The interluding days between Christmas and the New Year is always filled with reflection, early thoughts for New Year’s resolutions and a sense of achievement because, hats off to you, and rightly so, you’ve made it through another year.

A lot can happen in one year. A change of jobs, perhaps you’ve moved to a new house or maybe this is the year you had that epic holiday (I certainly had one of those). The various turning points of my year had their own soundtracks—playlists that could animate infinite, cliche montages.

Spotify, iTunes, Last.Fm and, of course, my iPhone allow me to take music everywhere; Last.Fm and Genius, within iTunes, automatically organise my playlists using collaborative filtering wizardry; as a paying Spotify customer I gain access to exclusive albums and an inexhaustible music library.

My LastFM history for twelve months

It’s never been easier to become a music aficionado. Like me, If you were plugged into any of the aforementioned services, I’m sure your year had its own soundtrack too. My listening history for this year shows which tracks I listened to the most, a very Indie year indeed, but what was everybody else listening too?

What was the the best music of 2010?

I used our Skyttle Search tool to track conversations about the, “Best music of 2010.” The documents functionality delivered a list of authoritative lists whilst the list of entities alluded to some of the most talked about artists: The National, Arcade Fire, High Violet, LCD Soundsystem and Flying Lotus gaining visibility indicates that alternative and Indie acts have been very popular.

Some of the best lists returned came from Impose, The Chicago Reader, Indie Rock Reviews, Cerebral Pop (I love that name), Paste and Timeout. All of the lists suggest that both Indie and Alternative acts have been more popular amongst music writers this year, which got me thinking about whether the lists, and the writers themselves, were too cool for school? Did they not represent the mainstream charts? I was expecting to see boy bands, surely Gaga? However, the BBC’s Sound of 2010 and songs voted by Guardian readers demonstrate how alternative and Indie acts have entered the mainstream this year.

Common artists found across all of lists include: Cee-Lo Green, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Hurts and MGMT.

I couldn’t help but think, whilst carrying out my research, that cloud-based music services and recommendation engines definitely influence the acts that enter mainstream charts. Does the most popular music on the web subsequently gain more radio plays? How are trends interpreted by the music industry? Questions and answers for another post, but what’s clear, from this quick analysis, is that the lines between Alternative, Indie and Pop genres are blurring increasingly each year.

Since the process is totally automated errors can occur. For example when an old news item about United Airlines filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection got picked up from The South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s website by a financial newsletter it got pushed into the “most-viewed items” section”. Google news gave it a current datestamp and courtesy of the Bloomberg wire service it was syndicated to the markets. The stock briefly crashed from $12.30 to $3 before the error was spotted.

[Update Saturday 12th September] The Times of London has a good follow-up to this story, tracing the exact sequence of events and drawing attention to the role played throughout by automated systems. Automation caused the story to be listed as the most popular on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel website, Google News picked it up automatically, traders responded to the headline, Bloomberg cited the headline when the stock started moving and automated selling programmes did the rest. Anyone who stopped to actually read and understand the story (complete with references at the stock price of $0.97 which clearly signalled its inaccuracy) would have known the story was old. But they would have been the losers, because every other system was in full “sell” mode.

When we first started pitching to institutions in the City of London a few years back a big fund manager said: can’t the analysis of stories be totally automated? We replied that it could only ever be semi-automated because human intelligence was required to interpret the patterns of sentiment, volume and authority. Part of their questioning leaned on the idea that automated tools for understanding conversations could be linked to automated trading tools. This is a dangerous idea – as the United Airlines story proves.

This is a profound remark. The blogosphere indeed functions as a marketplace in information, where spam takes the place of hype, and where a measurable consensus emerges around which companies have good products, and which ones are poor. Where a company’s employees, channel partners and customers spill the beans on how the company is doing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The blogosphere can be seen as “setting the price” of goods by forcing those with a bad reputation to discount in the search for buyers. Conversely those with a good reputation can charge a premium.

