(If you’re blogging for pleasure or your own entertainment, skip this post and read any of these wonderful stories.)

Is the purpose of your blog easy to define? What are you aiming towards accomplishing with it? How are you testing whether or not you’re reaching your desired effect?

My blog has changed a lot over the years. At first, I blogged just for pleasure. Then, I realized that I was developing a community, and that my community wanted some consistent, useful information, so somewhere around a few years ago, things started to make more sense. Here’s a little bit of the backstory.

My Blog’s Many Faces

When I started my blog many years ago (it skittered across several domains before I landed in “real” blog software), it was for fiction. I wrote stories. Then, I wrote about fitness and nutrition. Then, I wrote about self-improvement. Then, I wrote about new media. I went from that into writing about social networks and social media, and then eventually, I moved into how businesses could use social media to improve.

What am I writing about these days? Human business. It’s essentially the idea that relationships and human-shaped experiences serve business much better than cold marketing and afterthought customer service.

What will I write about next? I’m planning some changes to [chrisbrogan.com] in the near term. My redesign by Snowy Day Design is just the beginning, and you’ll be invited along for the ride. That said, I won’t change direction too far afield. You’ll most likely still like it.

Keeping a Focus and a Purpose

Your blog is a media property. It’s also a tool that allows you to build relationships (should that be of interest), to notify and inform (if you like telling the news), to reflect and react (if you like being a commentator), to report (if that’s something you enjoy doing), or a tool to educate, instruct, or establish thought leadership. It can be a call to action, a lead generator, a showcase for your talents, and many other things.

The question is: what will you choose as your focus, and how do you define its purpose?

Can you blog without purpose? Absolutely. Can you unfocus your blog? It happens all the time.

But your community (or your audience, if you’re not as close to them) are there with an expectation. They are seeking whatever it is you’ve been offering along the way. They want your best, and they want your material to enlighten, entertain, inform, inspire, or any of several other functions.

With that in mind, and accepting that things change over time, my question remains: what is the focus and purpose of your blog?

Photo credit respres

I was talking to a friend on the Third Tribe forums (disclosure: I’m a co-founder) about a sponsorship opportunity she had, and I gave her my advice for her specific circumstance (that’s the cool thing about over there: we do a lot of good one-on-one interaction in the forums). I realized that I have more to share here and so thought I’d give you some ideas about sponsors, audience, and your role as a content creator.

Sponsors Want Your Audience

First and foremost, if someone approaches you to sponsor your blog, your event, your whatever, what they’re saying is, “We’ll pay you in exchange for having access of some kind to your audience. They ultimately want to either a.) sell, or b.) show thought leadership in a space by connecting via your platform. More often than not, it’s A.

It’s up to you to help them achieve this goal. But of course, it’s also up to you to preserve your audience, and to not make them feel like you’re selling them to the highest bidder.

Your Audience Wants Good Content

Whether you’re a blogger, a conference, a TV show, or some other kind of media, the people you’ve gathered around you most often come to you for entertainment and education. If you’re Hanley Wood, you’re educating people in the building and construction world (for instance). You’re attracting contractors, builders, architects, and other related professionals to an event with information and opportunities that they won’t find elsewhere. If you’re Mark Horvath’s Invisible People, you’re attracting people who want to know what the world of homeless people is like, and want to hear stories that compel them to give.

Your audience wants the best of what you can put out, and they want to know that you’ll protect them from scummy people. For instance, if I go to a conference, and my inbox suddenly fills up with spammy emails from exhibitors I’ve yet to meet or signal that I want more information, I probably won’t go to that show again, and I’ll probably raise holy hell until my name is off every list, etc. Your audience never wants to feel sold out. They want your best, and they want your protection.

You Have to Make Good

You have to give sponsors the opportunity they need to sell or spread their influence. You have to give your audience your best content and your protection. By getting into the sponsorship game, you’re accepting responsibility for this relationship on both sides, and you’re promising to protect everyone involved. Once you understand this, you can determine when it’s a good idea to take sponsorship or not, you can decide whether your sponsors are the right ones for your audience, you can decide how best to give everyone in the triangle what they want.

