Open The Dialogue

In the past I've been hesitant on this blog to criticize the actions of other agencies and how they handle blog programs, even egregious examples like fake blogs being setup and other clear violations of the playground rules. It might be out of a sense of decorum - that it's simply bad form to lay into a rival - or because should I screw up in the future I wouldn't want to be dragged over the coals by those folks. I'm not sure what the reason is but it's not something I've been anxious to do.

I feel the need, though, to chime in on the current situation involving Edelman and Microsoft. Microsoft, through a program setup and executed by Edelman, sent free Acer Ferrari laptops pre-loaded with the new Vista operating system to various bloggers. While it seems that some bloggers were contacted in advance asking if they were interested in getting the mailing others were surprised to find a laptop on their front porch (scroll down to Update #2 for Scott's recounting of this). Whatever the case, it does not appear that either Edelman or Microsoft were requiring any positive coverage out of this. Certainly they were hoping for it but there doesnot appear to be any "If you don't love it we'll sue you" sort of language in any of the communications I've read.

Where we start to get murky is in the fate of the machines. To keep it, return it or do something else seems to have been the dilemma most bloggers were wrestling with and it's this point that I think caused some of the imagined outrage. The email that Michael Arrington reposted at CrunchNotes makes it clear that what the bloggers did with the laptops was completely up to them to decide. All Microsoft asked was that they be notified of that decision when it was made. I certainly applaud Scott Beale's decision to auction it off and donate the proceeds to the EFF but am disappointed that the guy was basically pressured by others into feeling bad about getting a gift. Scott did nothing wrong here. He disclosed that he got a machine, where he got it from and certainly didn't sugarcoat how he's not usually a Windows guy but thought this was still cool. He was open and honest and got hammered for it.

Some seem to think that it was Microsoft/Edelman's responsibility to hold a gun to the head of the recipient and force them to disclose everything about how they came to be in possession of a new Vista-loaded laptop but I disagree. Disclosure is always - ALWAYS - in the hands of the media. Some unscrupulous marketers (and I'm not accusing Edelman or Microsoft of this) will always try to buy a good review by wining and dining influencers, reviewers and other opinion makers. It's the ethical standard of those opinion makers that dictates to what extent they disclose any incentives they might have received.

Since I've been at MWW Group I have advised on many occasions that clients send products to bloggers to review, sample or otherwise check out. In fact we're working on a significant program along these lines right now. Doing so is no different, at a basic level, than handing out free cookies to commuters outside a train station. You're trying to influence that person's opinion and, if things go well, they'll share that opinion with others who will also be moved. This is just bigger because it's an expensive laptop and not a package of cookies. But it's the same motivation on the part of the marketer.

There were some mistakes made, or at least some glaring omissions in the planning and follow-up process that I think have contributed to the backlash. First, it's unclear whether this is coming from Microsoft or Edelman. That's a problem since, to my mind, there needs to be one person or group handling this. That prevents the confusion that will come from multiple figures thinking they're in charge, something that can lead to contradictory and confusing messaging. It's exactly that confusion that likely led to the second problem, which is this email to Marshall Kirkpatrick telling him the best thing he could do would be to return the laptop.

What strikes me most is the deafening silence from Steve Rubel. While I certainly don't expect Steve to chime in on everything Edelman does, he's in a unique position to clear up some of the misunderstanding and confusion that's come up. Instead, he's declaring this, that or the other thing "dead." I implore you, Steve, weigh in on this. You've shown a willingness in the past to cover Microsoft "as a blogger" so I don't think it would be out of bounds for you to take an opinion on this simply "as a blogger."

As I mentioned, MWW Group is working with a client on a similar program in the near future. So, to wrap this up, I'm asking for the community's input. Right now the program has three major points of initial contact with the bloggers we're reaching out to: 1) What's your address, cause X wants to send you something; 2) Here's what the program is, please opt-in/out and 3) The actual product being mailed. So in these communication points how much do we need to pressure the blogger to disclose what they're getting and why they got it? Right now there is some basic language there about how there's no requirement that they blog about any part of this, we just thought they'd be interested and please let us know how it works out. Do we need to go further in the interest of avoiding any appearance of impropriety?

I'm interested to hear what everyone thinks. Feel free to leave a comment, email me at chris-at-mww.com or IM me at mmmthilk. I'd love to put up a follow-up post with everyone's email or IM reactions but, of course, will be sure to get your permission before doing so.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Rounding some stuff up from before the holiday as well as this morning.

