I am very excited by the tremendous growth opportunities in all these businesses for HP and by the market disruptions that digital technologies provide us. I look forward to leveraging my customer centricity and web 2.0 experiences to compete with the likes of Kodak.
So here are my recommendations for your summer vacation shopping:
- Digital camera r937 (available this summer): this 8-megapixel camera has the largest touch screen interface (3.6inch) of ANY camera on the market. This allows you to apply creative touches, easily tag photos, add e-mail addresses for easy sharing and create slide shows …. all in the camera. The digital camera includes the latest HP Design Gallery features such as in-camera red-eye removal, pet-eye fix and the famous slimming feature. Don’t forget to buy a few accessories!
- HP Photosmart 475 Compact Photo Printer: This compact printer is the only printer of its kind: it allows you to store up to 1,000 photos! It also lets you print true-to-life 5 x 7″ photos, as well as 4 x 6″s and panoramas.
- Snapfish: Register for the best value in photography (12c each 4×6 print) and benefit from the summer sale with 30% off all gifts
- Visit our Photosmart studios, for example at Albertsons in Huntington Beach. *Update* – Find the HP retail photo service closest to you to quickly create fun photo products here.
- Download a few movies at Walmart.com
The obvious next question is: what should I do with my blog? I welcome your thoughts, suggestions, feedback, and advice on the following questions:
- What topics should I cover? Web 2.0 marketing, digital photography trends, our new products and ventures, all of the above?
- Should I be more “aggressive” in challenging competitive claims?
- Which name shall I give the blog?
I cannot wait to hear your thoughts.

—————————–
Spencer Stuart released their updated study on the length of CMO tenure, where they show surprising results that the average tenure has dropped again this year to 23.2 months, the lowest among the C-Suite. ANA Marketing Maestros had a great follow up post, highlighting that the first and most important step for a successful CMO is to establish a contract with the CEO on what he/she expects from marketing.
Marketing has most probably the most inconsistent role of all functions across companies (for example, compared to finance, where the role varies less) and aligning on expectations and charter has become essential. My blogging friends here sent me an advance copy of their new book Marketing Champions (Wiley Editions) and I like their thinking. Their main argument is that CMOs have to a great extent failed so far to draw the linkage between marketing and the harvesting of cash flow.
They have developed a hierarchy of cash flow responsibilities that I resonate with at a high level. In their pyramid model, the responsibilities gradually build in their relevance to cash flow. I thought I would describe the model and add my own comments and recommendations:
Level 1: Communications. This is the foundation of marketing activities from PR, to advertising, internal communications and other vehicles. These activities are critical to the company, but are often perceived as disconnected from the generation of cash flow.
Marketers should focus on more clearly linking them to business results. For example, brand valuation activities greatly help move up the role of Marketing in the pyramid by treating the brand as a financial asset and linking communication activities to shareholder value.
Level 2: Lead Generation. This is especially valid in B2B companies where marketing is primarily considered as a support to the sales activity. Marketing’s role is focused on activities that increase the pipeline size and velocity such as direct marketing and events. However marketing has gradually disconnected its activities from sales: fewer marketing generated leads get accepted by sales and marketing struggles to understand the ultimate impact of these campaigns on win/loss.
Marketers need to place more focus on clearly demonstrating their contribution to the pipeline by structuring and streamlining the end to end campaign management process, especially in its breaks with sales.
Level 3: Revenue. Some top executives perceive marketing as a function that generates sales. They intuitively know that additional marketing dollars can help drive short term demand in the market for their products (especially in B2C).
Marketers should focus on more clearly communicating to the C-level how they are contributing to helping the customer go though the decision funnel from awareness to consideration, preference and purchase.

Level 4: Profits. The Marketing Champions book identifies the packaged good industry as the only industry where marketing practitioners have P&L responsibility. They manage the demand and supply side of a product or product line.
Without going to that extreme, I think all marketers have the opportunity to tie more closely their marketing activities to business results by determining their return on investment (ROMI). This requires the development of sophisticated analytical and statistical models that correlate marketing activities and incremental sales and gross margins.
