Informationized — A blog by Phillip Baker

Participation in Corporate Blog Memes

August 5, 2009

This is the eighth post in a series on corporate blog memes. This one focuses on the number of times distinct blogs that participated in memes by publishing blog posts that linked back to corporate blogs.

A total of 1,553 blog posts were collected from the 299 memes previously identified and these were found to represent 792 distinct blogs. The table below plots the frequency of posts per blog from 1 – 20. It shows that 626 (79%) of the 792 blogs appeared just once in memes. Another 103 blogs appeared in blog memes twice and overall the pattern mimics those seen in corporate posts, meme size and links in corporate blog memes.

Over 95% percent of blogs appeared in no more than three memes which would seem to indicate that there are very few blogs regularly responding, sharing or otherwise spreading the content of Fortune 500 companies. It also deflates the idea that some small group of heavily invested customers or power users are regularly spreading information about any given company.

However, there are a number of factors to consider. It was already shown that only 299 memes were produced from 5,887 corporate posts. In addition, 14 companies accounted for all 299 memes. It is more likely that the lack of responses is because most corporate blog posts don’t produce memes to begin with, at least not through blog posts.

At the time of data collection, the exclusion of blog comments due to complexity was considered a potentially significant omission from memes. In the year since, the rapid growth of shorter, quicker and more distributed forms of social media make the lack of fully-formed blog memes less surprising. It also makes the study of memes by medium less useful.

Confirming the existence of vocal customers or power users and measuring their effect will take a lot of further study across multiple forms of social media. It also assumes the development of suitable tools that are capable of capturing distributed social media keeps pace with changes in social media publishing.

The complete table of data includes outliers values not shown in the chart. Two blogs appeared 187 and 188 times across all memes. In both instances, these blogs posted a (usually) daily summary digest of links and frequently posts appeared in multiple blog memes. For example, a blog on search engines posted a daily digest of links that included several corporate blogs on search and these posts subsequently appeared in all associated memes.

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Posted on August 5, 2009

News As A Comment-Driven Social Network

July 30, 2009

Last time out, I talked about the New York Times’ proposed membership plans. I like the fact that they begin to move away from charging for content and creating deeper offerings for Times fans. But, with the possible exception of ‘BackStory’, none of the things on offer are closely tied to the online news experience and they do nothing to drive or reinforce the use of Times content.

One of the problems news organizations face in attracting paid subscriptions in any form is that users are not invested in the same way they are with social Web services that are built around users’ own content. These services, while valuable to users individually, tend to become more useful as more users enroll and upload more content.

For example, users can upload photos to Flickr for free up to a specified limit. At the point a paid subscription is required, it can be more convenient (by design!) for users to pay to keep all their photos in one place than it is to start from scratch somewhere else. In addition, the more people and the more photos that are uploaded to Flickr, the more useful it becomes as a resource for users to search and be searched.

In contrast, the online news experience (whether it’s a paid model or not) doesn’t promote buy-in from users and doesn’t capture the effort users are already putting in. Harnessing user participation has the potential to transform news from a transactional product – formerly a newspapers, now atomized content – into a service that users have a stake in improving for themselves and that becomes more useful for everyone else as a result.

The biggest investment users already make in news content is comments. The best comments take more time to write and presumably reflect some knowledge or passion around the topic or event they relate to. I’m not trying to discount the value in sharing articles because social distribution is a big deal. The value produced by sharing news is not being captured very well either, but comments are more personal and represent a bigger part of our online selves.

Obviously, not all comments are informed, thoughtful, constructive or even civil, and perhaps a greater portion on highly trafficked news sites are not. But by embracing comments, I think news organizations can start to harness the investment their most valuable users are making in their services.

I don’t think any amount of higher quality or more unique content can differentiate news services, but a connected network of engaged users can. Other users are what make Facebook and Twitter so useful and even addictive, not whether they have the best features.

These things may determine the type of people that show up in the first place but quality is a prerequisite to developing a relationship with users. Network effects emerge from connecting users to each other and that is the piece that becomes difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The good news is that these things have already started to happen. The Times has TimesPeople which they even call a social network for news. Similarly, BusinessWeek has BusinessExchange which goes a step further and allows users to import and comment on non-BusinessWeek content.

However, both have a long way to go before they become fully-functioning social networks. For example, TimesPeople needs to more personal information in profiles, much tighter integration with article pages and whole host of features to improve comment threads and that is just for starters.

A comment-driven social network for news could provide the kind of platform needed to create deeper services and ultimately new revenues whether they come from users, advertisers, other third parties or all of the above.

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Posted on July 30, 2009

New York Times Memberships

July 28, 2009

The New York Times is considering two levels of paid membership packages ($50 for Silver, $150 for Gold) that offer a bundle of benefits including early access or additional background on some stories and preferred access to tickets for NYT events.

Mike Masnick is experimenting with something similar (with added fun) at Techdirt based on successes he has seen in the music industry. So it’s not surprising that he likes where the NY Times seems to be going with this. Conversely, Martin Langeveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab does not like the idea at all.

One thing these memberships do start to do is shift the focus away from arbitrarily walling off content and towards providing potentially valuable services to users. Fred Wilson made that point recently although I’m not as keen on the FT model he uses as an example.

The Times’ membership packages focus specifically on Times enthusiasts in so far as the actual services on offer are conceivably things that might appeal to loyal Times readers. However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between active users and people with an affinity for the Times brand.

From that perspective, the membership packages look like a mixed bag. BackStory and FirstLook might appeal to news hounds. Tote bags, crossword puzzles, discounts on Times memorabilia and perhaps even TimesEvents to the latter group.

