On Tues­day night, the orga­niz­ers took us to a great tra­di­tional Roman­ian restau­rant where I real­ized that one of my favorite non-beef foods, namely “Sar­male” (cab­bage rolls filled with a spe­cial kind of cured meat), is a national dish here in Roma­nia. We also got to watch a group of dancers and we even engaged actively in the action (poorly though, at least in my case :). Later that night we vis­ited Planter’s club later. I must admit that get­ting up at 7 on Wednes­day was quite tough, but as soon as the first ses­sion began, the fatigue van­ished in an instant.

The sec­ond day of the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 started with Loic LeMeur’s view on the future of social media. Loic talked about cur­rent trends like the new Twit­ter list fea­ture, social ser­vices like Google Lat­i­tude and a lot more — on the way to the Palace I did an inter­view we him, the video will be online asap.

Math­ias Lüfkens from Switzer­land, Social Media Offi­cer with the World Eco­nomic Forum in Davos, stressed the impor­tance of CEOs act­ing like jour­nal­ists when using social net­works. Math­ias also said that the num­ber of vis­i­tors on your own site doesn’t mat­ter any­more, since you have to be at so many spots in the social web. I totally agree when it comes to PR, but this strat­egy highly depends on one’s per­sonal goals: social media plat­forms are a per­fect tool for dri­ving traf­fic to any given site, so if you’re think­ing about mon­e­tiz­ing your own group, the fun­nel setup might look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Math­ias also enjoys Twit­ter a lot, espe­cially since it works so well on mobile phones. And when he tweets, a lot of fol­low­ers lis­ten: The eco­nomic forum has 1.3 mil­lion (!) fol­low­ers — this is what hap­pens when you’re on the “Twit­ter rec­om­mends” list.

Dario Gallo is a jour­nal­ist and Twit­ter celeb in Argentina. He gave his keynote speech in Span­ish and I was quite sur­prised when he explained that blog­ging isn’t too pop­u­lar in Argentina as the nec­es­sary tools (mobile media, inter­net access) are not widely avail­able, at least not for free. But I strongly dis­agree with his tango-comparison:

Writ­ing a blog is like writ­ing a tango — to write a tango, one has to suffer.

Eric Dupin runs France’s most suc­cess­ful blog “Presse Cit­ron” — last night, we did a bit of number-crunching — his unique vis­i­tor fig­ures are most impres­sive, and he pub­lishes 5–7 sto­ries per day. I enjoyed his pre­sen­ta­tion a lot as Eric man­aged to explain the enor­mous power of crowd sourc­ing very con­cisely. Btw: there’s more to come from Mr. Press-Citron — Eric agreed to do a guest post­ing here on datadirt in the near future!

After the first cof­fee break I gave my speech about the future and blog­ging and the mon­e­ti­za­tion of blogs — I stressed the fol­low­ing points:

• Social media ser­vices like Twit­ter or Face­book are not a replace­ment for a blog. It’s dan­ger­ous to totally rely on third party ser­vices, because the only way to have full con­trol over one’s con­tents is a self-hosted site.
• Before you start using Face­book, FlickR and other pub­lish­ing ser­vices, ask your­self the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “Do I want to get my con­tent out to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble or do I want to drive as many users as pos­si­ble to my own site?” This answer deter­mines how to use these ser­vices, as there are var­i­ous options: there’s a huge dif­fer­ence between using social media ser­vices as pub­lish­ing plat­forms or traf­fic dri­vers. If the lat­ter is your choice, use social media to tease peo­ple: upload some of your con­tent and tell peo­ple that they will find more pho­tos, videos or what­ever on your blog. Using this “push-technique” can be immensely effec­tive; I get about 1/3 of of my blog traf­fic via social media ser­vices, and I need to have surfers on my own site for brand-building, for increas­ing the num­ber of RSS read­ers and for mon­e­tiz­ing my con­tents effectively.
• Ban­ner ads are dead. Or at least dead-ish: more and more peo­ple use ad block­ers, less and less click ban­ners at all. The most effec­tive way of mon­e­tiz­ing a blog these days is affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing. The key fac­tor to suc­cess is find­ing the prod­ucts and ser­vices read­ers are highly inter­ested in — and this requires a good deal of research.
• Blog mon­e­ti­za­tion is in an exper­i­men­tal stage. In a cou­ple of years, more and more ad net­works spe­cial­iz­ing in blogs will offer their ser­vices. Until then, it’s trial and error: try as many dif­fer­ent ad strate­gies as pos­si­ble, gather data, do some com­par­isons and then keep opti­miz­ing the things that work. There is not mas­ter plan — it really *is* trial and error.
• “Dis­clo­sure” is com­pletely over­rated. It’s not impor­tant if pay­ment or some other com­pen­sa­tion is involved in pub­lish­ing a post — it’s all about adding value for your read­ers. Do that, and your user base will increase. Don’t do that, and it’s going to decrease — we’re talk­ing about a pretty self-regulatory sys­tem here. Mon­e­ti­za­tion does not play any role in this part. And to me, the line between “edi­to­r­ial” con­tent and ads never really existed, given that buy­ing your way into the edi­to­r­ial part of any mag­a­zine is easy if you buy some of their ads (and in many cases, it’s even a pre­req­ui­site). So instead of wor­ry­ing so much about (un)disclosure, blog­gers should rather be keen on find­ing out which prod­ucts and ser­vices add value for the user — read­ers don’t care if a post­ing is paid or not as long as it con­tains infor­ma­tion which is valu­able for them. This prob­a­bly sounds hereti­cal to many, but I strongly believe that users must learn to mis­trust blog­gers and to form their own opin­ion using var­i­ous sources. Nobody is able to pub­lish “the truth”, because there is none — there’s just a mul­ti­tude of opin­ions and points of view. So in the process of form­ing their own opin­ion, users have to learn not to rely on one sin­gle source but to take full advan­tage of one of the main strengths of the net: It’s really easy to look up a sec­ond and a third opinion.

After my pre­sen­ta­tion, Ramon Stop­pe­len­burg pointed out that blog­ging for him is all about shar­ing — not only con­tent, but also shar­ing the money you make from your blog with your readers.

Pedja Puselja from Ser­bia not using blogs any more, he spe­cial­izes in social mar­ket­ing and is solely using Twit­ter and Face­book to mar­ket projects for his clients. Andrea Vas­cel­lari from Fin­land said that he’s usu­ally quite reluc­tant to talk about the future (rea­son: the lack of a crys­tal ball), but I enjoyed his talk a lot — he has some very inter­est­ing ideas on how the web changes the rela­tions between users and brands:

We live in the atten­tion area — things are turn­ing upside down. We see a shift from the tra­di­tional top-down approach to users actively research­ing infor­ma­tion about brands and ser­vices online. The trust level with orga­ni­za­tions is decreas­ing, while the trust level between indi­vid­u­als is increas­ing at the same time.

Online Jour­nal­ism and civil society

Onnik Kriko­rian from Arme­nia opened the after­noon ses­sion about online jour­nal­ism and civil soci­ety, fol­lowed by David Sasaki who promised a con­tro­ver­sial speech (“con­tro­versy fuels dis­cus­sion”) — and he kept his promise. His pre­sen­ta­tion cen­tered on the fol­low­ing ques­tions: What are the ethics of atten­tion? Which are the deter­min­ing fac­tors that direct our atten­tion? And con­tro­ver­sial his speech was indeed — and I’m not just say­ing that because David pointed out that he agrees with me in that the main moti­va­tion for actively engag­ing in social media is self-interest. David also stressed the fact that even dur­ing the con­fer­ence many of us were dis­tracted, doing other things instead of really lis­ten­ing to each other. Self-interest is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, but espe­cially we blog­gers tend to for­get that the “notion of one’s own impor­tance” is a large and deter­min­ing part of the human con­di­tion. The means of cre­at­ing images of self at have mul­ti­plied via social media — and I fully agree with David when he says that prob­a­bly we should learn to lis­ten to each other again — after all, that’s how empa­thy grows.

Jeff Jedras from Canada is an avid watcher of the blo­gos­phere and he senses a lack of self-imposed regulation:

We as blog­gers need to come to some con­clu­sions — by now, it’s like in the Wild West: every per­son has got stan­dards of their own.

I totally dis­agree with him — Jeff even pro­posed some badge for blog­gers who abide by cer­tain stan­dards; I don’t think that’s a good idea, because there are only two options: either the badge is eas­ily abus­able by exactly the folks with low stan­dards, or it ends in some kind of jury which decides about the “okay­ness” of blogs. Sur­prise, sur­prise: I’m not a big fan of regulation.

