2010 Traffic Trends: Bizstreaming Gains Popularity But Doesn’t Quite Mainstream

Lifestreaming has been around for a while, arguably longer than blogging.

Where a blog is a collection of regular entries containing commentary around a certain person, topic, niche or business, authored by the people associated with it, lifestreaming is a centralized collection of the various streams about a single person, topic, niche, business or other entity.

Though it’s been growing in popularity for individuals at a fair clip since 2007, the technology to successfully lifestream has been behind the rate and design at which a business would find useful.

Most individual lifestreams are a collection of every public stream of information that individual finds relevant to share.  If you’re familiar with services like FriendFeed, you may already have an idea what this looks like.

However, businesses face different challenges in attempting to lifestream.

How much should they share, and how often? Should it be a completely automated stream of activities, comments, and mentions of the company? If so, what to do with negative entries? If not, how much information is too much – what would potential customers and clients actually care about?

At first, a simple aggregation of all social activities from a business seems like it would be an overload of information. Who cares if someone from Engadget uploaded a video.

Ah, but perhaps we do. It would depend on what was IN that video, wouldn’t it? If that site is beginning to publish some content outside of their central hub, which is all but necessary these days to continue to expand an audience, perhaps we do care what staff members are doing in their offsite time that is related to the publication.

In dismissing lifestreaming for business, we fail to consider that businesses use social applications differently than individuals do, and people who subscribe to them are there for different reasons. Most actions an entity associated with a company does with the company hat on, so to speak, is often related to relevant content, and is often relevant content in and of itself.

When Mashable sends out a tweet about something that may not be on their blog, depending on what that tweet is about, it may be more relevant to me in that moment than what they’ve published on their site. If it’s a heads-up that Pete is going to be on CNN, or a call for input on an article, that would certainly be important to me, though perhaps not an occasion for a blog post.

As a reader, I might appreciate a place where I can go for automated updates mixed in with links that gives a bit more space for publishing than Twitter. Maybe it would be cool if it was spliced right into the main Mashable feed every couple of hours, and I could get the link in Twitter anyway.

This is relevant to me as a publisher as well – it may be something for you to think about, too.

When I pass along a resource, 140 characters may be enough to announce but not to educate. But even a 3 paragraph blog post might feel like I was wasting my client’s time.

Being able to lifestream as a business would allow me to publish more often, in daily blurbs that reside alongside, say, a weekly full length blog post. My audience might receive the bursts five at a time instead of as they are published, but since my noted bookmarks, resources and mini-tips are going out automatically, I don’t need  to take the extra time to compose a post, or to find art to go with it.

I’ll be able to advise my customers, support my clients, provide thought leadership to my industry, and inform my audience without wasting their time, and in a way that saves much of my own.

So what could help launch business lifestreaming into wide adoption?

Business-minded applications that house the lifestream comfortably on the site owner’s domain, in more of an elegant fashion than the best personal lifestreaming applications.

While there are services that allow for a closed business experience of Twitter-like proportions, lifestreaming services that may publish to your own website via JavaScript or other means, and lifestream extensions for WordPress or other platforms, that let you lifestream in a blogging platform, there isn’t much of a standard. Some lifestream add-ons create pages, a few publish as posts, but without as much control over whether it’s all the stream that day in one post, or in what kind of format.

Many demand that your blog is either transformed to a lifestream design or simply adds a lifestream section.

But businesses will want more. I’ll come back to that in a second.

Some of the forward-thinkers moved to business-related lifestreaming ages ago, and it seems to work well on platforms like Posterous when just one personality is dominating the conversation, at least if you’re not particular about presentation.

But let’s say you are. The options are few at the moment, to give both the publishing flexibility and integration into your current design.

My prediction is that in 2010, an entire cottage industry will spring up around business lifestreaming, mostly focused on

1. applications that make it easier to bizstream from a company site, that also smoothly integrate with existing blogs and tagging capabilities
2. making the bizstream semi-automated
3. advising it as a corrollary to, rather than a substitute for, business blogging, and,
4. sharing a company’s lifestream in a way that is both attractive for the visitors, and beneficial to the owner as archived content, accessible to search engines.

Why? Because a handful of companies, in late summer or early Fall of next year, will be able to show how much growth, attention, publicity and measurable return-on-investment their companies got from integrating lifestreaming.