STUART SMITH: …Some obligatory statistics which will open the proceedings. The blogging phenomenon, as we all know, has literally exploded in the last two years. The number of blogs is doubling every six months. And, current estimates put the blogosphere at around sixteen million sites. Hand in hand with this, RSS or Really Simple Syndication, is changing the way that people consume their media. So, our theme for today's events is why blogging can't be ignored. And, to help us debate that topic we are joined by four panelists. On Table one we have Richard Edelman, our Globe President and CEO, and one of the public relations industry's leading bloggers. On table two we have Suw Charman. Suw is a blog consultant, journalist, and author working primarily in the areas of blogging and the use of central software in business, copyrighting form, and digital rights. While not advising companies on their blogging strategy, she blogs herself regularly around business blogging events beyond her journalism. On table three, we're joined by Kevin Anderson who's been an on-line journalist for ten years and was BBCNews.com's reporter in Washington from '98 until April this year. In addition to covering politics, national security, and the current affairs in the US for the website, he also covered technology for BBC, radio and TV. As part of his coverage of the 2004 US Presidential election, he wrote a blog. And, in April, he came to the UK to develop a blogging strategy for BCC News. And, he is now working for BBC World Service on a new interactive radio program called World Have Your Say. On table four we're joined by Charlie Preslik. Charlie joined the FT in '98. He's been the UK company's editor since 2004. And, before that, was the banking editor and head of financial services team. Prior to that, he was the investment banking correspondent. And, prior to that, he was at the Daily Telegraph where he spent two years as the new business correspondent. And, in London, his roles included city correspondent and the stock market. Charlie's well the FTA's most experienced city watchers and he provides daily insight analysis of breaking news in his business blog. Now, the way in which the proceedings are going to work, Richard will get up and present some of our latest research around blogging. And then, we distributed panelists amongst the tables in a slightly innovative move so that we can actually generate some conversations around each of the tables. Richard will speak. And then, each of the panelists will from their from their position talk for two or three minutes on their view their views on blogging. Then, we'll all sit down. We'll have our main course. And then, after that my co-host, Robert Phillips, will moderate a conversation amongst amongst the room. So, without further ado, I'll invite Richard to come up and give his presentation. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) RICHARD EDELMAN: The great thing about coming from New York is you can eat a roll in one and a half minutes before your speaking engagement. Anyway, thanks everybody for coming. I want to start off by telling you that what I'm gonna show you today is data that's fresh from the field. We just finished a survey with Technorati which actually follows the 18 million blogs in the world. We decided that the public relations relationship with the blogosphere is a little bit charged. That's the nicest word I can think of. I had a conversation with a very established blogger named David Weinberger in April that kind of describes this relationship. He said, "Well, I think public relations people are full of spin. And, that blogging is about being genuine and about having conversations. And, PR is is about artifice." And and you know. And, I said, "David, you got it all wrong. You you know." And, he said, "Well, no I don't." And, so we had a quite animated discussion about it. So, we decided to see whether people actually believed in the blogosphere, like Weinberger believes. And, if that's the case, then we have a problem. Or, is there an opportunity? A) for public relations to do better. And, B) for bloggers who I believe are now actually the source of many stories into established media. You know, whether we can have a relationship. And, if so, how? And, I'm glad to register for HP. But, I'm not gonna do that now. Remind me again. No. Okay. You can remind me tomorrow. Fine, I will be gone. Why the study? Well, Stewart's already described that the idea that an average person like yourself is now equal to an academic of a physician. That's a completely new thing in our trust barometer study. That's only happened in the last two years. And, I just described to you this whole relationship of PR firms and bloggers. Okay. So we just did this in September. So, it just finished. We went to 31,000 subscribers. We had 821 respondents. About half of them were American. There was basically pretty even mm, maybe three quarters of the balance from Europe. Some from Asia. So, who are these people? Why do they blog? Well, they want to be authorities. They want to have visibility. And then, the second reason is people see themselves as public diarists. In fact this is almost exactly what Suw Charman described to me before our session today. A) To be an expert in something. And, B) to be a diarist. They post very frequently. This shouldn't surprise any of you who follow blogs, whether a gawker in Gadget or anything else. Most are posting at least once a day. Now, this is a very important point for all of you in public relations who feel that the blogosphere is basically the domain of mischaracterization, haft accuracy, et cetera. False. And, there's a tremendous desire on the part of the bloggers to be accurate. So, if there's a mistake about your company, about your product, send them an e-mail, raise your hand. They will correct it. That's what our studies show very clearly. Either by striking through and writing "here's the fact." Or, by correcting. One or the other. Very few of them will leave an inaccurate post. They prefer that you send and e-mail as opposed to posting a comment. Like, a nasty saying, "You didn't understand the Microsoft product. Why in the hell" you know. Don't do that. Send them a nice note and say, "You know, you should correct this in a e-mail. Don't embarrass them. That's a better thing. Okay, so why should you care about this? Good question. Because companies, products, and employees are very often the subject. In fact, more than half the people who wr answered our survey said that they write about companies and products at least once a week. So, the idea that it's simply a sort of public diary about, you know, I went to this movie today and, you know, I went on the subway today, no. It's much more than that. Second important finding: Most bloggers have never been or are rarely contacted by companies. This is a big mistake. Now, I know that there are many of you in the room. Microsoft example. You contact bloggers all the time. But, many of you companies don't do it at all. Only 21 percent of these 800 odd people said that they have ever had contact from companies. Or they're also tremendously willing to review products. Seventy to 30. You can send them samples. They call it swag. It's good stuff. You can sometimes get it back. Don't count on it. So, what's the best way to engage? Not the way we're doing it right now, folks. The way it's going now is a way to demise and death which is, you know, send them a press release or a nice form e-mail. Why bother? That's the way we've done it with journalists for years. That's how bad PR people do it with journalists, folks. The same applies to the blogosphere. You've got to have a relationship. Who do you get contacted by? Most people have no idea because they aren't. So, it's either by a PR agency or a product team, in the event that they are. This also fascinated us. We figured that the blogosphere would be incredibly distrusting of the corporate community. False. It's true that they don't see you as very trustworthy. But, they also don't see you as very untrustworthy. So, in that great middle, which is where people win elections in the so-called somewhat or occasionally trustworthy, you too as a candidate can win your election. Meaning, you're somewhat credible as a corporate blogger. However, the big secret folks is employee blogs are very credible. Why is it that Mr. Scoble and his Scoblizer for Microsoft gets such play? Well one, because he's sometimes very critical of the company, about the gay rights legislation in the State of Washington, or other things where he took on senior management. This gives credibility. So, employee blogs all right a good idea. And, bloggers would prefer to interact with employee bloggers. They see the employee bloggers as a very good source of information. So, if it's somebody who's blogging in R&D, or something like that, that's better than a product manager blogging. And, it's a hell of a lot better than a CEO blog. Although, I am a CEO blogger. Take it for what it's worth. So again how much do you trust a message from a company if you get an e-mail, for example, about a product or whatever? Again, we were very surprised by this. Only 19 percent said "not trusted." So again, you can win this election. PR firms. The bad news, folks, is that PR firms have a long way to go in the blogosphere because the not trusted is 33 percent. In fact, there is a guy from Yahoo, who's a very well known blogger, who suggested that there be a ban on e-mails from certain