Digital Media Diva by Lynne d Johnson

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Report from BlogWorldExpo: The Cult of Blogging with Leo Laporte and iJustine

Highlights from 11.09.07 10:15 AM session @ BlogWorldExpo.

iJustine and Leo Laporte discuss the cult of blogging. Justine livecasts her life 24-7. Laporte utilizes many tools online to share his life: radio, TV, photos, message boards, The Life of Leo Blog, as well as other means.

Justine says learn to control; you don't have to Twitter everything you're doing. When it got really scary for her is when she looked in the archives and saw herself sleeping in a hotel. Everything she's livecasted is there forever, archived.

Both say another example of someone who has built up a cult online is Chris Pirillo. Laporte says Pirillo has used every form of Internet media to build his brand.

Laporte says he is making money podcasting because advertisers realize he has loyal listeners. All of this media is about engaging your audience, he says. You got to be careful, he adds.

Justine says advertisers want to have her endorse their products. She will not put her name on a product that she doesn't stand behind.

The short-term strategy is to cash in and loose your audience. The long-term strategy, Laporte says is to have integrity and wait for the right products to come along.

When asked what he uses to measure podcast audience he says he uses Podtrac, also to connect with the right advertisers.

The conversation moved into the realm of sharing and licensing content. Leo was asked about Creative Commons licenses. The licenses enable creatives to determine how others can use their content. You can also select setting for CC licenses on the flickr photo-sharing service.

Audience member asked how they see their brands evolving. Justine says she sees creating a platform to making a community like Leo making things possible for others who enjoy what they do.

Laporte says he loves working with these people. It's scary when you start making money, because things change. He still works in mainstream media in TV and radio, so for him it's a hobby and it all synergizes really well. He's created a brand of himself. When he appears on Regis & Kelly or is on a podcast -- five years ago he wanted to be the Martha Stewart of tech. He's not anxious about being a millionaire. He likes doing it the way he's doing it. People tell him he could be bigger with proper management. What's really satisfying to him is finding people who really have talent and helping them create their own voice and their own cult. On tech.tv he was the only one who had television experience. By sharing his own notoriety with Kevin Rose, Kevin was able to create a career for himself.

How does Justine separate her real world? She says it's difficult. She doesn't have a boyfriend right now. He grandmother subscribes to her RSS feeds and gets her Twitter updates. So her family is part of her life. Some people don't want to be public in her world online. She can't tag them in photos on facebook or things like that. This livecasting thing has been a social experiment.

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Report from BlogWorldExpo: The New Media Moguls Roundtable

Highlights from 11.08.07 5:15 PM Featured Panel Keynote @ BlogWorldExpo

Are blogging networks and blogging communities (group blogs) becoming more like MSM (mainstream media) or are they still blogs? That's the question I asked myself as I listened to this panel. And, does it even really matter? Isn't media going to become more like an intersection between the blogosphere and the mainstream with UGC (user generated content) playing a larger role in MSM?

Panel include: Richard Jalichandra (CEO Technorati), Roger L. Simon (Pajamas Media), Jeremy Wright (b5 media), Brad Hill (Director of Weblogs Inc.). Moderator: Jason Shellen (The Secret Agency)

Brad Hill: The future is richer media. We're getting more into video. Opening the door federating sites together and inviting blog brands that match verticals. Cooperating on content and business issues. 2008 seems huge to me for the whole industry hope it's huge for us as well.

Roger L. Simon: Moving in an environmental direction. Our site called energytrek. This site will be a place where everyone can go and record contributions in energy conservation arena.

Jason Shellen: What can new media learn from new media?

Richard Jalichandra: More likely to twitter than blog on a daily basis.

Jason Shellen: How does that factor into networks?

Brad Hill: Some of your readers probably read your site without ever visiting it. Push the brand off the site and into the pipeline where the audience is. It's an old concept that the people should come to you . Widgets is a big part. Remove from home base. Sharing traffic. Get your brand extended everywhere you can think of by every technology you have at your disposal.

