This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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May 8 New York Times: A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip
Nick Denton (Gawker Media) scores some serious PR thanks to NYT writer, Tom Zeller, Jr. Too bad he misses the point when it comes to blogs. Denton’s closing quip:
"’There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet
for every company’s marketing problem, and they’re not,’ he added. ‘It’s Internet media. It’s just the latest iteration of Internet media.’"
Okay, so Nick is a died-in-the-wool capitalist. A savvy entrepreneur capitalizing on the latest means (i.e. blogs) for monetizing online content. My hat’s off to him for that. Really.
At the same time, however (and I’ll try to spew this without yet another Cluetrain reference), Nick either doesn’t see – or utterly ignores – the broader cultural trends fueling the blogging brouhaha. Perhaps his center-of-the-universe, downtown Manhattan, Triangle Below Canal Street loft is just too isolated – too far removed – for him to see what’s really happening at the frothy, leading edge of western culture. It’s either that or the rent’s just too damned high for him to focus on anything other than traffic counts, ad dollar tallies and the bully bottom line (who could blame him).
Give Nick his props for helping to pioneer a potentially profitable, (slightly) new publishing model, but beware of thinking of him as a serious trend spotter. And the model really is just slightly new. After all, internet marketers have been doing the same thing – selling content and advertising space – via email for about a decade. Magazines have been doing it offline for a gazillion years. Nick does the same thing except he uses RSS.
From the same article, Zeller adds:
"Stowe Boyd, president of Corante,
a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that
there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs
turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an
overlord and underwritten by advertisers."’They’re pursuing a
very clear agenda and they’ve done very well with that,’ Mr. Boyd said
of Gawker. ‘But they’re just an old media company in new media clothes,
and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point.’"
I agree there are a sizeable number of people (2734 at last count) who fall into Denton’s "magic bullet" crowd. But again, Nick misses the point that these folks too simply miss the point of blogs.
No, blogs are not a magic marketing bullet. They are, however, a powerful weapon that fires the real magic bullet into a rapidly emerging consumer culture that sometimes demands and sometimes simply suggests that businesses of all sizes cease treating them like the proverbial money tree from which they can pick at will.
The savvy solopreneurs of the 21st century not only see this trend, but they’re also helping drive it. Hell, it’s a big part of why they decided to go solo to begin with. They’ve oriented their lives and their businesses around the mandate that relationships come before revenue. And that there is yer magic bullet mister.