New Influencers book - draft chapters for review

Thank you! The New Influencersis now available Tha...

2007-05-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

Thank you! The New Influencers

is now available

Thanks for stopping by to look at the draft chapters of The New Influencers. The chapters have been taken down since the book was published in mid-April. Visit the website at www.NewInfluencers.com to learn more and to order a copy at the lowest price available on the Web.

Thanks to the many people who contributed valuable insight and feedback during this public experiment!

Thank you! Thanks for stopping by to look at the d...

2006-09-25T14:00:00.000-04:00

Thank you!

Thanks to the many people who contributed valuable insight and feedback during this public experiment!

Table of ContentsThanks for looking at these draft...

2007-01-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

Table of Contents

Thanks for looking at these draft chapters of The New Influencers, to be published by Quill Driver Books in the spring of 2007. New chapters will be posted as they come together. Please comment on content, style, direction and anything else you wish. Except typos. There are many, some introduced by my own fingers, other attributable to a semi-functional voice recognition system. Those will be fixed.
Be brutal. I have until mid-September to pull everything together and I'd rather learn the error of my ways now :-). Use the comments section or send your comments to me directly at paul@gillin.com.

DRAFT CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 - ORIGINS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

CHAPTER 2 - FROM CHAOS - STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 3 - THE ENTHUSIASTS

CHAPTER 4- MEASURES OF INFLUENCE

CHAPTER 5- CORPORATE CONVERSATIONS

CHAPTER 6 - SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER 7 - PUTTING THE "PUBLIC" BACK INTO PUBLIC RELATIONS

CHAPTER 8 - THE TALKERS

CHAPTER 9 - TOOLS OF THE TRADE

CHAPTER 10 - GOING VIRAL

CHAPTER 11 - NEXT STEPS

INFLUENCER PROFILES

THE GADGET KING (Peter Rojas)

THE GUERILLA (Darren Paul)

THE MARKETER (Steve Rubel)

THE TOOLMAKER (Dan Bricklin)

THE SOUND MAN (Doug Kaye)

THE CORPORATE RENEGADE (Robert Scoble)

Appendix A - The numbers

2006-09-25T11:49:00.000-04:00

Who, exactly, are the people using social media? MySpace demonstrates that a lot of them are teenagers, but for the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the business influencers.

There have been several attempts to define the demographics of the blogosphere and get at the motivations of the people who are active there. Edelman’s 2005 blogger survey[1] recorded 821 responses to a series of questions about blogging and business. BlogAds.com got a massive 38,000 responses to a survey of people who read political blogs[2]; however, more than four in five of those respondents weren’t bloggers. I also conducted a much smaller (163 responses) survey of bloggers, focusing on their motivations and influences. In addition, Technorati publishes a regular “State of the Blogosphere” report that often has interesting statistics about the blogosphere’s overall health.

Here are some generalizations based on the published research about bloggers.

They’re from all over the world. Technorati reported in early 2006 that Japanese had passed English as the most popular language in the blogosphere, with 37% of new posts in Japanese, compared to 31% in English. In fact, the number one blog on Technorati for part of 2006 was Chinese. There are some interesting differences between U.S. bloggers and those from other countries. Edelman’s 2005 blogger survey found, for example, that Asia/Pacific bloggers are much more inclined to use blogs primarily to record their thoughts (50%) than North American bloggers (28%). Almost 21% of North American bloggers listed “connect with others” as a primarily motivation, compared to 12% of Asian bloggers. By and large, though, motivations and practices differed little by region.

They’re not in it for the money. The research emphatically establishes that profit is not a major blogger motivation. In my own survey, only 10% of respondents listed “make money” as an important reason for blogging. A third listed “career advancement” as a motivator, perhaps reflecting the large number of consultant bloggers. Overwhelmingly, people noted intangible factors as being more important. They include connecting with others, influencing markets and “it just feels good.”

Less than 6% of the respondents to Edelman’s survey, which offered a narrower range of responses, cited money as the primary reason they blog. More important factors included keeping a record of thoughts (28%) and gaining visibility as an authority (34%). Fewer than 4% of respondents to the Blogads political study cited the profit motive. Blowing off steam and formulating new ideas were big motivators for that group.

They’re active. Bloggers are clearly active readers, with 96% of the respondents to my survey saying they regularly read one or more weblogs. Reading blogs is more than just a casual activity, too. Over 41% of respondents read more than 50 blogs a week, with more than one in four reading more than 100. The message: bloggers are more likely to read other bloggers. Only 22% of respondents to the more-general Blogads survey said they read more than 10 blogs a week.

Those who do blog seem to like it a lot. One in nine respondents to my survey contributes to three or more blogs. Commenting is an important part of the culture, though, with 71% saying they comment on four or more blogs at least monthly, and almost 30% commenting on more than 10. The frequency of contribution is an important factor in keeping blogs high in search engine and popularity rankings, a fact that’s clearly evidenced by respondent activity. Over 21% of the respondents post more than 10 entries per week with 80% posting at least three times weekly. Business and personal issues, by the way, are the most popular subjects, with sports, reference and humor being least popular.

They’re aware. Respondents to my survey said they were most likely to post when a personal experience or observation moved them (79%). They also write entry when they see something on another blog (70%) or in mainstream media (57%). Press releases regularly prompt only 18% of the bloggers to post entries. If you needed any more evidence that blogging is social, you need only look at response to the question “Have you ever met with or telephoned someone you me through blogging?” More than 60% said they had.

Edelman inquired about trust, and there the bloggers affirmed the importance of their peers. Asked “When looking for product information, which do you trust most?” almost 63% cited “other bloggers” while only 31% noted company websites or press releases. The results confirm the assumption that bloggers are a community bound together by trust. This affinity creates an environment in which one blogger is able to influence many others, leading to vigorous discussion and the occasional swarm. More than half the respondents to the BlogAds research said they spent more than 10 hours each week reading blogs, although the finding that 14% spend 19 or more hours each week in that pursuit strains credulity.

They’re well off. Bloggers skew toward the high end economically, with 26% of the people who responded to my survey earning more than $100,000 annually and 42% making $70,000 or more. More than two-thirds of the BlogAds respondents listed family income of more than $60,000. With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why bloggers have captured the attention of marketers.