• An Australian court has ruled that simply linking to copyrighted material is enough to be an offense.
• Jackie and Ben show how one blogger's efforts led to mainstream media coverage of some controversial cameras in downtown Chicago. That coverage then resulted in the cameras being removed.
• Shel Holtz is worried about the amount of spam pitches he and others are going to get thanks to Umbria's new system of selling batches of URLs of bloggers to marketers.
• Shel also is talking about how old media can actually adapt to the new media world.
• If you've been itching for a chance to work with Joe Jaffe he's got two ways we all can participate in the creation of his next book.
• Mack Collier is finding that his "Z-Lister" meme is having exactly the effect he hoped it would and sending new links to some off-the-beaten-path sites whose owners put up consistently good content.
• An excellent overview of YouTube, both its uses and dangers, from the LA Times.
• I've always been, well let's just say skeptical of what Microsoft had in mind when it started mucking around with RSS. So I'm not encouraged by the patent filings by the company that have everyone buzzing.
• Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales got some money from a group of sources and will be attempting to launch a search engine to rival Google next year. The search wouldn't be algorithm based but, like Wikipedia, rely on the judgment of the community to determine search results.
• Andrew Baron is trying to remind people he's still around.
• I think Rick Klau from FeedBurner is right. If we can overcome the education gap that exists with RSS it can truly change the way content is delivered. As soon as anyone I know has discovered it they wonder how they ever searched the web without it.
• Everybody's speculating that big media companies are lining up to buy AOL or Yahoo!. Yeah, cause the whole AOL/Time Warner thing worked out so fantastically.
• Business networking site LinkedIn has been valued at $250 million.
• The New York Times makes some media predictions for 2007.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Get a cup of coffee. I'm catching up from the last few days so there's going to be quite of bit of news in here.

• Blogjackings seems like a nice new term for a practice, hijacking the URL of a legitimate site for nefarious purposes, that's been going on for a while.
• The new version of Google's Blogger is finally ready for prime-time.
• Once again bloggers are referred to as dirty ******** hippies. That's us. All unwashed, socially awkward weirdos who live with our moms and don't know how to talk to girls.
• Joe Jaffe spills the title of his upcoming book. An anxious audience drools.
• CC Chapman has a very cool PDF on marketing in Second Life.
• The Venice Project, the internet TV project from a couple of Skype founders, looks extremely interesting.
• A bunch of new websites are putting a new twist on matching up singles. They arrange for meetups on planes and other things like that, pairing one single person with another for a trip. I may have now officially seen everything.
• I hate to tell you, Facebook, but no matter how many times you say you're not for sale some people are going to continue their speculation. Sorry.
• Sex sells, even when you're talking about mainstream media coverage of Second Life.
• Finally, Phil Gomes finds some sharks with laser beams on their heads in Second Life.
• Josh Hallett has some justified problems with how the Florida Tourism Department is dealing with a site they setup for state residents. The main problem is that they seem to have no policy in place regarding negative comments on the site. This is something that everyone - everyone - needs to have thought out when they launch something like this.
• I'd be shocked by the news that the planned YouTube killer from a consortium of TV networks seems to be falling apart if it weren't for the fact that I and everyone else saw this coming from the moment it was announced.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know that I'm supposed to be all flattered by Time magazine's naming of me as their Person of the Year but the award is diluted slightly by the fact that it also awarded all of you the same honor.

That award is supposed to mark something truly special; it's supposed to commemorate someone who made a lasting impact on their world. By naming "You" (or, I guess, "Us") Time really copped out. I can't decide if the editors who made this decision were lazy, trying to blatantly generate link-bait for the online world or just didn't want to talk about those messy things (genocide, civil war, nuclear proliferation, etc) happening in non-U.S. parts of the world because it would make people feel bad.

Even worse, though, their profile of the citizen journalists included almost solely A-list bloggers and corporate executives like the founders of YouTube. To many people on the web those people, because of their incredible popularity and/or financial success are still "them" and not "us."

This choice by Time is basically an attempt to play to the cheap seats. It's a power chord in a stadium-ready anthem. It's a chase scene. It's a flatulence joke. It's meant to make as many people as possible feel as good as possible as opposed to actually showing them what's important.

