Bloggasm

I’m quoted briefly in this piece:

When blogs go blank

Back in 2004, the blogger known as “Mister Bachelor” was swinging at the top of his middle-aged game — collecting women and readers (nearly 8,000) — with salacious tales of his Lothario lifestyle.

He was revered and reviled and loving every minute of it.

Then he fell in love, and with that it was all downhill — for the blog, that is.

Earlier this year, the once frolicking Mister Bachelor of heavy Web traffic and outraged comments was laid to rest. In its place, The Blog and Chain was born, snarky and sardonic but devoid of sex and drama. At last count, it had fewer than 150 readers, according to the reformed Mister Bachelor, who now goes by the alias Daedalus.

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Let me give you an example of what I can do. Back in May a film company approached me because they were trying to push out a YouTube video that was highlighting what they perceived as unfair labor practices from a well known brand. I wrote up a short post about the campaign and then that night spent about two hours pushing it out to a number of bloggers and social media users that worked within niches that I thought would be receptive to the content. One of the talents I have is using analytic search tools to identify specific micro niches of influential bloggers that are most likely to write about the content I’m pushing.

By the time I woke up the next morning, the post was getting over 1,000 views an hour. It was linked to by some of the most popular sites on the web (at least one of which receives over a million visitors a day) and several large marketing blogs. Several dozen smaller blogs wrote about it and links to the content were tweeted by several hundred Twitter users. It also gained strong traction in Stumbleupon and the post received nearly 500 hits an hour just from that site alone.

When all was said and done, the story had been placed before thousands of people, many of whom took the time to take that content and push it out to even more people. And all this was done because of two hours of work — I knew the exact bloggers and online journalists to seed the story to, and once they had it it was just a matter of watching the flames spread.

Drop me a line if you’d like to talk strategy for your content or brand: simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

This week over at PBS’ MediaShift, I profiled a laid-off soccer journalist in the UK who decided to take the brand his paper had spent so much energy building up and used it to launch his own sports writing network: Laid Off Sportswriters Find New Life Online

For one possible answer to this dilemma, one would have to travel overseas to Norwich, U.K., where a man named Rick Waghorn has been writing for several years. The journalist spent over a decade covering the Norwich soccer club for the Norwich Evening News, a newspaper that spent money during his employment advertising his face on the back of buses in order to promote his brand.

But back in 2006, Waghorn, like thousands of other newspapers journalists, found himself swept into a redundancy process, and like some other laid-off reporters, he decided to continue on with his beat independently. Waghorn began reporting on Norwich’s soccer club and published his content on his own site, with the idea that the brand his former newspaper had spent so much time and money building was still extremely valuable.

“So we literally took the name, the brand that was built up during my beat reporter’s job at the Evening Press,” Waghorn explained to me. “I’m in year two of this experiment, which started in the summer of 2007, and you kind of look around and say, ‘There’s one of me, a reporter, on every city paper in the U.K., doing my job, following their particular soccer team around the country. Maybe I need to think about a generic model.”

If the New Yorker were a planet, blogs like Emdashes and the New Yorkerest would be satellites orbiting around it, meticulously analyzing its landscape with fine-tooth photographic lenses. They are fan blogs that are specifically centered around the publication — in the case of Emdashes, it even takes on interns — and I find such devotion fascinating, not only as a fan of the New Yorker myself but also contemplating the promotional marketing aspects that sites like these can provide for a publication. But what is it about this Conde Nast publication that causes such brand loyalty?

For an article in PBS’s MediaShift, I decided to explore this issue:

The Twitter user who writes under the handle Vanityfairer would not tell me her real name. She began following me in December after I mentioned the magazine Vanity Fair in a tweet, and for the next few months we exchanged replies and direct messages about the magazine’s content and its writers. Though she made no claims to be associated with Vanity Fair, there were debates in the blogosphere over whether she was a marketing ploy for the publication. That speculation ended after the magazine’s web editor wrote a post thanking her for her coverage:

One of them is a mysterious and fascinating (to us, anyway) character who calls herself Vanityfairer…She has been doing an amazing job of covering our work here on the site without our knowledge.

When the term “crowdsourcing” is used it’s often referring to how media companies can utilize it for journalistic purposes, but other industries have been using it for years — most notably software companies. This week for PBS’s MediaShift I profile a new company called Article One Partners, which uses the wisdom of crowds to try to validate or invalidate patents by offering up awards of $50,000 for those who can find prior art.

I recently wrote a feature piece for PBS exploring how dieters were able to utilize blogging — and the community support built around it — to maintain weight loss. I found it incredibly fascinating combing through the archives and speaking to these bloggers, some of whom have lost upwards of 60 pounds after launching their blogs.

A few days later I was contacted by a producer from a program on community radio in Sydney, Australia called “The Fourth Estate.” She said she wanted to interview me about my piece, and you can listen to the interview on the program’s website — just click to listen to the March 12 episode and I’m in the very first segment.

For my latest PBS article I tracked down several independent bloggers who have become powerful voices in their local communities, in some cases being able to far out-perform traditional news outlets when covering their niches: How Niche Bloggers Fill Gaps Left by Local Newspapers, Alt-Weeklies