 And I'm going to talk about five major themes for today. The first one is how this all became. Now for those of you that have been blogging for some time, you might find this topic very basic. But let's just level set it for those who are watching here and those watching on the live stream, can just understand a little bit of the historical perspective. Two, I'm going to show you how some of this power is shifting to those who participate and about trust data. And the third one is adoption around the globe. And we'll spend a little bit of time looking at the Arabic blogosphere as well. Then we'll take some examples of look at who is doing it right, a global perspective. And I'll give you a framework on how you can prepare your blog as a strategy framework. And then what I see happening in the future of the space. So in 1997, the term web blog was coined. Then Peter Merholtz out of San Francisco, he used the term we blog, which eventually got shortened to just blog. By the way, that's a horrible name for a movement, blog. When I first entered this space as a blogger, my mom says, ah, you're a blob, which is a movie that you don't want to be associated with. I used to work at Forrester Research as an analyst for the last two years. And I was researching how social technologies are used around the globe in context of business. And this isn't my research. This is from Edelman, but it looks very much the same. And in fact, I've seen three pieces of research on trust. And basically they asked consumers, who do you trust? And over and over, this is the third one down, it's a little hard to see, conversations with your friends and peers tend to be higher up the trust ladder. The different colors is the purple is 2008, the darker blue is 2009. So there was an actual big decrease in trust around the globe. This was a global study primarily due to the recession. People started to clam up. And so people have always trusted each other. And now they can use these technologies to talk directly to each other, that more of that trusted conversation. What's interesting, and this is important to note, I'm not here to evangelize the technologies, but to tell you what is happening. So towards the bottom here, a corporate website is trusted a lot less down here, 24%. But even beneath that, business blogs are trusted 19%. How many of you have a business blog for a company or an organization? Anybody? So it's important to note that many business blogs do not do it right. They're simply using the same rhetoric or the same, we are the greatest type of discussion and not having that true human discussion that the people already having out there. So if you're going to use blogging for business, it's important you do it in the right way and part of the real conversation that people are doing. Or you may be wasting your time and be one of those untrusted blogs. Here's some other data. This is from Universal McCann. And it actually shows that the adoption of social tools around the world are increasing. So at the highest one here, the pink one, which is Watch Videos Clips Online, and then blue, listening to radio. And then you start to see the red one. That's the fourth bullet down under 2009 that people are reading blogs at around 70%. So readership is definitely happening. But a little bit lower, you can see people are in the pink one, which is about 30%, 35%. I actually start my own blog. So what does this data mean? It means that people are certainly reading blogs, but not everybody is going to be creating them. Full adoption. Technorati looked at this data. And you'll notice that it tends to be focused on US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. And this is Other Bucket, Other. Here's another business opportunity. We don't see a lot of stats on the Middle East when it comes to these social technologies. So if you're in the analytics business, or if you're into the measurement business, this is an opportunity to tap into a new market, the Arabic blogosphere and the Arabic social technology space. So I would love to come back in a year and see if this other can be broken out into your community. Let's take a look at some examples of who's doing it right. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to break this into different frameworks because I want you to think about this in your overall strategy. Really important thing. When you're blogging, choose an objective. Figure out what is your goal. Don't just blog just because you want to. What are you trying to accomplish? That's very important. So let's first look at bivertical. And what I mean by that is a particular industry that you're focused on. And I'm going to give you some examples from around the world. This was the UK Trade and Investment Group. And it's a springboard for global growth. So they write. And they have a bunch of different bloggers around those topics. And they also integrate YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other social networking tools like LinkedIn. So they're using a variety of voices but to focus on trade and investment. So that's one particular area to focus on. Next, let's think about it by audience. Maybe there's a particular type of person that you're trying to reach. Me, I'm trying to reach CMOs and VPs of marketing in large corporations. I know who I'm trying to talk to. In this particular case, New Zealand's libraries, they have blogs written for kids or for kids' parents. And they want to teach them literacy and how to use the school resources and the library resources and talking about new books to read and covering the new types of things that are happening in their particular community. So the takeaways from this particular section. Start your blog with a clear objective in mind. So Her Majesty, Queen Ranaia, was listening. She wants to hear from what people are saying. She's made that very clear that I want to understand. That was her objective. The second objective was the dialogue to talk back and forth with people, to allow and encourage people to leave comments or put videos up. Another objective is supporting, encouraging the readers to talk to each other. And I'm gonna talk about that from my blog a little bit later. I have a surprise for you. And then the fourth one is that co-innovation, actually