Comments on: Do Corporate-Sponsored News Blogs Work? A Look at ThreatPost and Building43

By: gfsnell3

gfsnell3 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:08:29 +0000

Hi Tom:
It’s not about naming a better IT security aggregator, although TechTarget and some of the online IT books do an excellent job covering the space. It’s about whether Kaspersky’s investment is paying off.

I’ve been told by sources that the Compete.com numbers for ThreatPost are off and if the stats I’ve been shown are real then it is doing better than the Compete.com numbers indicate.

I’m curious though. You’re in IT security. Does ThreatPost being sponsored by a “security company” make you at all suspicious of the news they decide to aggregate? Do you trust them as an impartial, unbiased news source?

By: Tom Bain

Tom Bain — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:36:12 +0000

Name a better content aggregator for
IT security George. ThreatPost has all the feel of a more socially-engineered site like Twitter – and their Twitter pushes are better than other security sources. Their title does them justice – it focuses on the new threats and variations of threats that impact the market. That said what good is good content if its not consumed…

By: gfsnell3

gfsnell3 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:57:39 +0000

Hi Robert:
There’s no doubt that there are other success factors for Building43 other than audience numbers.

I’ll be curious to see what changes you and your team decide to implement in order to grow your community.

I agree that the information overload on the web is getting out of control. It can be difficult for people to manage their email, text messages and calendars – never mind Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites and RSS feeds and news sites and, well, you know…

Must say that I do miss reading the regular postings on Scobleizer, but understand how you need to prioritize the “day job.” I still think it is weird for you to be at RackSpace – but wish you the best of luck!

By: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:56:11 +0000

Part of the success of building43.com is not visible: it keeps us in touch with the startups who are trying to change the world and, who, buy lots of hosting. From that standpoint building43 has been a sizeable success, but it’s not one we talk about in public very often. Maybe we should.

As to using my face, I was explicitly trying to build a community of people who care about the 2010 Web and are trying to help other businesses get into it. From that aspect it’s been a C+. We haven’t gotten the community to gel here the way I’d hoped, but that’s because Twitter and Facebook are far better places to do that than FriendFeed and we misjudged there. We’re looking at those things and doing some rethinking that should be coming in early part of next year.

But you hit on another thing: I’m spread too thin. My blog isn’t getting the attention it deserves because I have been focusing more on social media. Now that Twitter’s lists are here you can see that start to pay off (in just the past couple of months I’ve gotten some nice growth on Twitter, which will pay off).

But something deeper is going on here. Look at http://twitter.com/#/list/Scobleizer/tech-news-brands and see how often it changes. The flow of news and distractions for people are going up. It’s harder to get attention, and the news brands like Techcrunch are now using more and more video so getting attention on video is more and more difficult.

All of this requires doing some innovation and making sure we remain relevant. I’m having a ball trying to figure it out, so I hope to be here for quite a while working on it.

By: gfsnell3

gfsnell3 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:46:01 +0000

Hi Mark:
Great points on social media and micro-targeting. I had to make some assumptions because I don’t have an inside track on the internal goals for either blog. So perhaps they would view the success/failure of the projects differently (in fact, I’m sure they do).

But since both are news focused, I assume (and I know how dangerous that can be) that they hired professional journalists and content creators so that they could reach a large (or at least larger) audience. Otherwise why use the strategy that they did? There are better ways to micro-target using social media.

I’m also more interested – at least in this post – about whether these kinds of corporate-sponsored “news” blogs will be able to attract large audiences and replace (or at least supplement) traditional news outlets in the creation, distribution and analysis of news.

Thanks for the feedback!

By: Mark Drapeau

Mark Drapeau — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:23:11 +0000

Good article, execpt for the hyper-focus on monthly unique visitors. While that might be the primary goal of (say) Brogan, who’s selling ads on his site and presumably making money from it, what if the goal of (say) Building 43 is not to get the most traffic possible but rather to attract extra eyeballs to the brand of Rackspace?

Here’s a real question: How many visitors to Building 43 had never been to the Rackspace site before? (I had never heard of Rackspace before Scoble went there.)

Here’s another question: How passionate are the (fewer) unique visitors to Building 43? If they are five times as passionate (w/r/t talking about you on their blogs, etc.) but you have one-third the traffic, isn’t that a marketing win?

There’s a difference between marketing goals and traffic metrics. No where in this article were the goals and strategies of the companies and people involved discussed.

I don’t disagree that Scoble might be the focus/face of the site though. Why hire a face and then leave him in the back room?