May 9th, 2005

Filed under:
Blogosphere
6 Comments »

Improve My Pastel Diagram

A very bloggy post–regular people, feel free to move along.

This Wednesday, Jeremy and I are the lunchtime entertainment at Vision (what, registration is at 7:00am?), a conference run by the ironically-named BC chapter of the American Marketing Association. Predictably, we’re talking about blogs.

In thinking about our talk, I made two very simplistic diagrams. One expressing the world of PR and marketing before blogs, and one after. They’re after the jump.

Hopefully they’re fairly self-explanatory.


Old school


Err, new school

My difficulty lies in positioning the bloggers in the second graphic. To me, they’re both media and consumers, yet they’re also talking to both groups. Should the bloggers set encompass both groups, with some inward pointing arrows? Should they overlap both sets, with some arrows pointing to each of the other groups? Is it fine the way it is? Am I on crack?

Comments: 6 Responses so far

Derek
May 9th, 2005
1:09 am

I think the position is fine, but the arrows around the Bloggers should be bidirectional, since blogger types tend to post about stuff from all sides and (depending on who they are) also get read by those from all sides.

That also provides a mechanism for information to get back to the Companies and Media from the Consumers (via the Bloggers), which is how things occasionally actually work nowadays.

In addition, it might be a bit better if the Bloggers blob intersected with the others, since there are bloggers in each category, and few who are entirely outside any of the others.

How about Customers instead of Consumers, too? :)

[Reply]

Dean
May 9th, 2005
8:12 am

1. I think the arrows to-from Blogistan need to be bidirectional.
2. I think Blogistan should overlap the three other spheres. Your first diagram is, I think, correct. The second is incomplete, in that it implies that Blogistan was sort of added, just dropped in to the mix. I don’t think that’s what is happening. Rather, I think that the concept of the blog is blurring what were once clear delineations (sp?).

For example, I read the blogs of media people. I read the blogs of consumers. I read the blogs of company people. When I write, I most often write as a consumer, but sometimes I write as a company person. Presumably, at least some of the people in each sphere read the blogs of people in other spheres. Statistically, I suppose, they’d have to.

The end result, though, is that members of each sphere have access to, and can become at least a partial member of the other two spheres.

[Reply]

Kris
May 9th, 2005
9:59 am

I’d love to come take some photos of your talk. Can you get me in for that?
Good stuff on the diagrams. :)

kk+

[Reply]

Travis
May 9th, 2005
12:30 pm

I think the bloggers should be all Venn diagrammy and overlap consumers and media.

[Reply]

Anders Floor
May 9th, 2005
6:28 pm

Like others, I think you missed the overlap in the second diagram, and that communication isn’t one-directional anymore.

Furthermore, this would put bloggers in the center of all things. Even though the influence and power of the blogosphere cannot be denied, it should also not be overrated - something all bloggers tend to do. When talking about the influence of blogs you should, amongst others, not bypass all the other means of consumer generated media: bulletin boards, forums, chatrooms etc etc etc.

My version:
http://tinyurl.com/bbl6v

No arrows: all traffic is multidirectional. To be more accurate it would have to be a 3d or maybe even 4-dimensional chart, but hey, I should have been in bed long time ago by now so give me a break ;-)

[Reply]

Anders Floor
May 9th, 2005
6:32 pm

My apologies, that’s an internal url. This one should work:
http://tinyurl.com/824gz

[Reply]

Add a comment