Point of View: Jason Falls

In the past two years Zemanta built quite a fan base and a lot of our users are very interesting people with a lot of valuable media knowledge and industry insights. So we decided to feature their opinions in our blog, starting today with a new Tuesday series of Zemanta User’s Points of View. Our first guest will be Jason Falls.

Jason is an expert on social media and online communications with 15 years of proven track record in public relations, corporate communications, branding and advertising, social media campaigns and marketing.

He started his professional blog, SocialMediaExplorer.com, in 2007 when he took on directorship of interactive & on-line communications at Doe Anderson Advertising. He previously had a personal blog that dated back to 1997. He blogs passionately, with posts almost every other day, uses his blog to leverage professional reputation, and monetizes his blog.

His 2010 resolutions which he cared to share with the readership of his www.socialmediaexplorer.com blog were: don’t follow the crowd, have laser focus, move the needle, flee the bubble and remember why you did it. All of those goals we find interesting at Zemanta as well. So we decided to give you a chance to get to know one of Zemanta users, Jason, a little bit better.

Jason, let’s start with a simple recommendation for our readers – What is the one blog you read more frequently than you write your own?

For social media and business thoughts, I really enjoy Amber Naslund’s blog. She’s a phenomenal writer and a smart marketing mind who has a way of delivering strong messages through great storytelling. For personal purposes, I enjoy Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits because it helps keep me focused on simplicity, which makes life better.

Now, your own blog, The Social Media Explorer, covers topics related to online marketing and social media practices, evaluation and philosophy, with a broad range of personal insights and experiences that act like triggers for blog post topics. How would you refer to your early blogging ideas in comparison with what you know about the media now?

I think everyone starts out experimenting with topics, styles, lengths and more. It takes developing a voice and a focus before you become really comfortable in your blogging skin. I had an advantage, though, of having experimented with a personal blog for 10 years before I ever started Social Media Explorer. The style was old habit, by then. It was only the complete grasp of the topic that I needed work on. Fortunately, I’m a quick read and learned fast by actually doing social media for clients.

Your blog is industry/medium specific; it probably attracts a very specific profile of readers. However with the increasing popularity and importance of social media this audience is probably diversifying. What changes have you noticed in your readership throughout your career?

The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that most of my traffic comes from search engines and referrals – first time visitors. I’m not writing for a close-knit community like I once thought. Repeat visitors are only 30 percent of my audience. Everyone else comes for the first time, not knowing who I am or being part of my “following.” That changes the way you blog fundamentally, I think. Winning search terms, for whatever reason, suddenly takes a higher priority, especially if you can monetize that through business leads or advertising opportunities.

But I think I would also say that fewer people comment these days. I would venture to say fewer people actually read the whole post, too. Twitter has shortened our attention span and made us more browsers than readers. That’s sad. But that’s the way the market has taken us.

The blog media is still being labeled a young medium. You have been able to observe and compare its workings and behavior from the inside out. Would you be able to outline some features the blogosphere has that can be attributed to a young medium, although they are purely medium specific and will not change with maturity?

I’m not sure there’s anything that won’t change at all, but I do think there will always be that faction of bloggers that thinks they are entitled to advertising dollars and special treatment because they’ve managed to build a bit of a following. It’s shocking to me how some bloggers think they’re suddenly marketing consultants because they built a little audience around a specific niche. It’s the same thing with people who figured out how to drive traffic on Digg.com and similar voting sites. You’re not a marketing expert. You have experience and ability in one small sliver of that world, but when a PR person pitches you and you respond with, “I charge $125 per hour to speak with brands,” you just make a fool of yourself. Unfortunately, boneheads won’t go away. There will always be a few of them.

Where do you believe the next challenge lies for the blogosphere as a whole to evolve and what you recon is the biggest challenge for the individual blogger?

I think the biggest challenge is still figuring out where bloggers fall in the grand media mix. Is one blog or a group of blogs as impactful for advertisers or for public relations outreach than a traditional media outlet? If you have to prioritize as a media buyer or as a public relations professional, where to you put blogs in the pecking order? I think bloggers have a misconception that they’re much more impactful or important than they really are, but I think they deserve consideration because some can absolutely deliver impressions, exposure and even recommendations that move the needle for an advertiser or a brand they write about. But I can still get more people to buy my product taking out a TV ad than I can with any activity on a blog.

The biggest challenge for the individual blogger is going to be getting a piece of the action. If you want to monetize your blog and if you want to drive dollars through advertising, you’re not only going to have to prove you have an audience, but prove you can motivate them to try a product or purchase something. If you can illustrate that, and do it without scaring your audience off for being spammy or disingenuous, then you’ll be able to drive revenue. If not, you won’t.

Your experience in the social media realm is overwhelming and we know our readers are aching to find out two more things: What was the most innovative use of social media in the past year in your opinion and what was the most interesting project you worked on?

I think Nationwide Insurance’s smart phone application that helps people comparison shop when buying a car was brilliant. It had very little to do with Nationwide, provided a fantastic resource for consumers and connected people with one another to discover the best deals on a new or used car.

As far as what I’ve worked on? I helped launch MyTPSReport.com, which was not only the first attempt at mashing up Twitter messages with Google Maps and filtering conversations geographically, but was the first social media tool developed by a major healthcare company that was just a gift to the marketplace. Humana developed the tool internally to help inform regional sales teams. I helped them look at it through a different filter and see that it could be a useful service to anyone if they would just polish it a bit and give it away. They did. It’s still a pretty useful tool, even though the location-based services have taken over the mindset of the online audience.

And finally what irritates you most in the blogosphere – which services/tools do you miss / wish were more developed?

The thing that irritates me most is the vast lack of cataloging and organization. Technorati just flat stopped being useful about 2008. It still sucks. Blog Catalog is pretty good, but still doesn’t quite deliver and not enough people plug in there. Postrank tries to rank and catalog blogs by engagement, but their lists are mostly community curated which means they’re incomplete and inherently flawed in organization. If I want to know what the top 20 most popular, trafficked or engaging blogs there are in, say, the furniture industry, I ought to be able to find that easily. The technology is there. Can’t someone put two and two together and make it more efficient for us?

Is there anything you would like to add / anything important we forgot to ask you about?

Only that Zemanta kicks ass. I use it all the time and recommend it to clients as well. Saving time with royalty-free image finding and relevant article finding is a life-saver. Zemanta makes my blog better. I wouldn’t blog without it.

But I do wish Evan from Twitter’s awful picture would stop coming up every time Twitter is mentioned in a post. Heh.

Thanks for sharing Jason! We’ll be back in one week with words of wisdom from Kyle Lacy at Zemanta User’s Points of View. Until then we look forward to your opinions, comments, questions…you know the drill