Blogging TrendDay – Summary

Every three seconds a new weblog is created. Worldwide there are already over 14 Mio. Blogs counted. But these numbers don’t say anything about the potential of “Blogging”.

What is “Blogging”? Is “Blogging” opening new ways for marketing & communication? How will “Blogging” change the media-landscpae? Why is “Blogging” so revolutional? Or is this just another hype?

These questions have been discussed at the CScout Trend Day: Blogging on March 8th 2005 in Munich. Over 50 participants gathered at the BLM (Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien) in Munich.

On the podium there have been experts from the US & Europe: Nico Lumma (Blogg.de), Thomas Burg (Center for New Media, Danube University Krems), Gaby Darbyshire (Gawker), Jochen Wegner (Focus), Monty Metzger (CScout) and Loic Le Meur (SixApart).

The audience got an overview about the trend “Blogging” and learned more about cases and strategies. During the lively discussions the speakers point out three criteria for a successful Blog: Authenticity, Transparancy and high quality content.

Blogs are widespread in englisch-speaking countries, especially in USA. But the number of registered Blogs are enormously growing in Europe. This development is lead by France with already two mio. blogs online. Loic Le Meur mentioned a few interesting cases in France:

Le Monde: The famous daily newspaper “Le Monde” offers a Blog-System to their subscribers and also engaged their journalists to publish Blogs.

La Fraise: A t-shirt lover started to design his own t-shirts and asked for feedback on his Blog: La Fraise. Due to the great response he started to produce and sell the high-ranked t-shirt-designs and created an online t-shirt shop. This case is perfect to see how a corporate company can put their customer into the middle and focus on their needs.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: A well known french politician published around 100 notes since his start one and a half years ago. During this period he received over 5000 comments on his pages and showed how to use Blogs for political purposes.

Furthermore the speakers gave a short introduction to related trends like:

“Tagging” – In many computing and information processing contexts, Tagging is the process of labelling a piece of data with metadata.
“Social Software” – Social Software programmes which facilitate virtual connection and collaboration between people on a network. Most known are Social Networking Software like LinkedIN or OpenBC.

“Podcasting” – “Podcasting” is making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user’s convenience.

“RSS” – is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication, a group of XML based web-content distribution and republication (Web syndication) protocols primarily used by news sites and Blogs.

Loic Le Meur was happy to announce on the CScout TrendDay that T-Online starts to offer Blog-Systems in cooperation with SixApart in Germany. This might increase the number of Blogs in Germany in the next months.

Gaby Darbyshire (Gawker) shared some secrets about succesful marketing via blogs and some basic rules indispensable for a good blog:
“Making the right connection”
– Relevance: market niche products to niche audiences
– Maintain a human voice, don’t shout at the reader
– Use humor – witty, original copy gets attention
– Creative ads: make the ads as rich and original as the blog content itself. Don’t annoy the reader with distracting ads
– Involvement: get the reader involved in the creative process

Thomas Burg (Krems University) went a step further and gave examples for the corporate use of weblogs. He showed alternatives to email, file-sytems, and conventional intranets. Furthermore he presented a weblog-based tool that integrates several aspects of Social Software into one Knowledge-Sharing application.

The Feedback of the TrendDay was positive and even the speakers (Above: Loic and Charlie at the Panel) had a lot of fun.

Presentations

TrendDay: Blogging – Agenda

Monty C. M. Metzger, Managing Director Germany, CScout Trendberatung GmbH
Introduction: Blogging – Definition & Trends.

Nico Lumma, Chief Executive Blogger, Blogg.de
The German Blogosphere – some facts and figures.

Loic Le Meur, Executive Vice President Europe, SixApart
The Power of Blogs – Cases & Insights.

Charlie Schick, Marketing & Sales Nokia Lifeblog, Nokia
The Potential of Mobile Blogging.

Gaby Darbyshire, Director Gawker Media – New York
Blog Publishing & Blogging meets Advertising.

Jochen Wegner, Focus Magazine, Burda Media
Citizen Journalism – Changes in the media landscape?

Thomas N. Burg, Head of the Center for New Media, Danube University Krems
Corporate Blogging and Knowledge Sharing.