Click to download the podcast

Dave:

Paul:  Hi, David.  Pleased to be here. 

Dave: Perhaps you could give us a little bit of a preview of the upcoming book, Paul.  That will give people a sense of what you are about. 

Dave: The wild new world of social media. That sounds great.  What I thought we could do today is look at the world of social media and professionally produced media from the standpoint of a marketer.  You have had an interesting background in the B-to-B space and you are looking forward to casting your eyes forward in the consumer space and also the social media space.  What I would like to do is start with perhaps a little bit of your experience as founding editor-in-chief at Tech Target.  There, you were involved with a lot of content that inherently wants to be free, meaning freely available, free of cost, but has a certain objective with respect to marketing.  Maybe you could talk a little bit about your experience in the B-to-B space at Tech Target and speculate on what professionally-produced content of that nature might mean for business-to-consumer marketers. 

Paul:  The business model at Tech Target changed somewhat after a couple of years.  Originally, it was an aggregation model and then, it turned into more of an original content model, but the basic idea was still the same, and that is to organize.  I think that is going to become a more compelling content model on the Internet because of the sheer number of voices that are out there right now, with however many blogs there are – 60 or 70 million – 100 million MySpace users and all the video and podcasting.  Obviously, there is no way you can keep up with that, so the challenge becomes, how do you organize that and create some recommendations, really tell people what they should be – what’s interesting, not just what's out there, but what's interesting.  That was really the model at Tech Target and it's something that I think become a much more dominant model in the future because the volume of information is just exploding, so much more information on the Internet now, than there was seven years ago when we were starting Tech Target. 

The other thing about Tech Target that I learned that was very compelling to me was the power of small communities.  Media has historically, going back approximately 150 years, has been driven the concept of large, very large scope and broad reach, and what Tech Target did was really turn that on its head and say, no, the power is really in small – small communities, engaged people who are really interested and who want to interact with other people who have similar interests and those are very good people to get your message in front of. 

Seth Godin's new book is called Small is the New Big.  I think that really sums it up.  The future of media is in small markets. 

Dave: If we make that vivid for our audience, a small community in the B-to-B space might be a community focused on just VOIP, for example, or certain aspects of disk storage perhaps, things like that? 

Paul:  Sure, it could be anything.  It could be people focused on purchasing or some kind of computer application, computer software application, or people who do a particular kind of engineering, manufacturing people. 

One great example is there is a blog called the Tin Basher Blog that I love.  It's produced by a company called Butler Sheet Metal, in the UK, and it's all about sheet metal and sheet metal is a very fine art, in some respects, what people at this company do, and they've developed a following of several thousand daily visitors who are passionate about sheet metal.  You couldn't have done that five years ago, and now you can create these communities and you can interact with them and you can actually conduct commerce with them.  That's what the medium is doing.

Dave: So, now if you take the lessons learned from the B-to-B space, with Tech Target, and speculate a little bit about what they might have in store for consumer marketers, any thoughts along those lines? 

Paul:  Yes.  I think that already, you should be targeting communities either by demographics or by interest and identifying the areas where you can reach those people.  For example, if you are trying to reach teenagers, you should be on MySpace.  There is a very compelling body of evidence that a good MySpace presence can yield a lot of brand recognition for your company and the entertainment companies, in droves, are flocking to MySpace because that's where they are reaching the customers they want to reach. 

I think if you are in other consumer areas, the communities will be somewhat different, but the communities are out there.  It's not hard to find people who are talking about cosmetics or about herbal remedies or about beer or whatever else may interest you.  There are groups out there, there are people out there, who are talking about this.  It's easy to find them using search engines, and increasingly, I think you'll see these people organizing into groups that are sort of gated communities, kind of a MySpace for bicycle lovers, for example, and those communities are beginning to pop up, now, too. 

So, I think the MySpace model is going to be taken into many other smaller special interest communities in the coming years, and marketers should really be tuned into where that's happening in their area. 

Dave: If I’m a marketer that has professionally produced content that I believe is informative and definitely of interest to one of these small communities, do I insert that content sort of forthrightly under my brand or is it important to take a more gorilla- or street-marketing online approach? 

Paul:   That's a very interesting question.  It’s a good question, David.  The issue of transparency is very vigorously debated in the blogosphere.  It is important to be direct.  Deception is considered uncool in blogging and in social networking. 

That said, there have been some campaigns that have been fairly successful, where there was deception inherent in them.  The best example was probably the Blair Witch Project, which was promoted through online Internet meetings, with the message that said that this was a real story, even though it was false.  That worked for them. 

