Combine this with the fact that Tumblr is a free service that needs to turn all of those accounts into revenue and your thoughts probably go to advertising. But how and where? Well Tumblr thinks it may have a solution. Of course, in the name of journalistic integrity the “a” word is not mentioned but we are smart enough to read between the lines.

The New York Times reports

The popular social blogging site Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr.

Chris Mohney, a senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media, will be the site’s editor in chief. Jessica Bennett, a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will be the executive editor and, she said, a kind of Tumblr correspondent.

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

The talk is trying to keep people on the sites longer. While that’s a nice metric that will not pay the bills. How can they monetize the free service? There’s that “a” word again. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?

One can’t blame any business for trying to make money. After all, these free services that we all love to use and criticize are not public services. They are businesses. It’s making the move from free to “we need to make some money” model that seems to trip up most businesses like Tumblr.

So why does this happen? Companies like Tumblr have a hyper sensitivity to the relatively small minority of users that will cry foul when something of a commercial nature (that is generated by Tumblr not other Tumblr users) appears on the site. This content aggregation and curation model only makes sense if there is a revenue component to it. Tumblr will need to show some backbone during any transition because there will be whiners. It’s the Internet after all and people are curious in that they feel they can be outraged when things that are free to them change their little comfort zone. It’s not a healthy environment but it is very real.

Regardless of the ultimate goal, Tumblr’s new hires must have taken PR courses when they can produce the following

Mr. Mohney said that the forthcoming content will market Tumblr by highlighting how the site is being used, but, he added, “fun, cool, compelling and organic creation will go a lot further towards demonstrating the potential of this nascent creative population than simplistic or forced attempts at corporate boosterism.”

Ms. Bennett, when asked what statement Tumblr was making by bringing her and Mr. Mohney on board, said, “Tumblr is basically hiring a staff to celebrate creativity and innovation. How many companies can say that?”

That’s very nice Ms. Bennett but creativity and innovation don’t pay the bills. How will Tumblr make money from something like this is the real question. Any thoughts?

Book publisher, William Morrow, however, is looking to reduce that cost and they want to see a bigger return on their investment.

Earlier this week, the LA Times published the text of a letter that was sent out to book bloggers. It outlines a new system where, instead of getting random books in the mail, bloggers will be asked to choose their review titles from a list.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s more work on the publisher’s part, but it’s targeted so it should make for more and better reviews.

Now here’s the part that got everyone in an uproar:

If it isn’t already clear, WE LOVE THAT YOU LOVE OUR BOOKS!  And to allow us to continue to offer free copies and free shipping to you committed book reviewers, we will be tracking how many reviews we receive from you.  If we notice that you request books but aren’t posting your comments or sending us the link, we may suspend your ability to receive review offers from us.  We know you’re busy bloggers -– if you don’t think you’ll be able to post a review within a month, please pass on that offer so we can continue to offer you free books in the future!

Still sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? The blogger gets a book of their choice for free and in return they have to post a timely review. I’ve been reviewing DVDs for years and that’s always been the agreement, in print or implied. But according to the LA Times, bloggers are angry that “their hobby was being treated like an obligation.”

Am I the only one who thinks that’s crazy? Hobby or not, if you agree to take on a free item (I’m not talking about items sent randomly without prior permission) you should review it within a reasonable amount of time.

The bloggers are also angry because they see this step as a slap at blogs.  “Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or The NYTimes?” said Pam Coughlin, a blogger for MotherReader.

Well, no, because first of all, the NYTimes book reviewer probably turns in reviews on time and second, I imagine more people see a NYTimes review than one on MotherReader. (If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me.)

Maybe the real issue here isn’t unreliable book bloggers, but blogs themselves. Blogs are slowly getting pushed into the background thanks to Facebook and Twitter and even Tumblr which is more graphics than text. eMarketer’s stats show that Fortune 500 companies have slowed down on blogging. Mommy blogs are still going strong but how many people are reading them?

Personally, I believe that blogs are still the best place to find news and information about whatever it is you want to know. A blog post gives you room to deliver all the facts and your opinion about them. You can’t do that on Twitter or Facebook. But I’m a writer and a reader, and I fear that I’m in the minority when it comes to the love of words.

Which brings us back to books and book reviewers. The publishing business is running on a thin margin, so it’s understandable that they need to insure better returns on their investment. And that could mean more rules and passing on “hobby” bloggers in favor of professionals.

Do you offer review items to bloggers? We’d like to hear about your experiences.