Level 5: Customer equity. The marketers in these roles are responsible for customer acquisition, customer profitability and customer retention. This implies from a measurement perspective the development of customer lifetime value models (similar to what Fred Reichheld recommends) and net promoter scores. It requires marketing to take a broader role in designing and managing the entire customer experience and lifecycle.
Independently from what you aspire to, understanding the cash flow hierarchy and aligning with the C-level are critical steps to appropriately positioning the marketing function. This requires also the development of measurement systems that align with the cash flow hierarchy from brand valuations, to marketing’s contribution to the pipeline, ACPP, ROMI or net promoter scores to name a few.
What has been your experience? Where would you position the cash flow contribution of your marketing organization?
Read also “Marketing Excellence – Next Generation Wanted”
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy at HP. You can read his blog here

Marketers have recognized the need for a fundamental re-design of marketing practices linked to the technology-driven explosion of media vehicles, from the Internet, to cable TV, blogging or gaming. They have reacted by shifting their advertising budgets from traditional TV and print to online media. They are now experimenting with new technologies and viral marketing.
However, new technologies are enabling a more subtle shift that marketers have yet to recognize and adapt to …. I call it “dissociative identity marketing.” In medical terms, “dissociative identity” refers to the existence in an individual of two or more distinct identities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. “Dissociative identity marketing” would refer to the relationship a brand establishes with the various personas of a consume, from the blogging persona, to the social network persona or the gaming persona.
This phenomenon is not entirely new to marketers: they have had to grapple with the “dissociative identity” of their business customers, who are also consumers. The CIO of a Fortune 100 company could be interacting with HP on a $100 million IT outsourcing deal and on a $79 personal printer purchase for his daughter at the same time, but with different perceptions and interactions.
In these new cases, brands will have to act very carefully and respect online communities to avoid creating backlashs.
Blogging personas: understanding blogging personas can be complex for marketers as they tend to be fairly dissociated from their real life personas. At the same time, targeting blogging personas does not necessarily guarantee that you will reach their real life counterparts. Pete Blackshaw has IMHO one of the best written posts on the much blogged about Snakes on a Plane viral marketing campaign. He highlights that word of mouth spread through marketing bloggers who were enthusiastic about a studio inviting their consumers to “participate” but the core message and the core targeting did not necessarily reach the real life moviegoers.
Social networking personas: MySpace has introduced a blended form of advertising, allowing brands to create their own online personas to interact with social networking personas. Brands can have their own pages and their own friends’ lists.
A great example is the viral marketing campaign organized by FOX on Myspace for the release of X-Men as reported by Search Engine Lowdown. He highlights some of the smart uses of social networking personas and the strong success of this campaign (at least as measured in terms of number of friends).
BL Ochman reports in a recent post on other surprising examples such as Gil the Crab for the Honda Element, where the crab sounds off on the supposed decision to exclude him from upcoming Element TV ads.
Gaming personas: Nowhere is the development of brand personas more fascinating than in Second Life, the much hyped virtual reality world built by its 300 000 “residents.” New members can create avatars that interact with a new world, enjoy new experiences and connect with other virtual reality avatars.
According to a great Business Week article, residents spend a quarter of the time they’re logged in, a total of nearly 23,000 hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, available to everyone else. It would take a paid 4,100-person software team to do all that, says Linden Lab. Assuming those programmers make about $100,000 a year, that would be $410 million worth of free code work over a year.
Brands have been quick to react to the opportunity to establish themselves first in the virtual Second Life world and interact with the avatars. Digital Media Wire has an article on the “firsts” from second life.
For example, Starwoods Hotels will be opening a new line of moderately priced loft hotels and is testing the concept by having the first hotel built in Second Life. Similarly American Apparels opened a virtual store in Second life where items cost only $1 and has starting hiring virtual sales clerks. Kevin Maney even reports in his blog that Former Virginia governor (and rumored 2008 presidential candidate) Mark Warner has an avatar in Second Life.
So what do you think? Is “dissociative identity marketing” the latest fad or the ultimate customer-centric marketing?
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. You can find his blog here

He takes a look on a regular basis at the key mainstream media year over year comparisons.