technology PR firms whom he referred to as "spamaholics." I will not diss them. Fortunately, we were not one of those named. But PR firms have to do better. Trust in products is driven by word of mouth. So, in short if you get into the blogs, it goes horizontally. The idea of peer to peer matters tremendously. You've got to get into the blogosphere to get credibility in the blogosphere. So, I have four or five key conclusions. One, engagement. We cannot, as PR people, as responsible PR people forget about this important communications arena. And, the bloggers are not being contacted either by companies or PR agencies. If they are being contacted, they're being contacted the wrong way. They're getting spam. Listen, journalists like Adam or Charlie Preslik, you just have become inured to it. Just the delete button. Somebody from Fortune tells me he has a 120 that he just goes through every morning like this. Bloggers won't do this. They'll take your stuff if it's garbage and they'll crush you. So, it's not even a good idea to send lousy press releases. Anyway it's a better thing to have a relationship and say, "Look, I as a PR person actually know something about this product. I've tried it. I actually know what you write about." Miracle. "And I am not gonna send you stuff unless you want it. And, I'll put it up and you can take it." Stop pushing. Begin the facilitation of pull. I would also suggest to you that you create opportunities for direct contact with informed principals. Employee bloggers. There's a big message in this. Don't have your CEO write from the top of Mount Olympus. Have the person who's actually working on the product know something about it, do it. And also, if you really want traction, have other bloggers write about it. And then, blogs pick it up. It's like the snowball effect. So, I thought this was a pretty funny cartoon. These two dogs for those of you who can't read it in the back of the room, it's one dog speaking to another. And, he says, "I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless incessant barking." And, on that note enjoy your lunch. STUART SMITH: Now, we are passing over to Suw, if you want to, give us her view on on blogging and maybe some of what Richard just said. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) SUW CHARMAN: Right. Gosh. Guess I was asked to come away from my table and come up to the front for the sake of he camera man and the fact that everybody he's already shuffled around in their chair. So, I thought I'd start off just asking some difficult questions. What are the challenges with blogging? Well, I'll tell you what the challenges aren't. The challenges are not with technology. The installation of blogging technology is a trivial thing. I can go into a server and set up a blog in five minutes. If I want a hosted blog, then I can set one up in significantly less than five minutes. The challenges with blogging are not financial. If you compare blogging to a a standard commercial customized CMS system that may possibly cost you several hundred thousands of pounds. With blogs, you'd be really hard pressed to get it into four or five figures. So, the money is not an issue. So, where are the challenges? The challenges are in culture. The cultural change between the way that marketers and PR agencies are used to communicating and the way that bloggers are used to communicating are completely different. Blogging is a conversation. This is probably a phrase that you've heard over and again. And, if it hasn't, it's one you certainly will hear an awful lot. Blogging is very personal. People who are writing blogs, on the whole, are talking about their experiences. Whether it's their experiences in their life, their experiences of your products, of your company, of your brand, it's very personal. And, when they're talking on their blog, bloggers are talking to people on a one-to-one basis. Their readers are commenting and saying, "You know what? I had exactly the same experience." Or, "You know, I had the bought the same phone and it was great. And, I completely disagree with you." Whether it's agreement or disagreement, it's a personal conversation. And, marketers are used to the broadcast paradigm. For the last 50 odd years we've had mass media, which has allowed us to broadcast or tightly controlled, finely honed message to a passive audience. An audience who passively accepts that message or passively rejects it. But, never actually has any root to push back on that message to the marketer or the company. With blogging, certainly your audience has a voice. They have an arena in which they can say, "Actually, you know, that disher we bought of yours, it sucks. It sucks so bad it blows." Suddenly, people have a way of expressing their feeling. And, they will do so in no uncertain terms. And, this is a massive change for marketing and PR because if you want to engage with bloggers, certainly you can't broadcast anymore. You can't finely hone your message, put it out there, and expect it to say stay in neat and tidy, and as you created it because people will take that message, rip it into small pieces, and cast it to the four corners of the world. Sometimes they will do that in a positive way. They will take your message. They will say, "This is fantastic. I did this thing and with this product and this company and it was brilliant. And, I loved it." Other times, they will not be quite so positive. So, you have to start thinking about your audience as individual people. And then, amongst those people you will have critics and you will have evangelists. And, you have to learn, how do I talk to my critics? How do I address their problems? How personal am I going to get with this particular blogger? Do they have a problem that is legitimate? Do they have a complaint which we can address? What can we learn from what they're saying? And, with evangelists in fact, evangelists I think are slightly trickier because at least with critics you just have a complaint to deal with. With evangelists, you have to consider whether contacting an evangelist, whether providing extra information, sending press releases although, not that I'm keen on press releases but, striking up positive relationships with that evangelist, it could have two effects. It could help the evangelist become an even bigger fan. Or, it could put that evangelist in a very tricky position because have they been bought by the company? The evangelist himself, or herself, has to think about how their audience are going to view what they're saying. If they have suddenly started getting free products, suddenly started getting insider information, then are you damaging the trust relationship that that blogger has with their readers and their commenters? So, the culture of blogging is is one that needs a a a lot of consideration. It's a big shift for a a lot marketers and PR companies. And really, the only way to thoroughly get your head around blogging as a culture is to start blogging yourself. Is to start reading blogs. Find blogs that are are writing about the stuff that you're passionate about, writing about your brand, your company, your products. Stuff that is completely unrelated to work. If you're really into music, go. Go find the MP3 blogs. Go find the bloggers who are writing that stuff that you love. And, start to try and understand the passion that drives bloggers. When you start finish reading blogs, when you've you feel comfortable reading blogs, start commenting. Start engaging in the community because blogs are all about community. A lot of bloggers 'cause it's very easy to think of bloggers as en masse, as one big community. And, in fact, they're not. There are lots of very small, discrete communities. So, you have knitting bloggers. You have cat bloggers. You have gadget bloggers. Car bloggers. Language bloggers. All sort of different small communities that you need to to think about who is your community? How do I engage with these people? What are they saying that I personally have an opinion on? And, start engaging in a dialogue. A conversation with these bloggers. And then, think about whether or not your brand, your company, you as an individual feel able to start blogging. Set up a blog. Maybe a personal blog somewhere discrete like blogger, were you can just experiment and find your voice 'cause it can take a long time to become comfortable with blogging as a medium. I've been blogging for three and a half years. And, the first six months of that was me going, "I'm journalist. No, I'm not. I'm a blogger. I'm a journalist. No, no, no. I'm a blogger." And not entirely understanding what was I doing with this? How was I relating to people? What was I saying? Why on earth would anybody read me? And, I can guarantee, every blogger, whether they are a personal blogger or a business blogger is going to go through that exact same experience. That that feeling of what on earth am I actually doing? So experiment quietly. If necessary, start your internal blogs your business blogs internally. Give yourself a chance to figure out how does this fit into my day? How how am I going to find the time to do the reading I need to write well? And then, eventually, when you truly understand the blogosphere, and you truly understand your relationship to the blogosphere, your part in the community, then is the time to start thinking about blogging externally and becoming a part of the wider blogosphere. Thank you. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) KEVIN ANDERSON: So, just to prove that there is a blog on just about everything, I introduced my editor this morning to the stuff pus stuff plus cat blog, which is a blog all about pictures of putting things on your cat. So, this morning the top picture was the cat splayed out, as if it had a big bender the night before, and someone had stuck a beer bottle in between the paws of the cat. So, at any rate- (BREAK IN TAPE) five called positive blogs. Obviously, it didn't go through branding because it's a bad brand. But, we talk to bloggers all over the world. And, let me just preface all my comments by saying blogging is not a uniform universal global concept or a phenomenon. There are different kind there are different sort of national blogging communities. Different acceptance, awareness of blog depending on where you're at in the world. The US, France, China, Iran very vibrant blog communities. The UK and this is not cultural or national slight hasn't really embraced blogs like it has in other places. And, just to put it in context the fourth most common language in blogs is Persian. The Iranian blogosphere is huge. Both in Iran and outside the Diaspora. In part, because one of the A-list bloggers is a guy by the name or at least, he goes by the name, "Hoter" in Toronto and writes about Iranian politics. We've actually interviewed a blogger in Tehran called Mr. Bahai using scipe . So, it's it's not a universal concept. If you look at the awareness of blogs in the US, right now about a third of people read blogs regularly. Just to put this context, when you talk about awareness of blogs in the United States, 88 percent of media folks know about blogs. About 31 percent, 35 percent of normal average Americans know about blogs. So, factor that in when you're thinking about it. So, the media and blogs and I'll talk about the United States American context because that's where I'm from. They really entered the mainstream in the States in December of 2002 when bloggers brought down the Senate Majority leader, Tent Trent Lott. He had made some comments in a closed door celebration for Southern Senator Strom Thurmond. And that, at least in Washington, is where we we kinda picked up on it. And, in December of 2002, bloggers kind of kept this story in the mainstream. And Trent Lott was forced to stand down. It wasn't really a big story. It was kind of a minor comment by ABC News. But, bloggers pushed the story. And then, of course, there were there was Dean's Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Blogger Powered Howard. And, that's where again, the rest of us kind of picked up "what is this blog thing going on?" You know, this has been going on since about '98 in technology circles. But, really as far as entering the mainstream, it took a long time for for us to kinda get onto it. What really caught our attention though in the mainstream media in the States is when bloggers started lobbing grenades at us. And of course, the the first scalp that came probably would've been Dan Rather's and what the conservative bloggers called "Rather Day." And then, earlier this year, Eason Jordan, the executive at CNN was brought down by some comments that he allegedly made at Davos . So, the thing was, we looked at the explosive growth of blogs, which we've we all know about. And, we looked at the lagging fortunes of mainstream media. And, our editor said, "You got to get this blogging thing." So, you know, sometimes I'm accused of drinking the blogger's Kool-Aid. And I will say this about the mainstream media: There's nothing that adolescence have over the mainstream media when it comes to herd-like activity. So, we went that way to go to blogs because that's what we thought was gonna sort of save our skins. And all of our editors said, "We got to have a blog. Kevin, go out and blog." I mean, that's what they told me to do last summer. And, I said, "Yeah? Okay, fine. I'll go blog." And so, I did one during the Democratic and Republican Conventions. I did one during a 17-day road trip across the United States, which everybody in the BBC said was the best assignment during the US Election. And then, I did one for the last 17 days of the US Election. And the technology was horrible. It didn't have an RSS feed. We could barely take in comments. But, I tried to behave like a blogger. I tried to have a conversation with my audience. And and, I think that's what really kind of set it apart. We we my editors thought, "Wow, this is kind of interesting. These are things we never talk about. And, people are responding to this. And, we got better comments normally than we do into the news website." But, for most of the mainstream media and I include my dear organization, the BBC, in this we've done a lot of jumping on the blog wagon, as John Stewart of the Daily Show puts it. We headed off to go do blogs. We didn't really know what we were doing. We didn't really know why we were doing it. But, a lot of people were heading in that direction, so we were gonna go follow them. We thought, "Well, blogs. Yeah, they're snarky columns. We're really good at doing snarky columns. That's what we'll do. We'll have a blog that says Snarky Column." We thought blogs were about taking content we already produce, and as a friend of my calls it, doing news sushi. Taking news, chopping it up into bits, and feeding it back to our audience in sort of bite size nuggets, reverse chronologically ordered of course, because that's what a blog does. Yeah, right. We didn't realize that this was not just another publishing mechanism. This wasn't about distribution. And, it was about a distributed conversation. We didn't realize that bloggers didn't necessarily buy into our traditional means of assessing credibility, which was a problem because we were having some credibility problems of our own. Now, having said that, most most mainstream media blogs, as I wrote in an internal blog post of my own, suck. But, there are perfectly good, and defensible reasons for journalists to blog. And, I think it's kind of a synthesis, a a combination of traditional blogging and journalism. But, there are are good reasons for us to do it. Relevance, transparency, and credibility. As a journalist, I mean, our our currency is credibility. If our audience doesn't believe what we're saying, they'll go somewhere else. And, in the US that somewhere else is increasingly becoming blogs because as the as Suw has said, as Richard has said, it's about personal relationship it develops. And, sometimes even though, you know, your neighbor might not be an expert on X, Y, and Zed subject you believe your neighbor because you have a relationship with that neighbor. Same thing happens in blogs. You develop a relationship with other bloggers and you actually rate them. And, that's why you believe what they're doing. Just to put some flesh on this. So, when I did the US Election blog, the way that I did, even though the technology wasn't quite there, I said, "Okay, Fox News says we report, you decide." I said, "Okay, you decide, I report. I'm a reporter on a joy stick. What do you guys want to know about the US Elections? Send me out, you know. You have questions, I have access." And, that's kind of how I I did the blog. And, people sent in all kinds of questions. And, it was amazing. I mean, some of 'em were very wonky. Someone wanted to know all kinds of questions about the electoral college. What's a faithful selector? You know, all of these just kinda basic, you know, kind of Constitutional US Constitution 101 questions. But, we were able to kind of have a conversation about this instead of, you know, me writing a little fact box about about the news. You know, I'm I'm glad Fox didn't sue me for appropriating that their their tag line. But and I'll give you I'll give you an example. The BBC has an issue especially if you read the biased BBC, a blog that takes regular pot shots at us, about being seen as being sort of slightly left of center. And there was a target shooter in Milton Keenes who wrote into my blog and said, "You know what?" And, he spent the next 300 words slagging off to BBC, which I did post. And then, he talked about target shooting and his passion for the second amendment, which is the right to bear arms in the States. And, he says, "You know, I'm really passionate about this." And so, I edited it down and I sent him off an e-mail. And, I said, "Look, I had to edit your post for content because it was twice as long as anything I've posted in the last three days. But, I hope it retains the spirit of what you were saying." He shot me back an e-mail instantly saying, "I'm just glad to be listened to." And, that was a real awakening for me. That this was you know, this is what the internet's about. It's about kind of maintaining a relationship with my audience. It is this whole thing, as Dan Gilmor says, "It's news, it's conversation." And and this is what I hope that the mainstream media kind of cotters onto that it's not just about this one way transaction. That it is now the internet. And and a lot of other devices. Mobile phones, whether it be camera phones or text messages or whatever. Our audience their expectations are changing. It's not just about pushing stuff out at them anymore. Dan Gilmore going back to him he said that his realization, his "it moment" about the blogs and and participatory media and citizen journalism and the like was that people reading his columns out in Silicon Valley actually knew as much, if not more, about the subject that he was writing about than he did. And, by inviting them and engaging with them, this was a way to sort of fill in the gaps of his own knowledge. What we're seeing now is people not they don't only they're they're not just interested in consuming media. They want to contribute, participate. They want to be part of the part of, you know, part of the mix. And so, as I say at the BBC, you know, blogs for us can be a public interface for a public broadcaster. And so, while most mainstream media blogs suck, there's plenty of room for improvement. So, thanks very much. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) CHARLIE PRESLIK: Hi. Well, I'm definitely in the class of the adolescents. That's absolutely no doubt. The financial times is just experimenting at the moment. We're just at the very beginnings of of trying to find our way through the blogosphere and trying to work at how it works and what we do and what we should do with it, and that sort of stuff. And, I think that there's no doubt that by the definitions that the that we've heard today from Suw and Kevin on the purist definitions we would probably not my blog would not be considered a blog for a number of reasons, which I'll run through. We wanted it to be a blog. We think it's got it's heading in the right direction. But, there are there are problems with it. And, they and and they relate to some of the issues that that Suw and Kevin have quite rightly brought up. The first sort of obvious thing is that is that it doesn't have an we don't yet have the technology. Well, although we think we'll have it very soon, for RSS. The second is that we don't yet for reasons that I'll talk about in a minute we don't yet allow people to post comments directly. We have a very limited facility which allows people to e-mail a sort of central e-mail box, which basically is my e-mail box, which I not good enough. And there are re and it's you know, it's that that's not the point. And we know this. And, we are and I'd be interested in some of your views on how we get around that 'cause there are options there. The basically -- just to talk about it briefly -- Why we're doing this: part of it has absolutely to do with the band wagon that Kevin talked about. I mean, we know that this -- we're very committed to ft.com and to the internet as a medium for us to distribute our news, to deal with to deal with issues, to talk to our or to communicate with our with our readers. We know that it's very popular. We know that the internet is a very, very important medium for us and for all newspapers. That's a given. To take that one step further, there is this whole blog thing going on that many of us know a little bit about. But, most of us don't know much about it at all. It's a different medium to the sort of traditional newspaper relationship. The traditional relationship that a newspaper has with its readers. And but, we sort of felt that it was something that we ought to be in. And, w and as Kevin says, we are in our sort of in our adolescence. And, we certainly definitely got our sort of our stabilizers on still. But, I think the advantage that it has for us, and that it can have for us, is that our readers are increasingly sophisticated I think. All consumers of media are increasingly sophisticated. And, they no longer are happy just to sort of sit in receive mode. And, in fact, you saw television get this a long ago. Long before newspapers did in the way that they started showing you the lights and the cameras and the wires and the guys walking around behind with the newspapers under their arms looking busy. All this sort of stuff. You sort of took away some of the mystique. It was no longer just a sort of formal conversation between the news reader and the and the audience. I mean, it's no longer that. That was, you know, just a first step. It's obviously not a not interactive. But, there was a sort of lifting of the skirt a little bit. A little bit of showing of ankle. And, I think that that was this and that and that's quite interesting. People like to you know, people like to see behind the veil a little bit. And to and to understand what goes on. And, it and I think it can enhance the credibility of the polished product. So, you get I mean, the you know John Snow does a fantastic e-mail. It's not a blog. But, as a very good e-mail in the evening. It's called Snow Mail, where you get a sort of idea of the sort of debate that that's going on in their news room about what they're gonna do and what they think about these. And then, when you see the final polished product, you think, "Pretty good" because you realize that it wasn't a sort of it's that it's a sort of iterative process. It's not a sort of it's not no one wakes up and says, "Right, this is what we're gonna do." It's a sort of discursive process. And, I think that's what we are edging towards as well. That's that that point. The other thing is that it can build. We think it can build loyalty. And, the people feel more attached to the Financial Times. And, it's and its coverage if they can have a a dialogue with it. Tell us when they think it's dreadful. Tell us when they think it's good. And, in the process if we respond adequately to that then, you know, we will please our readers and our customers by at the same time. Truthfully, it can also act as a bit of a tease. You know, we can put out there some stuff that we can alert people to some things that we've done or are doing that people might not otherwise read. This may be absolutely heretic in blogosphere. It's must be much too commercial. But, anyway we think it's it can work like that. And, that it can act as a sort of as a well, this is the one of the one of the issues is the tone because it's not it's neither Lex, Column and Lombard. It's not a sort of formal commentary. And, nor is it wire copy. It's somewhere in between. And, the idea is that it should be the sort of the news desk's-- my quick assessment of what it is in UK companies -- what we're following, what our quick view of it is, how we might treat it. It's not the final considered view. And, quite often, the actual piece that we how we ended up treating it in the morning is different to how it looked like we were going to do that at lunchtime. And, I think that's fine. I mean, it's part of a you know, there's a sort of process. The issues that arise which Suw and Kevin have raised are well, there is the one of tone, first of all, which is that, you know, as a as a re as a reporter and editor I'm not used to talking in I'm not used to communi -- to relating my thoughts in a in an informal way. You know, we are the Financial Times. We have a a sort of there's a there's a there are standards and there's a certain language. There's a certain sort of grammar in the loosest sense of how we communicate with our readers. And, we s you know, we like many traditional news, we aim to, we trade on our authority and our credibility. And, somewhere between that and complete sort of chit-chat is where we need to be. But, you can't if but if I start chit-chatting, that damages our brand's credibility. We sell, you know, we're selling that credibility. So, we have to be informal and accessible. And yet, not and, you know, and yet, not flippant. And, it's a it's a very it's a difficult tone to strike. And, not one that I feel we've correctly struck here. We have days when, you know, I'm more flippant and more chatty. And, days when I'm pretty formal and boring. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, we're working it out. The other point is to do with which is obviously related is to do with accuracy. And we have to be absolutely right. And, when I see a thing cross snap across the wires you know, I have an init initial view, which is you know, I think often is right. But, quite often is not right. And, I may think this is extremely significant because it means, X, Y, and Z. And, I may be completely wrong by the afternoon. Now, in a newspaper, that's fine. You've got the afternoon to discuss it with your colleagues, to make a judgment, to think well, we are we gonna do this big? Are we gonna do this small? Are we actually gonna go brief it? Should we forget it all together? Is it is it what we think it is? In a blog, particularly when you're doing it against the time pressure that I'm doing it in, you've got to make your mind up and get it out. And, if and if you're wrong, does it matter? Is it f is it all very relaxed and cool? And, it's just the blogosphere? Or, actually is it damaging to your brand? You know, don't know. I mean, I'm inclined to get try and get it right frankly. But then, that you know, then it's reporting and it's not quite so chatty. And, it's not so blogging. So, that's a that's a challenge. One of the ways that I think the blog can have credibility if we can't be totally sort of hip and relaxed as some of the blogs are is by fairly crediting rivals when they do good stuff. So, I'm reading all the British papers and quite a few of the foreign ones. And, I read the wires and a lot of the news on-line as much as I can. And, when I see good stuff, I'm happy to say so. And, we should and I think that's it then makes us look less like a sort of self-promotion vehicle. And, we find links to good pieces in the Guardian, in the Indi, in the Times, wherever it might be. And but again, if you're going to be completely honest, are you going to say, "God, we had a really crap paper this morning. And, we got beaten about by the competition. And, we got scooped all over the place?" Which doesn't happen very often, but we have bad days