They’re skeptical of marketing. Edelman’s research focused on how bloggers interact with business and the story isn’t good for marketers. Asked to rate the trustworthiness of a message from a PR firm on a 1-to-10 scale, respondents assigned an average value of 4.6. Messages that come directly from a company fared somewhat better at 5.5. But part of this skepticism could be caused by the gulf that exists between marketers and bloggers. More than 79% of the Edelman respondents said they’re contacted by companies less than once a week, with more than 48% saying they’ve never been contacted. Yet 47% of the respondents also said they write about companies and products at least once a week.

The good news there, I suppose, is that there’s nowhere to go but up.

[1] https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy/

[2] http://www.blogads.com/survey/2006_political_blogs_reader_survey.html

Table of ContentsThanks for looking at these draft...

2006-09-19T11:17:00.000-04:00

Table of Contents

DRAFT CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 - ORIGINS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

CHAPTER 2 - FROM CHAOS - STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 3 - THE ENTHUSIASTS

CHAPTER 4- MEASURES OF INFLUENCE

CHAPTER 5- CORPORATE CONVERSATIONS

CHAPTER 6 - SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER 7 - PUTTING THE "PUBLIC" BACK INTO PUBLIC RELATIONS

CHAPTER 8 - THE TALKERS

CHAPTER 9 - TOOLS OF THE TRADE

CHAPTER 10 - GOING VIRAL

CHAPTER 11 - NEXT STEPS

INFLUENCER PROFILES

THE GADGET KING (Peter Rojas)

THE GUERILLA (Darren Paul)

THE MARKETER (Steve Rubel)

THE TOOLMAKER (Dan Bricklin)

THE SOUND MAN (Doug Kaye)

THE CORPORATE RENEGADE (Robert Scoble)

Chapter 10 – Going Viral

2006-09-19T11:12:00.000-04:00

Download in Word

If you go to EthicsCrisis.com, you can read some pretty eye-popping stuff.

“I'm going after my boss's clients,” says one contributor. “I never signed a non-compete agreement that went beyond termination of my employment, so all her clients are fair game. And I know I'll do a lot better than she did.”

“A vendor vying for a big contract from my company sent me on vacation. But I gave the contract to someone else,” reads another confession.

Is this site a tribute to pop psychology? “A virtual confession booth? Actually, it’s run by SRF Global Translations, a company that markets language translation services. EthicsCrisis.com is a variation on the popular PostSecret.com[1] blog, which has visitors admitting to their deepest, darkest secrets on elaborately designed postcards. Only EthicsCrisis allows visitors to rate the confessions other people have posted for acceptability. Some admissions have logged more than 2,000 votes

SRF didn’t even have a website until April, 2006. But since EthicsCrisis.com launched, the blog has been visited by tens of thousands of people who are willing to share their deepest ethical secrets for the sole purpose of getting them off their chest. There’s also a lot of information about corporate ethics in general, as SRF tries to stake out this topic as a specialty.

The site is the brainchild of BL Ochman, an avid blogger and the specialist in the burgeoning field of viral marketing. This specialized brand of promotion, also called “word of mouth” or “guerilla” marketing, is nothing new. Each person tells several friends and word spreads on a geometric scale. It is perhaps the oldest form of marketing, but the Internet has given it new power. If each person tells five friends and those friends, in turn, tell five more friends, more than 1 million people will of heard the news after only twelve tellings. Plant the right seed and watch a cornfield sprout. But you must have the right message and. you must understand the medium.

Social media has completely changed the dynamics of viral marketing. What once required a phone call or a letter can now be duplicated on a large scale using e-mail. And blogs magnify the effects by orders of magnitude. Get mentioned on the right blog, and the five friends become 5,000. It’s no wonder that specialized viral marketing firms are sprouting up all over the country.

Viral marketing is one way in which the new breed of marketers is learning to leverage the power of social media. It is an inherently risky strategy. A viable message that doesn’t catch on is a waste. But the cost of viral marketing is so low - in my interviews, marketers frequently cited costs less than a 30-second television commercial – that it’s cheap to try.

Viral marketing taps an existing vein of Web users and relies on them to spread the word about a site, contest or video by e-mail and blog. The campaigns usually rely on humor, mystery or competition to motivate people to participate. Marketers are intrigued. BusinessWeek estimated that viral marketing was a $100 million to $150 million industry in mid-2006.

Viral hits

BL Ochman’s best-known viral campaign was for Budget Rent-A-Car. Called “Up Your Budget,” the promotion hid $10,000 in each of 16 cities around the US. Clues to the location of the cache were distributed by Internet video and people raced to be first to find the treasure. The whole contest was managed via a blog.

“For my life, I have no idea how people found these things,” laughs Ochman. “They flew and took buses to other cites and created websites where they blogged about what the clues meant. It took on a life of its own.”

The campaign, which cost less than a half million dollars to produce, drew one million unique visitors and 10 million page views to the blog in four weeks, with traffic peaking at 20,000 unique visitors per hour. Promotion consisted of blog ads and well-placed mentions on the AdRants and MarketingVox blogs.

"To be asked to sit back and just let the viral do its job was a complete leap of faith for us," says Budget Executive Marketing VP Scott Deaver. "But we're very happy with the way it worked out."

When it works, viral marketing can have awesome power. In the book Naked Conversations, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel cite the example of ICQ, an Internet chat program developed by four young Israeli students. The group originally told 40 friends about their invention and within two months, 65,000 people had downloaded the software. By the end of 1998, just two years after the viral chain began, the service had been downloaded 25 million times and an AOL had purchased the developers’ company for $287 million.

Skype, the wildly popular Internet phone service, recorded 25 million downloads just nineteen months after startup, the authors relate. It sold to eBay in October, 2005 for $2.6 billion .

In both cases, the marketing campaigns were almost entirely viral and cost next to nothing. The developers used a number of innovative marketing tactics to seed the audience. For example, each new release of ICQ was revealed to 1,000 randomly selected users, who were given the same “secret password.” Creating the sense of insider awareness built excitement.

But even Skype’s remarkable record was eclipsed by Firefox, an open-source software alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer. It recorded more than 50 million downloads in the first six months, with no money spent on marketing. In fact, Firefox users were so rabid that they took up a collection to buy a newspaper ad, Scoble and Israel relate. This result would probably have been impossible to obtain using conventional marketing. The cost simply would have been too high.

These three examples aren’t typical, of course. In all cases, the products were free. The revenue model was built on advertising or there was no revenue model at all. ICQ and Skype appealed to a base of cost-sensitive, mainly younger customers, which is a demographic most marketers shun. Firefox tapped a well of anti-Microsoft sentiment to stoke the feeding frenzy. These cases are unusual but they do show the potentially awesome power of viral marketing.

