The blog was an unqualified success. By posting examples of how a good sign could impact business, Arnold had inspired a wave of sign-buying in the town. Businesses were now competing to see who could have the best sign. Even the new developments along the interstate were getting in on the act. A falafel shop had placed an order for a big stand-alone sign for the front of the store. Zylon had appreciated the tactful way Arnold had defended the company in the “u suck” incident. Zylon was a good corporate citizen as far as Arnold was concerned, and he was glad to say so. It had been a learning experience all around. Until the nasty comments on the blog, the leadership at Zylon hadn’t been aware of the poor relationship the company had with the community, and the CEO vowed to address it. He had started his own blog to explain the Zylon side of the story and to reach out to the town. Zylon had even started an internal blog to improve efficiency and to make employees feel like valued partners. “I understand the web. I even understand blogs,” Arnold explained proudly to June, whose hair was now a pale shade of peach. “Don’t rest on your laurels yet,” June said with a smile. “We’re just getting started.”

Part 4 of “Blog,” a short story by Joe Flood Much of this article has focused on what blogging is and can be. I would be remiss in not telling you where I, and many in the industry, believe blogging is going. After all, it won’t remain stagnant as new companies engage in the blogosphere, new communities begin to form, and new methods of pushing the envelope emerge, a considerable amount of change, tension, and growth will ensue.

It’s been said that the measure of a man is how quickly he accepts change. I believe the same is true for blogging. Blogging started out as a way for people to communicate; to update each other on important, relevant issues; and to establish relationships. From the earliest days of blogging, the purity of relationships was valued above everything else. Similarly, most bloggers believe that they are agents of change, helping the world come to appreciate blogging.

However, these agents of change don’t realize that by involving more people, the very thing they love will change. As change is inevitable, this article is dedicated to providing some insight and best guesses into what those changes will be and how they will play out. I can’t render judgment on whether certain approaches are good or bad. Ultimately, it requires risk-takers and people ready to push the envelope for us all to see what blogging can and will become. While hundreds of small and large changes to blogging are certain to occur during the years, I’ll touch on three specific trends as this article nears its close:

• The shifting focus from accuracy and relationships to communication and relationships

• The growing trend of businesses wanting to build “real” relationships with customers

• The principles of “awareness publishing” and how companies can relate one-to-one with customers on a global scale

TRENDS FOR THE FUTURE

Authenticity, relationship, and honesty you’ll remember these three themes since they’ve been included as a consistent part of this article. Bloggers, who are a representation of your audience, value these themes above all else, primarily because bloggers value relationships above everything else, and they rightly believe that any relationship that isn’t authentic and honest probably isn’t worth having.

This focus on realness and authentic relationships is one of the reasons blogging grew so quickly. As people tired of the mainstream media’s perspective, they could get an authentic report on events, people who wanted real financial advice without any spin could get a real opinion, and voyeuristic people who wanted to peer into someone else’s life could do just that all by using blogs. In the beginning of blogging, nearly everything was real. As your company enters into blogging, you must be aware of how important these values are to your audience, and as these values shift slightly, you need to be aware that peoples’ reactions will change. Some companies that haven’t been aware of these values have tried a number of things to appeal to blog readers, ultimately ending in fairly disastrous “lessons learned.”

First, character blogs were written by novelists trying to create “real” people online. One of the largest of these was “Plain Layne,” a sexually active, deeply troubled young woman. She had a following of tens of thousands of people all around the world that is, until it became known that every story, every picture, and every painful memory that readers had followed and offered help with were fakes. Next came companies who started “blogs” that were entirely and completely fake. Not only was no real person behind them, but their sole purpose was to get people to believe in an ad campaign. McDonald’s, for example, engaged in this type of activity with a blog about a French fry that looked like Abraham Lincoln and was sold on eBay (see www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/ weblog/comments/2450/).

And, as always happens in our capitalist society, the change from a relationship-driven community to one that still valued relationships but also wanted to make money slowly crept in. First it was ads on individual pages; then companies paid bloggers to blog about them; then companies sponsored entire blogs. Each of these changes shocked the blogging world but also brought about a more natural balance. Yes, sometimes bloggers will tell stories. And, yes, some bloggers want to make money. Overall, most bloggers eventually accepted these facts, as long as bloggers and companies disclosed that this is what they were doing. The word disclosure became so important that not disclosing whether you were receiving corporate money or not disclosing a relationship with companies you were blogging about was a shot against your authenticity and your character.

