blogger to look inside his audience’s minds and digest and internalize what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
By giving people the freedom to write about what they want, when they want, along with a more-or-less automatic readership, countless souls (including myself) have found their ‘inner writer’. Blogging is allowing people to create a new style of writing, with its own set of rules. As more and more people join the blogging bandwagon, it is increasingly difficult to ignore. As it gains more exposure, it is also difficult to ignore the fact that blogging, at its best, is indeed a unique art form.
what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
« Previous Entries
Interchanges.com News Weblog 