It’s a big responsibility, but it’s definitely one way to exchange value.

Any other questions? How else can I help?

Oh, and this is the kind of stuff we’re talking about at Third Tribe Marketing, or some of it. You can ask any question there about marketing and get a bunch of responses. It’s been really fun for me, and others are saying mostly good stuff about it. I’ve also started recording some new exclusive audio content for there that will start airing in a few weeks, so if you jump on now, you’ll get notified. Good?

* Oprah
* Jon Stewart
* Conan (especially if he doesn’t go to Fox)
* Rick Sanchez from CNN (from the news perspective)

To me, the thing they’re all missing is a deeper integration to social media tools for two-way conversations, for a deeper sense of loyalty and connectedness. Jimmy Fallon does that stuff reasonably well, but then, his show isn’t all that interesting to me. He’s got the social thing figured out a bit better, but the payload isn’t there.

Derrick Ashong, the guy who interviewed me from Oprah Radio made a good moving coming out to South by Southwest, because he showed, in that gesture, that he knew where the stories were, that he could get information from the ground-level stuff that we all uncover, and that he was there to learn as much as he was there to pluck stories from the air.

I think what’s next for media and entertainment will be a hybrid, not a fast shift away. But I think it will also be gatekeeper-free.

What say you?

The storyline of what most people are saying is, “Yikes. It’s pop culture over hard journalism. Society will collapse. Etc.”

First, let’s be clear: the pursuits of journalism and the pursuits of publishing aren’t the same.

Journalists seek to create compelling information that is helpful and news-worthy.

Publishing seeks to push more product, deliver higher circulation value, and create more value for sponsors/advertisers/money-holders.

Publishers need content creators of some stripe to do what they do. Journalists don’t need publishers, but publishers pay, so that’s a decent place to connect with an audience and be paid.

But never confuse the two.

The move by AOL is both smart for business and helpful for journalists who’ve lost their jobs.

Does this spell the end of news as we know it? Um, no. But news has been broken for a while now. That’s a good chunk of what Jeff Jarvis writes about when he’s not writing about Google. (Oh wait: Google is a publisher/media company, too!)

See how tricky this is? But don’t let your “shame, because we want purist journalism” to get confused in there with the “publishers give people what they want, and what they want is pop content” argument.

It’s harder than that to unravel.

And you said…

Valeria Maltoni has an interesting post about how journalists are now engaging fans. I’m lucky to have met and spent time with news people like Jennifer Cabala and Jamie Yuccas and Jim Long, who are people outside of their stories as well.

Some people are engaging. Some people are just turning in news the way they have all along. Others are learning what it means to be a storyteller with a face instead of the vessel of information.

And this isn’t just about news. This is a corporate story. This is a small business story. This is a relationships-are-good-again story. And the people who know how to storytell in this new space, and who know how to be a personality while telling these stories are poised to do interesting things. The medium has changed. The methods have changed. The opportunity has changed.

Jen and Jamie and Jim are three passionate people who aren’t just the news any longer. Don Lemon isn’t just a suit at a desk. You’re not just an employee in the machine. And there’s a chance for that to be interesting and useful.

What would you do with it?

While companies are wondering/worrying about what to do with social media for marketing, I’m thinking already about which forces are at play in moving information through our heads, through systems, through clusters of friends along trusted paths. I’m thinking about velocity of information, visibility (or rather, the filtering), proximity (and how location changes everything) and relevance (should I even be bothered)?

We’ve had two years to mess around with profiles, with friending behaviors, with making the advertising data flow into the old stuff that was lying around.

But those aren’t really the problems/challenges/opportunities, are they? How fast can information be made “firm?” How can we move information from tweets to validated information that’s useful?

How can we hide information that doesn’t matter? I don’t read all your tweets. Why should I?

When can we work on where information matters?

When can we work on making things more “touchable” and linked between the web and the world?

Those are the problems all of us who’ve figured out social media should get working on. Screw making a new Twitter-killer, okay? Work on the problems of making this storm manageable. Yes?

I want to address the many ideas his conversation with me brought about. Mostly, I wanted to share how the decisions we make as bloggers impact other people’s sites, and what it says about trust.

