No Man’s Blog

While working on a few projects recently I couldn’t escape this conclusion: our perception of bloggers as influencers is, in many cases out of date (read: bloggers outreach is sooo 2006). Due to the millions of words written about blogs (by bloggers) the stickiness of Gladwell’s ‘law of the few’, and the success of some early adopters brands/agencies with outreach initiatives, the concept of bloggers as influencers gain massive popularity over the past few years.

But that was yesterday, and in social web years that is long history…If 2 years ago all you needed was 20-30 bloggers in a certain field to kick start a conversation and to get to a reasonable reach, today you will probably need ten fold to reach the same level of audiences.

I already wrote about how technorati is fast becoming obsolete. It’s ranking technology (based on trackbacks links) which previously regarded as the bible for measuring authority of the blogosphere is as relevant as ancient stone money.

The most obvious suspect in crime is twitter. The common argument is that people are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities. As Brian at techrunch noted (as many before him) blogs losing their authority to the statusphere. We all want to be one click away from human contact and social feedback is universally gratifying (as well as highly addictive).

I think there is more than that. Blaming it all on twitter is easy but it’s just another example of the false consensus effect by narrowing it down to inter-bloggers relations. I really wish that traffic/readership analytics would have been transparent, I’m certain we would have seen a decline in audience in the vast majority of blogs.

After the initial enthusiasm of the idea blogging, i.e. that every dude and his sister can be a publisher, or content creator and have an audience, we slowly see that there is not enough audience and time and attention for all blogs. And what is happening in my view is a fascinating process of natural selection of interestingness of the blogosphere. Get almost anyone to start blogging today – whether you are a just dude or late adopter brand – see how difficult it is to get anyone interested.

What we see today with the maturation of the blogosphere is an interesting case of attention Darwinism. As the platform became mainstream, blogging naturally lost it’s novelty and is loosing in the attention war not just against twitter but against everything else that is out there, and there is loads out there. And so, in many cases, (i’m making HUGE unsubstantiated generalisation here) the big bloggers practically turned into money-making online magazines (think treehugger, engadget, mashable, techrunch and the likes) and the rest operate within their respective communities. The bigger the community (tech, gaming, planershphere) the difficult it will be to make a massive influence, unless you are already a big name in the industry (like anything related to human’s social dynamics, there will always be the hottest guys/girls in the group that will get a bigger share of the attention….)

So is it a case of each blog gets the share of attention it deserves? (from a natural selection point of view). Probably, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than looking at blogging from the jolly green giant perspective, perhaps we should focus again on the essence of blogging as conversation. Human conversations that take place within micro-communities of interest NOT another marketing channel for brands to exploit….

From a brand perspective you’re better off to reach out to as many existing fans as possible (these people already have a built in incentive to talk about you) and give them more reasons and tools to talk about you in a genuinely favourable way – it’s a lot harder to find these then 25 bloggers, I know, but hey that’s the idea of earned media – with any good social strategy, you will have to invest time over money.