So, it’s been widely reported that the web’s most popular blog, The Huffington Post, won a coveted Pulitzer Prize. In the eyes of many, this now legitimizes the site as a bona fide news organization (also noteworthy: the first for-profit news organization to win the award). However you view the site—as a puppet of the left, as a treasured news source, as your favorite source of pop culture gossip—its success can be attributed to how the site shrewdly leveraged the best tools of the web (aggregation, search engine optimization and social media) to become a juggernaut of information and, more importantly, visitors. 1.2 billion monthly viewers and counting.
When the news industry decried blogs (some of you may recall the huffing and puffing that surrounded the permission of popular politics bloggers to the 2004 and 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions), the Post was rising the ranks to become one of the nation’s favored news sites since its founding in 2003. I remember I was at a content conference just a handful of years ago in 2008 when I heard a former Los Angeles Times editor on a panel say “I think the bloom has fallen off the free content rose.” Of course, this was incredibly short sighted and, well, wrong. I heard what I'd been hearing for nearly a decade from the news establishment--that these fads were not about to replace them, blind in a way to their own diminishing importance to their once thriving audience.
Her comment, and the phenomenon that HuffPost best illustrates, is the embodiment of a popular term in technology and content circles: disruption.
To understand the rise of social media, aggregated content and blogging, you first have to embrace the concept of disruption. The ultimate example of disruption is what the Internet--and unfettered access to CD-quality music--did to the music industry; other examples include: how broadcast television killed popularity of radio in the 1950s, and how the national interconnection of the phone lines killed the necessity of the telegraph. These were disruptive technologies that wiped out incumbent technologies, and they did so almost instantaneously. What the Huffington Post represents (and its smaller competitors, like TMZ for example) is a massive disruption in the way that individuals consume news and EXPECT news to be delivered.
I read a fascinating and impressively detailed article (from the Columbia Journalism Review) about the founding of the Post. (It doesn’t matter how you feel emotionally about the usually controversial positions many of Ms. Huffington’s reporters and bloggers to get something from this article!!!!) It’s got some terribly applicable and viable take-aways, however, that make it a resource for the rest of us mere mortals as we shape and execute our own social media and content strategies. (Let's face it: very, very few of us will ever evolve into the mogul that is Ms. Huffington, even if we wanted to.) The article defines five elements that led to the Post’s phenomenal success: connections, stickiness, contagion, disruption, and voraciousness (the article brilliantly defines all five and dissects these elements with a precision worthy of a publication that exits to study nothing but the business of the printed word) .
This is a must-read for all marketers and anyone whose content journey has either just begun or who is well-practiced in online marketing.
This is possibly one of the most sophisticated, clear and entertaining discussions of disruption that I’ve ever read. What the history of HuffPost teaches us ultimately is about the power of networks, how to amass them, harness their power and then—and here’s the kicker—retain them.
Here is my favorite quote from the article, and I plan on posting it above my desk: what is vital about social media and understanding viral content is “the potential power that comes to those who can build, nurture, and harness a network that is at once vast and loyal.”
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