The interesting thing about this marketplace is that – unlike the stock exchange – the numbers are very hard to extract. You have to use social network analysis, natural language processing and statistical profiling to establish authority and sentiment. Having said that, these techniques exist (we and others are using them) and over time Wall Street and The City will track reputation indices as avidly as they track Standard and Poors ratings.

“What are people saying about my brand in blogs?”

“Can you help me monitor that?”

We say: we can help you monitor blogs, but first you need to do to help us define the questions you want answered. Monitoring blogs, review sites and messageboards on its own gives you large quantities of information, but few answers that can help your business. It is easier to make a business case for spending on online research and analysis if you can be pretty specific about the question that you need to have answered and about the relationship between that question and the business’s bottom line.  These are the questions that we suggest the client starts with:
Question 1: “Why do people choose my product?”

Question 2: “Why do people choose my competitor’s product?”

Question 3: “Why do people recommend my product to their friends?”

Question 4: “Why do people recommend my competitor’s product to their friends?”

Questions 1 and 2 may seem at first blush to resemble questions 3 and 4. But actually they are dissimilar. When someone recommends a product they will often choose a reason that says something about themselves. People will rarely say: “I chose this product because it’s cheapest”, but they may often say: “I chose this product because I care about the environment”. Conversely, why people actually buy a product is often around a combination of product features, reputation and price.

(Reputation and price are in some measure inversely related. Products with good reputations generally achieve that reputation by good service. Good service costs money and although consumers are tempted by cheap offers, they know that “free broadband” generally carries a cost in poor customer support. We recently completed some detailed research in this area which shows that brands with good customer support can keep their prices higher for longer than their competitors. )

All these questions are answerable from online research, and we can put numbers against the characterisitics of a product which are most likely to drive adoption. Those numbers have direct benefit to a key hiearchy of stakeholders within the company:

a) the product managers suddenly know which aspects of the product are key to marketing success (and which need most attention);

b) the marketing managers know what is the key product strength to push in relation to the corresponding weakness of a rival’s product;

c) the word-of-mouth marketers and PRs know which messages are most likely to drive viral adoption amongst users and can devise appropriate campaigns.

With this in mind, we designed a one pager Your 3-step guide to the blogosphere, (PDF download 70k) which we distributed at the conference. The HTML version follows …

1. Get started:

- Go to Technorati, the biggest of the blog search engines.
- Enter the topic you are interested in.
- When you find a blog that appeals to you, you can use Google desktop (a quick download) to automatically notify you when there is new content.
- Or save your search as a Watchlist, and get relevant information from a variety of sources.

Blogs to explore:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A lively commentary on events, the world’s most popular blog has 66,000 links from 22,000 sites.
Engadget Well-written technology reviews.
Dooce Personal blog by Heather Armstrong, who got sacked for blogging about her work colleagues
Public Relations Onlinefor discussing how businesses can best understand and use consumer generated content
British businesses using blogs:

The Guinness blog – bought to you by the Guinness branding team
The Cadbury’s Creme Egg podcast – with Kate Thornton
The Honda blog launched 28th February 2006, already has 107 links according to Yahoo

2. Join in

- Go to Blogger to create a blog for yourself. It takes about three minutes and is as simple as setting up a Hotmail account. Your blog will have the format http://yourname.blogspot.com.
- If you want to set something up with your own domain name for business, talk to a blog creation specialist like Market Sentinel.
- If you would like to comment on someone else’s blog posting, click on comment and complete the form. Sometimes (in Blogger and Moveable Type) you have to register in order to comment – this is to protect bloggers against spam comments from advertisers.
- You can comment on a blog posting on your own blog and put the address (http:// …) of the original comment into the “trackback” section of your blogging software. This will mean that your blog post is automatically linked to the blog you are commenting on. This facility has been abused by spammers, so most bloggers check trackbacks to prevent spam.