Google is trying to change that by offering new Dynamic Views which make presentation of blog materials a lot more modern and is Blogger’s attempt at staying competitive in the blog platform space. Hey with Tumblr just closing an $85 million dollar round of investment this is not a space to be sitting idle. Well, on the Internet, is there any space where you can do that?

Take a look at Google video presentation of these new Dynamic Views. This comes from the Blogger Buzz blog which is using one of the new designs as is the Lat Long blog.

So what are your views regarding Blogger as a hip and fresh blogging platform? Are you buying it or are you looking for other options?

So, for those of you who like to keep your bounce rate in check, stop reading. For the rest of you, onward we go to StumbleUpon’s new iPad upgrade. The new interface makes it easy to swipe through page after page, leave your thumbs up or down vote and even comment. It’s also more social with easy share buttons and connections to your SU friends. They also upgraded the smartphone app with a friends bar that shows which of your friends also liked the site.

The most important feature of the StumbleUpon iPad app is that it’s portable. Don’t laugh at me. Yes, I know that all things for the iPad are portable, that’s the point. But think this through. StumbleUpon is a time waster (and I mean that in the nicest way). It’s more of a game than a utility. You use it when you have time to kill, not when you’re looking for the best website on a given topic. It’s a boredom buster which means it’s perfect for killing time while waiting for an appointment, or a bus or to keep you from looking lonely when you’re having lunch alone at a restaurant.

My point here is, don’t count StumbleUpon out as a marketing tool. They even have a blog for marketers full of great pointers on how to use the service.  Sure, they’d like you to use their paid discovery program, but if you don’t have the bucks for that, just use the service like anyone else. Stumble your sites and other sites that support your brand.

All you’ve got to lose is your low bounce rate.

Arianna Huffington doesn’t agree. That’s the rumor, anyway. According to Business Insider, AOL, under the leadership of Huffington, is doing away with freelancers. Not only are they looking to work with only full-time employees, but one source says, those employees are expected to be at their desks at 9:00 am.

Business Insider posted an email that was sent to them from a former freelancer and I found this paragraph particularly interesting.

We’ve been told that all these new, full-time employees will be expected to report to the office every day for a 40-hour work week. For some reason, it’s very important to Arianna [Huffington] to have writers physically working in a newsroom in either LA, New York or Washington, DC, thus going back to an archaic newsroom model that went out with the invention of the telephone, and needlessly eliminating any talented writers in other parts of the country. So much for a global, cutting edge news team.

Huffington has been quoted as saying that she’s working to bring back old school journalism and for that, I say, yeah! But by cutting ties with freelancers, she’s in essence saying that she doesn’t believe they can do as good a job as an employee and that’s ridiculous.

News doesn’t happen only in LA, NY or Washington, DC. News happens everywhere, and having a freelancer close to the source can make the difference between getting the inside scoop and getting the scoop everyone else got. When it comes to niche topics, doesn’t it make more sense to have a freelance foodie from Florida than a full-time writer who also covers gardening, books and events handle that beat?

AOL’s business-and-finance editor Peter Goodman took issue with Business Insider’s original story and here’s what he had to say;

It is true that we are shifting from relying on freelancers and contractors to investing in full-time staff. We feel this gives everyone greater security and a shared mission. And we do want people right here in the newsroom, to participate in the sorts of spontaneous conversations that often yield the best ideas. This is something about which we are unabashed and even proud: We are assembling a first-rate group of full-time staff to take us forward.

As much as I hate to admit it, he’s got a point there. The one, very large, downside to having a team spread out all over the country is communication. I’ve worked with a half-dozen virtual companies and no matter how many phone calls or Skype meetings you set up, someone is always left out of the loop. And when it comes to brainstorming nothing beats a face-to-face pitch session.

But what Goodman gives with one hand, he takes away with the other.

At the same time, we will continue to embrace the contributions of a wholly different group of people — our enormous, diverse, vibrant community of bloggers. These are people who are free to write or not write as they choose. We own no claim on their time, or guarantee on production.

The phrasing here says that bloggers are not paid, someone correct me if I’m wrong. This paragraph goes along with a line in the original Business Insider post which said that although freelancers were being let go, they were told they could still contribute without pay.

I’ve been in the position of managing a writing team for a website and it is hard to keep the content flow and standards up when they’re freelancers. That’s been my experience and it sounds like AOL feels the same way, too. The trouble is AOL needs a huge amount of content everyday and now it’s going to be up to the chosen few to fulfill what was the work of the many.

So congratulations to the newly hired, full-time writers and kudos to AOL for trying to up the quality of content on the web. I’d also like to send my condolences to those same full-time writers who are going to be tearing their hair out a month from now as they try to meet all of their deadlines.