engaging with people, saying how can we improve? I want to hear your voice, but you gotta be ready. Another strategy is make sure that you keep your content focused on one topic. Don't deviate. You confuse your readers if you cover too many topics. If you find you're covering two topics, split off and create another blog. That's my personal take. Not everybody will agree with that, but I think it's important to remain focused. Measure. If you're gonna be putting resources, time, or energy into this, you should measure your efforts. And we're gonna talk about that in the workshops. So you should measure based upon what was your objectives. So if your objective was to dialogue, then you measure that. If your objective was to do innovation, then you measure based on that. Any questions? Let's talk about what I see as happening as an industry analyst in the future. The future of online voices. So I'm very pleased that there's a lot of focus on blogs today, but it's also important to note that there's a whole suite of technologies that are appearing. In fact, at Loweb in Paris, the topic was the real-time web. And this also has to do a lot with Twitter and mobile micro-blogging technologies and using mobile devices, wherever you are to communicate with each other. So this is definitely a trend that we're seeing in 2010. So one thing that we see is blogs are integrating social technologies from other social networks. Take, for example, the very popular blog, TechCrunch. They allow readers and commenters to sign up using Facebook Connect. Here's how you can see it down here. And this allows people, they don't have to leave their name and their email and their URL. They can just click Facebook Connect and it knows who they are and it increases the adoption. So these tools allow people to make it easier to comment and then also when they comment, it spreads back to other places as well. So when you are blogging and you use these connective tools, I call them, and then it encourages your blog content to spread to social networks. So you can see in these blogs right here that they're encouraging people to connect with Facebook or even their mobile devices or my blog log and other communities to spread it wherever they go. So on my blog, we have, I think we have Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other things that are connected in so it'll encourage people to spread. Next, another trend that we're seeing, this is certainly an advanced example, is the Huffington Post has used Facebook Connect. But what they've done, which is very interesting is, they encourage people to, you log in at the top left with your Facebook ID, but then it makes recommendations on what stories you should read in that blog based upon your social network. Think about that. That's turning the editorial of a newspaper over to your friends. So now your friends are recommending what to read to you and that changes how you see information. Expect this trend to continue. I'm sure that Google will, it was already looking at this with a lot of their tools. So takeaways from this particular area. You should integrate your blog with other social networks and other tools. This will encourage WOM, word of mouth, the spreading of it. Allow logins from other social networks to help content to spread. So encourage people to share it on their social network. I recently put tweet meme on my blog posts. It encourages people to retweet it and that sends a lot of traffic. In fact, most of my traffic is coming from Twitter. It's pretty amazing. Social networks and these technologies we're gonna allow for personalized news pages or editorial pages. In the future, it's possible I might change my blog. So once you log in, the stories will be just recommended to you by your friends, maybe not the just most recent story at the top, but I might turn over the complete control to my readers to decide what should be on my front page. I'm willing to experiment. I'm willing to experiment and see how that can happen. Okay, interactive ME from Cafe Viennese. Number one, how does J.A. gonna see the future of blogging? Two, and what price does blogging activity take? And what price does the blogging activity take place? Okay. Well, the future of blogging, as I went over, it's certainly being integrated on all of these social technologies. So the content is being spread into many locations. Now, what is the cost? Well, it's time. Now, if I spend two hours every day, usually the business days, that's 10 hours. That's very expensive. But I think it comes back to me later with the opportunity to come here. I mean, this is priceless. So it's really a lot of investment in time and you have to be prepared to do that. Now, two hours a day is probably a little excessive. I made this my career, but for other people, think about how much time you wanna put into this. Anybody have questions live as well? Ah, yes, sir. Oh, there's the mic. Hi, my name is Ammar, I am blogger. Do you think- Can you speak up a little bit? Do you think the social website like Facebook, Twitter is telling the real bloggers? Is it going what to bloggers? Sorry? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear the last part. Is Facebook and Twitter- Stealing the real bloggers, like you said, as you said- Stealing? Bloggering is human nature. Is Facebook and Twitter taking power from blogs? Is that what you're asking? Stealing from blogs? Okay. The trick is to use all of the tools in a integrated way. So I use Twitter in a way that's very different than blogging, but it's integrated in my blog. So think about your job is to build a house and you have a variety of tools, hammers, saws, nails, measuring tools. You wanna use all of these tools together to build that end product. Don't focus on just one tool. So Twitter is great for connecting with people, asking questions and pointing them to your blog or pointing to things that are interesting. But it's a very different behavior because Twitter is designed to just link out and find things that are happening. It's a very short attention span. Now Facebook is different. It's more of a social connection so people can talk to each other and learn about each other. And sometimes they'll talk about your blog things, your comments and your blog posts. So my