Mainstream media evolution
* TV: network TV had its lowest weekly ratings ever in July. CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute the week of July 4th, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record of 21.5 million, set during the last week of July in 2005.
* Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. Album sales – including those sold via digital download – amounted to 8.91 million copies for the week ended July 23. That’s the first time Nielsen SoundScan has tallied fewer than 9 million units since 1996, when the week that closed February 4 marked 8.94 million.
* Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
* DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
* Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
I did a comparative research on the CGM side and found these stunning reverse trends:
Consumer generated media
YouTube announced in July that viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site. Nielsen/NetRatings reported that weekly U.S. Web traffic to video sharing site YouTube grew 75 percent in the week ending July 16th, from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors. Among the top 25 Web brands ranked by unique audience, YouTube was the fastest growing from January to June 2006, increasing 297 percent. The number of Web pages viewed has grown even faster, increasing 515 percent. (See my post on YouTube.)
Blogs
The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. Technorati now tracks 50 million blogs and is most probably underestimating the overall number of blogs (see my post on French blogging). The total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second. This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
Social networks
MySpace has 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that’s 10,593 page views per second). MySpace hasn’t overtaken Yahoo yet in terms of page views, but they are a solid second and are ahead of giants like MSN-Microsoft, Time Warner (including AOL), eBay, Google and Facebook.
If we …. as marketers …. follow where our customers go, we will need sooner or later to make the mental shift to consumer generated media.
UPDATE: my good blogging friend Mack recently wrote a post, highlighting that MySpace had reached the 100 million user mark….
UPDATE: Steve Rubel has a great post highlighting that membership at social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace is exploding. In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109% (primarily driven by MySpace). Most of this growth has come about in the past 12 months alone! Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants – Google and Yahoo.
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. Read his blog here.

…and poorly represented in the US-centric view of blogging. According to Dave Sifry’s post on the state of the blogosphere (part two), April 2006, less than a third of all posts are now written in English.
I have already covered some of the major Web 2.0 developments that could serve as test countries for marketing innovation, from the French blogging penetration to the amazing Korean social networking phenomenon. I decided to explore a smaller country and the impact Web 2.0 was having there.
One of the great benefits of working at HP is that I have access to a wealth of global and local technology knowledge in virtually every country in the world. You may remember, from my post on the human face of your blog’s traffic, my colleague Jorge Luis Revilla, who works as a project manager for HP Peru, but also happens to be one of the top 5 bloggers in the country with El Metaverso de JL. I connected with him to better understand the Peru blogging scene and he painted for me a fascinating picture.
Perú is a country with 26 million people, but only 5% of them own a PC. At the same time, more than 50% of the population has access to the Internet. Internet Cafes are a national phenomenon and there are more than 3,000 of them throughout the country, where people pay an average of 50 cents for an hour of connection. Most of the time, people in Internet cafes use email, chat and VoIP to keep in touch with distant relatives. Other Internet services such as video, music and even reading the news are limited to the lucky 5% with a home PC.
There are approximately 3000 Peruvian blogs registered in the two main local directories (BlogsPeru.com and PeruBlogs.com). However, according to a report published a few months ago, only 900 are updated regularly.
The top blogs in Perú cover a variety of topics. The #1 Blog is Blogsperu’s own blog about the Peruvian Blogosphere. Number 2, Pueblo Vruto is a protest blog, which complains about the government, society and many other things! Jorge’s blog is #3 and covers topics such as technology, marketing, gadgets, politics, etc.
The local media is watching the blog phenomenon and El Comercio, a respected local newspaper, recently wrote about them, but focused mainly on blogs of personal nature as online versions of the old diaries. They didn’t realize that blog quantity does not equal post quantity. More than half of the active blogs are personal but thematic blogs generate 80% of the content.
Most of the blog readers are IT workers, geeks and computer aficionados. Peru is still in the very early stages. But even in a country with 5% PC penetration, the blogosphere is starting to take hold.
Thanks JL!

One of my favorite books is the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, which studies epidemics and applies the learning to explain such social phenomenon as the crime drop in NYC or Sesame Street.
