Technorati's Peter Hirshberg on Japanese bloggers, Jello and the shoe shine guy

Technorati chairman Peter Hirshberg gave a fab opening keynote at last week's conference on corporate communication and technology held by The Conference Board in New York.

Apologies for taking so long to get this post up. I've been going non-stop. I was on the blogging panel for The Conference Board, did blog training with a corporate client and then was on another panel for the Annual ASJA meeting. Fun week in nyc.

Here are a few highlights of his presentation:

Why Japanese is the leading language of the blogosphere

Texting! In Japan, blogging often means texting a one-liner which automatically posts to your blog. (Read more about Japanese bloggers and their mobile Internet use.)

Want to ignite CGM (consumer generated media or content)? Your brand has to match the passions of your customers

He gave as an example use of the word "Jello" on Elise Bauer's popular Simply Recipes blog. She wrote a post titled Why I Love Jello...  on November 29, 2006, noting also that she had a case of "wicked bad flu." The entry received 97 comments from readers.

By mentioning Jello, Elise was tapping into her readers' passion. They in turn linked to her post on their own blogs. Mention of the brand spiked in the blogosphere (also because of the holidays).

Her blog gets one million visits a month, according to Peter.

What the shoe shine guy knows about digital media strategy... A lot

Peter has made a series of very funny man-on-the-street videos over the past few years, asking New Yorkers what the word blog means, asking directions "to the blogosphere," etc.

(You can see some of his videos here.)

He showed us one of his classics, a video interview with the shoe shine guy at Grand Central Station in July 2004.

While he's shining Peter's shoes, the man opines about whether blogging will take off. And if it does, what it will mean.

"I really don't think this blogging thing will take off... But if it does take hold and become infectious I would imagine it's going to take several years."

Peter interrupts to ask: "Who's it gonna hurt and who's it gonna benefit?"

The shoe shine guy replies: "It's gonna benefit whoever owns it... and it's gonna hurt the publishing companies."

Remind me again why we need all those MBAs to explain business strategy to us?

Edelman's Guillaume du Gardier on his role as Director Online Communications Europe

Whirlwind day but fun. Back-to-back coffees today in Paris, first with William Arruda and then with Guillaume du Gardier. OK, it was wine for me by the time Guillaume and I got together at 5 PM. Last time we met, Guillaume was running his own consultancy, Blogging Planet. He's since moved to Edelman Paris as Director Online Communications Europe.

He says he's spending 30 percent of his time on the road, in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc. spreading the word for Edelman on social media.* He just finished a roadshow to present his findings from the Edelman/Technorati study of the European blogosphere (UK, France, Italy, Germany).

Guillaume and I speak in rapid-fire French (him) and French-English (me) and it seems to work very nicely. BTW, I notice he's doing a back-and-forth English/French thing on his blog these days. I like  it. Maybe because I speak French. But also because it more accurately reflects what's going on in the multi-national, multi-lingual blogosphere.

Most interesting new blogosphere stat: Japanese is the dominant language

My favorite new stat (from Technorati's Dave Sifry): the biggest language in the blogosphere as of March 2006 is Japanese (37%), followed by English (31%) and then Chinese (15%).

* Yes we talked a bit about the Edelman/Wal-Mart episode. And no I'm not going to tell you what I learned. If I could ever be said to have a "beef" with the fire-then-aim approach to blogging, it's this: journalistic rules of "off the record" should apply in the blogosphere when appropriate. God, do I sound old-fashioned, or what??