Jeremy Wright: Just finished aquisition of a video network. Negotiating a podcast network. We shared our tech with a business blog network. We do everything we can to promote social content

Jason Shellen: How do you define blog? Tony at alwayson had problem with defining blog and huffington post and then other sites came along and called posting blogging.

Roger L. Simon: We can let it evolve and not control the word blog. It's a democratic publishing platform that opened up and changed publishing. Where do we go from here? Some of us made networks -- our model, huff post model, weblogs model -- all these different things. The Internet is the electronic equivalent of the pacific ocean -- endless. We are all kind of swimming along in there. Some will be lucrative and be there and be powerful. Son't worry about blog or media company just get in and do your thing.

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Report from BlogWorldExpo: Blogging and Television

Highlights from 11.08.07 4 PM session: Blogging and Television @ BlogWorldExpo.

I came to this session expecting a talk about the intersection of blogging and television, perhaps even some highlights on Vlogging (video blogging). It was definitely a good panel, each participant had great case studies to share and presented their information with clarity and insight. The but here is that it wasn't as fluid in terms of what was presented, as each participant came from extremely different backgrounds. Read on, and you'll see what I mean.

Kesu James worked with BBDO New York to create the HBO Voyeur Project as a case study in voyeurism:

The project Weapons of Misdirection in a sense is a MilBlog (military blog), except it's fictional. Based on soldiers from the US, Kesu created characters focusing on the story about depleted geranium. Therefor there was fiction mixed with reality. The DOD (Department of Defense) called the site fake, but people said they didn't care. Kesu says we are in a new era of communications where entertainment properties are recognized as entertainment properties.

James Hibberd is an award-winning journalist whose blog " Rated" covers primetime television programming for the Los Angeles-based trade publication TelevisionWeek and its New York-based sister magazine AdvertisingAge.

Hibberd came up with the Idea to take the dullest part of coverage (his coverage) and turn it into a blog. That was the daily rating stories. Everyone gets Nielsen ratings and they all do the same thing with it. He says he was getting bored with his own stories and decided to put it into a blog.

He says: Instead of just here are the numbers, here are the stories behind the numbers. People in the industry; why a show didn't or did do well. Within 4 months more traffic to the blog than to regular stories. Got linked on Drudge and others. We started adding Q&A's and more themed stuff around shows. Videos of rejected clips became a popular feature on site. Crain has started to syndicate to Advertising Age. Blog exists on both sites. Looking to syndicate even more. Even if you're a publication or business with formal or professional style there are ways to find blogging that works for you and improves your presence on the Web.

Josh Krane is Senior Vice President, Interactive and New Media of G4

He says: We are a small and newer cable network merged with tech.tv and redefined our brand. On air focus on men's entertainment and now broadening our reach of games. On the Web trying to move more and more into original production. Blog happened by accident. It turned into a TV product instead of trying to repurpose a TV product into a blog. It's a little easier to play in blogosphere. Our readers make their own podcasts and blogs so we try to get to them in their voice. Our blog is called The Feed.

David Rolfe, VP, Director of Integrated Production at Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Highlights: Evolution of owning the water cooler. The consumers own it. It's amazing how we as an industry are coming to it.

Mark Tony; Seth Geiger - present a study on bloggers

Blog awareness and usage results

• The blog reader is male 31-32 ears, Caucasian, has at least some college education, makes $54k
• People read blogs to be entertained and get the latest news.
• Many things will work in the blogosphere -- trying to attract a small number of passionate people.
• Daily blog reader reads news elsewhere goes to blog for further and analysis. Weekly blog reader uses blogs as primary resource.
• Marketing of blog continues to be viral. From recommendations, social networking sites, and links.
• Not considered information platform in terms of trust. 2/3 of readers feel they need to go to journalistic site to vet information.
• Most bloggers are in it just to have their voices heard.
• Online video is leading and becoming online destination.
• Only 13% online users reading blogs a few months ago only 4%.
• Women read more celebrity health.
• Blogs serve role of providing updates.
• People find out from friends and social networking sites.
• Trust is an issue daily and weekly readers feel need to confirm.
• Willing to accept advertising.
• Career and money related motives less compelling reasons to blog.