goal is each technology is very different and I approach them very differently. I use different content on each particular one. So what I write in Twitter, I tend to, I have a certain style. If I want people to click on my links, then I usually ask a very short question and say, here's the answer that I linked to my blog. So if I was gonna blog about this one, I'll say, what are you missing to know about the Arabic blogosphere? Ah, I interviewed them, here's a link. And then people go, that's really interesting. And this is a technique called link baiting and I got kind of good at it. And so this is how you get people to do that. But that content would be very different in the way I would put it in Facebook. So their approach and the strategy is very different for each particular tool. And then on the blog posts, I have a more informative title, not with that question in it, because I wanna attract search engine optimization. So I'm very careful about the words I use in my title because I wanna think about, what would people search for 12 months from now? So I give it a lot of thought to how each of these channels stands. So I answer your question, they're not taking away from each other, they're all becoming one, but your strategy and approach needs to be different from each particular one. Does that answer your question? Okay, thank you, that's excellent. Yes, sir. Here's the mic, sir. Good morning first. Good morning. If I want to make a blog with a sexual blog, let's say with aim, with goals and these things, I think from your talking, I need the team to do this job, not by myself. Yeah, I have the idea. I wrote the idea, I wrote the comments, but who will improve the blog? I need technical side to improve it. One person know the technology very well to put the new things, so I cannot work myself. In the end, it's not my blog, it's our blog. So there's only one writer of my blog and that's me, and I didn't hire anybody until I started being successful with it. And to be clear, I'm only hiring this designer for one project a year, for maybe like two weeks. So it's not really a team approach. This is my blog. And I actually have a theory about team blogs versus personal blogs. I actually think personal blogs are more effective, a blog written by one person, because you build that ongoing relationship with your community, where I think that team blogs, sometimes you don't know actually what to expect from different people can be confusing. So I prefer that one personal blog because you know that one person over time and treat it like that. So when you hear me saying, treat your blog like your own company and your own platform, I'm just talking about Jeremiah's company. It's just really myself. But when I hit, when you hit a certain point, you wanna invest resources so it can grow even bigger. The great thing about blogs is, anybody can get started at a blogger or WordPress or type pad right away and most of the basic tools you need are already set up. Does that answer your question? Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Given that people tend to blog from work and even from home, sitting late at night in front of the computers, have you conducted any studies as to how blogging affects productivity at work and quality time with family? Yes. So blogging is, and we looked at the stats. So the question was, how do blogs actually work well when it comes to research and communities, is that what you're saying, and collective intelligence? Yeah. Blogs score very high in search engine results, pages. So meaning that when people search for topics because blog content tends to be very specialized, that it can score very high on very specific topics. So as a result, when people are researching and they frequently are using Google search, these blog posts come up high and they absolutely influence it. In fact, I just did a survey to my readers to find out does my blog influence their purchasing behavior or what they do in their own companies and their behaviors in the companies? And most of the data points up, yes, that it actually influences their behavior. But remember when we looked at our trust data, many blogs are not trusted business blogs. It's because it doesn't have that real depth of content. So to answer your question, it scores high in search engine results, but the savvy readers can smell when content is not right versus trustworthy. So your job is to make sure your content is trustworthy. Good. Oh, I recently saw another startup that you might be interested in. It's called Wordly, W-O-R-D-L-Y, I believe. And this is, they just launched at the low web and essentially they offer editorial to improve English writing. So you submit a blog post to them and they can turn it around a few minutes to make sure that it's grammatically correct in English and it costs a few dollars to do. So if you're trying to reach a Western audience, but you're not completely confident in your writing, there's a bunch of services that are now appearing that can do that very quickly. Let's check that out. I saw another question back there. Yes, I can repeat the question. Excellent one, is a question around marketing your blog, are there any new techniques? The best blogs, you just need to have honestly the best content. That's gonna be that continual driver. That's the core, spend 90% of your time there. What's the other things you can do? You should leave comments on other blogs in the focus areas that you talk about and be involved in those conversations and make your name known there. So as much time as you spend on your own blog, you should be leaving comments elsewhere. I actually probably not as good as that as I could be. So that's something I need to continue to work on myself. And then as you see interesting conversations and you add to those conversations in the comments, it's usually okay to link back to your blog but as long as you're doing it in a very collaborative and helpful way. Also I encourage you to make sure that you have search engine optimization set up right for your blog so that you have the right keywords and you're using tags and meta tags. These are topics that we'll discuss more in the workshops, more technical areas. But yet again, content is the number one thing. Anybody who covers this event