The growth of video sites such as YouTube.com and Revver.com Has further built momentum behind viral marketing. Smart ad agencies no longer create commercials just for television; Ad campaigns can live on the web for months, even years. Annheuser-Busch promoted online versions of its TV commercials the week before the 2006 Super Bowl got more than 22 million visits to its web site, according to The New York Times. And more than 800 other Web sites copied and posted the ads.

“Volkswagen, known for its distinctive advertising, keeps more than 20 commercials under the ‘VW Life’ section of its Web site,” the Times noted. Delivery service DHL “has an extensive archive that contains ads from two years and four campaigns ago. Bud Light now allows visitors to e-mail its ads or download them onto iPods.” In fact, the 2006 Super Bowl was the first in which a majority of the television ads sent viewers to an online destination.

Driving forces

Marketers’ interest in viral marketing is being driven by several developments:

Declining response rates – Click-throughs to conventional banner and e-mail advertising has been declining for some time, a function of list exhaustion and customer disinterest.

Technology developments – Web 2.0 tools, falling hardware and bandwidth costs and a growing online population are making interactive media more attractive. Multimedia content like video and audio files can now be delivered for a fraction of the cost of a few years ago.

Demographic shifts – It’s a fact that younger consumers are consuming more information online and less through traditional media channels. An Online Publishers Association study in early 2006 found that one in four Internet users watches video at least weekly and that they are the likely to be young, male and affluent.

Customer preference – It’s also a fact that people trust their peers more than marketers. Research by Keller Fay Group found that 76% of consumers don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertising. The percentage who say they trust other people “like themselves” has grown from 22% in 2003 to 68% in 2006.

Low cost – Done right, a viral campaign can deliver a larger number of engaged customers than a television ad at a fraction of the cost.

With all these factors in play, it’s not surprising that marketers are experimenting with viral media. A Jupiter Research study in late 2006 found that nearly one in five advertisers planned to use viral campaigns in the next year, half of them for the first time.

Viral isn’t for everyone, and there are a lot of risks. The more campaigns that are launched, the more crowded the space becomes. A lot of good ideas have already been tried. Viral marketing agencies, which are usually small and specialized, are beginning to cash in on the craze. Fees of a half million dollars are no longer unusual, and that’s without a performance guarantee.

For many products, viral campaigns won’t work at all. A two-year study of more than 15 million recommendations by almost 4 million users of a recommendation engine on a retail website found that viral messaging was largely ineffective in promoting purchases. “We find that most recommendation chains do not grow very large, often terminating with the initial purchase of a product,” the authors said[2].

What’s more, campaigns that are overly aggressive or provide too many incentives for viral promotion can actually backfire. “Recommendations start to lose effect after more than two or three are passed between two people,” the researchers wrote. “The result has important implications for viral marketing because providing too much incentive for people to recommend to one another can weaken the very social network links that the marketer is intending to exploit.”

Researchers also found that viral marketing works better for some products than for others. Books, for example, were less likely to be bought as the result of a viral recommendation, while DVDs did quite well. A lot of research is still being done in this area, but reliable conclusions are few.

Early successes

Early experience from the field points to encouraging, although decidedly mixed results.

One of the earliest and most famous viral campaigns was the Subservient Chicken, a Burger King effort to promote its new line of chicken sandwiches. The company created a website where visitors could tell the chicken what to do, anything from dance to watch TV. The creative theme filmed an actor in a chicken suit acting out about 400 sequences and then programmed each into the websites. The technology was slick and the novelty of the site appealed to bloggers, who quickly spread the word. The campaign logged 14 million unique visitors and more than 400 million page views over the course of a year, according to AdWeek. More importantly, sales of chicken sandwiches grew nine percent a week in the month after the campaign debuted.

General Motors launched a website, www.chevyapprentice.com, to accompany its sponsorship of NBC’s “The Apprentice.” The site let visitors assemble their own TV ads for the Chevy Tahoe sport utility vehicle (SUV), with the best ones spotlighted in a contest. In one month, more than 22,000 ads were created.

The GM campaign drew a lot of heat because of the several thousand negative ads posted by SUV critics. “It will kill every plant in its path,” read one ad, showing the Tahoe driving through an open field. GM didn’t remove the negative ads and declared the campaign an unqualified success. “A few media pundits seem to think this social media program was a failure,” wrote Ed Peper, Chevrolet general manager, on the Fastlane blog. “We, on the other hand, welcome the opportunity to clarify the facts…In our opinion, this has been one of the most creative and successful promotions we have done.”

USA Network launched showusyourcharacter.com, a Website that enabled users to upload videos showcasing their hidden talents. The six-week program culminated in a tour and national on-air promotion of the most distinctive characters. Visitors could watch the submissions and easily e-mail them to friends. A total of 288 videos were uploaded and visits exceeded 450,000.

The California Milk Processor Board created CowAbduction.com, a spoof site that purportedly documents cattle kidnapping by aliens. Visitors are invited to submit evidence in the form of photos and videos documenting the problem. Bizarre? Sure, but the site has more than 13,000 references on Google.

Scion and Toyota Financial Services used Whyville.net, a popular site with eight- to 15-year old kids, to promote it’s low-cost cars. Users could figure out the price of their green card, design bumper stickers and learn how to finance their purchase. Ten days into the campaign, members had used the word “Scion” in chat sessions more than 78,000 times and the mini-site had 34,000 visits.

Agency.com, an interactive marketing agency, created a swarm in the summer of 2006 with an unconventional video it posted on YouTube.com. The nine-minute serial dramatized the agency’s efforts to win the advertising account for the Subway sandwich shop chain, showing a snippet of life inside an ad agency.

Reaction was overwhelming and largely negative, at least from other ad bloggers. The video is “filled with mindless business blather, self-important ad speak, fist bumps, fashionably un-tucked shirts and way too many utterances of the word ‘dude.’” wrote Steve Hall on AdRants.com. " Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS.”

But there’s no doubt the video clip boosted Agency.com’s image. Two weeks after the video was posted, a Google search on “agency.com subway” returned 133,000 results.

Australian brewer Fosters[3] teamed with Heavy.com to create a dating game with videos of 10 “sheilas” (Australian slang for unattached women) posted on a site and users invited to vote for their favorites.

