stefan

Over the last few months, we have been working intensively with media companies on concepts for integrating user-generated content. What most media companies do today is to have their own staff and their own journalists blogging. I often wonder what the objective of this concept might be. My guess is that the motivation sometimes is more a sentiment of "we should at least do something".

Here are some of the reasons against the concept of "blogging journalists":

• Journalists are blogging during their working hours. Therefore, the costs for blogging are as high as all other content production.
• Often the content is more or less the same as in the traditional publication, only in a new format
• What makes blogs interesting is rather niche content than mainstream content. But the cost of production for niche content should be appropriate for its reach
• The personalized content approach aiming to establish a journalist/reader relation often fails as journalists do not mingle with other bloggers as they barley comment on other blogs or sometimes do not even publish a blogroll to avoid outbound links.

All of this leads me to believe that the strategy for media companies has to be to benefit from user-generated content. It has the potential to tighten relationships with readers and users are able to produce and add content that cannot be covered at reasonable costs by the media brand itself.

Toby Bloomberg has pointed to a recent survey by Jupiter on Corporate Blogging. She quoted the research “… 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006” and questioned if this could really be true.

My feeling is that all numbers on blogging out there are a bit vague even the number of active blogs. Anyway there is a huge trend going on and Corporate Blogging will certainly become more and more important in the future. As far as I know there is no research out there today if those blogging solutions will be multi-user or single-user solutions what of course I would be curious to see.