Final Words:

Josh Krane: We are not in better position. We can monetize and distribute better but not the credibility of blogosphere.

David Rolfe: Site that became very viral we are embarassed about. It is about finding niche. The effectiveness will be in finding niche groups.

Kensu James: Getting clients to spend resources to find niche understanding the nuance.

David Rolfe: Measurability will get better.

06:17 pm | 0 recommendations | 6 comments

The Selling of An Album: Jay-Z's American Gangster

When Jay-Z (née Shawn Carter), the rapper turned music mogul and top Forbes hip-hop money maker (banking an estimated $34 million in 2006), first announced that he was inspired by the film American Gangster and was coming out of retirement, once again, to record an album -- like many of his true fans, I was excited. Others brushed it off as a marketing scheme. To come out of retirement because he knew that the movie, of the same name as his album, based on the life of Frank Lucas, an infamous Harlem drug lord turned snitch, played by Denzel Washington, was going to be a smash.

If that is the case, it proves Jay-Z's business acumen all the more. Where's the bad in timing a record release to a sure-to-hit movie? Though it's not the official soundtrack, best selling movies usually have best selling soundtracks, and since this is a soundtrack by extension -- ah, well, you get the math.

There's a few other things that Jay-Z understands about the music business, but I'm not too sure he's on point with some of his thinking. Long a target of the black market, in which bootleg CDs of official CDs are sold on the street, Jay-Z has always been cautious about leaks (in fact Jay Smooth of illdoctrine vlogs about what Jay-Z could learn from Radiohead's distribution of their own album in a digital format in this instance).

In that regard, weeks ago I preordered Jay-Z's album from iTunes. But the day of the album's release, Nov. 6, the album was not available on iTunes. In fact I had to check my preorders in my account in order for it to start downloading. I couldn't understand why the album was on sale at Amazon and not on iTunes. This required further investigation on my part.

While the album is available as both a CD and MP3 download on Amazon, the MP3s are only available if you purchase the entire album. On iTunes, on the other hand, the album is not available at all, which means only people who preordered as I did were able to purchase from iTunes. Here's a bit more about why.

Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter has announced that the LP will not be for sale through iTunes -- not because of disputes over DRM or pricing like the usual iTunes-related complaints. Rather, he doesn't want the album to be broken down into individually-purchasable tracks.

"As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles," Carter said in a statement sent out earlier this week. Instead, eager listeners will need to purchase the full album from other retailers like Rhapsody and brick-and-mortar stores. [ars technica]

Now of course this can only work if the album is actually an album. In the case of Jay-Z, at least this time around, it is. It's a concept album, chronicling the rise and fall of a successful drug dealer. But unfortunately for Jay-Z, iTunes is in the business of selling singles. And I'm going out on a limb to say that even if he wanted to sell the album in its entirety as we see on Amazon, it wasn't something that Apple was willing to do.

What Jay-Z seems to be forgetting here is that P2P and Torrent sites haven't ceased to exist, and that people will make individual tracks available to friends on sharing sites such as these and other online storage sites. In fact, they might even make at least streaming of the songs available on imeem, a media sharing site for audio and video that uses a media player.

The music industry's understanding of how social media is affecting consumer behavior continues to elude me (Club Monaco -- yes the clothing company -- is hosting a conversation on this very subject in New York on Monday, with Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of Deep Focus, an entertainment marketing company). On one hand, when they stop threatening sites like YouTube and imeem and partner with them, you think they get it. Then when they make moves like Jay-Z's recent move, you understand that the need to control comes from an understanding that there really is no control. At the end of the day, the consumer is in control, and ultimately, entertainment companies are going to need to listen to the consumer.

Once the final digital sales roll in, they definitely won't reflect the true number of fans who have acquired this music digitally. In fact, many fans will be upset when the album isn't available in formats they're used to. Those fans will be the very ones who seek other means -- or simply write the album off altogether.

