Link-blogging before the blogosphere?

Peter Friedman tells me how he persuaded a training services company to embrace the blogosphere, before it existed! Shurely shome mishtake?

SF: Can we talk a little bit about Support Insight? I mean that’s where you personally got to put the model into practise wasn’t it? It was Support Insight that helped you develop the ideas further – I guess Support Insight was the forerunner of HereComesEveryone wasn’t it?

PF: Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. It was with Support Insight that we developed a lot of the media planning tools we now use and we also discovered that the old thinking – I mean that silo thinking – in terms of media such as TV, Radio, Print or in terms of professions and disciplines PR, Marketing., Journalism and so on – were no longer useful or relevant.

We recombined elements from all of them and we were able to punch massively above our weight in communications terms.

This was the prospect that we presented to the client that got them excited.

We convinced them that they needed to become a media company first and then capitalise on the attention.

SF: Who was the client?

PF: The client was a training firm with a reputation for handling highly skill-intensive IT  projects.

They wanted to a marketing campaign to reach out to new clients but wanted to do something with a big impact.

They wanted more bang for their buck as marketing campaigns in this sector are traditionally very narrowly focused.

They also wanted to reach out to people they didn’t usually reach.

We convinced them that we could do this for them, without spending a fortune on advertising.

I’d just come out of the Kyte experience and so was armed with all the research I’d conducted for Kyte.

I persuaded the client that this was the way forward - there was no competition at the time, you see.

There were no bloggers in their market and no social network sites, no myspace either.

This was long before RSS and blogging wasn’t really on anyone’s radar.

Blogging and RSS were around but they were still thought of as a nerdy kind of thing and had made absolutely no impact whatsoever on the news-o-sphere.

This was great for us but the downside was that there was no Typepad or Moveable type at that time so a lot of our upfront development costs went into developing and setting up a CMS

These days of course this would have gone straight into developing the editorial resource so today you can hit the ground running from day one, but we couldn’t you see.

Of course there was another drawback back then – there wasn’t the rest of the blogosphere to link to so we had to concentrate a lot of our energy on linking out to the mainstream media.

But in a way this was a good thing.

We had to work a lot harder.

We worked out a low cost, non-linear way of doing media planning that would allow us to bounce stories out of the box marked internet and up into the mainstream media.

When we actually proved that this was possible – they were ecstatic!

What we were setting out to do was to make the client the focus of industry attention in the training and support industries, but indirectly, by creating a news-driven conversation about the things that actually mattered to people in the industry, rather than bragging or boasting about their products and services.

SF: What were you actually doing – I mean editorially?

PF: Today you would have called what we were doing link-blogging. Essentially I’d say the site was a link-blog but a long time before people like Jason Calacanis (Engadget) and Nick Denton (Gizmodo) made this the centre-piece of their publishing empires.

We had two staff link blogging anything up to 10 stories a day and I played the role of executive editor and acted as an outrider looking out for scoops

The stories we were running came from giving a meta-point-of-view on what was happening as well as taking news feeds from PR wire.

Of course once the site began to draw down its’ own audience we were also in direct contact with a lot of PR agencies
 
We were also seeking and getting audience feedback on the ZD Net/CNET model via forums and pump-priming the forums on the basis of the model developed at Kyte

We weren’t just feeding stories into the forums – our equivalent of today’s comments system - we were repurposing some of the content from the forums back onto the main site as well as getting the community directly involved in the news creation process

In order to help build the client’s credibility in the area we were also seeking out industry experts and inviting them to come onto the site and perform the role of guest blogger – avant la lettre of course.

SF: Like who?

PF: Well, one of them was Michael Woznicki who we found on Amazon. He was Amazon’s No 1 training certification book-reviewer.
His appearance on the site generated literally thousands of posts.

SF: When was this?

PF: 2001/2002 - before the blogosphere really took off – I know that people today, even Scoble – date the beginning of the biggest expansion of the blogosphere from 9/11 but I don’t think that’s quite right.

It was certainly the beginning of the rise to dominance of the online news-o-sphere but I’d date the big bang for the blogosphere to the day when the Tsunami hit.

Part four: Social media and its discontents:

A conversation with Peter Friedman about his fears about what happens after what happens next.