If I disclose the fact that you paid me the money to write the post as required by the FTC, then I’m in good shape, right? But if I disclose the fact that you paid me, maybe the value of the post decreases because now people aren’t sure that I told the truth.

A few weeks ago, a mommy-blogger was outraged by a proposal from a marketing company that offered to pay her if she wrote nice things about a big name brand who was having an image problem. I can’t be any more specific about the incident because I’ve since found out that the the entire affair was drummed up by an industrious wannabe PR pro and was never sanctioned by the company. Still, it brings up an interesting point. How is asking a blogger to write something nice about a company for pay any different than offering a blogger a free product in return for a review?

You could say that a review requires an honest opinion, which could be good or bad. But what if I agree with the positive statements I’m asked to write? If I believe that, despite recent reports to the contrary, ABC Inc. makes the safest product in its category, is it wrong to say so and get paid? What if I write it and ABC pays me afterwards as a thank you, then do I have to disclose it?

Many years ago, I tried one of the Pay Per Post companies, wrote the required text and was quickly dinged by Google who dropped my page rank two points. I was devastated. If that happened today, I wouldn’t care. Page rank is passe. But I do care if people think I’m a shill, writing half-truths about window blinds in order to make $6.00. In the spirit of full disclosure, I do occasionally Tweet for pay but I’m selective about which offers I put through.

The question here is about drawing the line or if there even should be a line? It’s my blog and if you want to pay me to write something and I agree to do it, then are we all good?

KMart announced today that they’re looking for gamer bloggers to send to the E3 convention. It’s all expenses paid, travel, accommodations and entrance to the show and in return all they ask is that the bloggers write about the experience and post links to KMart’s gamer blog (who knew KMart was so big with gamers?). Is that the ultimate in Pay Per Post or what? A several thousand dollar trip to video game heaven? Sure beats a $10 Starbucks card as thanks, doesn’t it?

This is where you come in. What are your thoughts on Pay Per Post? Have you ever paid a blogger to write about your company? I’d like to hear about your experience and where you think companies should draw the line.

The article is provocative for sure and focuses on younger Internet users (at least initially).

Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills.

“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

First off, nice job by the Times using Twitter as the catch for their story then shifting gears to Facebook (which actually makes more sense from the get go but who’s counting?). But back to the premise.

The notion is that blogs are losing much of their ‘shine’ to Facebook and Twitter. This ‘conclusion’ is reached based on the following bit of research.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

This is where I call BS. How can you infer that blogs are ‘in trouble’ when you are looking at numbers relating to 12-17 year olds? Kids in this age range can’t pay attention to much anyway just because they are simply kids in that age range! It’s certainly not because they have found the better way to get their thoughts across. It’s because they found the easiest way, for now. A quote from a young lady proves this point.

Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.”

As people grow and mature in how they think, the inevitable happens which is that you cannot usually get a point across or make an argument or defend a position in 140 characters or less. Even Facebook has limits. This idea that blogs are fading based on the findings about teens and blogging is pretty silly. In fact, the Times shows it’s engaging in some sensationalistic journalism because if you read on the stance about blogging being on the decline softens and pretty much goes away. That’s why this whole thing is nonsense really.

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

Ok, New York Times what is it? Are you pushing the beginning of the end of the blogging or are you jus trying to use headline journalism to get a few more pageviews? Hey, even if blogs are going the way of the dinosaur it looks like you guys picked up a few tricks along the way, huh?

Let’s look at what is really happening. People who are blogging because they are looking for an outlet of some kind are losing interest mainly because people are not reading their posts. There are usually two reasons for that; 1) they are not promoting the blog so the idea of “if you write it they will come” is in effect and that doesn’t work and 2) it’s very likely that their writing is awful or what they have to say isn’t interesting to anyone but themselves. Don’t blame the platform if you can’t write.

Finally the article looks to blogging in older folks and reports

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

Here’s my conclusion. Right now, as the world exists today, with all of this still being relatively new to the masses, we like to think that everyone who is growing up on 140 character bits of communication and piecemeal updates via Facebook and location based services will continue to do so. I say they will but they will also embrace the fact that real communication requires more ‘meat on the bone’.

As a result you will see young people who really have something of substance to give to the world will come back to a blogging platform or one that resembles it. They will do it because they are thinking more analytically and realizing the limitations or annotated communications.

So if you are thinking that blogging is truly waning take a look at the reality and ignore the headlines. At least those from the New York Times.

eMarketer brings us a corporate some insights from a survey done by Blog2Print (an interesting idea, btw). Here are the reasons why big companies blog according to CMO’s.