like everybody. And, do you say so? Well, I don't know. You know, not sure I do really, apart from the fact that it would be demoralizing for my colleagues I think that's you know. But, if you're gonna be completely honest and informal, well you probably should. So, you know, we need that's an issue for us to think about. The other issue is engagement with other blogs. And, sort of piercing the blogosphere. And, it may be that I don't have as much time as I would like to just to sort of hang out there and surf around and sort of browse but I've been really disappointed by the by what I've found in terms of British business blogs. I can hardly find any. You know, I found one about sheet roofing stuff. It was great, if you're into it. Sheet roofing. But, you know, there's lots on technology. Obviously, if you're a tech technology want fantastic, you can go off and discuss the latest, you know, headset for telephones or whatever. But, I'm not very interested in that. And if you want just discussion about business, it's really, really difficult to find anything. And then, if you do stumble across something, the sort of bloggers the removal of spatial constraints seems to sort of remove all need for discipline on behalf of bloggers. They go, you know, tapping away for hours. And, who's got time for this stuff? It's undisciplined. Quite a lot of it is undisciplined thinking and undisciplined writing. And, it actually and the reason that newspapers and television and radio write as they do, is not just because it's a formality and it's didactic. It's also because it's efficient. And, people like to get information quickly and clearly and simply. And, they don't want to read eight thousand words if you can tell it in 800 or in 80. And, that's one of the issues that I found in some of the blogs that I've come across. And so, linking to them is problematic. The final big problem, which I'd be very interested in people's views on is as I raised in the beginning, is this issue of interactivity. Personally, I'm very dissatisfied about where we are in the moment where, you know, you could e-mail me. And, of course and I do e-mail back. But, it's not exactly, you know, it's not it's not what you aim for. What we want to do really is setting up conversation. The draw back of opening up completely to allow anybody to post comments is that it could go it could quickly go very badly wrong. You have a lot of people out there who talk nonsense. You have a lot of people out there, particularly in business and who want to pump stuff. You know, we have brand. I know that it's I know that these will be clearly demarcated as comments. And, they would be therefore not the Financial Times' views necessarily. But, nevertheless if it's on the FT site and sort of a whole lot of people are saying, "Yeah, this is great stuff. You've got to pile into this stock. Something's happening", I don't know. I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with that. And, I think that might raise problems for the FT. And, it only takes one really bad sort of event to damage our brand, FT.com's brand. And that's an issue. To say nothing of the fact, as I said, that there's a lot of nonsense. Do you want to clog up your your blog with a whole lot of sort of you know, I mean, these discussions I've found can disintegrate quite quickly into people getting miles off the topic. And, you know, talking about what they're gonna have for supper and all that sort of stuff which we don't want. The half-way house, I suspect is to open it up to completely free comments for subscribers. Now, you know there may -- one may question the sanity of subscribing to ft.com. I think it's a very good thing. And, I think we can assume that anybody who is a subscriber to ft.com probably has, you know, is probably going to be fairly sensible. And, that they're gonna want to have a proper debate. Well, I think it's a reasonable I think. you know, it's you're not going to attract complete nutters. And, if you are, at least they're paying. So, that's fine. So and, I think that one of the points that that Kevin raised would be is a very good one about how by opening it up, it would not only be sort of more credible and more discursive, but we would learn a lot about what our readers really want. And, we could adjust our coverage if it was clear that that we were going wildly wrong on stuff. Issues such as corporate pay, for example, I know that a lot of people feel very strongly about. And, some people think we should do much more of it, and some people think we should chill out about it. There's a you know, there's a range there. And of course, you could you could certainly get readers to send in their questions ahead of ahead of interviews, which would be I mean, you know, just transform the way we do journalism as Kevin has discussed. So, there's a lot of stuff there for us to think about. We're only just getting -- we are just beginning. And, you know, events like this help us form our views. So, you don't hold back. Thanks very much. Back to TOC top (will not reset video)

LUNCH! STUART SMITH: So, having having fed you intellectually, thanks to Richard, Suw, Charlie, and Kevin, we're now gonna serve the main course as there's meant to be conversations around your tables. And, at some point, Robert will stand up and summarize a bit of the conversations. So, main courses can come on now.... SUW: …to me. So, I just sit here and the website content comes to me. And, I read it in my ledger instead of me having to remember each one of these has its URL. And, having to go and look at each on individually. You only subscribe to the websites that you the RSS feeds you actually want to see. So, you can subscribe, unsubscribe. You can read it, not read it. Yes. Back to TOC top (will not reset video)

ROBERT PHILLIPS: …the question answer session now. Although, taking a leaf out of Kevin's book, maybe you decide and I report. So if people would like to, you know, for people there's some murmuring of yes and no… …than CEOs in the in the blogosphere in these days, which is good news for all of us at Edelman. And we've also learn that it is okay for PR firms and brands to enter the blogosphere, as long as they do so in a credible and and compelling way. And, we avoid spamaholism at all costs. From Suw I think we learned that this wasn't the technology challenge. That it's not a financial challenge. But, actually it's a cultural challenge. And, quite interesting because I've been asked a couple of times why the French saw more sort of constant bloggers. Why the Iranians are constant bloggers than us Brits. And, I think the BBC probably is at fault there. We also learned from Suw that this is about a conversation. It's not about didacticism or top-down thinking. But, within that conversation that we have to engage both with critics and with evangelists. And, that sometimes the evangelists are the bigger challenges. From Kevin for those of us who cats, we learned a lot about cats. We also learned that that politicians and journalists, as has happened in the States, can be brought down by bloggers. And indeed, political movements can be based on on bloggers. Interestingly for a newsman, we found out that bloggers give us better insight and better comment than a lot of news editors. So, that's sort of popular back home. Kevin, but we'll let them know obviously. And, this whole concept of you decide and I report, which is sort of the flip of of everything that we've been brought up to believing. And, the whole concept of listening is actually key. And, from Charles we found out that if the 40 people in this room could offer an opinion on his brand and could help him out, that would be a great thing. But, not necessarily to send all the e-mails to ft.com because they seem to end up in his in-box -- which would be an interesting way of spamming a journalist. So, we the issues that he raised were really about brand. But also, about the discipline that exists in the blogosphere; about the question of access or "too open" access; about the tone that comes about; about accuracy; about the fact that we have instantaneous output rather than maybe more considered or measured output; this whole point about how you respect bloggers, they respect you. And, what credibility they have. So, those seem to be the salient points brought up by each of the of the four speakers. And, there are some very enlightened and dynamic conversation going on over here on table two. I hope that tables one, three, and four are doing as well. Suw is drawing diagrams. So my standing here is a bit like a cross between a blind date and Rob Harris going on in the in the in the way that we're presenting. But, if anyone's got any questions please feel free to I have a roving mic. So, I will be the Debbie McGee to Stewart's Paul Daniels. And, I'll come around and you can ask questions. And then, hopefully the speakers are all mic-ed up, so they will be able to answer. Does anyone have any questions they would particularly like to ask? Back to TOC top (will not reset video) Maybe if you could just say who you are and we're you're from. KATE BISSAU: Okay, Kate Bissau Johnson & Johnson. I had a question for Charles. How does the Financial Times legal department view your blog? And, the posting or not posting of sensitive comments? CHARLIE: We'd be glad well, I'm glad to say that I haven't heard from them yet. But it is an issue. And when we have when we write articles that we think are, you know, makes us suck our teeth a little bit and make