Peerflix, a service for buying and trading videos, conceived of a contest in which users took photos of celebrities behaving badly. Money was paid for the best photos, with a “hall of fame” for those with the most credits. The campaign recorded two million game plays over three months after its launch in January, 2006. Promotion was solely online, mostly through blogs.

Snakes in the grass

Those are only a few of the scores of success stories that are described on the Web[4]. In some industries, viral marketing has become part of the landscape. The film industry was rocked by the success of The Blair Witch Project, the low-budget 1999 horror/thriller that grossed $140 million and which was marketed heavily through viral promotion[5]. Studios now typically seed new film ideas with bloggers long before the movie is released. If buzz about a film already exists, the tactic can boost interest. But it is not yet a substitute for conventional advertising.

New Line Cinema’s Snakes on a Plane, released in August, 2006, showed the limits of viral marketing. The film generated considerable buzz for its reliance on the blosophere for promotion. Bloggers reportedly saved the film from the trash bin in the first place, vetoed plans to change the unconventional title and enthusiastically promoted the production through web sites like SnakesOnABlog.com. Nevertheless, Snakes took in only a little more than $15 million in its opening weekend, a disappointing figure that was perhaps testament to the relatively small number of blogging enthusiasts.

“The Blair Witch Project campaign can’t be made again,” wrote Thord Henegren on the popular blog The Blog Herald. “Viral marketing… doesn’t feel new anymore…It would be really hard to rally the blogosphere like that again.”

Ford Motor Co.’s Bold Moves campaign, which was described in Chapter 5, had a viral element. Viewers were invited to visit the site regularly for updates to a video documentary about the automaker’s efforts to reinvent itself. However, early evidence was that Bold Moves was a bust. Ford’s vehicle sales were down 10% in the quarter the campaign launched and Ford drew heat for an online effort that seemed contrived and manipulative. Auto marketing expert Art Spinella told USA Today that bold products would be a lot more important than bold advertising to rescue Ford’s image.

Success factors

Experiments like Snakes and Bold Moves point to some essential truths about viral marketing:

The product had better be good - Bloggers told me this repeatedly. No amount of marketing can make a bad product sell well. Marketers must have confidence that customers will be genuinely excited about the product or the viral campaign will fall flat. In fact, most products would probably not do well if marketed virally.

The campaign must be innovative, intriguing and fun - Humor, contests and treasure hunts seem to do well in viral campaigns. Some advertisers have also experimented with serial dramas or mysteries using online video. The goal is to engage the user and give her an experience she’ll want to share with others. For this, you’ll need insight into what motivates the people you’re trying to reach (monitoring blogs is a good way to do this). The more narrowly you can define your target and understand their needs, the better chance you have to influence them.

Don’t push it – You want a viral campaign to look genuine. Pairing it with aggressive e-mail promotion or display advertising is risky because it can make you look disingenuous. If people believe you’re trying to manipulate them, they will hammer you in the blogosphere. You’ll know pretty quickly if the campaign is working. If it isn’t, write it off.

Reward people for coming – A funny video clip can be a reward in itself, but games, contests and make-your-own experiences need to be satisfying. Post the results of the user’s interaction on a leader board, enter them in a drawing or offer points for repeated visits. GM’s ChevyApprentice campaign is a good example: users could build their own ad and then save it and play it back for their friends.

Let go – Once you launch a viral campaign, it’s pretty much out of your control. You’re relying on people you don’t know and don’t manage to spread the word. This is scary, particularly to marketers who are accustomed to managing their media campaigns down to the individual insertion order. “I think you could creatively come up with a campaign for just about anything if your mind is open,” says BL Ochman. “The problem is when the client wants things to be about total control. That just isn’t realistic.”

Use the medium – Use viral means to promote viral campaigns. Contact influential bloggers and give them an early heads-up about your idea. Post teasers on relevant blogs (“relevant” is important; comment spam is a bad idea), put a link on your corporate site. You’re asking people to interact with you online so you need to show respect for the medium.

If there’s no doubt that viral marketing is on the upswing, NT cost is low enough that it’s probably worth if the marketer’s consideration. But be forewarned: a good viral campaign requires expertise that few marketers possess, and success will become more elusive As campaigns proliferate. As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus cautioned the police squad on Hill Street Blues at the start of each episode, “Let’s be careful out there.”

[1] Www.postsecret.blogspot.com

[2] J. Leskovec, L. Adamic and B. Huberman. The Dynamics of Viral Marketing. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC 2006), Ann Arbor, MI, 2006.

[3] Foster’s clearly believes in the power of online media. In mid-2006 announced it would halt all U.S. television advertising and put its entire budget online. Foster’s spend $5 million on TV ads in 2005.

[4] MarketingSherpa.com and MediaPost.com both have excellent archives of successful viral campaigns.

[5] In the case of Blair Witch, producers planted rumors on web sites and chat rooms that the film was a documentary. The mystery help grow anticipation prior to its release.

Chapter 11- Next Steps

2006-09-17T09:25:00.000-04:00

Download in Word

While I was writing the last chapter of this book, a friend asked me if he should start a blog. Tom is a talented artist, a career graphic designer who is trying to make the switch to building and selling fine handcrafted furniture. His problem is that he has to spend to much time explaining to people why $2,000 isn’t too much to spend on a hand-crafted end table His sales cycle is too long.

My mind immediately jumped to the possibilities, I thought of Thomas Mahon, the Saville Row tailor who reinvented his business by using a blog to tell world about the fine points of quality tailoring. I thought of Duane Keiser, who couldn’t make any money selling his art until he started selling it on his blog, and who now paints full time[1].

Tom is a tech-savvy guy working in a low-tech field. If he started posting photos of his projects, explained the geometry underlying the crafting of a perfectly tapered table leg and delivered it all with his characteristic good humor, I believe he would quickly developed a following, maybe an army. I don’t know if Tom will follow up on the suggestions, but the avenues open to a small business owner like him simply didn’t exist a few years ago.

Joining the conversation

Many businesses are grappling with a question of whether to join the blogosphere. It’s not a simple decision. As a noted in chapter 6, the decision is reasonably straightforward for small companies. If you’re passionate about to work and can communicate, then you should be using this channel. Blog about your market, your employees, your opinions, your craft, your ideas, your causes, your travels, your customers or whatever moves you. Launch a monthly pod cast to help your customers or your business partners work with you better. Use it to transfer some of the years of knowledge you’ve accumulated to the next generation. Put a microphone in front of a customer and ask them about their work. It doesn’t really matter. Just do it

If you’re a large corporation, the decision is more difficult. Your entry into the global conversation will be noticed by the media, your customers and your competitors. Once you start, there’s no going back. If you launch and then discontinue your blog, the media will wonder what’s wrong at the company and your competitors will ridicule you for the indecisiveness. You must make a decision you can live with.