Nevertheless, I think that it's more effective in social media.  The norms that are emerging there now are, you listen for awhile, you get a sense of what the community is like, what people are talking about, the types of terms they use, the culture norms in the community, and then you start by commenting on what they say and you sort of gently enter.  That's if you are entering as a participant. 

If you are entering as a sponsor, you do it as a sponsor.  You set up a storefront; you say, this is what I am, I am in business and I am here to give you things that are helpful to you, and you conduct yourself like a commercial enterprise and that's working in a lot of cases, but I think it's best not to try to deceive people because once they find you out, your name will be mud forever. 

Dave: Exactly.  So tune in before you strike a tone deaf contribution, basically.  Hey, let's turn this around and go in the other direction.  So we've got this explosion of social media and community content, much of which is authored by and about consumer enthusiast sort of endeavors and activities and products and so on.  Are we going to see some of that community content start to impact the B-to-B space?  So, this is in contrast with the professionally produced content.  Are we going to see community authored content and social media creeping into the B-to-B realm?

Paul:  Well, the origins of social media were in B-to-B.  If you go back to the early bulletin boards, CompuServe and The Well and the like, those were frequented by technologists, by computer programmers.  And that was a very B-to-B type of discussion.  In fact, the Internet itself was first used as a B-to-B medium.  However, your point is good, that outside of the text space, there really haven't been a lot of vigorous B-to-B communities that have emerged yet.  I do believe that that is going to happen; I believe that that's happening behind the firewall right now and a lot of this activity is invisible because companies are interacting with each other using social media tools, but they're doing it out of public sight.

Paul:  Right.  There is an awful lot of behind-the-firewall activity that you'll never see, that we'll never see.  There are communities developing in many B-to-B areas; marketing is one example.  There is very active social networking being used.  Another would be sales, more by corporate discipline than by market, by vertical SI code.  But I think we'll see how that plays out.

Dave: Paul, that's an interesting point.  We actually have one customer that uses a blog very effectively for their sales force.  So I understand what you're saying there with some of this going on behind the firewall.  And that is private to that company.  Interesting.  Hey, one thing that we could perhaps touch on before we wrap up here is what you see going forward and, in particular, if you have any thoughts around the whole idea of Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, which is starting to receive a lot of speculation these days.  What's in store next?

Paul:  Well, I think Web 3.0 will be the Video Web.  I think that's emerging right now.  YouTube is the poster child in that area, but there are many, many other sites that are coming about.  Google Video is huge already.  I think we've got a lot of running room in seeing how the Video Web plays out.  It's still very early.  YouTube is barely a year old, so I think that's going to be next.  In Web 4.0, or whatever follows the video – Web 3.5, I don't know what they're going to call it – I think that that is going to be driven by this small community trend.  It's going to be a devolution of the MySpace model into hundreds of small, special-interest communities.  And some of these will be gated, by the way.  Some of them, you won't be able to get access to unless you pay or unless you demonstrate that you have a certain kind of expertise.  And that's going to be really interesting because the volume of information that will be published when people are really engaged with a topic is going to be explosive.  Semantic Web, I'm not so sure I even understand what that is (laughter).

Dave:  Still an idea on the drawing board, to some extent, I think.  Well, this has been great, Paul.  Thank you so much.  We've been speaking today with Paul Gillin.  And do we have a title for the book yet?

Paul:   It's called The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to Social Media.

Dave: Wonderful.  And we think it might be out in the springtime.

Paul:  They're pushing for March now, which I certainly hope they'll make, and it's Quill Driver Books, where you can go and let them know that you're interested.

Dave: Very good.  Well, thank you very much Paul, and it's been terrific talking with you today.

Paul:   Thanks a lot, David.

Paul Gillin is a veteran technology journalist with more than 23 years of editorial leadership. Paul was founding editor-in-chief of TechTarget, one of the most successful new media entities to emerge on the Internet. Previously, he was editor-in-chief and executive editor of Computerworld magazine. He writes the social media column for BtoB magazine, and his forthcoming book, The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Media, chronicling the changes in markets being driven by the new breed of bloggers and podcasters, will be published by Quill Driver Books in Spring, 2007. Gillin specializes in advising business-to-business marketers on strategies to optimize their use of online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. He is particularly interested in social media and the application of personal publishing to brand awareness and business marketing. Paul blogs at www.paulgillin.com.