In an email conversation with Six Apart product strategy vice president Michael Sippey discusses the content of the session “Monetizing Social Media,” which he will co-present with Get Satisfaction co-founder and president Lane Becker Wednesday, February 4th at 1:45 pm at the Parallels Summit.
Promising to explain how the next generation of Blogging and social networking will evolve, “Monetizing Social Media” is a session at the Parallels Summit that will take a look at the past, present and future of those two buzz terms, as they converge to provide businesses and individuals with new ways to connect with customers and community. We will also discuss how this convergence opens up opportunities for hosting and Software as a Service providers.
Six Apart (www.sixapart.com) product strategy vice president Michael Sippey will be co-hosting the session with Lane Becker, co-founder and president of Get Satisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com), a web start up dedicated to fostering new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers.
With a diverse background, having completed his undergraduate degree in English, Sippey has “been pushing text online since 1995,” according to one of his many blogs, with early experiments in “online personal publishing,” which turned into blogging. Pioneering the social realms of the early Internet led him to San Francisco-based Six Apart, which was responsible for creating the Movable Type and Vox blogging platforms, as well as the TypePad blog hosting service.
In the following email interview, Sippey discusses some of the themes of the session he is co-hosting, as well as some wisdom about the capabilities of social media and the direction it is headed.
Since you are co-presenting “Monetizing Social Media” with Get Satisfaction’s Lane Becker, how do you plan to divide your presentation responsibilities?
Lane and I have a similar take on the social media landscape, but come at it from different perspectives. His company, Get Satisfaction, provides hosted tools for people to connect with companies and each other around customer support issues. Six Apart, of course, provides hosted and on-premise solutions for blogging, which gives companies the ability to reach out and start a conversation. For the presentation, we’ll be talking about the core topic — monetizing social media — from those two perspectives.
You’ve been involved in blogging since before it was even a term. Could you tell me a little about how blogging started out and how its roots have shaped what blogging has grown to become?
Blogging evolved out of a group of passionate individuals who found it empowering and exciting to publish online as a way to connect with other like-minded people. It flourished and spread because the tools became easier and easier to use, services sprung up that provided more ways for people who weren’t blogging to discover interesting blogs and connect with bloggers, and the benefits of blogging became more and more clear to more and more people.
Since then, of course, blogging has evolved from a passion for a few individuals to an entire industry, and blogging has played a significant role in changing the landscape of media, marketing and communications. But I think the core of what inspired and motivated the early bloggers carries through to today — simple, easy tools that let you share and connect online.
In the past few years, how have blogging and social media services overlapped with hosting services?
Reliable and affordable hosting services have helped blogging and social media spread like wildfire. Blogging tools like Movable Type or WordPress, lightweight forum tools like PHPbb or Vanilla and other commercial or open source tools have given individuals and businesses the tools to have control over their own sites and community experiences. And platforms like Parallels Plesk has made it easier for hosts to offer those applications to their customers, which benefits everyone in the value chain — application ISVs, hosts and the end customer who just wants to provide a great experience for the people visiting their site.
How has the proliferation of functional hosting services affected the hosting market? Are hosts faced with the challenge of selling “web hosting” to customers who may not know it by that name?
It seems that every time I turn around I see another start up company offering a hosted web application that is solving a specific problem in a specific way. Combine that with the evolution of cloud computing services like Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and that means that hosts are faced with some interesting challenges. When we work with customers who are deploying Movable Type in a hosting provider they are doing that because they (a) have a specific problem that they want to solve, and (b) have a requirement to have control over their site’s experience and the data that provides that experience. I think we’ll see movement in the hosting market that’s similar to what’s happening in the applications space: a move from a commodity “web hosting” play to hosts that market their expertise in providing services around a specific application or market vertical.
How can traditional hosting providers tap into the “social media” demographic who might otherwise choose a service like MySpace or Blogger?
There are direct and indirect strategies. The direct strategy is about going after the mavens — the social media producers (bloggers, photographers, community organizers) who are reliable users of hosting services — especially those that want to have complete control over their site and its user experience.
The indirect strategy is about going after the publishers and businesses that are building sites that will attract a large number of users. If you’re a blog network or a web application developer or even major media operating a dotcom, you need reliable hosting that can scale to meet the demands of a growing audience.
Given that you have been involved in social media for a number of years, what are your predictions for its future development?
Growth! The shift that’s happening — from centralized media to decentralized media and from patterns of consumption to a culture of participation — is real, and only becoming more pronounced. What’s exciting to see is that now the big players — the major newspapers, television networks, movie studios — are diving into social media with gusto, which is only accelerating and amplifying the trend. The web is making it easier for people to find, enjoy and connect with the experiences and content that matter to them, however mainstream or niche that may be. And that trend will only continue.