on their blogs and is live blogging today or blogs later today, that's a really good thing to do because then people will look back at your blog and I'll probably send you traffic as well. I see another, there's a whole bunch of questions so I'm not sure where it is to go. Did you have one? Was it on Twitter or something? Yeah, exactly. So I was trying to figure this out. Yeah. Personal blogs. So the question are these tactics that I'm talking about applied to personal blogs? Yes. Everything I said here applies to government blog, corporate blog, non-profit or personal. The strategies are all the same. They're all the same. Excuse me? Yes. Yes. I don't see. What about Facebook pages? Can it be taken at least as a start point for in blogging world? Yes. Facebook pages? Yes. Yes, okay, good. Is there anybody here from Facebook? Okay, good. I mean, anybody who's working at Facebook here. Okay, who wants to work at Facebook? Okay, that's right. Facebook fan pages are a great way to put your blog so you should also do that so people become fans of that content and that's another way to integrate it into that. I think I've done that as well and I also created a web strategy group that encourages people to have their own discussions and start them so I'm using both of those features. So that's absolutely an ideal thing to do. Good point. And same thing with Twitter. You should obviously create a Twitter account associated with your own brand or with your blog. Can you talk about three or four strategies that work to make your blog into a profitable business? Right here in front of you, this way, left. Raise your hand. Right here. Okay, making your blog profitable. This is a touchy topic. So I make money from my blog by generating business and to be a professional speaker. So I don't make a direct revenue generation right off the front. But there are many bloggers that put advertisements on their blogs and there's a bunch of ways you can do that either through Google using AdSense but I hear the payout is very low. Or you could join a actual blog network that I talked about earlier such as Federated Media and I think there's an opportunity for an Arabic blog network to create that and then you find advertisers and then you split the revenue with the bloggers. Or you could do something that's very controversial which is called sponsored conversations. And this is an area that I've looked into at great depth as a researcher and there's different rules and taboos depending on culture and even governmental things. So the United States government has put restrictions on what bloggers they must disclose any relationships. Be very careful if you're going to be doing that. There's potentially dangerous waters there. One way that I generate direct revenue from my blog is I put job listings on my blog and anybody can post those and they pay, I think they're paying 200 US dollars to put that job post on there and that covers my hosting costs. So those are some ways that you can generate revenue. I just wanna tell you your goal for your blog is to start with passion first and if it turns into a career, great. But if you're going into it just to make money, probably will fail. Next. Hello. Over here. See. I see you. Really? I see her, yes. But I'm here. Wait. Where are you? There's multiple mics. Just raise your hand. Hello. Hi. Hi, how are you? Good morning. Good morning. We hear that Obama win the election because of the blog, is that true? I'm sorry I say that again? We hear that Obama win the election because of the blog, is that true or not? It's not entirely true but it helped. And he used a variety, he had, so he hired one of the founders from Facebook to run his social media strategy. And they used a variety of tools. In fact, they used a lot of these tools to do a lot of fundraising. And it wasn't just one particular tool but that helped. Now when you look back at history, this has happened before. I mean not Obama or Facebook. But you look back in the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States used the radio to connect with American citizens. And then in the 60s, John F. Kennedy used TV, the next medium to connect with U.S. citizens. And now you fast forward, President Obama used the internet to connect with the world which is greater than just U.S. citizens. And so he simply used the new media that was at hand at the time. So I think this has happened before and someday there will be a new technology and some president and somebody will ask, did the president win it from electronic telepathy? And my answer will be the same. It's part of the strategy. That's a good question. Yeah, excuse me. Two more questions. Excuse me. Yes, hi. Hi. I have read about some incidents in other countries where some people have abused blogs such as threatening others or harassing others, invasion of privacy. So is there a method to ensure that some blogs are used in a civilized manner? One of the challenges that we have on the internet is through most often anonymous people disrupting content from others. But I think over time that could start to decrease because what we're seeing is verification of identity using Google profiles or Facebook or Twitter connects. So people will actually be able to identify, this is a real person that has a history and a reputation. And then I will allow them to comment or I would be allowed to see it. So the ability to filter away the unwanted content is becoming easier and easier. However, one of the beautiful things about the internet but has its dark sides is that anonymous content can certainly have a negative tone to it. And we should continue to expect to see that and as far as privacy concerns as well. Just like every other medium has had its challenges in the past, this one will have just as many as the amount of opportunities. So equal amount of greater opportunities, equal amount of greater challenges as well. It's just a reality that we'll have to continue to face. Thank you for having me today. You can find me online. Here's my email. My blog is web-strategist.com and I encourage you to leave a comment. I wanna connect you with my audience and my community in the western side and you can find, I also write for Forbes so you can find me there and also on Twitter. Thank you very much.