Blogs of the influential - leading thinkers write

There is an impression that blogs are just for entertainment or to "get your rants" out in public (so you will not need to go see a psychiatrist). If you look at sheer numbers, that could be true. But my search for for commercial and professional use of blogs started with three of the most influential people in technology. All three wrote books and gave keynote talks in conferences. So a blog from these authorities would be a good example of how someone with a theory could use blogs to support their traditional mainstream communication. The three people I am talking about are:

• Tim O'Reilly: computer technology publisher and Web2.0 trend coiner
• Jakob Nielsen: Usability expert - Alert Box newsletter.
• Clayton Christensen: Harvard business school and "Innovator's Dilemma" coiner

Individuals usually have less resources and are more focused on a specific message. Their core idea is usually articulated in their "main book" - in some cases you can even find it in an article. Blogs are simple and linear. They don't need complex navigation or structure so if you have one core message they work fine. The three people I mentioned above each have one very clear message. Basically an idea that explain something specific. For some reason all three people that I picked seem to analyze a behavioral phenomena on the Internet. (But I think this is just coincidental). All these examples show that one idea and a small team of domain experts can create a great resource. They also show that in depth work can be done gradually and does not need to be revealed at "one time" the way books or articles in professional magazines have been doing. These blogs seem to be addressing broad subject areas, but blogs do not have to be limited by their focus (broad or narrow). Let's look a little at each of the blogs.

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Tim O'Reilly with Richard Stallman the founder of "open source" (it was first called "free software".

Tim O'Reilly: He has been a book publisher, mostly for the "open source" community for a long time. Even before Linux became popular the O'Reilly books were known as good, accurate, and useful references for many programs and software technologies. As software evolved from open source to the web to what we call Web2.0, Tim O'Reilly has been observing, analyzing, and publishing trends. He is also still involved in the software technology itself, but has definitely noticed that someone has to write about the "big picture". Now that Web2.0 is somewhat of a core mainstream mantra, O'Reilly has created a much bigger blog of sorts with many contributors covering a wide range of topics. If you want to know this corner of the software / web world, his blog is a great place to keep up.

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Jakob Nielsen is well know inside the Internet world. He started out at Sun Microsystems (in the days where: "the network is the computer"). With one of the most read usability books for the web, he has been "evangelizing" usability for a long time. He started a newsletter 13 years ago, long before "blog" was even around. But I consider his Alrtbox newsletter to be somewhat of a blog. Sometimes I wish he did update the presentation to the more current blog format. But that is a small price to pay for such great information and knowledge.

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Rattling the technolgy "geeks" all the way from the Harvard Business School

Clayton Christiensen is not a technologist in the traditional sense. Actually, I don't think that he started out working on technology topics. As a Harvard Business School professor he tried to answer the old question "what is real innovation?" He has been doing this for a long time. His "Innovator's Dilemma" book has taken the technology world by storm. Not because it is controversial as much as it is well researched, analyzed, and presented. I chose him because he did not come from the core technology world. His blog started out as his own comments on companies and products which either innovate or fail to innovate. Now like O'Reilly and Nielsen he has a staff which write about many areas of expertise.

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Well, this is the introduction to the three blogs. Like anything else, I could write about this forever, but we need to get to many more things. It would be interesting to look at group, domain, media, and corporate blogs. At this point in time these are not as developed as other forms of media. Certainly not as other forms of Internet technologies. Next, I will look at grass root blogs like slash-dot and media blogs like New York Times. Both are interesting since they say something new in terms of communication.
 

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Tim O'Reilly: RADAR is his company blog center, other contributors. http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

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Jakob Nielsen's: Alertbox - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

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Clayton Christensen: The Innovator's Dilemma: http://www.innosight.com/blog/index.php

From presentation to the Web (2.0) - Get RRREEEEAAADDDYYY

I only touched on presentations in the last few articles.* This was done to give a starting point to the core subject of the blog: marketing with Web2.0 techniques. One of the first steps is to take existing material, first I will start with a presentation, which will be cut and modified to fit Web2.0 format. Doing this in real life is probably the best way to get started. With Web2.0 most of the tools are easy to get started with. Blogs, wikis, social networking, personal pages, and resource linking is available in many shapes and flavors. The popular services and tools also have million of examples. If you are not familiar with these, I would suggest that you go and get familiar. The best way is to actually sign up for these services and get your own "page" or "listing" started. Writing a blog or developing a wiki takes lots of work. Writing the content may actually be the simplest of the parts. If you write and create presentations on a regular basis this is not going to be your hardest task. But even if you write regularly, you will find out quickly that Web2.0 is essentially an "infinite resource". You can write, draw, sing, play, link-to, communicate... as much as you want. This means that you need to focus on exactly what you need to communicate. Work out a strategy and tactics to develop an ongoing program. Than roll up your sleeves and make it happen.

