The Blogpaper vs Traditional Media

The first issue of the Blogpaper was distributed in London on November 20th 2009 by theblogpaper.co.uk news community.

This project is aimed at providing an opportunity for bloggers, photographers and young journalists to reach new audiences. Also, the paper is supposed to give a weekly overview of the most important content submitted by the online community.  The Blogpaper intends to develop into a free weekly, but only a beta version has been published up to now, with an ePaper version available at its website.

“Instead of a few people controlling the majority of what is being published and therefore read, the blogpaper aims to put the majority in charge” the authors of the idea note. Although the new paper is aimed at a specifically targeted community, it does do some justice to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that “Readers, not owners, determine news”. Today the readers are not only determining the content, but they are as well eager to create it.

How is the Blogpaper created?

The Blogpaper is a free paper, composed of bloggers’ stories. Anyone can upload their stories and photo to the Blogpaper website, and then readers can determine their favorite stories by discussing and rating them. Those which get the highest ratings are then printed in the paper version.

Obviously, life is speeding up rapidly and new technologies enable anyone to make their own thoughts public with just a click of a mouse. Journalists are now working 30% more than they did 10 years ago and 1-2 pages per day is now an average quota for a journalist. A new trend of creating a newspaper within 1 day has become a popular way of entertainment among the new generation of Ukrainian journalists. But in addition to all their efforts they are now facing competition from their own readers.  This speed up of information flow creates new challenges for PR professionals also: offering readers, who are becoming the journalist as well, more and more targeted content.

But how many of us are willing to barter away exquisite chef’s specialties for fast-food snacks?

According to a leading media expert, Piet Bakker, traditional media would not disappear with the spread of social media, same as theatre still exists after the cinema was invented. Highly professional newspapers and magazines, offering analytics and exclusiveness, will never lose their audience.

About 70% of readers of printed news editions in Europe read other sources of information simultaneously, including Facebook, Twitter etc. Printed editions are not losing their audience, Dr Bakker says, giving an example of one of the most widely-circulated newspaper in Spain 20 Minutos with 270,000 offline readers daily and only 810 online visitors monthly. The same situation is observed with the Spanish Marca, El Pais and many other popular printed media in the world, which are not likely to lose their print version readers.

I’m looking forward to finding the Blogpaper in Kyiv one day. I would also be interested to know what its circulation and target audience would be. Your thoughts on this are welcomed.

As of December 1^st 2009, bloggers in the US will be obliged to declare sums of money or goods received to blog about a product or service. The VIPs of social media will have to declare material benefits received to promote a company on Facebook or Twitter. These are, in brief, the new regulations of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The fine for incompliance with the new rules can reach up to $11,000. How will the online environment evolve in the future in this context and what will be the impact of such decisions? What will be the distinction between an ‘endorsement’ (acting on behalf of the advertiser) and ‘personal opinion’ or how will the FTC monitor the application of this law?

A game of “catch me if you can” maybe? These are difficult questions to answer even by seasoned specialists.

Is the FTC right to create such rules? Some say the blogosphere representatives required this. And with online advertising having different facets, that are not always honest, this has become a good business. There are also opinions about blog advertising being similar to WOM advertising, as the blogger is perceived as an unbiased source, an honest dialogue partner.   However it seems there are bloggers willing to post favorable articles, reviews or product presentations in return of money or goods.

Looking at the bigger picture this is also valid for social media, where international stars or opinion leader comment, promote or simply discuss products, services or companies. By their presence in social media, opinion leaders can influence both the popularity of the network they use and the behaviour of the users. An example is the microblogging site that is closely linked to other social media such as Facebook – Twitter recorded an impressive increase in popularity in the past year after international celebrities opened accounts. According to Twitter founder, Biz Stone (@biz), the number of active users increased by 900% in the past year. How would Twitter have evolved without the presence of top stars? We cannot say for sure.

Recent studies show that social media are so popular, their use worldwide exceeds the use of email. Similarly, users spend three times more time on social media than they do online in general.

In the context of the new regulations, other interesting questions come up; how will new media evolve? How will the average user be impacted? What about the advertiser? How will user-generated content develop? Hard to say. What will online advertising look like and how much will it cost? Equally hard to say.
We will certainly hear more about ‘blogvertising‘ – a term that appeared in 2006 – and perhaps other similar ones that will be created to match the ever-changing reality of the digital world.

Nations differ. So, obviously, bloggers will differ between nations as well. Let’s see, then who is the “Russian blogger”?

According to “Russian Blogosphere” research conducted by the leading Russian Internet company Yandex, the average Russian blogger is an inhabitant of a big city. A typical Russian blogger is a 22-year-old woman from Moscow or Saint-Petersburg, with 13 mutual online-friends, who participates in 10 online communities at liveinternet.ru or blogs.mail.ru.

