Went to a particularly ideas-full conference run by the people at Sift - the people who manage the technology behind Simply.
There Lawrence Clarke introduced the idea of the 'Buzz Director'. This
is the person - expert in your industry - who follows what is going on
in the blogosphere and directs the rest of us to the latest controversy.
The
thesis goes like this. Odds on the best stories and the juiciest news
are not going to be broken on your site (no matter how hard you try)
but are scattered around the blogosphere. What Shel Holtz calls 'edge content' is becoming more important than the stuff we publish on our knowledge sites - whether Simply, Ragan or Melcrum - and much of it resides on blogs. Let me give you just a couple of recent examples. Lee Smith directed me to Liam Fitzpatrick's
blog where guest blogger Paul Massie, Chair of CIPRInside (the internal
communications group of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations)
laid into social media. Here there was a lively ding dong between a
sceptic (Massie) and the more socially-media inclined end of the
internal communication profession.
Then yesterday Neville Hobson went on FIR to podcast about the controversy of Debbie Weil trying to boost her corporate Alliconnect Blog. Alliconnect is a place to discuss weight loss with the creators of alli, an over-the-counter weight control medication, approved for OTC sales in the USA, made by GlaxoSmithKline. Allan Jenkins has been laying into her for encouraging fellow bloggers to put posts on her blog because it's not getting any from its readership.
These blogspats are more illuminating (and more
fun) than any academic article I could have commissioned on the
etiquette of blogging and they attract far more interest (measured by
the number of comments). And what's significant is that they flare up
out of nowhere, burn brightly and then subside very quickly sometimes
before you've caught them and put in your tuppence-worth. Famously
Dell managed to miss the exploding batteries story although they were at the heart of the firestorm.
So what we all need are Buzz Directors - people like Lee and Neville - to keep us up-to-date with the latest hot topic or controversy. These are the new Connectors of the blogosphere, the Technorati gossip columnists.
Is it just gossip? Or could Buzz Directors play
a key role in corporate communications within large organisations. If
you have a famous brand, should you not have a Buzz Director whose
full-time job is to scan the web about your iPhone or airline and
direct the rest of the company to what customers and commentators are
truly saying about your products or services. You might not like what
they unearth - but at least you can join the conversation.
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