3. Get your blog noticed

- Optimise your blog for the subject matter. If your blog is about skincare, then put the word “skincare” into the name of the blog, and into the url: www.skincare.co.uk
- Update your blog regularly, at least once a week and ideally two or three times. Search engines visit sites according to how often they find new content.
- Tag your content. When you make a post, use the “category” or “tagging” facility to tell everyone what it is about. Someone on Technorati will be searching on the tag “dry skin”.
- Use Technorati or Google blog search to find out who else is writing about your subject matter. When you make an interesting new post, politely email them with the url and suggest that they might be interested in reading what you have written. You will make some new friends, and you might benefit from some links!
- If you are hosting your site, make you “ping” all the right ping servers when it is updated.

Market Sentinel works with top brands like Yahoo! Europe monitoring blogs and advising on marketing response.

For more information on how to integrate blog communications intoyour marketing strategy, call +44 (0) 20 7793 1575 or mail simon DOT rogers AT new DOT com

So what are blogs saying about your business? In the US, where blogging has become a widespread phenomenon, blogger Eric Mattson has just demonstrated in an anecdotal survey that top US companies are much discussed. [Hat tip to John Cass of Backbone media for the link]

The UK situation is different. Athough the last few months has witnessed a huge growth in the use of community sites like mySpace, the majority of bloggers are either hard-core early adopters, or younger people. That still leaves blogs as a smaller scale phenomenon in the UK than in the US as far as most brands are concerned. Pick a UK-focussed brand like John Menzies and the comment count on Technorati is pretty anaemic. 79 comments in the database, and most cut and pasted from online news sources like Reuters and the Scotsman.

The truth is that for most UK industries the bulk of commentary happens in message boards or in other traditional sites. This kind of commentary is technically harder to get at than blog commentary (Technorati won’t be much help) but it’s also less susceptible to infestation by keyword spammers.

Market Sentinel has a number of automotive industry customers and our automotive database is comparatively light on blogs. The majority of these sources are sites which allow customers to review cars, or simply message boards. For the automotive sector at least, blogs are a rather small part of the story thus far.

This is not to say that the automotive industry shouldn’t itself use blogs to communicate with its consumer base – of course it should. And the most enterprising of the online brands are either doing this already or have plans to do so in the near future. But as far as listening is concerned, brands need to spread their nets a little wider than the blogosphere.

[Update] My colleague at our partner Onalytica Flemming Madsen draws attention to a phenomenon which can be made use of in the blogosphere today, and that is something he calls “statistically improbable links” and which we deliver in a branded form as “Stakeholder Spotlight”. That is to say – what urls are disproportionately linked to by the stakeholders in a particular topic? We have found this to be a fascinating predictor of trends and an early indication of problems. Flemming has identified that the Vodafone stakeholders are highlighting a blogger who has a complaint about data charges. For other Market Sentinel customers we have found that this functionality throws up interesting links to companies that might be considered acquisition targets, with the stakeholder group serving almost as a focus group of what might be considered cool and interesting on the web.

“Social media is all about ceding control to build the relationship with the consumer. They won’t put up with anything else, as the processing power has moved to the edge of the network, the consumer has been empowered by it.

“Look at my own situation – I can work anywhere. The rest of my team works remotely from me. I am displaced.

“What has made this possible? Cheap hardware, for one. Have you seen this $200 computer? Incredible. The impact of RSS – I don’t have to go looking for information, I can subscribe to it. It finds me. Sites like Trip advisor[travel reviews], Blogger, Wikipedia, eBay, Google and services like Bit Torrent [file sharing], the Linux operating system show this in action. Technology has moved towards the “people”.

“Like anyone, I trust recommendations from friends and family first, followed by online recommendations way ahead of other sources. Brand loyalty is declining. It is down from 59% to 54% in two years between 2002 and 2004 in Europe. It may not sound like much but 5% over two year is a major decline. The new technology has empowered communities, not institutions.”

Li mentioned as case studies some work done by Umbria about mobile pricing plans, analysing customer complaints online and using them to create a more consumer-friendly offering. She cited the website istockphoto, which derives its inventory from user-generated photos, and mentioned Burpee seeds, who have given their business a huge fillip just by shrewd use of RSS feeds of seasonal offers.

