Advance.net's Jeff Jarvis explained the impact of blogs at February's iMedia Brand Summit.

Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director for Advance.Net, which oversees the internet vision and strategy for Advance Publications, Inc. Products include CondéNet and Advance Internet. Over the past five years, CondéNet, working with the magazines of Condé Nast, has created national brands including concierge.com, epicurious.com and style.com. During this same period, Advance Internet, working with Advance Publications' newspapers, has developed local brands including nj.com, cleveland.com and OregonLive.com.

Jarvis enlightened the audience at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Springs in February about the growing importance of, what he calls, "Citizen's Media." Here's the first third of his speech:

Jeff Jarvis: Let’s say I’m publishing a new gadget magazine. How would I use "Citizen's Media" to promote that and to market that? Well, I could go out and just try to advertise, or I could do something different. I could go find the best gadget blogs. There are great gadget blogs now -- tons of them, tons of bloggers who love to write about gadgets. My twelve-year-old son at JakeJarvis.com writes about gadgets and gets money out of Google AdSense, which beats my allowance that I give him, by the way. 

So, you can find the best gadget bloggers. Find the hundred best gadget bloggers, right? Then, say, “Here’s an award. Here’s an Honorarium. We’re supporting you. We’re underwriting you. We’re telling your audience we like you, too.” Kumbya, let’s all hug, right? It’s a community. It’s a conversation. 

Then you can say to that same blogger, “Well, I’ve got a new magazine. Why don’t I give you an ad to sell subscriptions and I’ll give you a spiff for every sub you sell.” The blogger is going to say, “Thank you.” The blogger is going to be very happy. Then, why don’t you say to the same blogger, “Alright, here’s an ad avail. Put that up, and I’ll sell the ads and I’ll share the revenue with you. And, I can go to my advertisers and I can extend my reach of my audience into this new distributed world of influencers. That’s how you say, you shift from “we want your money” to “we share your interest.” You help underwrite and support what’s going on anyway out there in the world. 

Finally, Fred Wilson, a friend of ours, says that the <i>push<i> model of advertising is toast -- get over it. So, how big is this thing that I get so triumphal about? Pew just released a study that said that 7 percent of internet users -- eight million Americans -- now blog. The important number is that thirty-two million Americans read blogs. In this chart, the pink line is the readers. The blue line is the authors. So, this is turning into a real market, a real medium, with a real audience. 

Twelve percent post comments. It is a conversation; it is interactive. Five percent use RSS. (Don’t worry about that quite yet, in a few weeks you’ll worry about RSS.) Technorati is a wonderful service that tracks the links among blogs so it enables the conversation. When I post … I’ll tell you about that in a few seconds. But, Technorati tracks now 6.6 million blogs, of which more than half are active. Eight hundred million links among the blogs, right? Forty thousand new blogs every day. I saw Dave Sifry, the founder, a few days ago and I said I was putting this slide of, as he calls it “info porn,” into this presentation and I said, “You still seeing about fifteen thousand new a day?” And, he said, “No, that was a few months ago. Fifteen thousand a few months ago; forty thousand now.” Now, yes, half of them will die off; but, then that’s still twenty thousand new blogs a day continuing on and on and on -- it’s growing.

PubSub is another service that tracks blogs --they track eight million blogs. Twelve hundred posts a minute they track. That’s the conversation that’s happening out there. So, figure that there are seven to eight million blogs in America. At FourSquare, I asked Jonathan Miller how much time his consumers spend on the content that his consumers create. And he said, “Sixty to 70 percent.” The point is that our stuff (remember I’m Blog Boy, not a big media guy), <i>our<i> stuff has value. It’s not just the value of big media. The citizens say that what we do has value.