How Google Sees Trust (some of it)

Not all blogs are ranked equally in Google, but most of them are indexed and counted (unless you’re a spammer). Google counts links to other sites as proof that something on the other site is of value. They rate links based on the value of the site that posted the link, and ascribe some level of the originator’s page rank in Google to the target site. So, if chrisbrogan.com is Page Rank 6, and Jon Swanson’s blog is Page Rank 5, Google gives a little of my juice to Jon’s site.

So, just by linking to a site (or NOT linking to a site), I’m telling Google something mechanically about whether or not I trust a site.

(SEO folks will pipe in and tell us that there are 14.7 other things I missed. But you get what I just put out, right?)

Link Text And What That Means

By the way, HOW you link to something matters. If you link to www.chrisbrogan.com by calling it Chris’s blog, then you’re telling Google that people searching for “Chris’s blog” might want chrisbrogan.com. If you link to www.chrisbrogan.com by calling it social media resources or social media strategy or whatever (frankly, I’ve never known what to bother ranking for in search results), then you are telling Google that people searching for social media whatever might want to find my blog.

So in choosing the words for the link text, you’re also making decisions. How does that change the way you’re blogging right now?

What Your Blog Says About Trust

In a Nielsen survey, it was pointed out that 70% of people surveyed believed opinions they read about something online. It was the second highest level of trust people gave (trusting their known friends came first). So, just by writing something down online, 3/4 of the population will believe what is written. If you’re evil, this is awesome. If you’re a good person, this requires a little bit of thought.

When I write that I am frustrated with a brand, I write it as a person, as a consumer, as a user. Pat said that he considered me his trust agent and that if I’m slamming something, he’s taking that more to heart than others. This stopped me.

First, the concept of trust agent, as Julien and I wrote it, is more about the idea of someone representing a brand or a position officially, like Frank Eliason does for Comcast. We talk about how individuals can earn trust and build reputation, but it never occurred to me that people might see others (me) as a trust agent in most things. I mean, it makes sense, but then I fall into the basketball player role model problem. Know what I mean? You always hear the famous athlete saying (at his hearing), “I want kids to appreciate what I do on the court, but not to follow every damned thing I do,” or similar (I’m not making that up; you’ve seen that, right?).

So, I fall on the classic Spider-Man line, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Communities Demand More

A few people were upset with me in the comments of the Timberland post for voicing my opinion. I took offense at first, feeling that it’s my right to complain on my blog, and that I’m a frustrated consumer. Some part of me, however, is seeing their side, too. They come to me to get useful analysis. There’s some use in reading a rant of mine, but there wasn’t a lot of balance or analysis. Some friends might jump on this post and comment that I’m not obligated to do such, but I believe I am.

At the time of this writing, my blog is officially the #1 marketing and advertising blog as ranked by AdAge. (I rarely talk about that fact. It’s over in the sidebar badge there, but it’s not something that seems relevant to point out.) As such, people are looking to me for ideas on marketing and advertising. In the case of my Timberland post, I complained that the ad created demand that the retail operation couldn’t supply. It’s an advertising problem, or maybe a customer service problem, but it’s how I handled it that was called onto the carpet.

Translation

Interesting to consider for yourself, eh? Who’s looking up to your words on YOUR blog? Who is treating you as the authority? How are your efforts relating to trust? Is your blog a trustworthy source of information, ideas, and actionable items?

What about the blogs you read that you value the most? Do you consider TechCrunch to be trustworthy? Why or why not? What about Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine? The blogs you value, do you also find them trustworthy representatives?

And how responsible do you feel for what you post on your blog?

I’m going to start with a great quote from Bob Stein, from the O’Reilly Tools of Change event. He defined a book as such: “A book is a user-driven media where readers and sometimes authors congregate.” Do you love that? Is that crazy? I love it.

I extended myself into a platform. People try to ask about this at events, but because they don’t exactly know or see the edges, they can’t ask the question the way I’m framing it for you now. What do I mean? What’s it mean to be a platform.

