ChasNote

Research from Swinburne University of Tech says bloggers are better adjusted and have healthier social lives (from TechCrunch). However, “some ‘potential bloggers’ start from a less socially integrated position.” Hmm. If I knew what’s meant by “less socially integrated,” I might be worried about my own well being.

From NY Times:

“According to Forrester Research, in the second quarter of 2007, 21 percent of business travelers who use the Internet read blogs, not just ones about business travel, but also those involving sports, business, finance and other topics.”

I’d like to learn more about those business travelers who aren’t yet using the Internet.

Another powerful data point from JPMorgan’s Nothing But Net report:

“While portals were once dominant, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of minutes spent online in August 2007, down from 42% in August 2002. Meanwhile, blogs, online gaming, and social networking websites have experienced double to triple digit Y/Y growth rates in page views. This fragmented audience not only makes it more difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience through only a few publishers, but also makes it difficult for publishers to attract advertisers given their limited scale. We believe that companies that can aggregate traffic through the development of ad networks or partnerships will be more successful in driving growth in 2008.”

That’s the headline for Greg Jarboe’s column today at Search Engine Watch. I worked with Greg at Ziff-Davis in the mid 1990s and was at CMP before that, so it’s sad to see the group tombstone for the trade magazines that have gone under in recent years.

The good news is that the readers of those magazines did not suffer the same plight. They’ve just gone online and, in most cases, filled their informational needs with leading business blogs for their industry.

“According to Compete, 382,749 people visited Search Engine Watch in November 2007; 342,970 visited Search Engine Land; 278,014 visited WebProNews; 139,914 visited Marketing Pilgrim; 77,085 visited Search Engine Roundtable; and 32,398 visited Search Newz.

“This puts them in the same ballpark as the circulation of print publications: 440,000 for InformationWeek; 400,100 for eWeek; 58,979 for Advertising Age; and 23,152 for AdWeek.

“More to the point, the number of visitors to the online publications and group blogs covering the search industry is in the same ballpark as the number of visitors to the websites of trade publications in the technology or advertising industries.

“According to Compete, 424,773 people visited InformationWeek.com in November 2007; 331,060 visited eWeek.com; 213,900 visited AdAge.com; and 101,140 visited AdWeek.com.”

According to Douglas McIntire at 24/7 Wall St, that’s what’s coming, the only remaining question is when.

“…with the internet operations at newspapers and some other tradition media companies making very little headway, the big blogs take on a very significant attraction. They reach audiences in great numbers. They have credibility. They are not expensive to run. And, they make money.

“Take Huffington. According to research firm Compete, it has an audience almost as large as the online version of the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a part of a larger newspaper organization like The New York Times (NYT) or Washington Post (WPO), that audience could probably be much bigger. NYT and WPO need a Huffington or two. Their internet revenues are under 10% of their total and not growing fast enough to keep up with falling print sales. Huffington has raised $10 million in VC money. What is it worth? $100 million. Maybe more. Worth it for The Times or The Post. With the trouble that are in, yes.

“The big tech blogs are even larger than Huffington.”

The theory makes sense, up to a point. Audiences are moving online and advertisers, inevitably, are following them. If traditional publishers and portals can’t keep pace with the independent sites on the audience-growth front, acquisition is the likely strategy. The hard part, though, as McIntire points out is maintaining (and growing) the value of those acquisitions:

“The problem for the potential buyers is keeping the talent at the blog sites.”

It’s a problem that needs to be solved on both sides, the buyer and the seller. If the value of an independent media brand is only that of its front man or woman, the deal terms are bound to penalize him or her for leaving — some kind of long-term lock up that may not be appealing to a site’s author. The independent authors and publishers may want to change this formula. And if a potential acquirer can’t find a way to encourage a site’s author to continue to build relationships with a growing audience of readers over the long term, how will the acquisition premium ever justify itself? Acquiring entities may need a new approach, a model by which they pull top content-creators into the fold, but do so loosely enough that the content-creators can enjoy the freedom and decision-making authority they do right now.

American Express announced their new “plum card” earlier this month at the Inc 500 event in Chicago. Two FM authors, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, attended the event and covered the launch. (Amex runs ads on both sites.)

Googling “plum card” gives you a glimpse into the new dynamics of influence. Business Week and Inc. have more reach (unique users and pageviews) than sites like Duct Tape Marketing and Small Business Trends, and American Express owns the “plum card” trademark, but Google ranks results in order of relevance. Which sites, Google’s algorithm asks, are most trusted by others, based on their in-bound links? It turns out Duct Tape Marketing (the #2 organic result) and Small Business Trends (#3) are the marketshare leaders when it comes to trust influence in the world small business. American Express’s own site ranks #4.

