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The Rise and Fall of the Blogosphere
In 2004, "blog" was Merriam-Webster's word of the year. But according to the Pew Research Center, its popularity has fallen rapidly in recent years, especially among the young. Back in the day, blogging was
the easiest way to establish a presence on the Web. Some of the most successful blogs have grown to the point where they're pretty hard to distinguish from traditional media outlets.
But the young
seem to prefer keeping within the boundaries of social networking sites, and Facebook rules the roost there. If you believe everyone you want to reach is already gathering on Facebook, it would be silly to post your thoughts on the Web itself. You have to go where the audience is. Twitter is also more popular with younger Web users, who find that its 140-character posting limit is no problem at all. They're OK at expressing themselves with conceptual fragments rather than well-formed paragraphs.
According to this article in The New York Times, former bloggers have made the switch because of time constraints, but also because with so many blogs out there, there just aren't enough readers to go around. We even have a friend who even wrote a song about it!
The Kids These Days
Speaking of changing patterns of Internet use, comScore's 2010 Digital Year in Review found a huge drop in email usage among 12 to 17 year olds. This demographic saw a 59% drop, with another big fall off in the 25-to-30 year old segment. Only the geezers are increasing, with 55 to 64 year olds increasing their email use by 22%. Those are pretty dramatic numbers, and a clear sign that the youngest users are making social networking, text messaging, micro-blogging and mobile devices their communication platform of choice. Social networking sites accounted for 12% of all the time spent on line in 2010.
This is going to make for an interesting few years, in that email marketing is coming into its own just as the most valuable demographic seems to be going elsewhere. The marketers (and the
spamers) are already breaking into the newer technologies of course, but managing their spend across different channels is going to be quite a challenge. The same problem is going to crop up in the
workforce, too, as a generation that doesn't have the time or the attention to deal with email tries to fit in. ("You sent me an email? Whatever...")
Perhaps the most interesting
question is whether this move toward shorter, more fragmented communication is a good thing or a bad thing for human beings. A bagful of crumbs does not a cookie make.
KM for Customer Service
We came across a good blog post by a Forrester analyst named Kate Leggett. It's not that there's something new in what she says, but she says it well and encapsulates a lot of the advice we've given over the years. The context here is Knowledge Management for customer service, and she reports renewed interest in this particular kind of KM in 2011. We hadn't noticed, but it would be nice to think so.
She writes that KM is hard, "hard to explain, hard to implement, hard to do right." We certainly agree with that. Successful KM always requires a blended initiative that combines
technological bits with business processes and human communications. And she wonders why it is that since commercially viable KM solutions have been on the market for over a decade, it still hasn't
entered the mainstream of business.
She thinks that the increasing respect paid to social media is breaking up the ice around content, and breathing new life into KM systems. With more flexible
authoring systems, and a more open approach to content generation, the stuff within the system can be more dynamic, and more relevant. Whatever the application, she recommends adopting some kind of
feedback system, so you can fine-tune the material that's being offered to the users.
The Pendulum Swings
You might have missed it in the holiday crush, but last December Facebook replaced Google as the most
visited site of the year. Time magazine named CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its person of the year,
too. So it was a pretty good year for him, all things considered. According to The Huffington Post,
"Facebook" was also the top search term of 2010 (for the second year in a row), followed by "Facebook login." (Does this suggest that Facebook users are bookmark-challenged?)
We have to admit it strikes us as exceedingly strange. With hindsight, it seems natural and reasonable that the Web's early "walled garden" sites, like AOL, would gradually lose out to the
wonders of the full, open and World Wide Web. Why shop through the Tower Records' page at AOL, when you could shop directly at Tower's own Web site? The unregulated Internet might have been big and a
little scary, but it had a lot more to offer. So how do you account for the success of Facebook, which is a swing back toward the walled garden model? Tim Berners-Lee has criticized sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster for limiting the free flow of information. And who would know better than the father of the Web himself?
Perhaps we aren't yet ready for the vastness of the Web. It seems there are a lot of users who just feel better if their friends are manning the battlements.
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