We're important not because Time has told us we are. The online community is important - and will continue to grow in importance - because we've used the power of self-publishing to fill in the gaps and pick up the slack left by the mainstream media. We talk about the things they're not talking about. We connect with other people because doing so is easy in the online world. We create content because we can and no one else is.

The awarding of the Person of the Year to Us is an attempt by the mainstream media to bestow legitimacy on us lowly bloggers and podcasters that we don't need. The producers of good content earn that legitimacy on their own and fight for it against the perceptions of others every day. It's the MSM that needs to work on proving its relevance to the people and not the other way around.

So while some people are applauding this decision I'm not going to join them. I'll continue to work hard to use the tools that allow for self-publishing to engage with an audience that finds what I write of interest. Everyone should do the same.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Americans are spending a record amount of time, 8 1/2 hours a day, consuming media of any and all sorts according to a Census Bureau report. What I'd like to know is what KIND of media they're consuming, professional or consumer-generated and in what proportion.
• CBS is relaunching CBS Records as an outlet for new artists that will be distributed through iTunes and whose songs will be featured on CBS TV shows. Great idea.
• People are house-hunting online before going out and about.
• Jeremiah talks about how social media outreach is (rightly) becoming an actual budget item at a number of large companies.
• News Corp. reportedly offered to buy digg for $100 million.
• When he was just on YouTube he was branded as a nut, but now a Coast Guard whistle-blower's accusations have been investigated by some major media outlets and, guess what, he was right.
• Robert Niles at OJR has a good list of the problems that new online publishers often run into but should try to avoid.
• The Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson pops in an old CD-Rom and takes us on a trip down memory lane.
• A number of sites, including Last.fm and Bebo have come together to hold a contest looking for unsigned bands.
• Despite many people who are advocating a shift to a media-agnostic/message-specific mindset, most ad executives think media specialization is here to stay.
• Oh, like we didn't all see the day coming when Google would start selling domains itself. The only surprise is that this didn't happen two years ago.
• A number of European newspapers are finding that allowing people to design their own paper and print it PDF-style is allowing readers to connect with the papers better.
• Wow. When AOL re-structures it really restructures.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry, but I disagree with the basic premise that Max Kalehoff is basing this MediaPost column on. He says that it's more important to think of how you're marketing to algorithms as opposed to people. Since searches, which compile their results via those algorithms, are how people find brands, products and companies, it's more important he thinks that you keep those in mind when drafting campaigns and online content.

This is exactly like the thinking that has led to the fall of traditional advertising and the rise of micro-targeted marketing. Agencies and others became so obsessed with how a commercial was going to look visually, what was going to look flashy and high-tech and what was funny and slowly become less concerned with what was actually connecting with the audience. If marketers start getting so obsessed with how metadata-friendly their content is they're eventually going to forget that the whole point of being found is to reach out to the audience.

This is exactly the wrong direction to be going in. We do not need more focus on tweaking things so they're found within searches. I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with that being a goal - making the front page of Google results should be on every marketer's to do list. But that's something that we need to leave it to Google and other search engines to sort out.

Let me give you an example: Tom Biro is always sending me the Google searches he runs that contain phrases included in posts he's written. The latest one, just today, was a search for "i love netflix." The second result from that search is a post he wrote on his blog The Media Drop. Overlooking the fact that this is the kind of thing that just shouldn't happen, it did happen and it's not because Tom spends hours pouring over how meta-friendly his posts are. It's because Tom is a good writer who has developed a following by putting up important and relevant information. He's established himself to such as extent that his blog is ranked highly by Google and his traffic is representative of that.

That's what marketers need to be spending their time on, building relationships and their own reputations and not figuring out how to manipulate their content to come up higher in search engines. If it happens, it's because you deserve it, not because you gamed the system.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Not sure whether this is another "test" that accidentally got pushed live or not (I have a call in to a spokesperson) but I'm once again seeing Google AdSense ads appearing next to feeds within Newsgator Online.

Notice also that there's now a small "+" sign next to each post. Everything is now coming through as a partial feed and you have to click that "+" to see the full text. Even if the full text is already displayed (if, say, someone has just written a one or two line post) any links are being stripped out of the post. You have to hit that "+" to see the links appear.