FM’s Fall Shopping Guide, sponsored by JCPenney, rolled out last week. Earlier today, I searched for “fall shopping guide” at Google. Among the 44,600,000 relevant sites Google identified, the JCPenney-sponsored Fall Shopping Guide is the 3rd result. In the #2 position is a post at Craftzine, one of the participating sites, on a page where they tell their readers about the sponsorship program. Wow, what’s going on here?!

Here’s what the Fall Shopping Guide is:

“The Federated Media Fall Shopping Guide, brought to you by JCPenney and the new Chris Madden Collection, is debuting for the 2007 season, bringing together the most influential voices in the parenting, women’s lifestyle, travel & leisure communities.The Fall Shopping Guide features authors of the best and most influential independent parenting, cooking & home accessories web sites that exist today.”

The site aggregates editorial content from leading, independent sites affiliated with FM such as Dooce, Celebrity Baby Blog, Amalah, Parent Hacks, The Mommy Blog, Paper Napkin, Sweetney, Craftzine, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, and The Pioneer Woman Cooks. JCPenney doesn’t review or influence the content provided by these sites, though the sponsorship includes banner ads and product promotions for the Chris Madden line on the Fall Shopping Guide site.

If Opening Weekend is any indication, JCPenney also gets the benefit of engaged audiences that come for the third-party content, but find themselves talking about the JCPenny brand. “Giving Up My Vanity for a Laundry Room,” a post from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, published to the site on Friday, September 14. In four days readers have posted 77 comments.

One reader, a fan of Pioneer Woman, gives JCPenney full credit for the site:

“I never knew JC Penney even had a blog. But even moreso, I never dreamed I’d be reading it. And yet here I am. And there you are with your lime green countertop. And I’m going to have to subscribe to the dang thang to get the rest of the story. Darn you Ree.”

Another:

“As if I don’t spend enough time reading Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and The Pioneer Woman Cooks, now I’ll be checking in here regularly. Clearly, less sleep is the only answer!”

And:

“Ree, your writing is like crack cocaine to me (or how I imagine it would be anyway.) Last spring I stumbled upon your blog-I think it was the chocolate cake recipe before your ‘cooks’ site came along, started reading previous posts, and unless we’re camping in the woods away from internet connections, I MUST read it everyday. At least it’s a healthy addiction-provided I don’t cook your recipes every day. Thanks for all you put into it for all of us strange people who just can’t get enough of what you and your family are up to. I can’t wait to hear the solution to the vanity delimma!”

And:

“I am right there with OMSH. You’ve done it again Ree…and all of your faithfuls are following you. JC Penney has no idea what they have gotten themselves into do they?”

Or maybe — just maybe! — they do. By leaving the content decisions to established third-party authors, they allow the “sponsored” site to maintain the authenticity and active audience engagement that makes the participating sites themselves successful. Because the Fall Shopping Guide site assembles editorial (not advertorial) content, several authors, including those at Craftzine, invited their readers to have a look. When highly-influential, highly-trusted sites feel a sense of ownership over the project, it’s a winning formula for the marketer.

The FM team that built out this program includes James Gross, Sam Kahn, Matt Jessell and Pamela Parker. More on them here.

UPDATE 10/2/07: We’re just a few weeks into JCPenney’s sponsorship of FM’s Fall Shopping Guide, but today I came across an interesting stat: Among the top 5 URLs driving traffic to the Guide is Google’s RSS reader. In other words, visitors to the site like what they see, and they’re subscribing to RSS updates to the site.

UPDATE 10/4/07: Someone who’s enjoying the JCPenney-sponsored Fall Shopping Guide added it to social-bookmarking site StumbleUpon, and 500 StumbleUpon members paid a visit to the Guide. I have to admit, I don’t know much about StumbleUpon or the usage patterns of the self-reported base of nearly 3.6 million users. But if one-tenth of a percentage of them click through to the sites listed on a given day, that says 500,000 StumbleUpon users were exposed today to a free promotion for the Guide. Maybe a full percentage of StumbleUpon users click through, which would say 50,000 of them saw a link to the Guide. Either case, thanks for the love, Stumblers!

UPDATE 12/18/07: Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion applauds JCPenney’s Fall Shopping Guide sponsorship as a model for an emerging trend in digital media: brands “investing in creating their own content.”

At FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit this week, Comscore announced its new methodology to track readership and usage at conversational media sites such as social networks, participatory news sites, blogs and wikis. With the improved approach, Comscore reports that Federated Media’s sites reach 42 millions monthly uniques and Facebook’s audience is about 60 million uniques.

Nice to see that block in the upper right hand corner on Business Week’s business blog section is now featuring some of the FM sites!

For those of you who missed yesterday’s coverage by every site I can think of, here’s the official press release on Boing Boing’s redesign, including comments and a new gadgets site edited by Joel Johnson (former editor of Gizmodo).

Some of that coverage: CNET, CrunchGear, FM’s Andre Torrez, Mashable, SF Chron…..

Thanks, HP for sponsoring the new comments feature, and Jawbone for sponsoring the launch of the gadgets site!