In The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio, 2006), Debbie Weil proposes three issues to think about before you the launch a business blog . I’m paraphrasing:

Blog or be blogged. If people are already talking about you online, you need a way to respond. Choosing to remain silent will make it looked like you’re stonewalling. If you don’t blog, you’re not even in the game.

Think of blogging as a three-legged stool. The three legs are search engines, your customers and the media. Blogging is a low-cost way to communicate with influencers in your market. Also, their exceptional search engine performance makes them a cheap way to gain visibility in this important channel to your customers.

Blogs are part of next-generation Web sites. Static web sites are 1990s technology. The whole online trend is toward interactivity. New generations of blog-specific search engines are emerging and search is an increasingly effective way to be found online. If you don’t have a stake in the blogosphere, you will increasingly become invisible to prospective customers and influencers.

In addition to Debbie’s solid advice, I’d ask these questions:

Does my culture value transparency? As we have seen, choosing to blog means engaging in a very open and public conversation with all kinds of constituents. You will gain valuable insight from this discussion, but you will also take your share of criticism. If your management isn’t ready to respond to the skeptics humbly and constructively, your experience will quickly turn negative. You must buy into the perspective that being honest about your faults and shortcomings will create a more trusting relationship with your market and ultimately lead to better customer relations. If you don’t believe that, don’t get involved.

Are we good communicators? Not everyone is. As we explained in chapter 5, for example, CEOs often not the best people to participate in a conversation because their hands are tied by investors, regulators and the media. Your good communicators may be buried three or four levels down in the organization. Are you willing to give them a public soap box? Do you trust them to be positive and constructive? Are you willing to accept the possibility that their celebrity will make them a target for recruiters and your competition? Not all businesses will be willing to accept this tradeoff, and those that won’t should seriously question whether to enter the conversation.

Can we live with the commitment? Don’t start a blog because one incident motivates you to talk. Start it because you want to create an ongoing conversation about something that is important to you. You must be willing to commit to contributing new content every few days for years down the road. Your organization needs to join you in this commitment, because others will Inevitably take on responsibility for continuing the conversation. This is why choosing a voice and a topic are so important.

Podcasting is a little more forgiving. You can launch a podcast of limited duration, shut it down and archive it. However, I expect you won’t want to do that. Podcasting is addictive and once you start building an audience, you won’t want to stop.

Do I believe that small markets are important? Most marketers over 30 were brought up in an age in which size and scale was everything. Successful companies were big. The Super Bowl was the ultimate marketing platform. It’s human nature to want to define superlatives in terms of size. Even after seven years of serving small markets, I find myself doing it all the time.

In Chapter 2, we talked about the power of small markets, with their engaged audience and focused conversations. Direct marketing to these audiences can yield response rates ten times higher than those attainable with mass-market messaging. Yet many people don’t instinctively believe that these markets are worth their time. And marketing budgets, skewed as they are toward broadcast and display advertising, don’t reward this fine level of engagement.

John Wanamaker famously remarked that he knew that half of his advertising budget was wasted; he just didn’t know which half. The Internet makes it possible to market cost-effectively to very small groups. There’s much less waste and the quality of the customer relationship is greatly improved. It’s hard to imagine why businesses should ever return to a model in which they had to talk to 100 people to get three to listen[2].

Are you ready for a wild ride? No one is editing bloggers and podcasters. There are many intelligent, reasonable voices in social media, but there are also a few wackos. Fortunately, they don’t build much of an audience and their potential to disrupt conversation is low. But you will encounter them and they may be hard to ignore.

Early social networks were often undermined by disruptors, but that isn’t happening in the blogosphere. As more voices have joined the conversation - scholars, business leaders, authors, journalists, inventors, engineers, politicians and others - the quality of discourse has improved. The credibility of social media will be defined by those who choose to participate in it, and there is no question that the quality of those people is on the upswing. Not long ago, it was a notable event when the mainstream media picked up on a story that originated with a blogger. Now it happens all the time. Mainstream media has become so dependent on social media, in fact, that is hard to imagine that professional news organizations would let this channel go away.

In Chapter 5, we talked about the Dell blog, which drew immediate criticism in the blogosphere for being too promotional when it launched in 2006. I suspect Dell wasn’t ready for this firestorm, but the company responded appropriately, adjusted its attitude and kept plugging away. People will be quick to forgive you if you admit your mistakes and the voices of reason are coming to dominate the online discussion. But it helps to have some Maalox on hand in the meantime.

A bubble?

Watching the phenomenal growth of social media venues like YouTube and MySpace, some people have come to believe that this is a bubble economy. They will choose to wait for the inevitable shakeout before deciding whether to join the conversation. They will be waiting a very long time.

Social media isn’t a bubble any more than e-mail or instant messaging were bubbles. Bubbles need air in the form of investment capital and investors expectations. There simply hasn’t been much investment in this market. That’s because there isn’t much money to be made. As we saw in the chapters on enthusiasts and podcasters, most social media practitioners aren’t in it for the money. Rather, they seek recognition, a chance to meet others and the opportunity to influence markets.

As one speaker at the 2006 BlogHer conference put it, “I’d rather have 10 readers who are really interested in what I’m saying than 100,000 who aren’t.” Social media is simply an electronic version of interactions that have been going on for a long time. A good analogy is the campfire, probably the oldest social venue on the planet. People like to converse one-on-one and in small groups. They learn from people they trust and they trust the people they know. The top-down style of communication that has defined mass media for 150 years is artificial, but it was the best we could do given the limitations of technology. Now technology has changed the rules, and it becomes possible to recreate the campfire in cyberspace.

It’s true that the environment is still pretty chaotic and lacks the checks and balances of mature media. But those issues will be resolved over time. Author Clayton Christiansen has observed that the new technologies usually aren’t very good. The ones that succeed are those that give people the capacity to do something they couldn’t have done before. Automobiles, radio, television, air travel, telephones, personal computers and the Internet were all clunky and awkward to use in their early iterations. Yet they succeeded because their value exceeded the inconvenience of using them. Social media is in the second inning of its game and it will become stronger and more functional as time goes on. Talk to an enthusiastic blogger and you’ll hear terms like "empowerment,” “expression,” “community” and “conversation.” You will pry the blogging tools out of their cold, dead hands.