Jakub Gor­nicki from Poland, head devel­oper at mixxt.com and co-creator of prezi.com, had planned to become a jour­nal­ist (“and to visit a lot of press con­fer­ences includ­ing free food”), but at some point his focus switched to new media. He trav­els around with an 11kg bag and loves being able to pro­duce any kind of media any­where and recently started doing live online TV-shows. This kind of inde­pen­dence is espe­cially valu­able if you take a look at the poor guys pro­duc­ing con­tent for old media: it’s really expen­sive to pro­duce the stuff needed to fill the empty spaces in between the ads, the pres­sure increases while the low­ered quality-standards are a media-fest for PR agencies.

Dvorit Shar­gal from Israel authors the vel­vet under­ground blog which focuses on media crit­i­cism. When she started blog­ging, she had no pre­vi­ous online pub­lish­ing expe­ri­ences yet still her blog became a huge suc­cess in Israel after a very short time. The main rea­son, she explained, was that jour­nal­ists are dying for feed­back (seems they got a pretty dif­fer­ent type of journos in Israel). She started blog­ging anony­mously yet strictly stuck to jour­nal­ist stan­dard — Israel obvi­ously has some spe­cial obfus­ca­tion pol­icy when it comes to mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Erkan Saka from Turkey and Petrisor Obae from Roma­nia com­pleted the ses­sion with their views on the role of blog­gers in journalism.

The influ­ence of blogs on the civil society

I feel a lit­tle guilty about this, but I have to admit that I wasn’t lis­ten­ing too closely to the final pre­sen­ta­tions, as two days of dis­cus­sions and intense debates took their toll on my atten­tion span — plus I missed Jakub Gor­nickis open­ing pre­sen­ta­tion. Helge Fahrn­berger from Aus­tria asked the par­tic­i­pants if they had heard about the cur­rent stu­dent protests in Aus­tria — about 10 hands went up. Helge explained the role of the inter­net (mainly Twit­ter plus a Wiki) in the orga­ni­za­tion of the protests: this was actu­ally the first time that such a huge-scale protest was orga­nized with­out rely­ing on any kind of main­stream media, yet still the results and the vis­i­bil­ity were over­whelm­ing. Helge’s speech fueled the dis­cus­sion, as there are obvi­ously two dif­fer­ent notions: some peo­ple believe that “slack­tivism” is just a way of del­e­gat­ing respon­si­bil­ity while oth­ers think that social media activism will effec­tively change the world for the better.

Gio­vanni Rug­geri from Arme­nia gave his speech about the advan­tages of blogs (avail­able tech­nol­ogy, sim­ple setup and so on) — he is very fond of the oppor­tu­ni­ties dig­i­tal media offers to pas­sion­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tors. Onnik Kriko­rian, born in GB and liv­ing in Arme­nia, had a cou­ple of inter­est­ing exam­ples about the use of social media in Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia. He pointed out that social media is just one more tool and he rec­om­mends: don’t gen­er­ally use it for every­thing. Use it when it’s appropriate.

After the end of the last ses­sion the last day of WBF2009 ended with a heated dis­cus­sion about a “blog­ging con­sti­tu­tion” which is con­tin­ued on the wbcon­sti­tu­tion wiki — join the dis­cus­sion, we need to estab­lish a broad dia­logue as one of the main ideas is to find ways to mutu­ally sup­port detained blog­gers all over the world.

More on the World Blog­ging Forum 2009

A lot of par­tic­i­pants pub­lished pho­tos, videos and reviews — last week, #wbf2009 even was the hottest trend in Roman­ian twit­tos­phere! Andrei, author of the Swamblog, did an inter­view with me — we got a lot in com­mon, not only topic, but also logo-wise. Wel­come to the asso­ci­a­tion of frog blog­gers!

Andrea uploaded his pics to FlickR, Chinezu and w2.ro pub­lished a reviews (in Roman­ian), Luca Sar­toni uploaded a video about the event includ­ing var­i­ous statements:

More reviews: Daniel Bobe pub­lished an in-depth review of the event, Eric Dupin summed up our adven­tures in Bucharest.

Big up and thanks again to Mihaela and her team — the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 was an unfor­get­table, enthralling expe­ri­ence for me. Thank you so much for invit­ing me to Bucharest and I hope to see all of you again soon!