The most prominent reason might well have been named “If you can’t beat’em, join’em”. When you say that you are essentially “giving in” to do this then you wonder just how sincere or genuine the effort will be moving forward. I think it is safe to say that if there is passion behind a blog the chances of success through reaching the other goals desired goes up exponentially. But hey, it’s not often we confuse Fortune 1000 companies with passionate companies is it?

As for the attributes of what makes a corporate blog a success? Well, they seem to be a little more in tune on this one.

In the end, it is true that part of the cost of doing business today is having a business blog. It’s the expectations around the blog that are what need to be examined or even taught to most business people. The ‘build it and they will come’ approach (referred to here as the Filed of Dreams Method) doesn’t fly. The “Let’s make this a pure sales vehicle’ approach is obvious and unattractive.

What most markters should be concentrating on is the entire ecosystem of the online space that the blog is a part of (Oh brother, did I just type that?). In plain English, it’s just a part of the bigger puzzle. It’s a way to get links, it’s a channel to get some play in the social media world and it’s just another way to simply do business.

Is a corporate blog a requirement for success? I would say not. It is a requirement, however, for greater success in the digital business world we all live in today.

Your thoughts?

While this list is by no means comprehensive of all the challenges you’ll face in your campaigns, it’s a good place to start and might help you avoid some headaches along the way.

Also, check out my companion post The Top 6 Pitfalls of Affiliate Marketing for Advertisers.

1. Canceled transactions

Making money on your affiliate offers has a lot to do with the volume of traffic to your website. To crank up your earnings you might venture into purchasing traffic through PPC or some other medium. Before starting your new campaign you need to be aware that some of your “conversions” may be canceled before you get your first check.

Advertisers often have the ability to cancel transactions several days or more following the end the month. If you start dumping a bunch of PPC money into driving traffic to your site based on ROI derived from estimated commissions, be warned that many of your transactions could be canceled leaving your monetization model worthless. Be cautious and watch canceled transaction rates very closely during the first few months so you’ll know your PPC investments will net a return.

2. Fake EPC

EPC refers to earnings per 100 clicks and is a metric used by many affiliate networks to help differentiate between advertiser offers.

Before you go out and start promoting offers with the highest EPC, you should take note of a few points.

If the offer is new, the advertiser may just have a hand full of affiliates with good conversion rates resulting in a high EPC.

Additionally, if many of the advertisers’ affiliates are running sites where the product or service is discussed in detail, the visitor is much more likely to make a purchase than if they had visited through a traditional banner ad. Try to find examples of affiliates promoting the offer in the wild before making your decision.

On the more nefarious side of things, and as @affiliatetip pointed out to me Tuesday night, advertisers can also use PPC campaigns with high converting keywords to send traffic to their own affiliate program and drive up their EPC. To be fair, advertisers may also just have a high number of (or a few high volume) affiliates who send PPC traffic from high converting keywords, thus inflating the aggregate EPC.

While EPC may be a guide for the profitability of offers, just keep in mind there are a lot of factors that can influence it. Try to stick to picking offers you think will convert with your visitors. Let everyone else worry about their own results.

3. Many programs want traffic now

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and you want to start building a website around a specific offer, you should do your research on the offer ahead of time. Many top affiliate programs will require you to have an existing website and can even include traffic minimums. Do your research on offers and requirements before spending a lot of time on your website and strategy. There’s nothing more frustrating than building a campaign around a specific offer only to realize you don’t meet the traffic requirements. You might need a few backup plans to your target offer as you ramp up your traffic.

4. Impatience

This was a big theme of Austin’s @imarketingparty on December 14th as emphasized by @affiliatetip of Affiliate Summit and @DushR of ClickBank. Just because your campaigns are not working initially, does not mean it’s time to give up.

To quote Texas oil tycoon Ross Perot “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.”

Before you declare a specific campaign a failure or affiliate marketing in general a waste of time, think to yourself, did I really do all I can do to make this a success? Is there something I could try differently or test to improve my profitability? How much time did I spend on the couch when I could have been working on my campaigns?

While the 2 hour work week sounds good, most people find success after a lot of hard work, a good measure of pain and a whole lot of patience.

5. Not picking a relevant offer.

As we discussed already, picking an offer is a lot more than just picking the offer with the highest EPC. When you’re on your hunt for the perfect affiliate offer, make sure to find offers that are relevant or at least complimentary to your site.

Just because the Plasma TV site pays 50% commissions does not mean this is the best offer for you. Evaluate your site and make sure to pick offers that fits the mindset of your visitors.

As always, test a variety of offers to find the one that generates the highest EPC for you.