Predictions

In talking to scores of bloggers, podcasters and the people who watch them, I’ve arrived at a set of conclusions about changing influence patterns in social media that I feel pretty confident about.

This trend is unstoppable. All the demographics are lined up to support that assumption.. Study after study has demonstrated that people born after 1980 read fewer newspapers and magazines, watch less scheduled television and spend more time online than people born before them. My teenage kids don’t know what a jump page, section front or pull-quote is. They barely even know how to read a newspaper. All their news comes to them online and on-demand. So it is for all their friends as well.

What they do well is maintain a half dozen simultaneous instant messaging sessions, navigate through their friends’ pages on MySpace and find video on YouTube. They expect all the information they want to be right there when they need it.

Technologies that enable people to communicate more freely and flexibly inevitably succeed. In the process, they reshape institutions in fundamental and unforeseeable ways. MIT professor Thomas Malone has pointed out that more than 150,000 people make their living doing business on eBay. “If those people were employees of Ebay, it'd be one of the largest employers and retailers in the world,” he told the 2004 Supernova conference. “But they're not employees. They're independent store owners, and they have all the freedom independent store owners have.” This business model couldn’t have existed without personal publishing and the Internet. Will the eBay model spread to other businesses and markets? It’s likely.

Media institutions will matter less and less. Beginning about 150 years ago, influence began to become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer entities, mainly media companies. There were sound economic reasons for this. Publishing and broadcasting were expensive and few people could afford the cost of producing, distributing and supporting a viable media product. This meant that the true influencers – the people who shaped opinions – were beholden to their corporate parents, who often had an interest in marginalizing their identities in order to make them replaceable. What was important was the publication, not the writer or broadcaster.

Unfortunately, this created conflicts and inefficiencies. Influencers, other than a few very visible ones, were beholden to the politics or priorities of their corporate parents or advertisers. Even those who enjoyed strong name recognition were aware that their soapbox was owned by someone else, someone who could silence them if they went astray. Many media outlets subjected their reporters to restrictive political or commercial agendas. And the unassailable dominance that big media enjoyed ultimately led to laziness and scandals such as the New York Times’ Jayson Blair incident.

The economics of the New Influencers turns the mainstream media model on its head. With the cost of entry to so low, the need for institutions has diminished. The New Influencers don’t need corporate parents because their costs of production and promotion are next to nothing. A few entrepreneurs have tried to create social media conglomerates but none has stuck. Maybe someone will figure it out, but the business model isn’t self-evident.

There are big implications for marketers in this shift. The centers of influence in most markets are shifting from organizations to individuals. It will be much harder in the future to identify who the real influencers are because they aren’t aligned with branded institutions. On the other hand, the traditional media gatekeepers, with their pre-defined biases and agendas, are fading away. There’s a chance to start over and build centers of influence based upon the quality of what people say rather than who they work for.

Mainstream media will be around for a long time. It will change and adapt to a new world. But it will become less and less relevant to markets.

Very few traditional media will make the shift – Mainstream print and broadcast companies are caught in the headlights of an oncoming train and they don’t know what to do about it. Most are placing their bets on social media, adding bloggers to their home pages and tacking discussion forums onto their home pages. But they have an inherent disadvantage that will doom most of them: they are beholden to a business model that is increasingly irrelevant and they don’t have time or investor latitude to make the shift.

Mainstream media are addicted to a business model that is becoming obsolete. Sky-high ad rates were needed to finance large and expensive production and distribution networks to deliver a message. Until recently, that infrastructure was needed because the cost of disseminating information was so high. But that just isn’t true any more. Low-cost Internet publishing, combined with sophisticated search technology and community rating engines means that the costs of producing and distributing content in the future will be orders or magnitude lower than it is today. It will be cheaper for advertisers to find customers online than through broadcast or print outlets.

This is already happening today. The TechCrunch blog is arguably more influential in Silicon Valley business than the San Jose Mercury News, yet it has a total staff of six. Social media services are disintermediating an expensive delivery layer by concentrating around online channels channels. Content publishers no longer need a big organization to publish. They can do it all themselves.

An early 2006 report from Blackfriars Communications forecast a huge drop in business spending on traditional media. Companies allocated about 31 percent of their marketing spending to traditional advertising in 2005, but expected that number to fall to 22 percent in 2006, the report said.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism documented the declines in a 2006 report called The State of the News Media:

There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia, for instance, as in 1980. The number of newspaper reporters there has fallen from 500 to 220…The local TV stations, with the exception of Fox, have cut back on traditional news coverage. The five AM radio stations that used to cover news have been reduced to two.

As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24…The former dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein would conclude, “Unless they urgently respond to the changing environment, newspapers risk early extinction."

Major media companies are trying to make the shift. One heartening trend has been robust growth in their online revenues. Newspapers’ online ad revenue grew 35% to $613 million in the first quarter of 2006, according to a new report by the Newspaper Association of America.

However, these numbers are still a drop in the bucket compared to the huge – and still hugely profitable – revenues that newspapers generate from print advertising. In order to adjust to an online-driven model, these institutions will they need to jettison vast numbers of sales, editorial, production and marketing staff and fundamentally remake their businesses. I think a lot of media executives understand this, but they’re powerless to do anything about it. Their investors don’t have the patience to endure the short-term losses they’ll have to take to make the transition. They’ll milk profits out of declining markets rather than position themselves for growth in new ones.

This is an alarming trend. As we’ve seen, mainstream media has a vital role to play in disseminating information. They are the fact-checkers and the validators. They apply professional standards that don’t exist in the blogosphere. But their cost structures are increasingly a liability. Let’s hope they can make the transition because without a vibrant mainstream media, we are all worse off.

Everyone will need to work really hard for a while

We’re in the teeth of a seismic shift and that will be very stressful to everyone for a while. Content creators can’t be nearly as comfortable as they were in the past. The leading voices in the blogosphere are mostly individuals or small groups. As a rule, they have little or no administrative, marketing, sales or circulation support. Their source of influence is links and comments and if they can’t keep up the engine that constantly generates new links, they will die. Stowe Boyd told me that if he takes just a week off from blogging, his Technorati ranking drops from 2,100 to 2,300. Take off a month and you’re in trouble; six months and you’re invisible and starting from scratch again. Many A-list bloggers I talked to for this book said they haven’t taken a real vacation in years because they’re concerned about their popularity ranking.

