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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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Blogs and Business
March 23, 2006
Consumer generated content was the buzz of 2005 - with everyone from amateur journalists to heads of corporations joining the frenzy. Blogs (or weblogs) are a key part of this movement and can be anything from a highly personal online diary to a dynamic conversation between a CEO and customers.
Matthew Yeoman (who is running the Blogging4Business show at which I am speaking) has a great piece in NMA this week on the power of blogs for brands. Yesterday, I noticed an article in the FT by John Gapper titled "The fallacy that bloggers have replaced real news hounds" (may require registration). Blogs may not be replacing news hounds - but they are growing as a source for unfiltered customer feedback and highly targeted advertising.
As a blogger myself, I appreciate the fun and power of blogs. As a reader of blogs - you likely share my enthusiasm. UK internet users are turning to blogs more and more. Comparing Hitwise data from January 2005 and January 2006, market share of all UK internet visits going to blog sites have increased 24%. The number of different blogs receiving enough visits to be tracked by Hitwise nearly doubled year on year.
Blogs are more visited by the young - according to Hitwise data one quarter of UK visits to blog sites coming from those 18-24 in the four weeks ending 11th March 2006 - which represents 38% more visits from this group than average. These internet users spent an average of 8 minutes on blog sites, and most came from either a chat room (22%), a search engine (22%) or from an email provider (13%).
One of the most visited blog sites in the UK is www.thesuperficial.com, a celebrity gossip site. The site attracts some high profile advertisers, including ING, Orange and Ultimate Bet. The site sends 8% of its visits to News and Media sites, 5% to Television sites, and 4% to Shopping and Classifieds - underscoring the potential to monetise downstream visits from popular blogs.
If you have something to say on a frequent basis that will be of interest to your customers, you may want to start your own blog. As Matthew points out in his article, blogs can be an open and honest conversation with customers. If you are looking for highly targeted advertising opportunities, blogs can be a dream come true.
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, I hope to see you at Blogging4Business at the Marriott in London on 4th April.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:20 AM
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Comments
Blogs may be the buzzword of the Web 2.0 evangelists - but move beyond the superficial detail and we're really talking about separate issues of community and communication.
Blogs can do both - but in my opinion neither can match forums/bbs for either. Once the Web 2.0 people get a bit more web savvy and learn how to install their own internet software, you may well find the buzzword for 2007 grows into "community forums".
Posted by Brian Turner | March 26, 2006 11:18 AM
Brian - good point! When people ask me to define blogs, I often describe them as an easy way to post text to a site on an frequent basis. Sites like TripAdvisor and eBay that successfully create communities offer similar advantages.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | March 26, 2006 11:22 PM
Forums and blogs each have strengths, but the reasons why blogs usually beat out forums are multiple.
For one thing, a forum can be quite chaotic. The analogy I like to use is that a forum is like a wall of graffiti where everyone adds their tag to create a 'collective' mess (and messes can be beautiful! Read David Weinberger for more on mess and miscellany.), whereas a blog is like a gallery where different 'paintings' (blog posts) are on the walls, with people walking by and offering their critiques (comments), while not changing or obscuring the painting (blog post).
This not only maintains the integrity of the original thought or idea, but also keeps the hierarchy clean. And even without comments (or trackbacks, for that matter), I can still comment on your idea (and others) without having to join lots of bulletin boards or forums: I simply blog my response on my own space.
Posted by Jackie Danicki | March 28, 2006 02:39 AM
Jackie...I totally agree with you. I have never found the forum discussions attractive to consumers because the organisation is not great and the look and feel not good enough. Graphically and content wise you can do a lot of things with blogs that you can�t do with forums. You can publish text but also pictures, videos, comments, links (I like the system of trackbacks), create tags, add RSS for your readers and finally something I find quite innovative is that you can come back to your post and amend it if something is incorrect.
It's been said recently that there are 50 millions blogs created so far. In France, we are seeing right now a quite interesting phenomenon about blogging and the touchy suject about the "cpe", the Youth contract. Have a look at Technorati http://www.technorati.com/chart/cpe
Posted by Guillaume Thevenot | March 30, 2006 06:37 AM
Thanks for those interesting facts about blogging in UK.
Posted by Guillaume Thevenot | March 23, 2006 09:50 AM