us think we ought to have a lawyer, we you know, we send it to the lawyer. With a blog you have to be you have to sort of, you know, you need a little you have to pause and think before you press send. I mean, you've got to got to be careful. Yeah, it's one of the big risks. ROBERT: Other questions? HUGH DAVIS: Robert? ROBERT: Oops, sorry. I didn't see you Back to TOC top (will not reset video) HUGH DAVIS: Hugh Davis from Microsoft. Suw was talking about money and technology not being a problem to blog. And, I think one of the things that probably challenges all of us, some of us who are more into broadcast world of how do we track and manage and watch and prioritize. I would've thought for the companies, and those who's representing companies, money and technology are still a problem even if you are with Microsoft in terms of how do you decide which blogs to watch? How to rank them? I know Technorati helps. But if you've got any thoughts on that in in terms of how do we sift out, Guillaume was saying there were 3.3 million bloggers in France already. How do we sift out the ones to watch? SUW: There are services that claim to do this for you. But, personally I think that you can't get past the benefit of actually just putting the work in yourself. And, actually sitting down and reading the blogs, and trying to get a feel for each individual blogger and…who's writing about you the most? And, who's being the most incisive? Who has the best insights? The best points of view… And, I think that's a very difficult task to automate. It's a very difficult task to ignore. And, to some extent, you just kind of have to swallow the effort. And sit down and do it. There are a lot of blogs out there. There are search engines specifically that search blogs. So, Technorati being one. Ice Rocket being another. Google has got onto the blog search band wagon as a blog search meter which provides variable results. And, there are various other different aggregators and directories of blogs that you can use to find people who are talking about you. But, in general, you tend to find that there are specific communities that talk about specific types of issues. So, if you're a tech community, then the number of tech blogs is considerably less than the millions. And, the number of tech blogs that's being updated on a regular basis are ever fewer. So, you can cut it down to manageable numbers. And, you know, it's worth the effort of reading them yourself because not only do you then find out what is being said about you, and who these people are, but you also start to become much more familiar with the blogging culture. And, you start to feel comfortable in that arena, which is something that you are going to need to feel if you're gonna take blogs on and actually start blogging yourself. ROBERT PHILLIPS: Any questions? Oops, there sorry. TABITHA DEAN: Sorry. Thank you. ROBERT PHILLIPS: Sorry. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) TABITHA: Hello, I'm Tabitha Dean and I'm from COI Communications. One of the projects that I've been working on over the past few years is child protection on the internet. Now, a lot of children are put in danger in this country through chat-rooms. And, as far as I understand, there isn't a great deal of legislation or regulation around these blogs. So, how do we protect children from pedophiles in this instance through blogging? SUW: I think that's basically down to responsible parenting. The parents need to take responsibility for what their children are doing on-line. There are various filters that you can use to help filter out undesirable sites from the internet. But, at the end of the day, you know, this this really is down to understanding your child, understanding the sort of things that your child is doing. And, being aware of the dangers. I think many adults ignore the internet because they don't understand it. And, because of that they can't then give their children good advice. And, their children have to learn that the internet is a reflection of the wider world. It's neither more dangerous, nor more safe than the wider world. And, the way to remain safe is to be educated and to understand what the potential hazards are. And, the only way to do that, as far as I'm concerned, is through education. I don't believe that there is any viable way to regulate the internet, particularly there's no viable way to regulate blogs. And, we shouldn't be trying to do that. We should be trying to ensure that our children understand what's happening. That they understand their responsibilities. And, that that their parents understand how to look after their children on-line. KEVIN: And, just to just to chime in, in true blogging fashion, there was actually a discussion about this last week. Jeff Jarvis, who writes the influential blog, Buzz Machine discussed about kind of the thought process that went into thinking about he has an 11-year-old. And, allowing them kind of discussing about what was right to post on that his 11-year-old's blog. And, he just posted it last week. So, if you go to buzzmachine.com, there was actually quite a big discussion on-line about this last week, and about children on the internet. You know, when should children start blogging. What should they be and really, you know, I can only echo Suw's comments. I mean, it's all about parental engagement. I mean, not having your computer it's the same typical thing. Not having your computer in your child's room. Having it in a public place in the house so that, you know, you know about the communications that the child's engaging with. So, that's, you know, that all of the things that ha you know, there's nothing inherent in blogging that's any different than chat-rooms, or any other technology that's come before it. And, really you know, in some in some ways, it's like a lot of things. Your children are probably more proficient at the technology than you are. So, trying to block them is probably kind of a fruitless task. So, really it's just about that parental involvement. And, not using the computer as a babysitter. But -- my two pence. HUGH DAVIS: Can I just plug two things though? One, is there is a major campaign running at the moment called Get Safe Online, which has a school's subsidiary to it. So, if you go to GetSafeOnline.org something to do with us. But, not everything to do with us. And, the other one is within a few weeks there will be, hopefully, a big announcement on this whole issue of child safety and protection with technology companies working with the home office and the police authorities to provide a safety net for protection on the net. So, watch that space. ROBERT: I think that was a Brown plug. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) ROBERT PHILLIPS: A question that that we were debating over on our side was really whether for those of us who are involved in in consumer brands, as Jackie and myself, and many of you are is whether brands really should enter the blogosphere. I mean, we heard Richard's point that it's okay to do so in a credible way. Part of me actually perversely says that they should steer well clear. And, it's okay for CEOs or your marketing directors to blog in a personal capacity. But, maybe not try and involve their brand in any way, shape, or form. But, to be there in order to answer questions and correct information. I don't know if either of you guys Kevin, you want to — KEVIN: Well, I mean, in our discussions at the BBC, it's not a question as to whether our brand might stand in the blogosphere. It already exists there. People are talking about our content. You know, a number of us keep track about blogging, regularly discuss the BBC. So, it really isn't a question as to whether our brand should enter the blogosphere. It's already there. And, if we don't engage authentically, as Suw's asking us to do it's to our detriment. So, it's a lot of this issue of control. You really don't have that much control over whether your brand is in the blogosphere. It's already there. SUW: I think I'd to add as well that a brand cannot blog because a brand is not a person. People blog. People representing your brand, representing your company, they can blog. But to talk about a brand as if it's a person is just, to me, that's kind of missing the point of the blogosphere. You know, the point about CEOs, whether CEOs should blog, the people who should be blogging in your company are the people who have the most passion. The people who have something to say. The people who feel comfortable in the written medium because not everybody enjoys writing. And, to be a blogger you really have to enjoy writing. Otherwise, you know, it's going to be painful. You're going to turn your life into a living hell if you're blogging on a daily basis and you hate writing. So, from that point of view, it it's not really about the brand. It's really about what do your employees have to say that is interesting to a wider audience. And, I think one of the things that shouldn't forget is how interesting trivia can be to other people. There is -- someone actually mentioned it earlier -- here's a a blog called Tin Basher, which is written by a guy called -- I think his name's Paul -- from Butler Sheet Metal. And, just you would not imagine that a sheet metal blog could in any way, shape, or form be even remotely interesting. And, sure enough, when he started it, he started it as a news blog. And, rapidly became very bored with conveying sheet metal industry news because frankly, it's not interesting. And