Create your own demand
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
I've been reading alot recently about people creating a demand for themselves in the work place or as entrepreneurs simply be being creative with web 2.0 technology. Example: Robert Scoble was a "technical evangelist" at Microsoft before his demand rose so high that startup Podtech.net hired him away. He is seen as the world's first corporate blogger, a rank-and-file employee providing the outside world with an inside view of a company which has not been sugar-coated by the PR department. Some predict that Communications departments will be gone in 10 years. Scoble's willingness to both praise and criticize Microsoft propelled his popularity. Blog search engine Technorati ranks Scoble's site as the world's 22nd most popular blog, even though his blog talked about everything from his son's elementary school graduation to criticisms and praises of Microsoft products. Financial Times covers the topic a little bit:
"Thanks in no small part to Mr Scoble's influence, an increasing number of companies have begun to embrace employee blogging as a business tool.
But while bloggers have proven their ability to change the way customers feel about the
companies they work for and blog about, their personal brands remain portable  and highly desirable to competitors willing to offer the right incentives for an employee to make the switch."
Another creative idea people are creating are webcast TV shows. This is from Scoble's blog: "Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon (pictured), one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That's, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft."
As noted by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times (3/11/06), viewership numbers are similar to the size of a small cable show audience. In "A Blog Writes the Obituary of TV," Mitchell wrote:
- One recent week, the video blog Rocketboom drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics. The Abrams Report on MSNBC, meanwhile, drew 215,000 viewers to its weekday hourlong show about legal issues. Does this anecdote - that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences - prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business? A staff of two produces Rocketboom.com/vlog. "How many people do you think it takes to produce The Abrams Report on MSNBC?" Mr. Campbell asks.
posted by Michael Tavani @ 3:05 PM |