One of my main interests in joining the blogosphere was to better understand the emergence of viral blogging networks and other social effects of Web 2.0. I was very disappointed when I launched my blog 3 months ago and did not see any real marketing blogging community that I could connect into. The marketing community was a fragmented ecosphere with a few thought leaders such as Seth Godin or Ben McConnell.
And suddenly, a few players emerged that substantially changed the marketing social blogging network. I have been trying to think about their role in terms of the first law of an epidemic, the “law of the few.”
The “Connector” — Ann Handley, MarketingProfs Daily Fix
In Malcom Gladwell’s words, “Connectors know a lot of people. They have an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. They are also critical because of whom they know and they are able to draw on their connections to provide amplification and power to an idea or a network.” They see potential.
Ann is such a person and her blog emerged 3 months ago. She has been actively connecting with the key marketing players in the blogosphere, convincing them to write for the MarketingProfs Daily Fix. We also rely on connectors to give us access to opportunities and worlds to which we don’t belong, but that, once introduced, we function and thrive quite well. Ann was able to draw on her connections from the Marketing Profs newsletter (as well as her past connections as a founder of ClickZ.com) to establish her blog as a connecting platform.
The “Maven” — Mack Collier, The Viral Garden
“Connectors are not the only people that matter in a social epidemic. While connectors are the people specialists, mavens are the information specialists. Mavens are great collectors of information but also want to share their knowledge.” Then, they thrive on seeing others take that knowledge and run with it.
Such a Maven appeared 3 months ago when Mack set up his weekly Viral Garden top 25 marketing blog ranking. By publishing his weekly ranking, he shared a simple and very effective knowledge that had not been made visible before and that was furthered in its visibility by connectors like Ann. This is not the only way Mack seeks to share the wealth of information in his community; other initiatives include his “100 CDs for 100 bloggers,” which challenges music companies to commune with audiences directly through the blogosphere.
The “Salesmen”
In Malcom Gladwell’s words, “Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people …. – salesmen …. – with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing and they are as critical to the tipping point of word of mouth epidemics as the other two groups.” They do not need to “hard sell” their ideas, their passion is contagious.
Salesman #1 — David Armano, Logic + Emotion
David “sells” his readers on the idea that creativity, innovation and design are valuable marketing tools and that they need them in order to become relevant to the empowered consumer class. He tries to persuade people to look at creativity differently. His style is to present information in a compelling fashion and let his readers decide for themselves, which is typical from a “salesman.”
Salesman #2 …. – Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing
Toby is a true sales diva. She believes in the concept and that enthusiasm and excitement seems to energize other people. Her “light” style helps engage and build trust with the audience. That trust has in turn helped her open her readers to new ideas. One recent case in point is the viral impact of Toby’s post on the Jupiter Research corporate blog study and the snowball effect in the blogosphere.
Salesman #3 — Eric Mattson, Marketing Monger
Eric “sells” the future of online marketing, social media and podcasting. In many ways, he is just “selling” himself by doing something that other people (his listeners) value. By doing his interviews and sharing them with the world, he builds “social capital” which he can tap into in the future.
The marketing blogging social network is growing exponentially as experienced by the Alexa ranking threshold that you now need to achieve to be on the Viral Marketing ranking list. However, bloggers have a distorted view of their importance. We forget that being big in the blogosphere still doesn’t mean anything to 99% of the country. The risk for vibrant blogging communities is to be “trapped” in the blogosphere, which can quickly limit their epidemic effectiveness. So what will it take to transform this emerging community into a viral marketing network beyond the blogosphere?
Who are the right mavens, connectors and salesmen to make this happen? One opportunity is to identify the “few” that are able to bridge the gap between mainstream and blogosphere. It would require, for example, for Mack to build a reliable information source on blogs linked to corporate platforms such as Boeing’s Randy’s Journal, Forrester’s Marketing Blog or this blog. He could also build a top 25 marketing “salesmen” list based on influence, not ranking.
Another example would be to build more crossovers between the MarketingProfs traditional Web site/newsletter and its blog, or potentially find other connectors. ANA’s Marketing Maestros could be one of them if they opened their blog to postings from members. (By the way, I just noticed that Will promoted Mack’s list on June 1–.).
