mediaczar

(NB: If you have both a blog and a short attention span, please skip the article, and go straight to this short survey. Many thanks!)

What is a blogger? Everyone seems to think they know, and yet the longer I work in this area, the more I realize I know nothing. And the less I know, the more suspicious I become of marketers who use vague terms like “conversation” (which has – after all – become little more than a Latinization of the ghastly “dialogue”.) I can just about understand what Technorati means when they talk about

The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

(State of the Blogosphere 2008)

…but there are an awful lot of long words that could turn out to hide an awful lot. And that’s the carefully thought-out distillation of a bunch of experts. Most of us, most of the time fall back on lazy or confusing language. We talk about “social media” and never stop to think that — depending on who’s doing the talking (and what they have to sell) — what is meant by that apparently innocuous phrase shifts wildly from speaker to speaker.

I think that we do the world (and ourselves) as much of a disservice by lumping together a bunch of web sites based on the fact that they share a similar technology as we do if we can only lump all fiction, non-fiction, reference, text-books, guidebooks and manuals together as “books.” We need a better classification.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing, and now I think we’re ready to do something about it. But while my ambitions are actually rather modest, I need a lot of data to get started. This is where you come in. I really need your help.

(Seriously, if you’ve read this far, and aren’t sure if you want to read the rest of the article, please don’t. But please, if you’re going to leave, take this short survey. Goodbye, thank you, and see you soon I hope!)

OK. Here’s a quick distillation of what I’ve been thinking about that will help give us some context.

All blogs are not the same

This seems abundantly obvious. But I’m not talking about topic here. What else differs? Let’s look at what we know:

Audience reach differs

I am fond of drawing charts like this:

We know that a few large blogs together reach the great majority of the audience. The great majority of blogs, on the other hand, will reach no more than a few dozen unique users, let alone unduplicated audience, in their lifetime.

And yet we don’t have the language to distinguish between the various areas on the spectrum. Sure, we’ve borrowed the term “A-list” from the entertainment industry to describe the really big guys. But is that going to be enough?

Target audiences differ

Different bloggers write for different audiences. They may write for their friends and family, their peers, their colleagues, or for “people who are into the same sort of thing.” Some write for themselves, for people they know, or people with whom they have developed a writer/reader relationship, while others write for one-off strangers who are typing search terms into Google.

Or they may write to satisfy or attract customers and clients. Or to communicate with journalists and analysts. It seems perverse to lump “corporate bloggers” in with the rest of the blogosphere.

Blogger motivation differs

For the past three years, the Bivings Group has published research on The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers. You can see (from the chart above – well, if you click and blow it up, you can see) that nearly all of them have featured “reporter blogs” for a couple of years. This highlights a point that’s worth making: at one end of the blogger audience spectrum are a bunch of people who are paid to blog. Whether they draw a salary, or a traffic-related bonus their motivation seems pretty clear. As does that of the blogger who joins an ad programme, or an affiliate programme, or who seeks sponsorship.

Corporate bloggers are also driven by material needs; whether they’re trying to promote their product, service or organization, there’s a financial impetus behind it all. It may be harder to measure, but it’s pretty clear why they’re in the game.

Other bloggers, on the other hand may be motivated by deeper Maslow needs; to express themselves, to explore and share ideas (me), to make a name for themselves on a wider stage (probably me, and most of you who are reading this.) Or they may want to record their experiences and share news with friends and relatives (travel bloggers, for example, and some mommy bloggers.)

Or perhaps their blog simply gives them a better platform than email to share the amusing/interesting/shocking/useful stuff that they find on the web, a sort of digital scrapbook.

Why I think we need a typology

It seems to me that — as marketers and communicators and public relations people and social media experts — we need to distinguish between different types of blogger quickly and easily, and that it would help to have some kind of shared language with which we can do this.

It will help when formulating plans and approaches. For example, and off the top of my head, right now one can probably approach journalist bloggers as though they were journalists, while it’s probably not worth approaching someone who’s mainly a CEO blogger. I look forward to being shot down on this, but would first refer readers to my esteemed colleague’s notes on how to approach a blogger.

And it will help bring new people into the game. Currently clients and colleagues can be split easily into two groups, those who get it, and those who don’t¹. We need a way to talk to the second group so that they can get it. A simpler, logical categorization is one of the things we need to help us do that.

How many types are we looking for?

Obviously it’s possible to have as many types of blogger as there are bloggers; the interesting thing is to try and keep this typology as terse as possible. Katy & Co.’s valiant attempt to categorize different types of blog makes great linkbait, but we should avoid the unnecessary proliferation of terms. Seven (or ideally four) types of blog would make for something memorable and easy to use.

What we’re going to be doing

At the moment, this is an unfunded project, but we’re not going to let that get in our way. We’re not looking to create an industry-standard after all, just something that is useful and usable by us and whoever wants to share it.

We’re going to collect a little qual data from as many bloggers as would like to take part. We’ve created a short test survey (five questions, with a total of 33 statements at this stage) which we would like you to answer. We’ll also use our own tools to collect a little quant data from your blog (typically we look at “recency, frequency, tenure and authority” figures.) We’ll make the (suitably anonymised) data available to whoever wants it on this blog.

Once we’ve begun to code and analyse the data to generate what look like statistically robust clusters of behaviour, we’d like to start interviewing a few of you to find out more about what makes you tick, and what works for your audience.

From that, I hope we can develop some kind of a simple-yet-strong typology that we can share with you. Nothing too complicated, nothing too clever. We’ll also refine our survey, remove lots of questions that don’t turn out to be particularly significant or good indicators of anything, add a carefully-tuned question here and there. Then – with any luck – we’ll go out and do the same exercise again, but this time with more respondents and more languages. Again, we’ll try to share data sets, and will certainly share findings.

How you can help

Please help us.

Answer my survey

If you have a blog of any kind, please answer this short survey. It should take less than five minutes to complete.

Share the survey link

Please share this link via twitter, email, or your blog

http://icanhaz.com/blogger_survey
For us to get started on this, we’ll need lots of data; a few hundred respondents at least. We’ll be doing all sorts of things to get people to answer the survey, but the more you can help push it along the better.

Share your thoughts

Leave a comment below, write a follow-up post on your blog, or drop me a line. I’ll be dropping in and out of this subject for the foreseeable future, and I’ll try to write digests of what we’ve been discussing.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope that you’ve now got a better idea of what I’m trying to do (and why). Furthermore, I hope that you approve, and that you’ll try to help us out.

Note 1. Of course, this is a gross over-simplification. There’s at least one more group, “those who think they get it.” How can any of us be sure that we’re not in this group?