then, he started to think, "You know, okay, not going to do this." Nearly gave the blog up. But, started being much more personal about it. Started actually talking about what he was doing. What the company was doing. Just quirky little things. And, suddenly, his blog became incredibly popular. And, because of that he had requests from Gardiners' World. You know, we've seen these planters on your blog. Can we have some for one of our programs. You know, magazines wanting to do photo shoots. All sorts of opportunities that came up not because he was writing about planters and sheet metal, but because he was writing as him. As a person with passion and with interest. And, with something to say. So, forget about brands blogging and think about people. KEVIN: And also, just to build on what Suw's saying about identifying people with passion in your organization, I couldn't agree more. And actually, I routinely tell my bosses, do not get Jeremy Paxman to blog unless he wants to. If he wants to blog, by all means give him a blog. But, don't force him to blog because it will be atrocious. So but the other thing about it is, it's not just passion too. It's it's also about people in your organization who are social, who want to engage I what some of colleagues talk about the unwatched masses. If they want to engage in the public. If they truly are social. If they like to have that level of engagement, they'll make brilliant bloggers. I mean, I kinda -- people all in the BBC say, "Well, are bloggers journalists?" They said, "Well, not all bloggers are journalists and not all journalists are bloggers." And, same thing can be said for any business. SUW: I was gonna say, I think there was something I wanted to respond to Charles about the FT blog which was the question about -- the issue around comments. And 'cause I think one of the most interesting things about blogs is opening up a dialogue and having comments, and having people able to tell you what they think. And, it's a big problem for newspapers. And, the issue actually -- it's not around people its not around people going off topic. It's not around the comments running away in some bizarre direction. The only issue that newspapers really need to worry about is libel because if someone posts something libelous in the comments and you're hosting that, you know, you're basically aware of it. You're basically liable to deal with that on a legal basis. And I think The Guardian has done very well in having blogs that are not only well written, but also have comments. But, what they do is shut the comments down very rapidly. And, there's, you know, moderation of comments and close the comments rapidly I think is a good middle ground to take for organizations who have to think about issues like libel, and have to take it very, very seriously because a libel case is a cost that you really don't want to have to incur. But, the negative cost of not having comments open is equally something you don't want to have to incur. So, it's about finding balance rather than finding some kind of dream solution. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) ROBERT PHILLIPS: There's a question I think somebody had over there. But, just following off from that, one of the questions that I was asked and will throw it open to to the panelists is: How do institutions, governments, you know, broadcasters, major firms deal with employee bloggers? And, what issues does that raise because — SUW: It depends what you mean by employee bloggers. KEVIN: Do you mean bloggers in blogging for the organization? Or, blogging for themselves? ROBERT: Blogging from within that organization for themselves effectively. But, passing comments on the organization of which they work. SUW: So, official bloggers. ROBERT: No, unofficial bloggers. SUW: Unofficial bloggers. ROBERT: Unofficial bloggers. KEVIN: We've actually been having a discussion all summer and into the autumn about this. And, there's now an official policy. And, you know, without going too much into the pained internal dynamics about it, there's a real tension because we've got journalists and we've got people who create programs and other things. And, journalists are very nervous about you know I tell people who are creative in the organization, when I am outside the BBC, I'm almost never off clock. And, you know, I'm gonna be launching a personal pod-cast about new media, just to talk about new media. And, we're playing down -- my friends and I are playing down -- our association with the BBC. Anybody can Google and find out I work for the Bs It's not a big deal. But, it's a real difficult thing for us to do. And we have laid out some guidelines just to make sure that we don't have people -- I mean, there was in our own design team someone writing for a while. On the news website design team, writing about the gossip in the news website newsroom, which actually caused quite a problem. And yet, people who you know, I can of describe myself: "I'm not a blogger, but I play one on TV." So, I come to this a little bit late. And so, I may not have the pure blogger ethos about this. But there are definitely pitfalls. And I'd like to say that there's an easy answer to it. Most of it is just, you know, people have to have their own lives. But, as soon as it reflects back on our organization and the credibility and starts to deal with that, it's a thorny, thorny mess. CHARLES: And I would just add that the internet doesn't take away -- the blogosphere isn't a parallel universe where you're allowed just to express yourself completely freely. If you're an employee of a company, you're an employee of a company. And, although as a news organization obviously we rely on people talking out of turn. And, we like people to talk to us honestly and privately. But, we also recognize that is a risky thing for a lot of people to do. And, most companies, if you think, you know, commercially, are quite right. That if their staff just mouth off about commercially sensitive stuff, that's not acceptable. We know that, which is why we're very careful in the way that we talk to our sources about this. But there's no reason why the blogosphere should be somehow different. KEVIN: Now, we we do have internal blogs, which, you know, I don't blog right now outside the firewall. But, I do blog inside the firewall. And, I throw some grenades at people just 'cause I think it's useful. They're diplomatic grenades. But you know, but there are things I wouldn't say in an open forum, but I feel are important for an organization to know. So, I think there's actually a really good use of blogging internally. And, you know, you do have to be careful about what gets leaked out. Fine, but I think there is a huge area for blogs internally. And, just you know, let people 'cause I mean, they're gonna say it over the water cooler anyway. SUW: I think with employees who are blogging about your company in an unofficial capacity there have been a number of cases. I'd like to refer to the case of Joe Gordon, who was an employee at Watertones in Scotland. And, I think it was the Edinburgh branch. And, he blogged about his job and his dislike for his sandal-wearing boss. And, he actually referred to Waterstones as Bastardstones. And, I think that's possibly ill advised in terms of, if you actively slag off your company and your work colleagues, then you have to expect that to be uncovered and for there to be some kind of pushback. But, equally -- Waterstone's reaction was to fire him. Now, I think the reaction of a business to an employee blog has to be proportionate. If your employee breaches some kind of yeah, if it's an investment bank and they breach privacy or compliance, if they're giving away trade secrets, if they're giving away sensitive information, then that's one thing. I mean, that's basically gross negligence. If an employee is disgruntled with your company and saying, "You know, I hate my boss. He's a complete git ," then what you should be doing is not firing that employee, but taking that employee to one side and say, "Look, we've read your blog. We understand that you're unhappy. What's the problem? We would appreciate it if you actually don't slag us off in public. But, equally we also want to find out what the issue is. And we want to solve the problem." So, it's really all about, you know, trying to be sensible. Dealing with everything on a case-by-case basis. And, recognizing that for every employee who has an issue and blogs negatively about your company, you may actually in the future have a happy employee who could blog very positively about your company. So, it's really about, okay, you know, take the people who are unhappy and turn them into people who are really keen to blog about what you're doing. Get them engaged. You know, get make them enjoy their job. I mean, I say "make." I don't mean force them at gun point. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) ADAM LAYDON: Adam Laydon, Real Business. I'm thinking about the audience at this here today. [I'd like to] continue this idea about stories getting out. I don't think it's just unhappy employees. I think it's also particularly, for example, in the developer community, those kind of people can get into conversations where they accidentally leak information that's actually of real value to competitors. And, a real value to journalists. And, I'm amazed that that the PR community and the whole control of information isn't more concerned about the development community blogging sites. So, that that was one thought. I'm gonna be greedy and ask -- that was more of a thought -- but the question I wanted to know is: Is anyone gonna make money out of blogging? SUW: Well, people people are already making money out of blogging. ADAM: Well, I'd like to hear I'd like to hear how, please. 