So what do you think? What will it take to spread the “epidemic” to the other 99% marketers?
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. Read his blog here.

…from Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs): help me drive business growth. However, while the mandate seems clear, few organizations, CEOs and CMOs have successfully implemented this new model. Most marketing organizations have undergone substantial re-organizations in the past few years and CMOs still have the shortest tenure of all C-level executives.
I have recently read with great interest the study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Booz Allen Hamilton about the structure and practices of marketing organizations. You will also find a summary of the various models on Brand Autopsy.
They have identified a category …. “Growth Champions” …. that correlates with better business performance: organizations in this category are 20% more likely to exhibit superior revenue growth and profitability in their industry than marketing departments in the other five categories. However Growth Champions represent only 9% of the marketing organizations surveyed, which points to the challenges of becoming a leading Marketing organization.
Here are the five key characteristics growth champions share:
Characteristic #1: Growth champions can identify their contribution to business growth and they gain added authority by their ability to define Return on Marketing Investment. (See my post on ROI). Marketing ROI is one of the greatest priorities but also one of the greatest challenges of marketing organizations. Few are able to link marketing investments to sales results and gross margin both at an individual campaign level as well as at an overall portfolio level. The first complexity CMOs face is to effectively track the “I” in ROI: marketing is the most fragmented spend in companies with each business group, category, regional and country organization owning part of the spend. Tracking the spend along dimensions that make sense for marketing ROI requires that CMOs lead the implementation of Marketing Resource Management (MRM) systems …. a significant change management effort which spans over 2-3 years.
ROI implementation requires in addition the development of closer linkages with sales with clearer hand offs and metrics at a campaign level as well the design of sophisticated statistical modeling to correlate multiple marketing activities to sales results. Growth champions have recognized the need for Marketing Performance Management (MPM) transformations and have initiated long term programs. We have at HP one of the largest MPM transformation initiative with significant MRM and CRM Siebel deployments connected to our Enterprise Data Warehouse and have started piloting sophisticated marketing mix models.
Characteristic #2: Growth champions have a broader range of capabilities beyond the conventional definition of marketing practices. Growth champions assume strategic responsibilities in addition to more traditional core marketing responsibilities. They play a key role in new business development, product innovation but also in approving large investments or new marketing entries. They have a broader set of skills that traditional marketers in areas such as analytical and leadership capabilities that allow them to work cross functionally and ultimately take leading operating roles. I recently wrote a post that highlights the ever expanding set of skills that a CMO needs to have vs. the more traditional brand oriented marketer.
Characteristic #3: They use standardized tools and processes for efficiency. Marketing is the last frontier of process discipline. Marketers have long resisted driving process rigor and see it as an inhibitor of marketing art and creativity. Others functions such as manufacturing, supply chain or even sales have undergone more automation and have been forced earlier on to apply this discipline. Growth champions recognize this need to drive the industrialization of marketing processes to fully take advantage of automation opportunities. They also understand this imperative as they drive more “IT-based Marketing” leveraging customer analytics. They apply proven techniques such as Six Sigma to fragmented manual marketing processes (see my post on process …. a bad word in Marketing)
Characteristic #4: They are proactive, not reactive in providing both guidance and services that they believe add value to the senior leadership team. They have a deep business and strategic understanding and apply their knowledge of the customer and of the marketing levers to help drive business growth. One great example is their ability to become the voice of the customer, lead customer experience design and link all siloed activities to deliver on business commitments.
Characteristic #5: They are perceived by other C-suite officers as contributors to and leaders of the growth agenda. Michael has a great comment on the ANA blog that marketers often lack the “street cred” to gain the respect of the CEO and CFO to be put them in the driver’s seat. When asked “can you tell your CFO what effect a 10% budget cut will have on your revenue and profits?” over 64% of marketers said no. How then can marketers expect to gain any credibility when the rest of the organization will resoundingly answer this question with a very loud “YES”.
So what will it take to move beyond 9% of all marketing organizations? It will require CMOs to aggressively develop a culture of accountability and discipline. It will also require marketing organizations to more clearly define and align their activities to delivering on business growth and quantify their contributions.
