BlogOn 2005: The Business of Social Media

The big themes running through the conference have centered on blogs as community-builders and the rise of an empowered consumer searching for authentic interactions with brands. And this interaction with brands will increasingly happen through conversations with other consumers in networks of shared interest. All this against the backdrop of declining effectivness of traditional advertising and marketing.

This perspective has fueled an explosion of innovative products featured at the conference. Seth Godin has launched one such product. His new venture that empowers bloggers to become "lensmasters," filtering online content and helping consumers pinpoint information. On the backend, Squidoo will broker a revenu split between the blogger, the platform and various non-profit charities, all based on contextual advertising. Functionally speaking, the platform seems like Yahoo! 360 or Google's personal homepages, but the real innovation of Squidoo is a adjudication of credibility (and ranking in search results, internal publicity) across multiple lensmasters.

An interesting panel featured Jeff Jarvis, Peter Friedman and Bill Schreiner.  Jarvis explained Web 2.0 as people and trust - the two key variables that differentiate the emerging social media landscape. Schreiner echoed these observations and expanded on some of the trends that define the business of social media: 1) Consumers are in control; 2) Consumer tagging allows communities to organically form, overlap, emerge and disperse; 3) "People surfing" - the Internet is being experience through filters, through people, not official branded content; and 4) The under-30 demographic has a fundamentally different view of privacy online.

How should business approach Web 2.0? Listen to communities of interest, find influentials or connectors, and enable them, according to Friedman.