Again, I've got a call into the spokesperson I'd previously talked to about Newsgator adding advertising and will check back in here with any updates I have.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Users of social networking sites can now connect via the phone thanks to a new click-to-call app called Jaxtr. You can't actually see the phone number that you're calling but clicking a link will connect you to the cell phone of the person you're trying to reach.
• Thank you, Gartner, for throwing a stick of dynamite in the room by declaring that blogging will "peak" in 2007.
• The head of the Media Bloggers Association wants to be able to give some training to bloggers in journalistic best practices in order for them to be credentialed. Great idea.
• Just because there are some not nice things going on online does not mean you need to start leveling fines at everyday people over their blog content. The proposed legislation from Sen. John McCain is too draconian and it aimed at exactly the wrong people.
• Research that looks at a variety of retailer data shows the Long Tail in action as search enables people to find the right product for them, no matter how narrow the niche.
• ABC is doubling the amount of video content it supplies to Yahoo!. Of course this is totally unrelated to Amanda Congdon debuting her segment on ABC News, a debut that Rocketboom co-founder Andrew Baron says he's none too thrilled with.
• One in four links within searches for a brand name go to consumer-generated media. That's kind of huge.
• Neville Hobson rounds-up some of the discontent over the recently concluded Le Web 3 and the way it was seemingly taken over by French politicians.
• Go listen to the "boozcast" with David Armano and Greg Verdino. It's a hoot.
• Speaking of David, don't miss his round-up of people's thoughts on the most significant take-away from 2006. Lots of smart people sounding, well, very smart.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Like Eric Kintz I think it will be interesting to watch as more companies that compete directly with each other open their own blogs and use them as a means of targeting those competitors and controlling the information flow. That's kind of an area that gets ignored when people are corporate blogging. Sure, blogs are great ways to speak directly to stakeholders and consumers, but how are they really utilized to position a company in its marketplace?

A lot of this is going to depend on how much influence the marketing department has on the blog's content. If they're the ones writing it or approving the content then the conversation could move from one of impassioned people sharing their viewpoints to one that becomes simply a battle of copypoints - and we have enough of that in the form of paid advertising and press releases.

Personally, I think this polite yet blunt. Think about watching the British Parlimentary debates on C-SPAN (don't try to say you've never done this). One member gets up and goes through his or her bit and then someone from the opposition gets up and says, "My honorable colleague..." and then proceeds to call him or her the equivalent of a raving lunatic. Get gritty. Fight for position. Back up your point of view with facts (not spin) and then dive into the fight. That makes for both good reading and shows that you as a company are passionate about what you do and how good you feel you are.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Another fake blog has been outed, this one from Sony, who apparently set up a site that was just a tad too enthusiastic in its love for the PSP.
• Mike Arrington has some interesting developments in the long-rumored Yahoo/Facebook saga that shed light on how this has progressed over time.
• A number of retail sites that list deals and such are using RSS to allow people to get updates and alerts that are relevant to them.
• NBC Universal's iVillage has established a presence in Second Life that includes a regular "girls night out" session on the iVillage island.
• Speaking of Second Life, some are wondering if the real-life energy usage of so many avatars is sustainable from an environmental point of view.
• Netflix, in their upgrading of their Previews service, might have tipped their hand regarding a future movie download service.
• YouTube is taking some measures to make the site a little more comfortable for CBS by adding a layer of comment filtering onto clips from the network.
• Microsoft is taking RSS into the 3D realm, bringing back all sorts of bad memories of Jaws 3D.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I'm even impressed by how fast things are changing and happening in the the new media world so many of us live, work and play in. A group of stories have appeared recently that I haven't known what to do with on their own but which, when put together, provide a narrative of what we're now dealing with.

Let's start at the Blog Herald, where Tony Hung weighs in with his thoughts on the "death of FrontPage as a publishing tool" meme that's been floating around. I think Hung is right in that blogging software hasn't exactly been the nail in the coffin, it certainly provided most of the nails that went there. Free online tools that allow for site creation with AJAX or other easy to use technologies mean the ability to create a really sharp site is no longer solely in the hands and heads of programmers and other techies. Anyone can. For a now-deleted blog I used to write for I raised a similar point, saying that more and more mainstream pubs would find that blogging software, with a little design tweaking, would do the lion's share of what their current web architecture does now. Eventually the line between "blog" and "site" will blur so as to be virtually indistinguishable.