As Joseph Jaffe says: “One continuum is ideation to execution; another is innovation; a third is the coverage – and influence – throughout the organization (the opposite of a silo approach); a final one is the ability to try out new approaches (versus status quo/best practices)”.
***
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. Read his blog here.

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?
Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.
#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting …. The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months and cutting through the clutter will become ever more difficult with a new blog emerging every second. Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter.
Although this strategy made sense 12 months ago and still makes sense for the top bloggers, its effectiveness diminishes with every new blog created. Traffic is generated by successful bloggers linking to you either in their posts or in their blogroll. Mack at Viral Garden has a series of great posts on the importance of joining the community.
#2 …. Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway …. Unless you specifically target bloggers like Bruce, are a blogging consultant or blog about your latest book, traffic is irrelevant to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a much smarter strategy than posting frequently
#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 …. As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.
#4 – Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory. According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time
#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere …. My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.
A recent study by Forrester found a reluctance among marketers to shift from more tried-and-true online channels like search and e-mail marketing. Just 13 percent reported using blogs or social networks in marketing, and 49 percent said they had no plans to do so in the next year. If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype), frequent posting and required bandwidth are undoubtedly a major barrier to adoption.
#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality …. The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Ben at the Church of the Customer Blog explores the 1% rule and cites the Wikipedia example: 25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors. I would argue that the same is valid for the blogosphere as a whole where most of the original high value content is driven by 1% of the bloggers. Some of the most insightful … and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.
#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere …. as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content …. it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.
#8 – Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies …. As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value.
#9 – Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill …. According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write frequently certainly contributes to people abandoning their blogs. Is that in the blogosphere’s best interest to have a third of its participants frustrated by their initial efforts?
#10 – I love my family too much - Ann pointed out to me this cool blog that highlights the challenges of blogging addiction …. Bloggers Anonymous. Very funny–..
If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.
As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty. As Seth Godin says in his post, “blogging with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.”
As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. Read his blog here.

The wake up call for me was Dave Sifry’s post on the state of the blogosphere, April 2006, in which he clearly demonstrates the growing international nature of the Blogosphere.
Out of the 37.3 million blogs tracked by Technorati, less than a third of all posts are now written in English. The Blogosphere has become deeply international and multicultural with a growing importance of Japanese (37% of all posts) and Chinese blogging (15% of all posts). As David points out, he also grossly underestimates Korean blogging considering that the largest Korean blog and hompy services (like Cyworld or Planet Weblog) are not being indexed by Technorati at this time. Check out my post on Cyworld to understand this incredible phenomenon.
Japanese blog posting overweight could be explained by mobile phone blogging with numerous short posts and Chinese blogging is most probably linked to the rapid growth of Internet penetration in this country.
But one other fact caught my eye, because the explanation was less obvious. The French blogosphere is greatly underestimated by Technorati statistics and France has become one of the major blogging countries in the world. According to a compilation of French sources such as Mediametrie (see Loic’s podcast on the topic), France counts close to 7 million blogs today. This represents a significant part of the population, far above the penetration in the US or other European countries.
So why is France blogging and why should marketers pay attention? I decided to connect with leading French bloggers on the subject. Many thanks to Loic, Roland, Alain and our own in-house expert Srdjan for their insights.
2005 …. Web Tipping Point Year in France
According to Mediametrie, two tipping points have been achieved in 2005. More than 50% of French above 11 years of age are now Internet users and more than 25% shop online. More than 50% of households now own a computer with a very rapid growth of high speed connections: 80% of internet enabled households use high speed, which represents an 80% growth over last year.
According to Srdjan Ivo Vejvoda, one of HP’s European experts, “France has basically catapulted itself from being one of the laggards in Internet peneration among the developed western European countries to one of the leading adopters of Internet-enabled technology. One of the main reasons is the very rapid growth of high speed connections. Unlike the US, where you usually don’t have much of a choice from whom you get your DSL or other broadband connection, in France there is very healthy competition from multiple service providers offering which has driven prices down and increased higher speeds of connection. Here’s a great overview published in Salon last October about differing national broadband policies and how other countries have leapfrogged the US in this area, confirming the technology underpinnings of the international nature of the blogosphere.
