On October 19th we present at the Hyperthinking eMarketing event organised by ZN. We’ll be presenting insights from social media and how marketers can understand more about the conversation in blogs and forums. Joost from ZN did a podcast with me and the link is here. I am looking forward to the event…

About Hyperthinking — So why should you spend time on this? Maybe you want to become more at ease when you collaborate with people online. Or you would like to upgrade your personal reputation. There are hundreds of reasons. Do you want to tell us yours? —

We spend a lot of time telling people about the power of blogs and the networking that is possible. It is something we really believe in and through blogging we have made great contacts and find it a super place to find and share information.

Just recently, this was brought home to me. When reading Tom Raftery’s two months ago I saw that Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) and Rick Segal (Canadian investor/blogger) were coming to Europe. I saw that Ireland and other European cities were on their schedule but not Belgium. I thought I should ask why they were not coming here to Brussels, given an emerging interest here in start ups, collaborative software and of course our central position in European affairs :)

Shel responded and asked “Why Brussels?”. A fair enough question, so I gave him the selling pitch (I think I included great beer and chocolate). He said he would talk about it to Rick and come back to me. It turns out that Kris Hoet from Microsoft had also been in contact with them for the same reason and in the end they are coming over on the 21st of October and we will get together a group of bloggers, entrepreneurs and eMarketers for a round table and dinner. (Hopefully we can experience some Brussels night life as well…)

In conclusion, the blogosphere is a great way to make contacts and most of all it’s fun. Their agenda is below

Oct. 14. London– dinner with small group of entrepreneurs.
Oct. 15-16–Scotland. Learning about social media in public education system
Oct. 17–Cork. Meetings with entrepreneurs/blogger dinner
Oct. 18–19 Dublin. Blogger dinner; participate in SaaS conference Trinity College
Oct. 20–Brighton, England, meet entrepreneurs
Oct. 21,2–Brussels, meet with entrepreneurs
Oct. 22-24–Estonia, meet leaders of online community, private dinner.
Oct. 25–Berlin, meeting with entrepreneurs as well as companies in Jenna.
Oct. 25-30. Rome, Guest of American Embassy. speaking meeting with Italian entrepreneurs. 

Charlene from Forrester highlights a recent study that shows younger people GenY (18-26) reading blogs in greater numbers that later generations. In my age group GenX (27-40) only 12% of us read blogs, my feeling is that number is set to rise. Anecdotally, a wedding blog that I co-write has been read by most of my friends and I know that last year more would have greeted it with scepticism.

Charlene’s points do highlight that younger web users are comfortable with blogs or more generally sharing their lives online and that marketers should care about what they write, what they read and who is influential…

“One key data point that stood out for me: 24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief and look to at least one bellweather demographic to get an idea of how widespread blog readership can potentially grow in the future. So if you’re a marketer that targets Gen Yers, you should at a minimum be monitoring what your audience reads.”