6. Laziness

Just because your campaigns are up and running, you’re generating profits and you’re cruising around the Caribbean in a 100 foot yacht, this is no time to rest on your laurels. You could be cruising around in a 150 yacht if only you’d spend a little more time on your site.

Don’t forget, that what works today may not work tomorrow. Watch all your campaigns closely. Become intimate with your ads and your advertisers. Join advertisers’ press release feeds, ask about new products, update pricing data as needed and make suggestions. If the advertiser has a seasonal offer or one that expires, make sure to set a reminder to update your ads after the offer is over.

Nothing will drop your EPC faster than running the wrong offer on your site.

7. Not shopping around.

So you’ve found an offer that works, now what? More golf?

Actually, it’s time to shop your traffic around.

Start by running your current advertiser(s) in even rotation with competing advertisers. Identify the EPC of each. Contact all advertisers and request bids for increased commissions. When the bids come in, calculate the revised commissions into your EPC formula and presto-chango you should have your winner.

Keep good relationships with your old advertisers. You never know when you might want to run their offer again. It’s also a good idea to run competing advertisers in a lighter rotation than your highest EPC advertisers, but keep in mind you might pay the price of exclusivity for higher commissions.

As always, factor in payment schedules and affiliate support into your decisions on offers. When something goes wrong (and something will), you want a partner who will pick up the phone and make things right.

****************

So what about you? What pitfalls have you encountered with your affiliate marketing campaigns?

Don’t forget to check out my companion post The Top 6 Pitfalls of Affiliate Marketing for Advertisers.

Many marketers and small business owners see blogging, rightly, as an important aspect of their SEO efforts because of their ability to attract inbound links. And even beyond SEO, getting lots of links for your blog posts is key to establishing yourself as an expert and building traffic.

I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on over 150,000 blog posts and I’ve identified several ways you can optimize your blogging efforts to drive more incoming links.

Day of Week

I found that blog post published in the early and mid business week tended to attract more links than articles published on other days. This is likely because the “linkerati” (people who control and create links, like bloggers) tend to spend the most time working on their sites during the week, as opposed to on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Time of Day

When I turned my analysis towards the hour of publishing, I found that blog posts published very early in the morning (like, 7AM early) attracted many more links than articles posted at other times during the day. This is because most linkerati are looking at their inboxes and feedreaders in the morning to find interesting content to write about and link to.

Most Linked-To Words

When I studied the words that occured in blog post and how they correlated with incoming links, I found words like “recent” and “soon” that indicated linkers were interested in writing about timely content. I also found many words like “insights,” “analysis,” and “review” that told me people were interested in linking to content that expressed a blogger’s personal and unique point-of-view.

Least Linked-To Words

When I looked at the other side of the coin, I found that complex and technical industry terms like “settlements,” “franchise,” “derivatives,” and “futures” often occurred in posts that got fewer links than the average. I also noticed that the word “episode” correlated with lower linking rates, possibly indicating that people aren’t excited about linking to one piece of content in an ongoing series of content.

That’s why the latest faux pas from The Nielsen Company may be bigger than it seems. On Thursday, the company sent out a note to all of its clients saying they had been undercounting traffic for the past three months.

The problem was one of long URL’s. One’s with more than 2,000 characters as a matter of fact. They found that their system wasn’t recognizing these URL’s all the time resulting in an estimated 22% decline over the prior year.

Long URL’s have become increasingly popular – just look at a Facebook URL after you’ve been moving around the site awhile. And URL’s from email and RSS feed clickthroughs can be enormous.

Nielsen says the problem will be corrected by December in time for the first reports delivered in January 2011.

A headache for everyone involved, for sure, but I’m not here to point fingers. Nielsen believes this issue happened because the Internet is changing at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. Here’s a quote from the letter:

“The extraordinary changes and complexity of how the Internet is used warrants our increased attention to help the entire industry mature with a trusted source of data.”

What everyone needs to take away here is that it’s easy to get complacent. We have systems that work so we sit back and assume they’re still working a year later. But the reality is, that through no fault of any human being, systems break because the way we move around the Internet has changed.

So take a few minutes tomorrow and look at your analytic software, compare what you’re seeing to other measuring tools to see if you can spot any glitches. Look at the clickthrough and sales reports that come in on your ad placements. Make sure your Adsense accounts are still functioning.

Don’t just assume the numbers are right. Make an appointment every few months to make sure they’re right so you can correct issues before they turn into big problems.

eMarketer, however, is taking another stab at looking at this part of the online marketing world and sees the following from data that apparently goes beyond just the big boys. (Note – The full report is from eMarketer and is for sale on their site and MP receives no compensation from eMarketer).