A few examples: You probably all know, (you should know -- and have seen here before), Nick Denton at Gawker Media. Nick is a friend of mine, he introduced me to blogging long ago, and when he showed me I said, “What, what’s the big deal?,” I’ll admit. Nick founded Moreover, and I’m on the board of Moreover, (so that’s the full transparent disclosure here). Nick has created something amazing in Gawker Media with no money at all. Entertainment Weekly went through two hundred million dollars before breaking even (none of which was my fault) quick add … it was all circulation, damn it. Nick spends, you know, a few thousand dollars to launch a new product. Right now he has 2.5 million uniques a month; thirty million page views a month. You’ve seen him get press everywhere. He has created talent for other media -- Ana Marie Cox from the Wonkette is on TV all the time. His advertisers are flocking to him. Nike, as you know, did something recently with him. Audi launched a new blog with him. His advertisers include Sony, GE, AT&T, Disney, Viacom, HP, Jose Cuervo, British Airways, Playboy, CNET, Comedy Central, Amazon.com, Warner Bros., Absolut. That’s pretty amazing for one guy in a loft. That’s what you can do now.  You can start new, credible media properties from the virtual garage.

Technorati I mentioned before, I’m going to mention again because it’s important -- it enables the conversation. Here on this page is my page. So, these are the people who link to Buzzmachine. I go to it with an egotistical fervor to find out what people are saying, not so much about me, but they’re reacting to what I’ve written. So the conversation doesn’t just happen in a forum, or in my comments, the conversation is distributed, right? Technorati brings it together. So, I write something in my blog. Somebody writes something on their blog and links to me. Because of that link, I now see what they said about what I said. I react to what they say; somebody else joins in. That’s how the conversation happens. So, here there are 2,533 sources -- 2500 blogs linking to my blog off their homepage. And, here’s how I find out -- so this was a few days ago, after the Iraqi election -- and, so the first post there says that I’ve noticed the shrill harpies on the left (mind you I’m a liberal, too) who didn’t think it was good news. So this conversation was going on like crazy for a few days. Then, it dies off. Something else comes along.

Hyper-local, I want to spend just a minute on this. This now puts my “job hat” back on. At Advance Internet, our local newspaper related sites, we’re trying to figure out how to use blogs to extend our reach, extend our content, extend the means by which we can gather news and content at the same time that our revenue is shrinking. Extend the means by which we can serve new advertisers at the same time that classified advertising is shrinking. So, the idea is, we’re creating town blogs with citizens bringing us content. Is it fully journalism? No, it’s citizens giving us content. It’s citizens saying what’s going on in their towns. And, so they bring the content into the blogs -- the idea goes, it’s still unproven -- and, if we can get down to a town level, then, we can now laser focus advertising and automate it to get down and finally bring in the pizzeria, the dry cleaner and the lawyer we never had before because they couldn’t afford us. And, so as we’re losing revenue on the top line from Classified (thank you, Craig), can we get in a new population of advertisers on the bottom line?

goskokie.com is a project I did with students at Northwestern to test this out in Skokie. In 11 weeks they got a credible product going with people in town contributing content. Baristanet.com is by a journalist named Debbie Galant who was a New York Times Jersey columnist. She now covers three towns in New Jersey. She goes out and covers all the events; she sells advertising; she gives away free Classifieds. She’s doing that as a one-woman shop, and she’s getting people who are contributing stuff and sending her stuff and she is now becoming a new community paper. Compare that to the paper you got in your room this morning and see which is going to be more vibrant and which is going to involve people more. I hate to say it.

The Northwest Voice, out in Bakersfield, did something that I wish I’d done first, but they beat me to it. They took citizens’ content in; put it in blogs; turned around, freeze dried that; and, printed a newspaper out of it. Distribute that total market coverage in Bakersfield in a neighborhood there; sell advertising in that -- after two issues, it’s profitable. The content of the citizens is valuable to the citizens. 

Bloggers make money one off. One political blogger made $150,000 last year thanks to the election. I asked bloggers what they made. One hobbyist blogger with an Olympics blog and a camera blog I’d never heard of makes $40,000 out of Google, AdSense, and Amazon.com, and Blogads.