'Cause all I can see is a huge you know, huge demand on journalists' time. ROBERT: Does anyone have an answer to the money making? SUW: Oh yes. Well, basically there are a number of different issues around making money from blogging. There are a small number of bloggers who are making money specifically from their blog. I would refer you to Trionaughts, which is a blog about Trio phones. It's done by a guy called Andrew Carlton. And, I know that he, well, I don't know exactly how much money he's making from his blog. But, I do know it's enough to allow him to buy a new car. So, yes. People are genuinely making money out of blogging. They are fairly few and far between. But, it can happen. If you have a niche blog about a consumer product that is very popular, then you have every possibility of making money directly from your blog. From advertising, from affiliate sales, from sponsorship. What's more important than that though, and what's much more widespread is making money because of your blog, which is what I do. I don't have advertising on any of my blogs. But, I get virtually all of my clients and all of my work because of my blog. If I didn't blog, I wouldn't have any kind of presence. And, as a a well, I mean, it would make it very difficult for me to be a blog and, you know, social software consultant if I didn't blog. But, my entire reputation is based on my blog. And, there are a lot of people in a lot of different areas who are increasing their profile through their blog. They're getting invited to conferences. They're finding new audiences, finding new clients. And, I think that's actually a far more significant phenomena of you know, making money because of your blog. ROBERT: Guillaume. you had a question ? Back to TOC top (will not reset video) GUILLAUME DU GARDIER: Yes. Excuse me. I'm Guillaume du Gardier, Director of Online Communication at Edelman Paris. I'm the first French PR blogger. That's why I would like to add something on this topic, which is that we have in France one of the first examples of people earning money directly, I think, through their blog. And, I follow Suw on what she she said just prior to that of course. Andrew Carlton from Trionaughts has been generating something like $8,000 amounts thanks to his blog just with advertising. This is the number. And, in France we have a guy who is called Patrice Gassart , who has been selling T-shirts on the internet thanks to traditional e-business websites. And, he decided he wants to add a blog to his websites. And, when he did that, last year in April, it was just netting something like 3 K Euro amounts. Now, he's doing a revenue of 50K Euro amounts because of the traffic generated by his blog first of all. And also, because he has been developing a community of clients that are linking to him there. And, that are helping him developing the products because he's asking directly to these clients what kind of products do you want us to do for you? And, the clients are competing. The clients are making the design. And, the clients are voting. And, they are winning money if their T-shirts has been elected. And then, the T-shirt is produced. So, it has been completely changing the business model. The clients are the developers. The clients are still the clients. But also, this community. He was supposed to be alone on-line. And, what he's often saying is that he has the feeling that he's been able to create an on-line community of clients as if he was living this little village as with a shop in the streets. He did the same thing but on-line. And, this is the m main strength of this model, which is the link, the connection between the people that are building this community of people around him. And, this was really the first success in France of someone having directly living, thanks to a blog because of the traffic. And, revenue generated. ROBERT: Just take a couple more questions. And then, I think we'll wrap up. And, just to that point, Guillaume: I think it's a shame Richard Edelman had to leave to catch a flight back to the States. But, obviously soon we'll be seeing Edelman T-shirts available at blog sites. And a whole new revenue stream for the company. Back to TOC top (will not reset video) HUGH DAVIS: I'll try not to mention the name again, but just given what you're saying, I think it's really important because --it'd be interesting to see how Suw and the others have see you know, think about this -- But, if you look at the way that Google's business model is evolving and our company made some major advancements last week about changing our business model. And, I can't believe that there won't be, within the next two or three years, a very rapid alignment between these big company business models around advertising and the people who are driving the communities, the bloggers. And, that they'll be so many more opportunities for people to to build business models around these relationships and these conversations. KEVIN: Well, I mean, if I can just broaden this out slightly from blogging. I mean, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates came to talk to the BBC a few weeks ago about web 2.0 which is this concept of, you know, the next evolution of the of the internet. And, really honestly, it's about web 1.0. And, that web the point that he makes is that people that piled onto the internet in the mid-90s kind of didn't understand the culture. And, that it was a participatory community-based culture. They thought it was a publishing culture, a commercial culture. And, that this is really an interactive two-way medium. And, it was like I was saying at the end that you, the rest of the audience kind of caught up with us net-heads. And, that you know, they expect to participate. They expect a relationship to develop. And, I think that's kind of what Suw and I are have been saying is that really this is about relationships. And, the internet is just a force multiplier, if you will. That, instead of having a mass relationship, where there's a mass medium or mass PR the internet actually, I mean, I'll just my own examples: I mean, you know, the people who are stopped writing into the BBC's election blog and started writing to Kevin is a different relationship. And, the BBC stops being the British Broadcasting Corporation and becomes something a bit more accessible to our audience. And, I think that's something that's not specific to a media company or myself specifically. And, I think that really it's, you know, I remember in a conversation Suw and I had over coffee about this is really an older model. It's it's about you know, kind of the corner shop owner who had a relationship with his with his customers. And, what blogs do and and why Suw is encouraging you to sort of stop thinking about brands and start thinking about relationships is that this is about breaking down those sort of barriers that have grown up between us in a mass society. And, really about re-establishing those customer-consumer community relationships. And, so that that, I think, is probably what you're hitting on. SUW: I'd like to add to that. When the internet started, it started as a community of universities and researchers exchanging information. And then, when browsers started and the world wide web came to be, companies started to think, "Okay, you know, we can we can monetize this," to use a completely vile word. You know, "We can we can live here. We can do stuff on-line." And, they turned the internet into this massive shopping mall. And, what we're seeing now is a return to not just the personal relationships that shopkeepers had 100 years ago. We're returning to the writs of the internet as exchanges of information. And, much more personal relationships between internet users. And, I think that there are companies who are looking at blogging and thinking, you know, "How can we monetize this? How can we turn this back into our shopping mall front that we did with the internet originally?" And, I think that's going to fail, because in general, people don't want their personal conversations -- which is what blogging and social networking is -- they don't want those personal relationships interrupted by marketing and sales. So, I'm certainly interested to see how this pans out. Interested to see how big business reacts and relates to bloggers. But, I think they'll be a lot more resistance to anything which is overt. Anything which is trying to exploit blogging and social media. And I think, you know, companies are going to have to be very, very careful that what they do provides benefits back to the community because the community is fed up with being taken for granted. ROBERT: I think we've got time for one last question. Or, any last comment or thought. Anyone to share anything? Charles, you've been quiet the past couple - you'll pass on that? In which case, just remains for me to thank our three panelists. Our 6AM blogger, Richard, Edelman, now departed. And as Richard wrote in his non-didactic passing of notes to me of things I should say at the end, it's about conversation, not control. So let's remain, for those of us that are still here feel free to engage in conversation. Round of applause. Thank you very much, guys for taking part. Back to TOC top (will not reset video)