Honestly, that is still a pretty low percentage in my estimation considering the potential value of a blog (if done correctly, kept up and truly utilized which is what keeps most away from the practice to begin with). Even with the prediction of 43% of companies utilizing the technique by 2012 it seems low but that’s just me.

What else did they uncover about blogs? The usual funny stuff that shows just how lame traditional media can be when it cries foul around their online counterparts / competition then turns around and relies on it for information for their ‘profession’.

Here is a chart showing how journalists use the online space (I think the correlation to the blogging info above is that they use blogs as sources but that’s just a guess). There is quite a dependency on all things online for these folks including ones, like Wikipedia, that are notorious for their content being factual vs. fictional (although maybe the truth is setting in since their dependence is down from last year).

So is corporate blogging set to become more commonplace? Will there be a time when over 50% of the companies are using blogs to their benefit? Is the importance of corporate blogs overplayed? Should companies at least be blogging so they can feed journalists the information they want to see published since they are increasingly being used for sources anyway?

You tell us. You’re the experts after all. Thanks.

Right under that are Conversationalists and Critics who exchange info by Twitter, forums and Facebook posts. The majority of social media user fall into the middle of the pack and they are Joiners and Spectators. The difference being that Joiners have social media profiles but they’re not overtly active.

For the last few years, Forrester has tracked growth in all areas but this year Creators hit a plateau. According to their 2010 Global Social Technographics report, despite advances that make it easier, creators aren’t creating like they used to.

They chalk the change up to human behavior, which is a scientific way of saying they have no idea. But I suspect it’s simply a case of the novelty wearing off. When blogging was new, not everyone was doing it, but now that every third person you know is keeping an online log of his eating, dating and sleeping habits, it’s just not special. YouTube was a place to share that funny video of Uncle Sid falling asleep in his Boston Cream Pie. Now it’s a website for music marketers, sponsored web shorts and bootlegged episodes of Baywatch Nights.

Forrester agrees with me in a round about way. They say that social media tools will begin focusing more on how “social content is consumed rather than how it is produced.” they point to Twitter’s new design which doesn’t help you Tweet better, it just helps you get more out of the tweets you receive.

While creators are taking a much needed break, joiners are still going strong. Forrester’s report says that more than ever people are getting social media accounts just so they can read what their friends and family are saying. My husband falls into this group. After years of actively avoiding any type of social media, he reluctantly joined Facebook in order to view photos posted by a friend. He maintained his account with no activity for more than six months and only last week decided it was time to add a photo and profile.

Says Forrester:

“The fact that Joiners continue to grow means marketers must continue to focus their attention and budgets on social networks in 2011. More people will spend more time and get more information through social networks, and where consumer time and attention goes, so will marketer investment.”

Where do you fall on the Social Technographic Ladder? Check it out and let us know.

Fortunately, eMarketer and IZEA has done that and it appears as if the idea of “earned media” sounds much better as theory rather than reality. Are you really surprised?

Social media advertising company IZEA surveyed Twitter users, blog writers and other social media publishers about their openness to sponsorship of their social content. More than half said they had already monetized their activities, and almost a third more wanted to. Overall, 71.3% had been offered some kind of incentive, like cash, free products or coupons, for a blog post or tweet promoting a brand.

Asked about the idea of being paid for content, it sounded good for about 89% of the bloggers surveyed. Apparently, the economy has taken its toll on accepted payment methods because social media content generators are not so much interested in barters or coupons, they want to be paid the old fashioned way: cash. (I personally like gold bars but I am different for sure).

The most startling part of this research is as follows

In December 2009, the US Federal Trade Commission released new guidelines designed to protect readers of social media content from undisclosed sponsorships, but according to the IZEA survey more than a third of PR, social media and marketing professionals have not heard of the rules at all. Only 29.9% said they had read and understood them.

So what happened to the idealism of the world of social media? It went the way of just about every ideal that makes everyone sound so great when talking about it. Where is that? It ran headlong into reality where people have to make a living.

So how do you feel about the apparent blogger for hire social media world we really exist in? Is it OK or is it ‘not the way it is supposed to be’?

Now imagine that you are going to be charged $300 for the privilege of having your blog start from the City of Brotherly Love. Yup, that’s right, Philly is hitting bloggers with this and other measures. If you haven’t had enough of the government on every level getting into everyone’s business this may put you over the top.

This comes from NBC Philadelphia’s web site:

Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.

This $300 “business privilege license” is for all local bloggers – even the ones that make no money off their words.