In short, the days when Johnny Carson or Dan Rather could disappear on vacation for a couple of months and count on the network to cover for them are gone. When there’s no network, there’s no safety net. Influencers will increasingly be solely responsible for keeping their names before their constituents and ensuring their relevance to the conversation. Perhaps, in time, new brands will emerge that have the staying power of the old networks. But it’s going to take a while to get there.

For marketers, the task of finding the New Influencers is going to be difficult. As we explored in chapter 4, the metrics for assessing influence in social media are imperfect and still evolving. And the proper metrics for the long tail may never evolve. In other words, if your company makes industrial welding equipment, you may never find a search engine that really tells you what you need to know about the influencers in your business. The discipline of finding those people may be manual for a long time to come.

But maybe that’s not so bad. Marketing, after all, is the art of establishing relationships with customers. Because of business pressures, it has evolved into the science of managing lists and measuring response. But does that mean it can’t return to its (more interesting) roots. The metric-driven culture of direct marketing has come to dominate the marketing field. Maybe it’s time to relegate that overly simplistic discipline to the trash bin, where it belongs.

Reinventing marketing

In my 24 years and publishing, I’ve had the chance to meet thousands of sales and marketing people. I’ve observed that the relationship between these two groups is often pretty badly broken. Marketing supports sales. Its job is to deliver a message, which many marketers still interpret as meaning they should blanket the largest possible universe in hopes that two or three percent of the recipients will respond. These leads get thrown over the wall to a largely disinterested sales force, who doesn’t trust marketing very much, anyway. Often the leads are never even followed up. And a big reason, of course, is that the leads aren’t very interested; they’re responding to a message, not engaging in a conversation. Salespeople spend a lot of time chasing dead leads until they conclude that the leads aren’t even worth chasing any more.

In my years as a journalist, I was frequently amazed at how little knowledge marketers had of their product how little latitude their superiors gave them to make decisions on their own. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given how regimented their job has become and the high turnover rates in marketing in general. Perhaps understanding your product and your market gets in the way of generating more leads.

A lot of marketers, maybe a majority, won’t be able to make this transition. Social media guru Stowe Boyd told of how he participated in an American Marketing Association press tour to explain social media but dropped out early after it became clear his audience wasn’t interested. “They were basically interested in doing as little as possible to prepare for it,” he says.

This perspective was bolstered by the results of a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Council study released in April, 2006. The survey of 550 marketing professionals found that nearly three-quarters didn’t run a customer advisory board or a formal online community of customers. Only six percent of those who did said it was critical to their work. Nearly 30 percent said someone else in the company determines customer segmentation and targeting and that most customer interactions are driven by the sales organization. I don’t believe these shortcomings are due to laziness but rather to resource constraints and control-freak behavior by CEOs and heads of sales. Marketers are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

The global conversation is a chance for marketing to break out of this stalemate and regain control over customer conversations. In my meetings with marketers and PR people, I’ve found them largely fascinated by the changes going on around them. They understand the shifts that are occurring and they want to find and talk to the New Influencers. They are overwhelmed by the enormity of this task and confused about where to begin. That may make them look disinterested, but I believe most are still just struggling to understand these shifts. In the next couple of years, they will start to change their way of doing business and I suspect that innovations will emerge from that. We’re just in a difficult transition period right now.

Traditional marketing and traditional media will always have a role to play in commerce. The will morph and adapt to changing demographic trends. But it is clear that growth will be centered around on conversation-based tactics. The next generation of customers will want to interact with businesses in very different ways. The New Influencers are here to stay. Your challenge, and your opportunity is in learning how to influence them and in becoming and influencer yourself.

[1] Both of these innovators are profiled in Chapter 6.

[2] If you are a disciple of Seth Godin, as many marketers are, then subscribe to his blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. His latest book, Small is the New Big, could change your perspective.

Profile - The Gadget King

2006-09-14T14:52:00.000-04:00

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The Gadget King

No one has done more to legitimize blogging as a news medium than Peter Rojas and no one has profited more handsomely from it. It’s an unexpected distinction for the 31-year-old west coast native, who holds a master’s in critical theory from a British university and who was unemployed as recently as 2002.

Peter Rojas founded two of the most popular sites in the blogosphere: Gizmodo and Engadget. Both consistently rank in the top 10 blogs on Technorati. Both serve a community of hard-core consumer electronics enthusiasts. Together, they are arguably the most important sources of news in their markets online or in print.

Engadget prides itself on being first with everything, with an edgy, attitudinal voice that can send shivers down the spine of electronics marketers. Engadget is so fast, so timely and so savvy about the market it covers that it’s quickly become the gold standard for journalism in its field. Its traffic has soared past established publications and websites. Elite journalists like The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg admit that they read Engadget every day.

Peter Rojas was made for blogging. An engaging young man with piercing dark eyes that betray an intense intelligence, he seems unaffected by his sudden celebrity. “I just wanted to blog about gadgets and hopefully make a little money with it,” he says. “The idea that you could make a million dollars was incomprehensible.”

But that’s what happens when you’re one of the world’s best and most prolific bloggers. Rojas was featured on the cover of New York magazine on February, 2006. The story, titled “Blogs to Riches,” was a coming-out party for the blogosphere, arriving just three months after Forbes’ withering “Attack of the Blogs” indictment.

Wrote New York writer Clive Thompson:

To see just precisely how rich blogging can make you, it’s worth visiting Peter Rojas, the cheerful, skate-punk-like editor of Engadget—and the best-compensated blogger in history. When I meet him one December evening in his apartment on the Lower East Side, he’s sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. “Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow,” he says, sipping a glass of water. “But to keep it there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.”

Hard work clearly never bothered Peter Rojas. He sailed through Harvard, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in social studies in 1997. He completed a masters in English literature at the University of Sussex a year later. He loved his specialty – critical theory – but quickly realized there wasn’t much of a market for it. “You get so specialized, it takes 15 minutes to explain what you do,” he says. By 2000, he was on the west coast, working as a media planner in an ad agency and trying to figure out what to do with his life.

Whatever that was, it wouldn’t involve media planning, “the wrong job for me,” he says. Rojas had no journalism experience, but that didn’t matter much in the go-go late 90s, when Internet euphoria was filling magazines’ coffers with venture-backed ad dollars. He got an interview at Red Herring, a magazine for investors, and got hired. “They were desperate for people,” he says.