At Bloggercon, we love to make up really obnoxious names for things. Bloggercon is a conference of bloggers at Harvard. I gave a session on blogs making money, you’d think that I would have been drummed out of the room, “No, you are corrupting this.” Quite the contrary. The room was jammed with sweaty bloggers dying to make a living of this. They want to quit their day jobs and do this. They want to become William Randolph Hearsts. 

Right now, about the only way you can efficiently buy ads and blogs at all is through Blogads. It’s a small company run by a wonderful guy named Henry Copeland. You can go in and you can buy the blogs one at a time. That’s inefficient -- I’ll get more into that in a minute. But, that’s what exists today. 

Blogs are not just about content and advertising; they’re also, of course, about customer relationships. You need to read what people are saying about your publications and your advertising. The marketers need to do this. There’s a blogger who blogs just about Netflix. He loves Netflix. Netflix is his life and his passion. He went to Netflix and asked to get to their PR -- somebody was asking for flattery. Do you know what Netflix did? They said, “No, you are not a journalist.” What idiots. So, of course he did what every blogger does -- he blogged about it on his blog and everyone read about that and how stupid Netflix was. There’s a different way to look at customer relationships.

Treos. I have my Treo, love my Treo. Dave and I were doing Treogeek a minute ago, right? Well, I just did customer service with Dave because he wanted a new mail program and I told him what to use. He didn’t call Treo to get that. He didn’t call Sprint to get that (God knows), right? Customer to customer. Treo Central is an amazing place where the customers are customer support-free. They’re marketing-free. It’s amazing, if you harness this and embrace this, something happens. 

Finally, on this slide, I’ve seen cases where there are brands and companies I haven’t liked, and I finally got the idea that I went into Google and I put the name of the brand in followed by the word “sucks.” I would like to call that the Jarvis Sucks Index, but I think that doesn’t ring right. But, you’ll be amazed what you see because that is the standard nomenclature for things people don’t like. So, put a brand in followed by “sucks” and see what happens.

You can also use blogs for corporate purposes. Bob Lutz, the legendary car designer, now Vice Chairman of GM, just started blogging. He’s doing a good job. His first post was about how Saturn is too dull and we’re fixing that. There was a human honesty there that was important. What’s happened now is that bloggers have gotten mad that he’s not blogging enough.

You can do product blogs. I think it’s rare that that’s going to work, but Maytag has done one for it’s SkyBox, the -- I think $500 drink dispenser you can have in your home for Super Bowl. You shouldn’t do it (in some cases), this is a little bit old now, but a milk-based soft drink, Dr. Pepper, did a blog by a cow. How insulting can you get? This is a human medium. That’s like going to a wedding in a cow costume, right? It’s a human medium. Treat me at a human level. If you try to make this funny and cute, it’s going to be found out. This is a very transparent medium. 

So, a few dos and don’ts about Citizens’ Media: the first is heresy. You cannot obsess about ROI -- there’s no measurement. Now, to make advertising explode in this new medium, we do need three things that don’t exist today. (And, I hope that somebody’s going to come to me from the room and say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, we’re working on that.”) Number one is, we need author and audience metrics. How big is it? Who are they? All the stuff the advertisers always want, we don’t have in Citizens’ Media. And, I say author because, imagine your launching a new Avril Lavigne album, you might want to be on the blogs written by seventeen-year-old girls, not just read by seventeen-year-old girls. Right? There’s new ways to look at this. 

Two is: targeting a network creation. If I want to advertise Epicurious, our wonderful Epicurious (Jen’s here), on blogs, I would want to find the top, let’s say hundred food blogs. I could define “top” in a number of ways -- traffic, audience. I could go to Technorati and find the blogs that have the most influence. I could go to Technorati and find out the blogs who are ahead of the path and start conversations. Then, finally, of course, performance metrics, so we can measure that. That doesn’t really exist, yet. We need that to make us expand so we can create networks. 

The last thing we need is new measurement. This is not about the coincidence of a word on a page, like Google. This is not about played audience. It’s about relationships. It’s about influence. We need to be able to start measuring influence.

Tomorrow: Marketers need to embrace, read and interact with blogs.