Blogging industry analysis with marketing plan and web 2.0 considerations

Blogging Industry

Environmental Trends Impacting

Blogging and User-Generated Content Industries

The proliferation of blogging platforms and applications that are textually, graphically and video-based together reflect the design criterion and objectives originally defined in the Web 2.0 taxonomy created by Tim O'Reilly CEO and Founder of O'Reilly Media. Based on an egalitarian framework of collaboration and communication, Web 2.0 has since become the foundation of many of the blogging and social media platforms dominating the typical Internet user's hours online today (Bernoff, Li, 2008). Figure 1 provides a graphic representation of the Web 2.0 Meme Map as originally designed by Tom O'Reilly and John Battelle (O'Reilly, 2006). Web 2.0 continues to be the primary catalyst of the greater opportunities and threats to consumer-generated content.

Figure 1: Web 2.0 Meme Map

Source: (O'Reilly, 2006)

Central to the concept of Web 2.0 technologies is that the Web is a platform not just for pushing content out but also for listening and engaging with readers and those interested in the same and comparable subject areas as well. The Meme Map today serves as the foundation for Foursquare, Facebook Twitter, WordPress and nearly every major blogging platform being used today (Davidson, Vaast, 2009). The accumulative effects of Web 2.0 technologies in social media now pervade public relations strategies of companies as well, as they look to connect with key influencers and buyers of their products and services online as well (Porter, Chung, Sweetser, 2009).

Additional environmental trends, opportunities and threats influencing blogging platforms specifically and user-generated content in aggregate is the quantification and measurement of influence through analytics (Griffith, 2011) and the use of advanced analytics to determine company reputation and influence (Carr, 2011). These two trends are both opportunistic and threatening to blogging applications and social media platforms. First, quantifying influence is already beginning to force a balkanization of the Web in terms of blogger access to information (Griffith, 2011). Klout and other scoring methodologies are ideally used for segmentation analysis and defining criterion for breaking markets into various audiences. It has had the effect of also forcing a pareto analysis of influence onto the blogger community, creating varying communities of bloggers who tend to become insular over time. The quantifying of influence provides insights into creating market segments which is useful from a public relations perspective (Porter, Chung, Sweetser, 2009) yet it does not provide greater fluidity and movement of content throughout the Internet. Amplifying these differences is the use of Klout-like scores to evaluate the overall performance of companies online as well (Carr, 2011). As the majority of companies use their blogs to generate website traffic for lead generation (Thevenot, 2007) the use of influence scores is also impacting their ability to grow profitably over time. This quantification of influence will continue to influence the effectiveness of user-generated content (Griffith, 2011).