Red Herring turned out to be an epiphany for Peter Rojas. He’d always been a tech geek. His father, a doctor, had owned one of the first CD players sold in the US. As a child, Peter had owned an Atari 400, an early personal computer that failed to catch fire but ignited the imagination of enthusiasts. He was a musician in high school who dug playing with the latest audio equipment. Now, living in the Bay Area in the late 90s, where technology suddenly made anything seem possible, was like a fantasy. Rojas got to write extended pieces about the future of technology. “It was a perfect fit for me,” he says.

Until 2001. That was when the Internet economy, erected on a bubble of inflated expectations, suddenly met reality. As venture capital drained out of the economy, magazines closed down or cut staff. Peter Rojas was laid off in May, 2001, “a huge setback,” he remembers. He spent days putting together portfolios of clips, only to be turned away or ignored. One magazine shut down two days after he interviewed there.

The Bay Area network did pay off, though. Wired’s Paul Boutin had become a good friend and began to feed Rojas some freelance work. Rojas had also befriended Nick Denton, a former Financial Times writer who had recently founded a news-aggregation service called Moreover.

Wired provided steady assignments, but there was no promise of a staff position. With the Bay Area in the throes of the worst tech recession in 20 years, Peter Rojas decided to go east to New York. It was 2002 and he was living mostly on savings. His income that year would total about $14,000.

Rojas had begun experimenting with a blog while in San Francisco. He didn’t update it very often, but it had promise as a way to get feedback on story ideas. Not many people were blogging at the time, anyway.

It was Nick Denton who planted the idea that the blog could maybe make some money. Rojas demurred at first. “If I’m going to spend an afternoon writing, it might as well be a pitch” for a job or freelance assignment, he says.

“What if you could make a living with a blog?” Denton asked.

Preposterous. In 2002, no one was blogging for their bread and butter. But Peter Rojas was unemployed, so what the hell. He and Denton concocted the idea for a blog about consumer gadgets. They called it Gizmodo and Peter Rojas was the first and only writer.

It seemed an odd choice. The consumer electronics world wasn’t hurting for information. There were several enthusiast magazines and many bloggers, even in 2002. But the mainstream publications mostly dealt with the topic the same way, delivering elaborate product reviews full of charts and graphs. A magazine’s three-month production schedule precluded quick turnaround. The blogger enthusiasts mostly worked the same way. They delivered great substance, but not much immediacy.

Gizmodo filled a gap. Rojas and Denton understood the unique value of blogs: they could be updated quickly with the latest news, tips and rumors. Nobody was chronicling the hectic, day-to-day activity of a business that was set to explode in 2002. Gizmodo would be the fingers on the pulse of the industry.

For over a year, Peter Rojas was the voice of Gizmodo. He blogged furiously, often more than a dozen posts in a day, snatching tidbits of information and rumors from all over the internet. The articles were brief, many less than 200 words, but they were timely and opinionated. “Stick to the topic, give an unvarnished opinion and style supports substance,” says Rojas, summarizing his operating principles. “And never talk about yourself. Readers don’t care.”

Rojas always believed his readers knew more than he did. Gizmodo was an insider’s guide with attitude. Rojas advocated feverishly for his readers. He wasn’t afraid to poke a stick in the eye of the big electonics firms. What difference did make? He was just one guy writing a blog.

But it did make a difference. People were noticing Gizmodo and the site’s traffic was growing dramatically, reaching 1 million page views in a little over six months, then doubling that three months later. It was now part of a network called Gawker Media, run by Denton. Next to the namesake Gawker celebrity blog, Gizmodo was arguably the best know member of the family. Gadget freaks loved the constant stream of insider knowledge and electronics makers were beginning to notice.

So was Jason Calacanis. A Brooklyn native who had become famous in boom-time dot-com circles with an insider magazine called Silicon Alley Reporter, Calacanis was trying to build a business model around blogs. Like Gawker, he was recruiting individual bloggers to become part of a network, with advertising to be leveraged across the sites. Unlike Gawker, Calacanis’s Weblogs, Inc. was going for massive scale: hundreds of blogs.

Calacanis needed Peter Rojas to build a franchise in consumer electronics, so much so that he offered equity in the company. In February, 2004, Rojas jumped. Speculation in the blogosphere was that Rojas and Denton had had a falling out, but Rojas dismisses the rumors. “It was just a better deal,” he says. “It was a chance to blog full time.”

With more time at his disposal, Rojas wasted none of it putting Engadget on the map. The editorial model was similar to Gizmodo’s, but the site emphasized even greater speed and volume. “Write it, find a photo, post it, move on to something else,” Rojas says, summarizing the process. “I’d be on the phone with a PR person and they’d ask what my lead time was for publication. I’d tell them ‘I posted as I was talking to you.’”

Engadget was a one-man show for a while, but added freelancers as the site grew. Its coming-out party was at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in January, 2005. Rojas and a small staff posted more than 250 articles from the show, overwhelming competitors and putting Engadget squarely on the map. “We outhustled CNet and PC Magazine,” he says. “We were covering the show in real time.”

Engadget had some notable scoops, among them Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game machine. In May, Microsoft’s Bill Gates paid the site the ultimate compliment with a one-on-one interview. In true blogger fashion, the interview was published in its entirety, all 5,000 words of it. It wasn’t long before Engadget surpassed Gizmodo on the technology rankings. Over the summer, its traffic passed that of PC Magazine, which had been a fixture in the consumer technology industry since the late seventies.

In October, America Online bought Weblogs, Inc for a price reported to be around $25 million. Peter Rojas’ share wasn’t revealed, but it was certainly in the millions. “I didn’t intend to become a millionaire,” he told New York. “But I wound up there anyway.”

Marketers now beat a path to Engadget’s door. But don’t expect that door to open for a press release or product pitch. “If people ask how to get my product on Engadget,” he says. “I tell them to start by creating a good product.”

“Read the blog every day,” he adds. “I can tell in an instant when somebody doesn’t. Marketers can’t control the news any more, but they can support the conversation that is part of the market.”

Peter Rojas still blogs for Engadget but not with the intensity that he used to. A small staff of writers keeps the site humming, working from a six-page document articulating the site’s distinctive voice. At 31 in the summer of 2006, Peter Rojas is rich, successful and has his whole life in front of him. That future may include blogging or it may not. “After 10,000 blog posts,” he smiles, “I’m happy to step back.”