Though Liveinternet.ru and Blogs.mail.ru are the most popular blog sites, they are not the most influential. Companies aiming to launch their online PR campaigns usually focus on livejournal.com, which is popular among politicians, businessmen, professionals, managers, journalists, etc. Posts from this blog site are often quoted by print media. Livejournal.com’s average user is a 26-year-old female, interested in sports, internal and international politics, and business.

Every day, Russian bloggers leave some 1 000 000 messages, among them 300 000 posts and 700 000 comments. 26% of Russian bloggers publish only posts, 21% only comments, 56% both posts and comments. The average blog post of a Russian blogger consists of 101 words.

In recent times the online media landscape in Bulgaria has begun to boom, due to the fact that internet access in the country grew a staggering 450% in the last eight years. No wonder that in a country where our language is formed from the Cyrillic alphabet some obstacles needed to be overcome. One of the solutions is the BG-technorati site (in Bulgarian only) that currently gathers information for and from 1,570 blogs, written in Bulgarian.

The ranking is done according to incoming links from other Bulgarian blogs and blogrolls. Based on that, BG-authority is so developed that it gives a pretty clear picture of  ‘who’s who’ in the Bulgarian blogosphere.

Map source: Visit to Bulgaria

The highest ranked blog has an authority of 242, second place scores 175 and third place reaches 166 according to the site’s authority rankings. RSS feeds are also monitored and the ranking according to the number of RSS subscribers each blog has shows the top Bulgarian blog with 3,476 active subscribers, followed by the second blog which has 2,445 and third place with 1,851.

Going deeper, you notice that the highest blog by authority is a multi-themed one, covering topics from visiting the dentist’s to serious issues like gay rights. Top 10 most commented posts accumulated a staggering 1,832 comments. With a Google Page Rank of 5 and Technorati ranking of 156, this blog for sure is the most commented and the most linked to in the Bulgarian blogosphere.

Interestingly the number 2 and number 3 ranked blogs by RSS subscribers both cover fitness and wellbeing and collectively they have 4,296 RSS subscribers. Even more interesting is that this number is higher than the circulation of some well-known monthly Bulgarian health and fitness magazines.

Things are certainly advancing in the Bulgarian online market. However, since Bulgarian is not the most popular language on Earth, planning and implementing of any campaign for digital PR should start with native speakers, to be able to take a client through the landscape of blogs in Bulgarian by, of course, Bulgarians.

Action Global Communications Bulgaria, together with Taurus Consultants, recently organised a digital and social media PR seminar, with guest presenter Stephen Davies, the online PR specialist and consultant. (Stephen’s online communications and technology blog, www.prblogger.com, has been recognised by PR industry professionals around the world, and has recently been named ‘the UK”s number one PR blog’, according to Advertising Age, the leading US marketing publication.)

More than 25 professionals from marketing and communications departments of leading Bulgarian companies attended the seminar, together with some colleagues from well-known agencies. Among them were:

• Danone Bulgaria
• Colliers International
• Penny Market Bulgaria
• Piraues Bank Bulgaria
• OMV Bulgaria
• Indesit Company
• Ogilvy PR
• Publicis Consultants.

As part of the campaign to promote the seminar, Action Bulgaria set up a dedicated blog, achieving 313 unique visits from interested businesses in 14 days. We noticed that as we provided ongoing updates, teaser information about the seminar, the agenda, the speakers, etc. the visits jumped each time.  Action Bulgaria also engaged with members of the dedicated group using Facebook. Details on blog visits are given on the screenshot below

Facebook group members jumped from 1 to 39 in a matter of less than 10 days and the vast majority of those members actually attended the seminar.

The richest content delivered in the seminar was a series of case studies, which was tailored to their specific industry sectors: banking, pharmaceuticals and fast-moving consumer goods.  Case studies were also presented that focused specifically on Bulgarian companies, and these were presented in Bulgarian by Darin Stoykov, Action Bulgaria’s Global Client Service Director. Details on one of those could be found here

As a result of the case studies, www.jobs.bg, a popular Bulgarian recruitment and human resources website, conducted an online magazine interview with Stephen Davies about digital and social media PR, including an insightful video interview.

There was a great volume of interest, engagement and feedback for the seminar. Two such examples we’re delighted to reference are detailed below:

• The seminar was remarkably useful for future projects we might undertake”, Radina Ralcheva, Country Manager of Hochegger PR
• “At least now we will not be afraid of entering this “dark zone” called the Internet and we will more confidently rely on our agency to propose Digital PR initiatives”, Roumen Kofinov, MD of Boehringer Ingelheim Bulgaria