by Liz Daube
Staff Writer
Just as the steam printing press made for a democratic wave of cheap newspapers in the 1800s, Josh Hallett thinks the Internet will make today’s news more accessible and communication between businesses and customers more direct than ever before – and he’s turned his knowledge of an ethereal and evolving medium into a career.
Hallett makes his living as one of roughly 15 independent blogging consultants in the United States. He lives in Winter Haven, Fla., but travels throughout the country to discuss the perks, problems and possibilities of online communication. He advises schools, groups and businesses – including the University of Florida, Jacksonville’s Marketing and Advertising Club (JaxMAC) and The Orlando Sentinel – on how he believes blogs can be used to monitor relevant trends and create better customer relationships.
Hallett’s Web site calls him an expert in the utilization of Web-based business communication. He says “expert” is a loose term for a devoted attempt to stay up to date on a “blogosphere” that sees about 1.4 million posts and 100,000 new blogs each day.
“Anybody who says they’re an expert in this field is a liar,” said Hallett. “The big thing is it’s constantly changing.”
The changes Hallett talks about aren’t always well-received. To start, he believes traditional media outlets like newspapers and television will continue to lose audiences to amateur bloggers, message boards and other online media.
Blogs are online journals with a wide range of purposes. Some people provide commentary or news about a specific topic, like local events or product reviews, while others are more personal online diaries. As blogs gain popularity, Hallett said, advertisers are looking to reach the targeted, younger audiences that follow, for example, a blog about MP3 players. Those advertisers are spending more money on online marketing – and less money on traditional ads.
“It’s a bit heart-wrenching to hear him talk,” said Alexandra Brownrigg, a JaxMAC member who works in The Florida Times-Union’s advertising department. “He talks about how the printed word is going to be on its way out the door for blogs and the grassroots marketing effort of people advising each other on what to buy or what not to buy.”
After explaining his impending doom theory for the traditional news media, Hallett tells advertisers and media outlets how they can try to adjust to Web-savvy audiences.
He encourages marketing professionals to use Web sites like Technorati.com to track what bloggers are saying about their companies and products – then contact those bloggers directly.
“It goes back to improving your brand and improving your relationship with customers,” said Hallett. “A traditional advertisement is a lecture or a pitch, whereas what’s going on here is a conversation. People react better to that.”
Hallett says many traditional advertisers worry that appeasing an upset customer – say, a blogger who complains about trouble with a cell phone – is just damage control. Rather than crafting an advertisement that lures customers in, Hallett says companies will have to focus on improving their products and customer service.
“You’re letting your customers advertise for you,” he said. “The only bad thing is you lose control of your image ... It kind of forces people to keep a higher standard.”
For example, he recently wrote a blog about how he needed to buy a digital camera for an event, but a new and improved model was coming out just days later. Hallett said Nikon read the blog, contacted him and loaned him a camera for the week – so he could wait to buy the new one.
“If you just go out there and fix the problem, they (unhappy customers) suddenly become your biggest fan,” said Hallett.
So far as the future of traditional media, he’s helped newspapers get familiar with new technology and connect with bloggers.
“I don’t think I understood the transformative nature of blogs and how the social network that blogs enable had really taken off,” said Anthony Moor, the associate managing editor of The Orlando Sentinel’s online department, which launched a blog initiative with Hallett’s help last year. “I knew of blogs really as diaries online. That’s really giving them short shrift; they’re more than that.”
The Sentinel’s print reporters contribute to blogs related to their beats on the paper’s Web site, offering additional information or a “more breezy, conversational” writing style not featured in the print edition. Hallett trained the reporters on how to link and connect with other bloggers to build an audience for their topics. Moor said the blogs give a “personality and a brand to the beats that the newspaper doesn’t.”
The blogs are supposed to raise online advertising revenues. Moor said Web site readership has increased 3 to 10 percent, depending on how it’s measured.
“We’re in the midst of a huge cultural shift in the news industry,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning of that and we want to create Web-native forms of content.”
When asked about the faults of blogging, Hallett said people have a tendency to post when angry or upset – and the vast number of blogs can make finding trustworthy sources of amateur news difficult.
“People are more willing to vocalize criticisms than praise,” he said.
Hallett said issues of online libel are still being worked out in the courts. In September, a Florida woman was awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted Internet messages accusing her of being a “crook,” a “con artist” and a “fraud.” In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from blog and message board postings have been filed across the nation.
In Hallett’s opinion, the importance of bloggers – and their millions of opinions – shouldn’t be underestimated.
“I get asked that a lot: ‘Who are these people, and why should I care?’ ” he said. “Every person who writes a blog is a person. When you belittle this and say, ‘I don’t care about this,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this customer.’ ”