I just found the State of the Blogosphere in 2010 report over at BlogHerald. It’s chock full of lots of data about blogs and the bloggers who blog them, taken from the BlogPulse survey that includes over 150,000,000 blogs.
In the infographic below, you’ll discover the following:
Top 10 blogs by traffic
The spread of pro, part-time, hobbyist and self-employed bloggers
Breakdown of their age and demographic data
How often they post
What languages are most prominent (hint: English is now ranked #2 as the most prominent language of blogs. See if you can guess what #1 is.)
Revenue earned by bloggers
Geographic distribution of blogs within the U.S.
Typically, this is a function that was handled by Technorati. It would seem that their report is still a few weeks away. You can check out the archived posts for the State of the Blogsophere in 2009, 2008, 2007 and earlier. But it leads to the question: whatever happened to the prominence of Technorati? It’s a question that’s been asked before.
In the meantime, enjoy the eye candy. Other great infographics are available from BlogHerald here. If you have any observations or insights, I’d be glad to hear about them below.
One of the oft-overlooked elements in the routine of blogging is image selection. Now, not every blogger uses images, charts, graphs, or other visuals as part of their storytelling approach (Seth Godin, most notably, is almost always a text-only blogger).
But for those of us who do, our photos can be just as important and compelling as our written copy.
The art of communications and marketing is largely one of storytelling. As someone with small children, I can appreciate the necessity of images to help tell stories. Images can help to set expectations, evoke emotional responses, draw attention, provokelaughter, or symbolize irony, among hundreds of other things.
So you see, the cavalier approach to image selection simply won’t do for blogging. Or shouldn’t. Similarly, the sources and the rights of images needs to be taken just as seriously as choosing an image. This post is designed to help you think about where and how you choose images for your blog (or site, or brochure, or whatever), with some bonus content thrown in.
Remember the Yellow Pages? When we needed business information or personal contact information, we would have to find the right book from a huge stack, then flip through all those pages to find what we were looking for. If we needed a contact in a different state, we had to make phone calls to find a possible connection to someone we already knew. And we probably didn’t even think about making connections with someone in another country.
Now it’s a whole different world with social media, with almost instantaneous personal connections to people all around the world. Instead of just one-to-one connections, we get one-to-very-very-many connections as we can now tap into the extensive networks of everyone on our own social graph.
If I need a contact in a particular company, or city, or country, all I need to do is post a question on Facebook or better yet, Twitter, asking if someone has a trusted contact in that company or location, and I will soon have a name and contact information. If a colleague across the country needs help in their own town, a quick tweet will likely reach at least one person who can either directly provide that assistance to my colleague, or at least provide the right connection.
We also need to remember that bloggers are an important part of social media’s reach. Just recently, I had two different situations of helping bloggers reach other bloggers in another part of the country – due to the broad social media reach I have created by putting relationships first, I was able to help them connect and get the assistance they needed within minutes by simply tweeting out a request for a contact in a very specific community. Complete strangers tied together through one trusted connection, and time and distance were immediately condensed through the use of social media.
At OpenSky, we are all about the relationships and social reach of our trusted influencers (bloggers, authors, editors, celebrities, social media mavens) and their communities (networks). Instead of just offering products for sale, we offer connection and community to influencers who have products they believe in (from innovative suppliers) and want to share with (sell to) their network. This is the new way the world will connect, where relationships matter.
The world is now your oyster, use social media to find the pearl(s)!
Social media participation is a marketing game changer for every size of business. The playing field is leveled and companies from @Ford with 198,000 employees, to @AmeriChoiceFCU with 60 employees, to @GoodHlthRewards with 7 employees have equal opportunity to tell their story, attract an audience, listen to the customer, and make the sale.
Perhaps you think blogging, tweeting, and checking-in is a fad. Who cares if @AlanBr82 had coffee at Starbuck in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania? @Starbucks cares and commercial real estate developers like @RichardEJordan2 care.
“Social media brings new tools to our preliminary market studies,” says Rick Jordan, CEO of Smith Land & Improvement Corporation. “In real time, we can learn consumer trends and desires. Twitter is one massive focus group. As a property owner who leases office and retail space, it’s good to know that our tenants have a loyal following and are building community. By tracking conversations, we can discover what products and services people want in a region and attract specific tenants to fill the needs. That’s good for business.”
Chances are high that your competition is already engaged on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Foursquare. To find out, go to www.socialmention.com, www.trackle.com, or set up some Google Alerts. If you’re not on at least one of these social platforms, you can join the conversation today to add social media to your marketing mix. It’s never too late to tell your story.
Where should you start?
1. Meet with the CEO to establish executive buy-in. Top-down support drives a social media marketing campaign. Peter Aceto (@CEO_INGDIRECT) is an excellent example of an executive who harnesses the power of social media for a business advantage. He tweets about his institution, his team, his family; and he has gained loyal customers and fresh insight because of his transparency. Ford’s Global Digital Communications Director @ScottMonty explains the power of these tools and the CEO’s support in a video interview at Ford’s World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Whether an executive understands these nascent tools or not, dismissing them can be business suicide.
2. Develop a social media strategy. Don’t make this step too difficult—plan for where you want to engage your target audience (are they on Facebook or LinkedIn, are they local or global, are they retail or B2B), and plan the content of your messages. Focus your strategy, and commit to participation in at least two channels where your customers or clients are. Determine objectives, messages, and who will lead the messaging. Every tweet and post embodies your brand. Don’t be fooled by the language and brevity in the social media. Those 140 characters carry tremendous potential to boost your brand or set off a PR nightmare. Are you determining trends, seeking opinions, looking for new customers, finding influencers, or pitching the media? Start with measurable objectives and allocate sufficient people, time, and money to accomplish them. (This is where the value of #1 is realized.)
One of the oft-overlooked elements in the routine of blogging is image selection. Now, not every blogger uses images, charts, graphs, or other visuals as part of their storytelling approach (.jpg "Alan Mulally")