Blogging directly to the influencers

Using innovate new media to bypass the gatekeepers

• Introduction to blog marketing (PDF)
• How a blog influences the Internet (PDF)
• The social community rules (PDF)
• Convergence: world view (my poor neglected blog)

The traditional methods for engaging influencers—media, press, investors, analysts, even the public—seem to have fallen on hard times. And with good reason; they never worked and they succeed even less in the modern Web 2.0 electronic world.

Part of the failure is reluctance of the recipients to believe anything force-fed through mass communication channels. Look back as far as The Times of London in the late 1800s to see laments about peoples' ignorance and lack of attention.

But recently, the business of information dissemination and purveyance has become—literally—a crap shoot. To fully engage the public in a dialog, one needs the resources of a major corporation, or the guts of a serial murderer. Even large governmental bodies aren't doing a good job anymore.

So how does one communicate with a broad range of people without resorting to something very controversial. For instance, what would a small non-profit organization do to push its name in front of a lot of influential people?

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly the dialog I'm having now, both as president of a small literary arts organization (www.rasp.cc) and as a marketing communications professional looking for a way to promote my employers.

In the Web 2.0 world—that is, in a world where audience "communities" deliberately segment and differentiate themselves—blogging seems to be the best way to cross the lines. Blooggers are the nearest thing to true mass communications. Within minutes of any major announcement, you can count on bloggers with too much time on their hands to post their analysis of whatever it was. And even the Wall Street Journal has started relying on some of this blogged analysis for its own coverage.

In my introduction to blog marketing, I note the steps it takes to market an organization using a blog and website combination. I used my recent overhaul of my sister’s website as the example. As I guided her through the redesign and redevelopment process I uncovered a startling epiphany. Blogs have a significant effect, which I only noticed when I created the flowchart.

It is so significant, in fact, that I was thunderstruck. Suddenly, for the first time, I realized that all the rules for the entire game had been re-written. The social community, the small discrete groups we choose to surround us as we isolate ourselves from the rest of the envirosphere, are the key to the new marketing paradigm.

Take a look for yourself—at how the community works.

As this is written, my sister’s blog has still not been implemented. But it will come … as will a blog for RASP, and my own neglected blog. Sadly, the rest of the paradigm has not shifted. Time is still not plentiful enough (I confess: I do occasionally like to sleep), there is too much work to be done, and knowledge must be acquired.

And I'm still trying to learn the RSS technology to link it all together; like how I send people to my blog from my website, and how they syndicate notification so whenever I update anything, they are automatically notified. I'm working on it.

Stay tuned.