Related Content:

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The new wave of technology has the big names in entertainment cozying up to the new kids on the block. Look for significant shakeups in the music and television industries and small steps toward less conservative approaches infilm and radio. Plus, Web 2.0 finally clicks with Internet titans, and companies catch the gaming bug. By April Joyner

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Report from BlogWorldExpo: The Future of WordPress

Liveblog of highlights from morning keynote session @ BlogWorldExpo.

Edward Sussman, executive vice president for the online and business development groups at Mansueto Ventures LLC and the president of the Inc.com and FastCompany.com network of sites interviews Matt Mullenweg founding developer of WordPress.

Matt: In terms of writing on the Web the tools suck. There's no spellcheck. No good way to tie blogs together. Pingbacks are rough. Comments are rough. There are things still fundamentally behind -- we're like in year four of a 10 year blogging history. We're thinking about every day how can we make it easy for people to publish their site. We're starting a firefox model, we're you can update from clicking a button.

Ed: Any big changes in video blogs and podcasts?

Matt: Photo blogs are still probably my favorite. It's rich media but I can still scan it. I would say a lot of the video stuff we're seeing today is reblogged content. Video is still tricky to do. Hard to encode these giant files. Audio casting is there. Not sure where it's gonna go. The written word, I'm still a fan.

Ed: Let's talk about your company and where you think you're going in a year, five years? You told me that part of your model was emulating Craigslist.

Matt: I love the Craigslist model in that -- if you ask Craig why doesn't he have ads on the site. And he'll say well the users didn't ask for it. They listen. A lot of the Websites that I interact with are a really bad date. They don't stop telling you about themselves and ask you how do you feel? How's that chicken.

Logistically we're going to get bigger. Especially on a global scale. Adding at least a developer in each language. Always going to be open source and I hope we stay alive.

Ed: Are you actively planning strategies for how you can monetize? Is that at the forefront or is it still in the background.

Matt: Capitalism is a working system. We did take a small investment about 2 1/2 years ago. If you look at companies making money on Internet, they've enabled others to profit. I think if there are ways to enable folks to profit and to keep it incredibly tactful.

Audience Question: What is driving WordPress forward?

Matt: At the time tools like geocities weren't sustainable in connecting with people. The tools I see working are the tools enabling people to interact with one another. I am a strong believer in open source. Selling software is completely die. As folks it's easy to get into these walled gardens. If we could create a framework that is opensource that enables us to run the data ourselves. I know this is incredibly geeky. I want the majority of content of the Web to be published open source. Right now Google did a survey looking at http headers and they published it. And it was like the people who had valid xml. .8% people on the Web had x pingback and that's us that's wordpress. My goal is to get that number up.

Audience Question: How can I monetize this for myself?

Matt: Start two years ago. All the numbers are trailing. Uniques over the past year. Political blogging is incredibly seasonal. You may not catch it this round. Start now. Fundraising. Contacting people. Getting in touch with people.

10:19 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Technology: The Talk About Google's OpenSocial

And everyone thought that Microsoft had punked Google by investing $240 million in Facebook for 1.6 of the social-networking site, when all the while Google had a plan for Orkut, that being OpenSocial -- a set of common APIs for building social applications across the Web, (with a developer sandbox at Orkut).

"Orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through Orkut," said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for Orkut, Google's social networking service. "By using OpenSocial to open up Orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently."

Here's what's being said around the Web about OpenSocial:

• OpenSocial - What a Difference a Day Makes
  Today Google made its official announcement (NYTimes coverage) of the networks that have joined their OpenSocial initiative. By adding sites not yet named in Tuesday's NYTimes piece, namely the addition of MySpace, we have a completely different picture of the combined OpenSocial sites compared to Facebook. By popular requests here's an updated chart:
• Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday
  The new project, called OpenSocial (URL will go live on Thursday), goes well beyond what we’ve previously reported. It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.
• MySpace Joins Google’s OpenSocial
  Until today. MySpace and Google announced that the largest social network in the world will be joining the developing initiative by the largest search engine in the world. Google has said that over the past year, they’ve been secretly working on with MySpace to include them in the OpenSocial.
• NewsGator Joins OpenSocial
  NewsGator was quick to take advantage of the new developer’s platform OpenSocial to create an application for Google’s new partners in the social networking space. Named “Didja Hear!?” this app will let you share and discuss multimedia images and video content. The premise of Didja Hear will basically organize and distribute video and image content between you and your friends.
• Open Social: screencast and screenshots
  In yesterday's post, I described the new Open Social API, sponsored by Google and supported by a wide range of Internet companies including my company Ning.
• Charlene Li comes clean on OpenSocial leak
  Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li now claims that she was the source of the New York Times scoop about Google's OpenSocial program, something we alluded to in a post yesterday about a quote from Li being scrubbed from the Times story.
• Google to open Orkut OpenSocial developer sandbox tonight
  The campfire is burning tonight on the Google campus as the company prepares to launch a Orkut sandbox for working with the OpenSocial APIs. Developers will be able register, get the docs and try out their code on the Orkut “container.” Other containers, such as Ning, MySpace and others, will become available based on schedules set by those companies. “Ning is ready to go,” said co-founder Marc Andreessen. “We are waiting for the APIs to stabalize.”
• Google Open Social - Don’t Believe the Hype
  At first glance, Google’s Open Social sounds like a great thing. Open… Social… two great tastes that go great together, right? Maybe not. “Open Social” sounds a lot like an “Open Marriage” – on the surface some may think this sounds fun but after thinking about it for a minute you quickly realize it’s a bad idea

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Tech Monday: It's A Blog World After All

Back in the spring, there was some discrepancy about whether there are actually 70 million blogs in the world. David Sifry of Technorati posted "The State of the Live Web" in April and revealed a steady growth in blogs to the tune of 120k blogs each day. Of this great number, it was discovered, that perhaps only 15.5 million of the blogs are actually even active, and that perhaps blogging has reached a plateau.

"There are tech bloggers who say it's dying, but that doesn't mean for everyone else it is. Many of those bloggers were there at the beginning of the beginning, but to be quite honest, very few bloggers crossover outside of their niches. There's a viable future here. Magazines, radio shows, TV shows -- go out of business every day, blogging (blogging, vlogging, Internet radio, Internet tv) is the same thing," says Rick Calvert, CEO & Co-founder, BlogWorld & New Media Expo. "There's no sign at all that it has reached it's peak and dying, to the contrary, it's just the beginning."

Calvert created the Blog World event to cater to the next group of evangelists, those at the lower end of the long tail, who still have a lot to learn about blogging from a business standpoint as well as a technological standpoint. "There are sites out there with 80,000 readers a day who don't know how to monetize content, while sites with half that amount of traffic are making a living from it," he says.

Calvert and his organizers say Blogworld is the largest blogging and new media conference ever assembled, with more than 70 presenters. The speakers list includes a who's who of blogging, such as Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, Om Malik of GigaOm, and BJ Schecter of ESPN among many others.

"I launched the event because I wanted to attend an event like this, and when I went looking for it, it didn't exist. Coincidentally I run tradeshows for a living and I couldn't believe that anything like this didn't exist, so I created it," says Calvert. "There were many niche blog conferences: religious, political, tech, etc. This is all of them in one place, like any other tradeshow, like what NAB is to broadcasters."

And it's not only the bloggers who are attending the conference, but major media outlet representatives as well. "Every publishing, radio, and TV outlet is getting their staff to blog," Calvert explains.

Blog World is held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, November 8-9, 2007 with an Executive and Entrepreneur track on November 7. The program will include presentations on strategic marketing, brand building, monetization, increasing readership and influence, digital music and video integration, and many other topics of importance to bloggers.

For more info visit, BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Normal discount pricing ends October 19, with additional discounts for Fast Company readers who use the code: FASTVIP. The Fast Company 15% reduced rate will also be available after the normal discount period.

04:59 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Tech Monday: What The Women Bloggers Know

Back in July, I went to Chicago to attend the 3rd Annual BlogHer Conference to moderate a panel, "Privacy, Exposure, Risk: Can you maintain safer spaces online?" BlogHer is a community for and guide to blogs by women, as well as an annual conferences, Web network, and an advertising network with the mission of creating opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. I've attended, and I believe, spoken at each BlogHer event, since its inception. But I must say, that overall I found this year's conference the most cohesive programatically than any before.

