For fans of John Battelle
Blogger, Meet Marketer
June 09, 2005
By Fawn Fitter
John Battelle described his business model for connecting bloggers and marketers.
MediaPost Communications' premiere OMMA West conference -- focused on online media, marketing and advertising -- took place June 6 and 7 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Read coverage of Publicis Groupe Media's Rishad Tobaccowala's speech from Monday in which he outlined six issues that could collapse the interactive marketing industry if not addressed.
Tuesday, internet visionary and media guru John Battelle presented the afternoon keynote address. Battelle is taking on the challenge of monetizing the blogosphere as his next project. In his speech, Battelle announced the birth of his new company, Federated Media Publishing (FMP), and described it as an intermediary between bloggers who have a committed, active audience and marketers who want to reach those readers with focused, blog-appropriate messages.
FMP will work only with blogs that offer high-quality content, expertise and authority in the blogosphere -- a group Battelle numbered "in the tens" today and probably never more than a few hundred. The company will aggrega
te these chosen blogs into bundles of up to 20 based on theme or content, he said, and will serve as a "matchmaker" to suitable marketers.
FMP will provide metrics and analysis to both marketers and bloggers, allowing them to fine-tune their relationship over time, Battelle said. It will allow its member blogs to accept ads from other sources as well, he added, and members will be free to leave the FMP network without penalty at any time.
While Battelle said Tuesday's speech was his first announcement of FMP, the fledgling business has been a topic of rumor and speculation ever since he posted on Searchblog in late December that he intended to start a new business in media and technology. On March 31, Battelle started a new website at fmpub.net with a blog announcing "a publishing business focused on high quality content," partnering with site authors to provide them with revenue and back-end support.
Battelle, whose forthcoming book is called "The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google," revealed his latest venture in the last five minutes of a speech about how and where search and media intersect and collide. While mainstream media sees search as a brand killer, a trend that undermines its opportunities to sell advertising, search-savvy companies see it as a way to expand their audiences and create a measurable return on their marketing investment, Battelle said. Thanks to search, he said, "marketing is a sales channel."
In a post-search age where people are looking for specific content (i.e. business news) rather than a specific site (such as the Wall Street Journal's website), he explained, companies can build their businesses by harvesting user-generated content and using it to attract other customers. As an example, Battelle cited Amazon's reviews and "people who bought this book also bought these books" lists. In addition, he said, the more valuable specific content is, the higher it will appear in search engine rankings, giving the company further leverage in controlling the conversation about the subject, be it DVD players or rental cars.
How do blogs play into this? Looked at one way, they're simply another publication, one which creates content and fights to find an audience. But unlike mainstream media, Battelle pointed out, the best blogs have a direct, open, conversational relationship with their readers -- readers who have been trained by search to seek out content based on its relevance to their interests and intent. Marketing in the blogosphere means including commercial speech in the conversation, not as a one-way communication but as part of the discussion, he said. Aggregating blogs is, thus far, the best way to place appropriate marketing in a way that scales beyond the individual blog.