Speaking of tools, the Seattle Times' Charles Bermant points to how what's changing isn't so much what we're saying so much as how it's being received. While Bermant is specifically talking about the convergence of e-mail and phone systems, the larger point is applicable to anything really. I choose not to receive Chicago Tribune content via print publication (except on Sundays) but I do get that content delivered via RSS. Did the message change? No. I chose from a variety of distribution methods until I found the one that works best for me. The same sorts of decisions are being made all over the place and are affecting and sometimes disrupting established business models. But, as Thomas Jefferson said, a little revolution now and then is a healthy thing.

As Steve Bryant says, though, it's not just enough to allow my to view your media. Unless I can reuse it it's really not of value to me. Bryant is advocating - or at least foreseeing - a future where all content is mashable, where the community can create as many versions as the market can bear, with the best ones rising to the top and revenue being shared with the original artist. That's certainly a possibility, but right now it's just important that content creators realize that it's important, as I mentioned a while ago, to let people share media on their own terms. That goes for nice, clear permalinks, embeddable video and more. If I can share something on my blog I'm much more likely to pass it along to my readers. And because it doesn't involve the reader clicking away from where they already are it's more likely they'll view it and continue on with what they were doing instead of bypassing it because they don't want to go back and forth. That can be something as difficult as creating tricked-out press rooms for all shapes and sizes or as simple as adding social-networking tools to stories like The New York Times recently has.

Allowing media to go where the people are is vitally important because, as Stefanie Olsen at CNET says, media consumption is a full-time job for the teenagers and young adults marketers are always trying to reach. This group is always online, listening to music, watching video (be it TV, movies or other) and are also producing their own. They are growing up accustomed to being always connected and always out there for the world to see. These are the people whose purchasing power is lowering the cost of technologies previously reserved for the hallowed few, something that's lowering the barrier of entry to publishing, which further drives down costs and so on and so forth.

Of course not everything that they publish and not every consumer-generated version of a song will be popular, regardless of its artistic qualities. "Long Tail" author Chris Anderson reminds us that not everything that's a hit is good and not everything that is good becomes a hit. There's a lot of factors that pull consumers into or against a crowd mentality. We are a "niche culture" and the ability to find our niche and communicate with others who are there is very powerful. When there are so many products that are available at little to no cost - largely because of the low cost of production and distribution - it doesn't matter what's a financial hit or not. What matters is whether that product hit the right group at the right time.

But the mechanism to bring the product to the consumer needs to be in place and be easy to use. That's why I don't read too much into the news that consumers still prefer renting DVDs to downloading movies. For all the advances that have been made in the last six months in this space, downloading and watching a movie is still not as convenient as renting the disc. Right now DVD players are ubiquitous in the personal electronics space but they weren't three years ago. You can get a portable player for $90, you get one when you buy a laptop, you can get one that comes in the same box as a TV set. When downloading a movie is as easy to do as getting a movie from Netflix - and is free of all sorts of "you have to start watching it in six hours and you can't watch it on Thursday afternoon" type restrictions then we'll watch this space take off.

But which movies will we be downloading? Because of the aforementioned lowered entry barriers the role of the professional critic is increasingly being called into question. Right now the trust factor for a great many people is higher with citizen journalists who they've found whose opinions they agree with and perspectives they respect. Unlike the high-falutin' critic, who descends from the Great Ivory Mount of Journalism to deliver "The Review," bloggers and other online media are seen as ordinary people who pay for movies, have kids to arrange baby-sitting for and other relatable issues. In fact, the only time critics seem to be relevant anymore is when they decide to start handing out year-end awards. Yes, there's still a lot of progress to be made before online media folks get some official respect. But most of this fanboy-ish behavior comes from the fact that these self-publishers are fans. They're people who are genuinely excited about movies. That's a good thing when it comes to what they write but can hamper their relations with studios and stars accustomed to the "civilized" behavior of the professional press. The problem, of course, is that the professional press simply isn't meeting many of the needs of today's media consumers. So companies are just fine talking to members of a media that's increasingly irrelevant but is freezing out members of a media that is growing in popularity, reach and trust. That should be interesting to watch.

Knowing how respond to all levels of professionalism in the media is important because, as Mack Collier states, social media has killed the idea of there ever being an "isolated incident." That convenient corporate excuse has been done away because of the ease of publishing a gripe about a product or service. That gripe will be indexed by the search engines, archived, and eventually found by others who thought they were the only ones having that problem. The good news is that this example also works for positive experiences, with people sharing how well they've been treated or their genuine enthusiasm for this, that or the other thing.