All of these trends will continue to collide in the future. Companies will want to pour money into blogging. Bloggers will want to make money off of blogging. Fake blogs, character blogs, and inauthentic blogs will appear. But these will not prosper unless the writer behind them is authentic. Authenticity will continue to drive serious blogging for many years to come, which is a good thing for your business, because it allows you to relate to your customers directly something that smart businesses crave. I believe that several minor trends will collide with interesting results in the future:

• Accuracy versus timeliness

• Relationships versus readers

• Purity versus income

In the past, reporting things in an accurate fashion was highly prized by bloggers who reported events. They knew that even if it took an extra half hour to do so, verifying the facts was an important part of what they were doing. In many ways, they were acting as micro-journalists or as citizen journalists. However, some individuals and groups have realized that others out there are doing similar things on blogs; as a result, some bloggers have become more like mass media in general in that they not only strive to publish something before the mainstream media (which is surprisingly easy to do), but also to publish it before other bloggers. This is sometimes at the expense of accuracy. I see this trend continuing for some time, at least until bloggers decide to take a stand for the truth instead of blogging for attention.

The pressure on increasingly popular bloggers is immense. Most bloggers start out with just friends and acquaintances reading their new blogs. Then readers who don’t know them find their blogs, and a community of hundreds or even thousands of readers can develop. When a blogger has that kind of reader base, what follows is pressure to write about certain topics in certain ways and to do all of this on a very frequent basis. The challenge for bloggers who enter this stage is to continue to value relationships ahead of readers. However, the lure of readers, fame, and fortune can be strong, and quite a few bloggers have either given up or even stabbed their friends in the back seeking out that fame or fortune. I expect this type of behavior to continue. Like it or not, blogging fame can distort your view of reality to the point where the reason you started blogging in the first place becomes less important than the things you can get by blogging. On a similar vein, I believe the purity of blogging will start to be called into question, specifically by those who started blogging the earliest. Many of these early, and very vocal, bloggers will see the increasing presence of media and corporations in the world of blogging as a bad thing. This is ironic, considering they once claimed it would become vital to those same corporations. However, many newer bloggers will eschew this purity in favor of income, reputation, and visibility. Not that they will necessarily be any less interested in authenticity, honesty, and other themes, but they will be looking for something that gives them benefits and not benefits just to the entire blogosphere. Overall, expect the blogosphere and bloggers in general to become more professional, more money and visibility focused, and, in spite of that, to continue to resist change. (Sounds very much like the open-source movement!)

ACCURACY VS. TIMELINESS

One of the hallmarks of blogging is its accuracy not necessarily in the traditional mainstream media type of accuracy, but accuracy as to what the blogger is experiencing. When bloggers write reports, they do so largely from an experiential and emotional point of view. They state their opinions, show off other opinions, link to a variety of sites, and somehow come together with writing that is real, honest, and accurate at least to the blogger who wrote the post. This focus on accuracy is one of the reasons that bloggers and blog readers don’t enjoy hearing what they call “marketing speak,” which is effectively the canned, hyped-up type of talk that goes into press releases and that emphasizes the “new” and “innovative” and “world-changing” nature of some new product a company is touting. Bloggers, and to a growing extent the general public, would rather hear why your company is doing something, why it excites you, and what you believe it will do for customers.

Blogging is also an incredibly time-sensitive activity. In the mainstream press world, it’s a big deal if you are behind on a story by a few hours (in TV), or a day (in newspaper), or a week (in a magazine). In blogging, you lose the advantage if you’re off by minutes. For bloggers whose traffic, reputation, and style is built on their ability to find news first, minutes matter. As a result, I’ve seen occasions in which these two paradigms collide: nobody can be the fastest and the most accurate one or the other needs to be the priority. As you begin to explore blogging further, you will undoubtedly encounter this phenomenon and you’ll likely wrestle with the desire to write something first instead of writing it right.

THE VALUE OF FAST

Generally speaking, the blogger who finds and posts something first gets recognized as such by receiving the most incoming links on the subject. People look at the original post more than any other, primarily because that’s assumed to be the one that has the most information. The value of getting information out quickly is a double-edged sword, though, because it’s difficult to include every perspective, to verify information, and to form a full opinion if you have only seconds or minutes in which to write the post. These posts will often be framed in a “I just came across this . . .” or “This is just a rumor at this point . . .” style of post. That said, unlike mainstream media, blogs can be edited live, so many bloggers begin adding context, accuracy, opinion, other perspectives, and such well after their original post appeared. Nevertheless, this value on fast over right does play havoc with the first readers to a post who don’t necessarily get all the accurate information on the story.

Gawker Media (www.gawker.com ) is an interesting blog network, in that it is highly focused on the “fast” side of blogging: lots of rumors, lots of unconfirmed stories, and lots of sensationalism appear on this blog. Gawker is based on the concept of fast reporting, possibly with more in-depth reporting being provided later (if there’s anything new of interest). In many ways, it’s similar to a tabloid, and we all know how much tabloids improve the value of the mainstream press. As you begin blogging, you will often encounter the choice of whether to report everything or to report something. Whichever choice you make, be aware that you are making a choice, and that you are (in many ways) setting a precedent; so make sure it’s the precedent you want to set. Ultimately, the choice of valuing fast or right needs to be considered as you’re developing your blogging strategy and blogger relations strategies. True niche blogs have the ability to be first and foremost, since breaking stories will often be sent their way before being offered to the mainstream media.