The city doesn’t stop there. In addition to the $300 for the license to write on the World Wide Web, bloggers must pay city wage taxes, business privilege taxes and taxes on any net profits — on top of state and federal taxes — even if the blogger only made $11 over two years, reports the City Paper.

Blogger Marilyn Bess, whose Ms. Philly Organic Blog has made her a whopping $50 over the past few years, went to the city’s tax amnesty program to explain that she makes pennies on her hobby. They told her to hire an accountant, she told the City Paper.

I know of more than a few bloggers that call Philadelphia home and I wonder what they are thinking about this approach.

I just want to go on record as saying that this is completely ridiculous. I get that things are bad. I get that the government provides services (how well they provide them is a completely different matter for a different place). I get that it takes money to do things but taking this action?

My hope is that other regions are not as desperate or ignorant to do this as well. Although I live in North Carolina where our governor thought it was a great idea to tax all Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon basically said “Screw you!”. That eseentially closed that door on people who were just trying to bring more money into the state that would be spent in the state.

What is your take on this action by the city of Philadelphia? I think you already know mine.

According to a study by eMarketer, 34% of all US companies have a public blog and they project 45% by 2012. That’s up tremendously from 2007 which lands at only 16%.

“Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service.”

The study suggests that there is a larger number of blogs devoted to smaller companies, where larger companies may be lagging due to legal and logistical issues. It’s a lot easier for George to upload an off-the-cuff blog post when he’s the CEO of a two man company than it is for a VP at Procter and Gamble to make his thoughts known.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging over micro-blogging is the evergreen nature. A blog post is searchable and indexable as long as blog site shall live. That means consumers can easily revisit the information a month from now or a year from now. Try doing that with a Facebook post or a Twitter message that’s more than a month old.

Ideally, a combination of social media messaging is the way to go. A Twitter tweet leads readers to the blog post which leads them on to the Facebook via a “like” button at the top of the post. Of course, for all of this to work as it should, you have to have something interesting to say and that’s the hardest part of blogging.

What am I talking about? Paid blog posts.

According to Fleishman-Hillard’s 2010 Digital Influence Index (pdf), consumers are wising up to paid/sponsored blogs posts–and they don’t like them!

If you’re given a free sample, only 24% of your readers will trust you to be unbiased. Paid to write a review, that trust drops to 19%.

Still, in both cases, there’s this big area of indecision (61% and 54% respectively).

Of course, it’s one thing to say that you wouldn’t trust a sponsored blog post, but what about in reality? Factors that need to be considered in the real world include:

• Do you generally like and trust the blogger in question?
• Do you want to buy the product anyway–so need little persuasion?
• How was the disclosure handled?
• How relevant is the product to the normal content of the blog?

All of these would effect the scores above, but at the very least, you have been warned that your readers don’t embrace sponsored posts as much as you’d like them to!

Ellison attacked what many have held up as one of the prime examples of a company creating content through executive blogs and more. In fact, he didn’t just attack it; he crushed it.

The focus is on the Sun Microsystems purchase that was completed in January of this year. Sun’s former CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who resigned his post with a tweeted haiku in February of this year, has gotten a lot of attention for his CEO level outreach through blogs. I have even admired it. A quote from Ellison though, makes it clear what his stance is on the matter. This comes from InformationWeek.

“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” said Ellison. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

Sun became the poster child for content creation that came from all parts of the company. Trouble is the company lost $2.2 billion last year so Mr. Ellison may have a point here. It’s like writing a journal while the Titanic sank. If someone actually read it there may be value but the bigger issue of impending death outweighs it by far.

I think Ellison views this corporate foray into blogging as if Schwartz is a modern day Nero. As Sun Microsystems crashed and burned around him he was blogging much like the Roman emperor played his lyre while Rome was being consumed by fire. I wonder how he feels about the efforts by Oracle execs to blog? Is that adding to the bottom line of Oracle these days?

So is this call for transparency and openness throughout companies really necessary if it doesn’t add to the bottom line? Or could it be argued that if there wasn’t the blogs that kept some Sun customers engaged that the company may have failed even more severely?

Were there any metrics in place to see what effect the culture of blogging at Sun had on the bottom line? If not, was this just a spectacular PR play that got people to pay attention to Sun’s willingness to “communicate” rather than concentrate on keeping the business afloat?

We would LOVE to hear from any current or former Sun bloggers or employees to get your take on this. There are more questions being posed here than answers so any help would be appreciated. Did this culture of blogging cover up a bad business plan that was doomed to fail despite some of the best engineering talent as Mr. Ellison claims or was it really just as exiting CEO Schwartz said in his farewell tweet.

Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

I think if you asked Larry Ellison he’d tweet

Wrote too many posts / While company crashed and burned / There’s the door use it

So what’s your take and if you can give it in a 5/7/5 syllable format then you get extra points for having nothing better to do this fine day.

Six Apart, owners of the blog-hosting service TypePad, have found a new way to monetize blogs: advertising. Okay, so that’s not new, and neither is the basic concept of sponsored conversations, but the execution this time is a little different.

We’ve seen sponsored blog posts for reviews and pay-per-post models—and we’ve seen them done badly, too. Paid reviews often ended up sounding like (surprise) ads, with or without disclosure. Six Apart’s new TypePad Conversations seeks to avoid that problem—by not having bloggers actually talk about the products.

With the inaugural advertiser, Sprint, Six Apart is rolling out a few different forms of advertising. The first is the TypePad Conversations site. Right now, they have six questions up for discussion. You can answer the question on its page on the Conversations site, or from your blog (they pull your answer and put it on the Conversation page, too—with a real live link). The Conversations site features a leaderboard ad at the top of the page and a large square ad in the right corner.

Several partners also get to feature what’s essentially a large ad for the conversation (with a large square ad for Sprint) on their site—the first example I found was actually after an article about Sandra Bullock on limelife (the answer directly below the question appears to be the blogger’s):

Other partners are featuring the discussion on the front page. TechCrunch reports this unit is called the “Awesome Bar,” though obviously it’s not really either of those things. Bloggers get a share of revenue from the ad, though it appears it’s not on the basis of how many comments they generate for the conversation. The comments featured scroll through the whole discussion, and comments posted from the Awesome Bar are aggregated on the Conversations site as well.

Interestingly, the conversations aren’t all directly related to Sprint products and services—some of them not related at all:

• Is technology making us better or worse at communicating with each other? How so?
• What’s the best parenting advice you’ve ever received?
• Have you ever wanted anything from an informercial? What was it and did you buy it?
• Do your kids respond better and faster when you text or call them?
• If you could connect up to 5 devices at a time using just your mobile phone, how would that change how and when you access the internet?
• Do you want a 3D TV? Why or why not? And will you ever get one?

The about page says the questions are written by the Conversations editorial team.

The regular, everyday respondents (whether on their blogs or on the Conversations site) don’t appear to be getting a cut in the advertising, or the “Awesome Bar.” According to the about page on the Conversations site:

The biggest benefit of TypePad Conversations is that it allows bloggers to engage their readers about relevant topics. One of the best parts of blogging is getting comments from your audience; TypePad Conversations is a simple way to start a dialogue and hear from your readers. In addition, you are participating in a conversation that is happening across the Web and, as a result, will see an increase in traffic to your site.

I guess that’s not a bad benefit, especially since you don’t have to carry a space-sucking-probably-not-much-revenue-generating ad.

What do you think? Is this good enough for the average blogger to want to participate in the conversation?

Ooooor not. In what appears to be the first test case of the new guidelines, the FTC targeted Ann Taylor Loft—over $10 gift cards distributed to bloggers after a preview in January. Well, more accurately, gift cards worth up to $500, distributed after Ann Taylor reviewed the bloggers’ posts. (I believe the conclusion we can jump to here is that the cards or their amounts were directly related to how positive the review was.) As Econsultancy points out, this is “in direct violation of the FTC’s new disclosure rules.”

(Does $10 buy anything at Ann Taylor Loft? A bracelet?)

Ann Taylor Loft, according to the FTC, is responsible for ensuring the bloggers disclosed the relationship. However, there are no fines handed out this time. AdAge says:

The FTC said it decided not to take action against Ann Taylor, because, according to the company, the January preview was the first and, to date, only such event. Also, only a small number of bloggers posted content about the preview and several of those disclosed the gifts. A sign posted at the event directed bloggers to disclose the gifts, though the FTC says it’s not clear how many bloggers saw the sign. Finally, Ann Taylor’s Loft division adopted a written policy regarding its interaction with bloggers in February [after the event].

And, says Econsultancy, “LOFT adopted a written policy . . . stating that LOFT will not issue any gift to any blogger without first telling the blogger that the blogger must disclose the gift in his or her blog.” So short of making an announcement during the preview, Ann Taylor did work very hard to try to follow the FTC guidelines. So the first test case may not be very eventful—but the door is open. The FTC has long noted that the severity of their reaction will depend on the product itself. A $25 hardback isn’t going to draw the same censure as a $25,000 automobile.

What do you think? Who came out on top: the FTC or Ann Taylor Loft?