This is a very long way of saying that the media rules have changed for everyone. It's important that we look around and assess what the new rules are everyone now and again and not only make sure we're playing the game right, but that we're playing the right game in the first place.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Like Brian Oberkirch, I really enjoy strategies that get down into the nitty-gritty of who a company is reaching out to and why. Outreach means absolutely nothing if it's to the wrong group.
• Hey, if I'm not worthy of my own Wikipedia entry then no one is.
• Author Steven Johnson has shown that the information provided by websites and local bloggers can lead to greater understanding of not only current events but also the past.
• I've said it before and I'll say it again: The biggest reason I love how people are self-publishing is that they're covering niche topics that it's not financially viable for big media to cover.
• The Bivings Report lays out the stats on how magazines are using new media tools such as blogs, RSS and more. It's a great read. It's important, I think, to look past what we might consider low numbers and realize that the fact that publishers are using them even at this level is great.
• Seems the MPAA had a hand in killing a bill that would have made "pre-texting," the practice of mis-representing yourself in order to gain private information, illegal. The movie trade group claimed such a law would make it impossible for it to investigate piracy.
• Almost under our noses a new business model emerged that allows people to only pay for the things they want. That means trouble for companies, like photo film makers, who profited off the fact that you had to print the entire roll of film. Now you just have to print out the ones you want.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is talking about how he now "gets" JPG Magazine. The title works something like this:

1) Photographer submits picture they took to an online site
2) The online community ranks and votes on which ones they think are the best
3) Those winners get their photos printed in a print version of the title

This makes complete sense to me. There is still tremendous allure to seeing your name in print, on TV or in some other form of controlled media. I know, that was supposed to disappear as a concern with the rise of social media, a time when anyone can publish online, create professional video or do just about anything else a big, corporately controlled outlet can do.

But just because the barrier to entry has been eliminated doesn't mean that people don't keep trying to clear the barriers that are still in place. It still means a lot when what you've done is granted time in a media where time, whether it be measured in actual time or column inches, is an asset that needs to be allocated to those things items that are deemed to be worthy of mass awareness. Trying to meet that standard is something that, just like any other goal, is worth trying to meet.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not quite sure what to do with the meme that's running rampant in certain neighborhoods of the online world regarding the short life expectancy the page view has been given. On the one hand it makes sense to me that, yes, some tools that are being used are going to render the page view obsolete as a measurement tool. RSS and Ajax aren't going to move the needle on page views and therefore it is not going to be an accurate measure of online activity.

On the other hand, though, I think that proclaiming the coming end of page views is a bit like declaring the coming end of, I don't know, the office. Yes, maintaining an actual office will eventually be an unneeded expense as home internet connections become faster and cheaper. And it will be easier to attract the right worker if you aren't going to force them to uproot their family and make them move to wherever someone 40 years ago decided to take out a lease. Is there a legitimate point to be discussed? Yes. But let's spend more time figuring out how to work this problem then just trying to get linked to for asking a difficult question.

The first thing to remember is that, regardless of page views, visitors are still going to be an important number that will need to be measured. Even if you've AJAXed the page, put all sorts of windows and widgets on it and made it so that the visitor never really needs to leave it, you still need to count the people how load that site. This should be a given but I'm afraid some have overlooked this reality. And this number added to the number of email or RSS subscriptions should give you a good number of people whose eyeballs you can count and report.

After that it comes down to...wait for it...engagement. Yes, that favorite topic that everyone talks about and no one can define. Much like the internet has proven a powerful tool for actually drawing a line between advertising and potential/actual sales (previously nebulous at best), the internet can provide numbers that actually measure engagement. But each company will have to define what that looks like and what sort of visitor behaviors actually count as engagement. Some might value comments left over number of links. Some the other way around. Some might not put much value on either but find something that is important to them and use that as a measure of success.

So yes, the page view is going to eventually be not as important as it once was. But there's an awful lot of assumptions of corporate behavior and public education behind claiming that it will be gone by 2010. You might as well state that all blogs will be part of an organized social network by 2010. It's rooted partly in recent precedent but it also discount any future innovations that might trump it.

This is just the latest in a series of changes that the corporate world will have to adjust to, a series that extends back to the invention of the printing press. As always it will be up to a few forward-thinking individuals to plot the course and lead others.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)