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Whatever method works for you, my observation in people who started with Web2.0 tools can be successful in doing one of these:
• Just Do IT: simply go to an application and start it up.
• Learn and explore: pick one or more application, sign-up, but just look and learn.
• Buy the book, take a class, do the tutorial: this helps for some who need that first push.
• Get a tutor / guide: sit with someone and go through the basic steps: this always helps get over the "fear of starting"
• Get into a group: start commenting on a blog before you have one, add a page to a wiki in an area of your expertise, get invited into Linked-In by a friend, etc.

Web2.0 Tag Cloud - already too many tools and services...

Whatever your "style" I would suggest a few things to get you organized. Simply start thinking as if you are already in the groove and going.

• This means gather the material that you need, get your plan started, outline actual articles or even edit existing material to fit into the format you will need.
• If you work with schedules: deadlines and milestones, start sketching out your work.
• If you like organizing in a project format, make this an active project with all the related documentation and tasks involved.
• If you are in a corporate or government environment and you need to do more formal planning, write a proposal, and solicit agreement to secure resources (funding, headcount, equipment) than go ahead and start there. Whatever method works for you, get started.

Web2.0 is not just an experiment or a technology fad. Actually, it is a huge trend in the use of the Internet. Tim O'Reilly actually coined the term by observing how things were developing in the real world and than crafting a theory around the "outside world" of core computer development world. This type of observation is not a common way of doing things in the computer/Internet world. Until now, ideas, uses, products, essentially "technology" always came from the technologist world. The proverbial "young gun" / "hot shot" isolated "genius" crafting a new product in the form of a site. Essentially, Tim O'Reilly noticed that the "new web" enables users to be the real "content creators". Internet developers has hoped for this since the very beginning of the Web. But the applications and the technology did not develop as quickly as expected. But now, we - the marketing professionals as individuals and leaders of small organizations**, have the means to do what only large teams of programmers, editors, and web-masters.

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Thinking strategically about marketing with Web2.0

What that mean to technology marketers is the beginning of an opportunity to get in touch with a whole new market using new tools. First of all, since the technology and the behavior of the market is new we can track it and adjust our way of working as it is developed. Second, we can lead competitors and partners in innovating. Not the innovation that just comes from a new technology, but the innovation into areas which have stayed static. This includes: positioning, message, target market, packaging, and even pricing. Changing marketing strategy is not a strange concept when new form of marketing distribution channel. I call "marketing distribution channel" anything that is the method a marketing message connects a technologist to the market. The Internet has had at least two big innovations in "marketing distribution channels". The first came with e-Mail and early networking (pre-web era). This shift in general terms was not as visible as the next one, but in the technical world marketing with e-Mail, BBS, and News groups was nothing less than a revolution. Many companies gained a huge advantage over others with the early Internet technology. Just like the more popular Internet (i.e. web) technology change, the early technologies really separated the quick to adopt from the slow ones. The same happened with much bigger effect when the current Web technology hit. We all see how people buy books at Amazon, how Dell sells computers, and Yahoo provides e-Mail service. Web2.0 is just starting out, currently MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, Blogger, WikiPedia, are getting lots of media attention. But in the business world, especially in technology marketing, these tools are not being used. But this will change, as these tools become more robust, reliable, and popular, their use will grow quickly. This is one good reason to think about Web2.0 as a strategic investment in marketing.

NEXT TIME: Industry examples from Web2.0 technology.

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*   If you need more information or training on creating and giving presentations take a look at blogs and books in this area. I believe that you can never give a "good enough" presentation. I also see that in the technical world, both technical and business people need more work in this area. This is specially true in creating presentation material. This area could use a whole blog series by itself.
** I call marketing small organizations because relatively to other corporate roles marketing is still mostly the smallest effort in MOST companies. Please excuse my generalization if this is not true for you or your organization.