“Brands are being defined by the communities that accept them. For example on Bob Lutz’s famous GM blog, there is a Community-driven conversation about the Solstice” Li reported an exchange between commentators on the blog …

“Guy one: I can’t wait to own a Solstice: it’s a chick magnet of a car

“Guy two: What about us family guys?

“Guy one: Get rid of the kids.

“The phenomenon of Digg [tech-focussed news where the item's prominence is driven by social bookmarks] derives from the same motive. If you are a corporation, you have to let the customers become the brand. This is what Nike ID have done with their software which lets you design your own shoes, and then encourages you to let other consumers vote for your design. Similarly with CNet, they have taken the decision to window other sites’ content

“From companies I hear from corporations a lot about the risks of ceding control – the fear that the employees and executives will say something bad: ‘We can’t have negative opinions on our site’

“But the point is that constructive criticism should be welcomed. Sure, you don’t need abusive comments, but it is better to have your brand advocates engage you directly with their constructive criticism, than have them do it behind your back. People say: ‘We’ll lose control of the brand’. I say: ‘You already lost control of the brand.’ They say: ‘People will delete the RSS feed.” I say: ‘Do you really want to send unwelcome emails, instead?’ People say: ‘We’ll get sued.’ I think those risks are easily manageable.

“So, how does your company get involved with all this? First: decide how involved you want to be with social computing. At a minimum listen to what is being said in message boards and on the blogs. Test the waters and immerse yourselves in the tools. It’s a new mindset and you are not going to get the hang of it straight away.

“Take the case of Dan Entin: he blogged that he couldn’t find his favourite deodourant (Degree Sport, as it happens). A sharp-eyed Unilever employee spotted the post got in touch, advised him on local stockists and then gave him a box of the stuff. He blogged it, naturally. That is a huge PR win for Unilever.

“I would argue that companies should focus on the relationship, not the technology. It is not so much about blogging or about podcasting … it is about the relationship with the consumer. Technologies will come and go, but the relationships will outlast them.

“For companies my advice is: start small and prove the business case. It’s a mindset: it will take some time. It took eight days to set up the small block blog. If you want to get your feet wet I would suggest that a recruitment blog is worth having. You always want to attract new talent to your company. Or at the very least ensure that your press releases are in RSS, or that when you do an earnings call you make it available as a podcast. You don’t have write new stuff necessarily. You probably have some existing speeches from executives that you can repurpose.

“The key thing to consider is to let you cusomters tell you when you are doing it right and also when you are doing it wrong. And then measure engagement, measure frequency of visit, length of stay, links. And benchmark your position before and afterwards.

“I hear about return on investment: Typepad costs me $15 a month and I have got $1m of business off it in the last year

“In conclusion: what does it all mean:

“Social computing will move into the enterprise. Wikis and blogs are perhaps even more effective internally than they are externally.

“Consumers want to create their own applications. Jeff Bezos said that Web 2.0 was all about computers talking to other computers. That makes it easier for consumers to use applications to create new applications of their own. For example you can take Google maps and overlay something else

“I predict that Community-based political systems will emerge, where people who share common views will seek out candidates to represent them.

“Finally social computing will become like air, as it becomes part of everyone’s experience, it will disappear …”

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said – it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all – and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal – something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean – even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1′s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before – the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other – is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. ”

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself – oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding – as a metaphor – is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still – mostly – the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best – or at least very good – if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group – a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. ”

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy – not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else – keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. ”

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

I am not aware of any research which compares blog-writers with message board contributors. It seems to us that there are distinct contrasts. Bloggers tend to solitary, opinionated, contrarian, message board contributors are friendly, clubbable and consensus-seeking. Bloggers are cats and message board contributors are dogs. Not very scientific, I know. I am always quoting some Delahaye research which showed that 23% of blog comments are negative and only 11% of message board comments. Previously I had assumed that this was because of the nature of the conversation. The blog is a monologue (with interjections) and the message board is a dialogue, or even a public meeting. Now I am beginning to think the differences go deeper.

We will look for chapter and verse.