I know I'm getting to this post late, but there are so many lessons I learned at BlogHer that have positively impacted the way I work. Though the conference was divided into five tracks -- Art of Life, Business of You, Community, Identity, and Technical -- I most gravitated toward the tech tracks, especially "Blogging Workflow Tools and Tricks," hosted by Barb Dybwad of AOL's Weblogs Inc. and Gina Trapani of Lifehacker. Don't get me wrong, other panels throughout the conference were very informative and important in terms of understanding blogging culture, blogging as a business, as well as the social and political implications of blogging, but again, as I stated earlier, the tech track resonated with me most.

From Dybward and Trapani, I learned how the most prolific bloggers get the job done -- it's primarily because they've learned trade secrets that, as this panel illustrated, they're all too willing to share. Much of what was presented can also be found on the Blog Tools Wiki - Back end tools page. These tools enable you to blog faster and easier, such as:

• Scribefire -- a Firefox extension that enables you to blog from anywhere on the Web, once you've set up your blogs. You can even drag and drop images.
• Ecto -- a blogging desktop client that integrates with Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Drupal and more. (I've been using a similar tool Qumana Blog Manager, that also makes it easy to blog while you're offline and then upload your posts whenever you're connected again.)
• Lifehacker roundup maker -- this roundup tool helps you make a list post such as my Tech Monday: New Media News Roundup. All you do is insert URLs, text links, and descriptions and the tool automatically generates all of the HTML code for your list.

Other tools include easier ways to copy links and text without having to cut and paste in the old fashioned way, as well as the ability to output copied text and links directly to HTML code. If you don't understand anything I'm saying, but you're interested in making your blogging easier, you should definitely visit the Back end tools page to learn more. I find the tools not only useful for people who want to blog faster or easier, but for people who manage multiple blogs as well.

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Video: Yves Behar -- Master of Design

In case you missed it, our October issue features our fourth annual special report about the intersection of business and design. You can get full access to all of the content, including exclusive multimedia features, such as two video interviews with Yves Behar, a video tour of R/GA Interactive's best agency work, and slideshows of the widgets we love, such as the Nokia N95, plus additional exclusives by clicking over the Masters of Design home.

Here's one of the videos featured in our package, where Senior Writer Linda Tischler caught up with Yves Behar at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair to discus the future of furniture design.

To see more, go here.

09:55 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Tech Monday: Which Social Network Fits Your Marketing Strategy?

Currently, I'm suffering from social networking fatigue with a dash of information overload and a sip of keyboard-itis thrown in . No, I have no inflammation occurring, but a friend and I joked on IM today about my disease of keyboard, in that I type so much that it seems at times I can't type at all -- anymore. I type and a flurry of erroneous misspellings enter the IM screen, though I know at the very moment my fingertips meet up with a letter key that I'm about to commit an offense. Though, for some reason, I can not stop myself. I can not correct this action midstream. And it's not so much that the words are being misspelled as it is that letters are missing or somehow seriously misplaced within the word. But that's not what I'm writing about here -- my love/hate affair with my keyboard. Love: because I have to use it to work. Hate: because I'm tired of typing 90 WPM for 2-hour straight intervals. But I have to do this -- I have to email, and IM, and social network simultaneously in order to get my job done. It may seem that I'm rambling and digressing all at once, but I'm coming closer to making my point -- you'll see.

There have always been online groups and dating sites, and IM has been replacing the phone as an alternative means for business communication for a while now, but the influx of social networks is more than offering individuals an opportunity to connect with others through various means, it's becoming a primary communications tool. As a social connector these networks are becoming more important to many people's day than making a phone call to a friend, or even in some cases, gasp, going on a date.