Perhaps most importantly, the benefits don’t appear as though they will scale that well individually and there is no collective synergy or network effect to promote further engagement with Times content. For example, the value of preferred access to tickets for Times events will diminish as more people enroll.

Attempting to derive revenue from users rather than content and extending offerings for the most valuable users are good ideas but I think both need to be woven into the fabric of using the Times online.

Connecting users to each other and harnessing their participation might be one way to achieve that goal. I’ll talk more about what that means and how it might work in the next post.

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Posted on July 28, 2009

Social Gesture Index

July 27, 2009

Social gestures have started to emerge from the most popular Web services. A critical mass of users can create a collective understanding of some new action that is often coupled with a product-specific term. Social gestures add context to content through our common understanding of each gesture and our relationship or perception of the people that express them.

I wanted to map out existing social gestures and what they mean so I made a list. It includes a description of each gesture’s stated function and in some cases an attempt to understand its implicit meaning. Gestures are ordered (very roughly) by strength, starting with strong positive gestures and ending with strong negative gestures.

I realize that every aspect of this list is highly subjective, not to mention incomplete. It is very much a work-in-progress but I hope it can provide some food for thought in the short-term and a marker that can be revisited, expanded and improved over the long-term.

Retweet: The act of republishing someone else’s tweet. What separates it from reblogging (below) is that users republish complete messages. Although, edits might be made to focus on one element of a Tweet or in order to add a comment and/or to fit the 140 character limit in Twitter. It is the most powerful gesture because users deem retweets important enough to insert into the feed of their followers.
Reblog: The act of republishing some or all of a blog post on one’s own blog or feed. This is more powerful than simply sharing a link because it inserts some portion of the content into rebloggers’ followers/subscribers (like retweet, above). It can and often does include comments by the reblogger.
Like: An explicit signal that indicates interest, agreement or affection for a piece of content. Present in some form in many social services. It is sometimes used to insert content into feeds for followers/subscribers which makes it similar to retweet and reblog. It is less likely to include comments.
Bookmark: The act of storing or publishing a link in a public place or within a feed of content. It’s not as powerful a gesture as reblogging, retweeting or liking because it does not push the actual content of the bookmark into a new stream. Bookmarks can be considered useful to the bookmarker or a recommendation for others but is less intrusive upon followers/subscribers and as a result it represents a less powerful endorsement.
@: A way of referencing another user directly with a comment, reply or more general message. It has spread beyond Twitter to comment streams but has not been incorporated into the fabric of other services.
Comment: A specific reaction, thought or piece of knowledge or advice posted in direct response to a piece of content. Comments occupy an odd space among social gestures. They are completely free-form and the gesture or ideas or opinions are included within the free text. Comments can express agreement or disagreement and anything in between. Because of the broad scope, it’s unclear what the individual act of commenting means. The aggregate number of comments attached to a piece of content often provide some measure of popularity or controversy and perhaps, as a result, relevance.
Follow: The act of opting-in to receive updates from a specific person or entity on a service. Following t is ostensibly the same as subscribing but services with ‘follow’ functionality usually result in content that is associated more closely to the author. Supporting other social gestures also increase the humanity of content updates over subscribing to a feed of content.
Subscribe: The act of opting-in to receive content updates from a website or blog, usually via RSS feeds but also via e-mail updates and dashboards if content ‘readers’ are integrated into the same service used to publish content. There is a often a weaker tie to authors’ identity.
Unsubscribe: The act of opting-out of receiving updated from a previously selected source under a subscribe system.
Unfollow: The act of opting-out of receiving updates from a previously followed source. Both unsubscribe and unfollow are somewhat private, or at least unnoticed acts although they do alter following/follower/subscriber numbers.
Block: The act of proactively preventing someone or something else from receiving your content updates. This is also a somewhat private act. I’m not sure how service providers use ‘Block’ data to filter out spam accounts and other inappropriate uses.
Report: The act of actually reporting another user for posting inappropriate content or using social media services in an inappropriate way.

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Posted on July 27, 2009

Companies and Corporate Blog Memes

July 24, 2009

This is the third post in quick succession and seventh overall in a series on Fortune 500 corporate blogs. This is the final post in the series on blog memes and focuses on which companies produced the most memes.

The chart below shows all 299 memes by company and it is a short list. All 299 of the memes I collected were attributed to just 14 out of the 76 Fortune 500 companies with corporate blogs.

The concentration among such a small group was surprising because this data was derived rather than actively collected. It was also a little disappointing because it immediately limited the extent to which any findings could be generalized across all companies and corporate blogs.

As the graph clearly shows, Google’s corporate blogs accounted for almost half of the memes by itself. Although, it is important to note that all corporate blogs associated with each of the 76 Fortune 50 companies found to have blogs were tracked.

At the time of data collection Google had 62 blogs, more than any other company. The next highest was Hewlett-Packard with 53 blogs followed by Yahoo! with 28. Although Google dominated blog memes, it was also part of a larger skew towards Internet and technology companies in general.

The pie chart below shows that almost two third of memes were produced by Internet Services and Retailing companies while related industries such as Computers/Office Equipment and Peripherals were also present.

This was a little less surprising than the company spread because the overall number of Fortune 500 blogs also skewed towards technology-related industries. The complete table of data for memes by Fortune industry sector is available here.

These findings affect the interpretation of all of the data on blog memes presented in this series. It has to be analyzed from the perspective that a small number of companies, clustered in technology-related industries and dominated specifically by Google were disproportionately represented in memes.

Similarly, it is also useful to remember that most memes were made up of just two posts connected to a corporate blog entry. All of the patterns and relationships in the data are interrelated and deriving meaning has to be done holistically. The previously mentioned and general limitations also apply.

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Posted on July 24, 2009

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