I am me. I make media. I push the media onto this blog (at the time of this writing), 30,000 or so folks get this via a subscription, and over a month, I’ll have 250,000 unique visitors). I have this linked to my Facebook, so another 4750 people get this. If I tweet the link, just short of 100,000 more people get this. I speak at dozens of events a year (Will I hit a few hundred? I haven’t counted).

That means my ideas spread pretty darned far. Not TV show far, but not bad, eh?

You can do the same thing. That’s really what I’m going to say to people. I’m going to talk about HOW I set it up, how I built the network, what I did to nurture it, and how I use it to help other people, and finally, what that does to help me.

Do you know how? You’ve been here a while now, right?

I started by connecting with people in one place, and making relationships. I invited those people to my other platforms. I explored their interests. I learned what mattered to them and tried to fuel it. I moved into new platforms. I went everywhere that information could spread easily. I went nowhere that information was penned in. I connected with as many connectors as I could. I put my ideas in forms that other people could take them and run. I reinforced and encouraged others. I thanked others. I asked for very little in return for everything that I gave.

I co-wrote an entire book on how to make information and value move through systems, that most people buy because they think it’ll teach them the secrets of social media. The secret is that these tools let us build better relationships. That’s it.

The platform, friends. You’re great alone, but you’re everything once you figure out platform thinking and how to equip and empower value transactions.

Make sense? What am I missing in my descriptions? What do you want to ask, given what you see above? What would you add, my brilliant friends?

The very best content is that which leaves us feeling like the hero.

Think about the movies you love. Think about the songs you replay over and over. Think about the books you read. When we participate in stories, the ones that move us the most are those where we see a bit of ourselves in the storyline, right?

It’s not always easy, especially when you’re creating media for a corporation, but there are some guidelines you might consider when you think about building your media, be it a podcast, a video, a blog post, an ebook, a book, or whatever.

How to Make Your Audience Feel Like a Superhero

• Let them feel smart and included. Stories where we are introduced as “part of the group” or “in the know” help us get over our initial discomfort.
• Give them a solid map. The only time readers shouldn’t know where they’re going is if they’re reading a mystery (or a Chuck Palahniuk novel). The rest of the time, start people off with a sense of where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and tips on how they’ll know they’re done.
• Reward them. If you’re producing material that’s longer in form, give your audience some kind of reward. This might be a checklist that lets them run off and do something with their partial knowledge. It might be some kind of acknowledgment that they’ve reached a next step. Whatever the case, if you’re challenging your readers, reward them. (Works in video games; works in other media.)
• Respect their time. Brevity, friends. I point it out all the time. If you can say something with fewer words, do it. Okay?
• Write about them, not you. Or, if you have to write about you (memoirs or biographies come to mind), give them something they can do to make meaning of what you’ve shared. One reason I loved WINNING by Jack Welch was that I felt I could use the stories as a better perspective of how corporations work. Make sure your media empowers your audience instead of toots your own horn. It’s how you make superheroes.

Storytelling has much more to it than this, but I’m going to respect your time and let you decide what you think of the above. Do you see how this might improve how your community will react to your stories?

What’s your take?

If you were given a few million bucks from a venture capitalist to build a media company, what would that look like?

Not so easy, eh? So, I’m going to think about it, but then, it’s your invitation to think about it, too. Because some of what you and I come up with here might be useful, don’t you agree? Maybe we’ll figure out where some of these companies might hop next, or maybe we’ll just invent something new.

The Next Media Company Manifesto

Here’s what I believe might need to be true about the next media company:

• Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.)
• Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow.
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready. (Mobile devices need to evolve here, too).
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.
• In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many.
• Contributors come in many shapes: onstaff, partner (how pros like TechCrunch link to Washington Post), guest (for love and glory only), and conversational come right to mind. Who else?
• Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from Ad Age or FastCompany?
• Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best?
• Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication to be a business periodical, then I don’t want to have to read a piece about sports.
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand.
• Do-it-yourself publishing is next for us all. At first.
• We will all audition for mass physical distribution.
• It won’t matter (mass physical distribution) to us, lots of the time.

What Else?

Am I way off here? Is this too Pollyanna? What makes sense? What’s just wrong? How far am I off from your perspective?

I welcome the conversation.