Just the other day, I watched a campaign for a new Website make its way through MySpace, start a facebook group, and then Twitter about its latest happenings all during the course of one day. This is happening because marketers are trying to find myriad ways of meeting people where they are most -- online. But they're not just online, because if that were the case simply setting up a Website and creating a print and broadcast campaign around it to lead people back to said site would be more than enough. It no longer is. Today's CMO has to become as well versed in a social networking strategy as she does any other aspect of her marketing mix, or 3 P's, or any of that other stuff she may have learned in B school. This is the stuff I'm learning to do more of -- better, and thus the reason my keying is not so keen any longer. Yet what I'm lacking in ability to key letters, I'm gaining in introducing more people to FastCompany.com and educating them about our various products.

Sure I see myself and others like me as cowboys and cowgirls traversing across the wild wide web. The fact is, though, targeting the right social networks to create the right mix, is becoming harder. In a recent article, "Targeting Social Networks," by Dave Coffey over at adotas, he wrote:

"With the Internet becoming a key component of our daily social experience, and people sharing more and more of their personal information, protecting one’s privacy has become that much more of a challenge. The reality is that those using sites like Facebook and MySpace (rumored to be following in Facebook’s footsteps) need not worry because while behavioral targeting’s media exposure is just now gaining momentum, its practice has been honed over a period of many years."

While I agree with Coffey, and understand how Facebook -- and perhaps even MySpace, Jaiku, and Plaxo -- because of their leanings toward making lifelogging and presence possible (more on this in a follow up post) -- will make behavioral targeting more clear and possible, I'm not sure that I'm sold on whether Facebook or any of these other sites are the best place to reach a consumer, your consumer -- head on. Sure there's a lot to be learned about an individual's interests and activities on sites like these, but what about the niche sites -- the sites that speak directly to the core audience you hope to target? In the past couple of weeks alone I learned about three such networks and see a marketer's potential targeted plan in them all.

First there's the $4.5 million-funded GlobalGrind, that's a NetVibes of sorts for the hip-hop community. While I have my doubts about how successful an aggregator can be, and though the target demographic for hip-hop community is never quite clear, this non-geeky aggregator just might catch on with the young non-RSSabled who revel in hip-hop's underpinnings (the music, the videos, the clothes). In this case, the demographic may be clear enough, if it catches on, for marketers to reach a direct demographic (whatever that is) without going to an overly populated network and attempting to narrow them down into this one funnel. They're already there, served up in this one homogenous audience.

Looking to target a specific ethnicity? How about a live language learning community? This site may be exactly what you're looking for. And then again, it may not be. Who knows for sure just yet. But what is apparent is that LiveMocha is a community that feels a lot like a real, offline community. For those trying to learn a language, in this ever-increasingly shifting global economy in which the ability to speak multiple languages will be key, this site is a place you go to work with others who offer peer review and assistance in learning your new language. Of course advertising revenue is not LiveMocha's primary focus, but it is an integral part of the program. The site's "About Us" section reads:

"Like many other Web 2.0 companies, we believe we can significantly disrupt the market and deliver significant new value by leveraging the latest trends in social networking to connect people in new and exciting ways and leverage their collective intelligence. Our business model involves advertising, but is based on the foundation of a real subscription model that will generate substantial revenue. Over time, we will build the scale necessary to serve up a highly profitable advertising model"

And finally there's blogtalkradio. The blogger's audio show platform and listening site isn't exactly new, but it's recently launched a few social networking features such as listener profiles, the ability to add friends and favorites, rate shows, and live chat, along with other such features. In the regard that the targeting here is based on listening habits and behaviors around listening habits, this site could work for a present-day marketer just like any campaign in old media -- broadcast media -- would have.

We all know that none of these ideas are categorically novel, or even terribly new, it's just that the game continues to take place, more and more, on a new terrain, and therefore new rules are involved. I'm not the only one out there targeting consumers and partners one-on-one in the social networking space, others of you are everyday, but then there are others who haven't yet realized that the time has come to figure out which way to run the play. There are many choices out there, but like every other form of media that existed before, and even Web 1.0, not every platform is going to last. Where's the best place to gamble your odds? Where's the best place, on the Web, where your consumers are active, or possibly even just lurking?