This tipping point phenomenon is accelerated according to Alain Thys at Future Lab by online history in France. “Online history goes back to the 1980s with the use of the online terminal system Minitel. This little device which was eventually used by over 25 million households to do many things which still happen today. (Online chat was already a phenomenon in France before the English speaking world had ever heard of it.) Digital communication habits in France are essentially “one generation ahead,” which is also highlighted by the fact that many French kids are ‘hyperwired’ by Anglo-saxon standards. This also shows in the blogosphere.”
Many French people have therefore accessed the internet with high speed at a time of great awareness of blogs and have jumped immediately on the bandwagon. About 73% of all French internet users know what a blog is and 28% visit blogs in 2006 vs. only 20% mid 2005. Additionally according to Loic Le Meur, the leading French blogger and General Manager Europe for Six Apart, 7 million French people read blogs every month.
Youth-driven growth triggered by the emergence of French platforms
The penetration of blogs is greatly driven by the youth: 11-15 year old teens represent 35% of bloggers, 16-24 year olds represent 47%. Skyblog, a free blog hosting service launched by Skyrock Radio, is a great example of this trend. Skyrock was one of the first media companies in Europe to offer a blog publishing platform to its audience of 12 to 24 year olds in 2002. Skyblog now hosts close to 5 million blogs, mostly by teen listeners. It includes close to 245 million posts and 415 million comments. If you check their home page, you will notice that a skyblog is created almost every second!
It has also brought close to $10 million a year in advertising revenues to Skyrock. Skyblog has been the French equivalent of social networking developments such as Cyworld and myspace. Advertisers range from Coca Cola to Ecureuil (financial services) or SMS providers. Skyrock and Skyblog were acquired last month by a private equity firm.
Growth driven by opinion leaders
Blogging has taken a critical place in the political debate as we get closer to French presidential elections.
According to Srdjan, “The traditional print media have played a leading role in making blogs a part of mainstream in France. For example, one of the national dailies, Liberation, has its blog page but it also launched last month a weekly magazine called Ecrans (Screens) — that focuses very heavily on the Internet. The vénérable “Le Monde” has done even more and has a huge selection of blogs on its platform. A left-leaning news weekly, “Le nouvel Observateur” also has a significant blogging area.
Key French opinion leaders have also launched blogs to convey their ideas. Segolene Royal, one of the leading French presidential candidates, blogs on Desir d avenirs: close to 60,000 have visited her blog since December. As Roland Piquepaille … one of the leading French bloggers …. points out, she has not necessarily stayed true to the spirit of the blogosphere since 40 people contribute to writing her posts (see this French article on the topic). Nevertheless her initiative has clearly raised the awareness of blogs as a vehicle to bridge the gap between politicians and citizens. Similarly Dominique Strauss Kahn, another French politician, claims one million pages read and 26,000 comments on his blog.
According to Roland, the case of Michel-Edouard Leclerc is quite atypical for a French CEO but contributes to the increased awareness of the French blogosphere. Michel-Edouard Leclerc, CEO of E. Leclerc, a leading discount retailer, leverages blogging as a key lobbying tool to criticize French policies as well as to communicate his own moral values. Similarly Pierre Bilger, a former Alsthom CEO, started a blog to convery his personal views following a scandal around his golden parachute.
So what does all this mean for marketers?
Blogging marketing is still in its infancy across the world and marketers should apply sound marketing practices. At the same time, France can represent a very interesting marketing pilot country (similar to Korea in Asia). A very interesting case study is Vichy, a skincare company, part of the L’Oreal Group. Vichy launched a blog for the introduction of a new anti-aging product as part of an integrated marketing campaign.
Bloggers quickly bashed the Vichy blog for presenting a fake character and filtering comments. The Vichy team learned from its mistakes and developed a blog with bloggers going through the anti-aging treatment and providing honest feedback, creating viral marketing for its cream. Shel has a great post on the Vichy experience on his blog.