Business Blogging

In his recent post at the Harvard Business Review blog, Umair Haque argues that the ’social media bubble’ has devalued relationships through inflation. In economics, the more money there is in circulation, the less value (i.e. buying power) that money has because increased circulation causes prices to rise, and Umair suggests that this is what social media has done to relationships.

It’s an interesting idea but I think it’s flawed.

For this idea to stand up you would have to assume that we have a strictly limited amount of attention to devote to relationships, and that every new relationship you participate in somehow degrades the value of all of your other relationships. I don’t think this is true.

People do not invest any less effort in their important relationships just because they have a large number of less important connections on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. If anything social media enhances relationships, providing an additional conversation channel between friends and family that can be used to connect when they are apart.

Facebook enables me to maintain a constant, low level of conversation with those close to me throughout my working week. I don’t have time to write emails or have IM conversations with all of my friends and family over the course of a week, but with a few status updates here and there we are able to communicate casually when we are not spending time together.

Looking beyond the stronger relationships, Facebook makes it easier to stay in contact with people who might otherwise have drifted away. Colleagues from old jobs, friends and relatives who move far away, with the best will in the world, you struggle to stay in touch with some people because of the practicalities of everyday life.

The relationships with those people may be weak, but at least the connection is maintained rather than being completely severed. And the same is true of channels like Twitter and LinkedIn. The relationships I have on those platforms are mostly with colleagues, professional acquaintances or simply people who share the same interests as me.  These relationships are mostly low value, but it takes very little effort for me to maintain them, and the level of effort required does not significantly increase when the number of relationships rises.

Low value relationships are fine, so long as they come at low cost

This brings me onto my key point: the reason social media enables us to vastly increase the number of weak relationships is because tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn significantly reduce the level of effort involved in maintaining those relationships.

Most of those relationships are of low value, but under the right circumstances any of them could evolve into a much more valuable relationship; they might be able to help me with a problem, give me a great idea, or lead to a solid business opportunity. The ‘opportunity cost’ (i.e. the time and effort I have to expend in maintaining them) is so low as to make it more than worthwhile for me.

Umair argues further that the ultimate proof of the true worthlessness of social media relationships is that nobody is willing to pay for them. This point is hard to counter, but I think it’s fair to say that just because it is hard to monetise something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has no value – the internet is full of good things that are not particularly profitable, high quality news journalism being a good case in point.

I find it frustrating that, over a decade since Blogger.com launched, public relations people are struggling to understand blogs. The same old questions keep popping up: How do you define a blog? What makes bloggers different from journalists? How do we deal with bloggers?

The line separating traditional media websites and blogs has become so blurred that the word ‘blog’ itself is a meaningless label. It’s practically impossible to say categorically what is a blog and what isn’t, because there’s no robust criteria that you can apply to make that differentiation.

Instead of trying to pigeon-hole websites, we need to look at them a little more intelligently and find a way of grouping them that is useful for PR people. Rather than trying to draw a line between journalists and bloggers, it makes more sense to understand that in the current media landscape we’re dealing with a wide range of different influencer types which all have different expectations of how PR people should engage with them.

What are a website’s most important attributes?

What do you need to know about a website in order to start building a relationship with it? I think there are two key questions you have to ask:

• Is the site’s content created by professionals or consumers?
• Does the site have broad appeal or is it focused on a specific niche?

Of course, these questions do not have absolute answers. Many sites sit somewhere in between being professionally produced or being entirely user generated (increasingly we see a combination of the two). Equally, ‘broad appeal’ and ‘niche focus’ are not binary values, but opposite ends of a scale.

We can visualise this by plotting sites onto a chart. If you want to give it a fancy name, we can call it the Online Influencer Engagement Quadrant…

I’ve thrown a few well known websites onto the chart where I think they should fit, but these are just my estimations – your mileage may vary.

Professional vs User Generated Content

At the far right hand side of the horizontal axis, we would place sites which are professionally generated and most likely form part of a broader content distribution network including TV and print (e.g. BBC, The New York Times). On the far left of the same axis are the sites which are entirely based on user generated content with minimal editorial oversight, like discussion forums and social news platforms (e.g. Digg, Reddit).

In between these extremes are all the sites which don’t clearly sit in one camp or the other: Sites which are written by non-professional writers, discussion forums which include some editorial content, editorial sites where there the user comments make a significant contribution to the overall balance of the site, and any other sites which balance professional and user generated content.

Broad vs Narrow Focus

Sites are positioned on the chart’s vertical axis according to the scope of their content. Those which publish content with broad appeal (such as general news) are at the top and those which focus tightly on a specific niche are towards the bottom.

Obviously it will take a little judgement to decide where a site fits best on the vertical scale. For example, Wired is clearly a tech focused site but it is still broader than tech sites such as Mashable or Gizmodo which cover much narrower niches within tech.

What use is all this?

The primary point of doing this is that it lets us, as PR practitioners, start looking at websites in a more constructive way. Once you’ve identified the websites where your target audiences are found, you can think about where those sites fit onto the chart and then use that information to help guide your engagement strategy.

Up at the top of the chart are sites with a broad general interest. While they’re more likely to have a larger audience (BBC News gets as many as 10 million visitors a day) you are probably going to need a really strong story to get any interest from them.

Towards the bottom of the chart the sites are more focused on niche topics, and it’s safe to assume that so long as your story is relevant you will stand a good chance of getting some coverage or instigating a conversation.

Sites which lean towards the right side of the chart are more likely to be staffed by journalists who are used to dealing with PR. Towards the centre they are more likely to be amateur writers who probably do not often get contacted by PR and will need to be handled accordingly. Bear in mind that they will often be running the site in their spare time, making little or no money from it and won’t follow the same processes as a professional media organisation.

Sites on the far left of the chart will be driven entirely by communities rather than journalists and require a completely different approach to traditional media. A good start is to talk to the site admins to get an idea of what kind of partnerships they might be looking for.

Conclusion

This is in no way intended to be a conclusive framework for classifying websites, just a suggestion for how PR execs can stop getting wrapped up in semantics and start looking at sites in a way that has more practical use. If you’ve got any thoughts on how to improve it, drop them in the comments box below.