Media Transparent » blogging

Slideshow: Posterous is the new blog

Pat Kitano — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:35:28 +0000

Originally published Sept. 29. 2009:

I originally intended this slideshow for local business people who wanted a blog for marketing purposes, but didn’t have the inclination to start a blog due to writing and time commitments. After posting the slideshow, I received feedback that Posterous was a great method to create new “blogs” on a variety of topics and interests that were parallel to the principal blog. One mentioned how fast Posterous blogs were indexed by Google.

How to create a blog without “writing” one

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

Lifestreaming, blogging and microblogging – how they fit together

The End of Long Comments

Pat Kitano — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:08:55 +0000

Two years ago, online conversation used to reside on blogs and their commentators. The objective was to make and validate points of discussion. Now, soundbite communication – SMS, micro-blogging, “like” – distills communication down to making the point.

The speed of online communication is accelerating because, in simplest possible terms, there are now more people online to communicate with. The development of the social network has become an objective unto itself, and the most efficient way to grow the network is to have shorter but just as impactful conversations. The analogy is the Hollywood producer in the 80’s who would limit each phone call to 1 minute, if not 15 seconds in order to optimize productivity without chitchat. Dry, but effective.

Online conversations are like watching chat boxes:

(from today’s Friendfeed)

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The evolution towards small talk continues with unveiling of the Facebook Connect Comment Box:

(screenshot from Mashable article on Comment Box)

Now conversations can devolve into salutations, affirmations and “Awesome”.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like these micro-communication features because frankly, I was never garrulous to begin with. I just ignore the chaff.

Incorporate “Breaking News” into Websites and Make Them Compelling Reads

Pat Kitano — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:45:37 +0000

I have been discussing over the past half year a new paradigm for capturing committed loyal readership to websites using “Breaking News”. Consumers contemplating any major financial transaction based activity – real estate, securities, cars, even retail – need continual flow of real time news to evaluate when to pull the trigger on the transaction. They need a ticker tape to make intelligent decisions.

It’s natural for any company providing transaction based services to add relevant news feeds to serve their customers. Better yet, leverage the social media and get employees and partners of the company to contribute to breaking news.

Financial services

Financial services giant Fidelity just turned on their news feeds (h/t to Paul Kedrosky ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.

Financial services giant ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahooggggggggggggggggg Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

Real estate

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision. Homescopes is the first real estate site to “broadcast” local breaking news for the San Francisco Bay Area housing markets. I discuss Homescopes in detail at sister site Transparent Real Estate.

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision

Enterprises

Our company, Domus Consulting Group, is developing news feed systems (we call it the Social Broadcasting System ) for enterprises (it’s free!). We coach employees in using the System to distribute breaking news about their company and industry via the social media. We do this via our web conference based Social Media Marketing Workshops. You can find more information about our workshops from various participants’ blog posts, and see the Twitter based discussions here. You can register here or contact me.

Three Social Media Functions: Source, Distribute and Discuss

Pat Kitano — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:15:58 +0000

Anybody writing a blog, participating on Twitter, upload to YouTube or using one of the thousands of social media applications can divide their activity into three categories:

	Content Sources	Content Distributors	Social Butterflies
What they do	Bloggers and journalists who source, analyze or interpret new information, ideas, data or breaking news.	Bloggers and social media hubs who broadcast and share news and information with their network	Social media aficionados who seem to spend all their waking time Twittering, commenting and talking.
Applications used	Usually have prominent blogs and are cited on Techmeme and HuffPost, etc. Use Twitter for broadcasting (like mass media outlets, ie CNN) Publish on a variety of platforms, ie Scoble on Friendfeed and Qik	Share articles on Google Reader, social news sites like Digg and SocialMedian, and bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo. Retweet news with Twitter. Stumble articles as an act of generosity to the blog writer	Ubiquitous presence applications like Facebook and Friendfeed On every social networking app. Uses Twitter more for chat than content distribution. Followcost.com determines whether too loquacious for following.
Role	Thought leader, blogging CEO, pundit	Knowledge hub, trend watcher, analyst, karma gatherer	Social hub, influencer, party animal

The Portability of Content

Pat Kitano — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:57:22 +0000

Wired magazine’s article last month Twitter, Flickr, Facebook makes Blogs look so 2004 posits the “death of blogging”.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The mainstream media now gets this. Once the principal creator of “content”, they are firing their journalists/reporters, and moving into news and data distribution. They realize they can still capture eyeballs by republishing, aggregating and delivering content and data, created in-house or user-generated. It’s not a lucrative as before, when MSM controlled the content and viewership, and charged SuperBowl rates, but then the wave of user-generated content forced their hands.

At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve postulated how blogging is changing in real estate because the objective of a real estate blog – lead generation for the real estate professional – is inconsistent with the act of writing a blog. The average real estate agent just wants to get a blog up quickly while doing as little work as possible. Now, creating exhaustive content isn’t the methodology, it’s distributing the real estate data and information that’s already out there quickly to their constituency. It makes the act of “blogging” much easier when you don’t have to write original and compelling content, something that is hard to do on a real estate blog. (Most real estate blogs discuss hyperlocal issues, which is essentially irrelevant to any reader who lives outside that real estate bloggers’ domain).

Is Blogging Dead?

Nine tips for real estate bloggers on the “new blog writing”

The Social Media System

Pat Kitano — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:43:31 +0000

We’ve just updated our Domus Consulting Group site to clarify one of our initiatives we introduced at BlogWorld:

Domus Consulting Group is the leader in the development of a new social media platform we simply call the “Social Media System“. This system enables companies, organizations and groups to create powerful effective social networks WITHOUT REQUIRING THEIR PARTICIPANTS TO BLOG. Using various popular applications like Twitter and Friendfeed, and bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, our Social Media System facilitates real time news wires. We developed the System because blogging can be challenging, but participating in the various social media is easy and fun.

For example, the System can be easily incorporated into a typical real estate brokerage site. Real estate agents broadcast market news through Twitter and other micro-blogging applications. The effect is that of a local news wire reporting updated Twitter feeds by a corps of agents. One agent may Twitter “this San Francisco 3BR condo just went for $200k over asking… in this market? Click here – http://tinyurllink.com“. Readers will click and subscribe to real time news offered by that agent because it keeps them up to date on the markets they are interested in. More importantly, the Twittering agent develops a following and builds a lead network that will benefit from his/her insights into the market. You can see more details of the System at our slide presentation Website 2.0 – Creating the Conversational Web.

The Big Reader Divide between Mass Media and Social Media

Pat Kitano — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:18:57 +0000

We in the social media implicitly understand that the mainstream media readership are still getting their feet wet when it comes to finding, reading and subscribing to blogs (unless they look like MSM like Huffington Post, or are blogs residing within MSM like the NYT).

I discovered a contrary example in a Washington Post article – Making Connections: Web 2.0 Creates New Ways for Agents, Home Shoppers to Find Each Other. Such an article (with extensive quotes from Web 2.0 luminaries and bloggers) would resonate prolifically within any online real estate forum, or real estate oriented social network like Active Rain, but 10 days after the article published, I submitted the sole comment:

I’m postulating that bloggers either generally don’t monitor the mass media or don’t find it worthwhile to establish conversations within their space. Frankly, the Washington Post and other publishers offer a conduit between their consumer readership and the real estate bloggers, so it behooves the bloggers to participate within their sphere. The mass media is still not linked into the blogosphere.