Blog Marketing

Recently, I had the opportunity to turn a negative blogosphere commentary into a positive, or what John Battelle calls “Marketing Judo”.

Over at Liz Strauss’ blog, some criticism was leveled at our upcoming conference our upcoming conference was being discussed in a less than 100% glowing way.

“Every word I read about this conference seems geared toward folks who are already blogging. I wonder about that,” wrote Liz.

In the comments, the commentary got even more negative there was some more criticism. Commenter Sabine wrote:

I know what you mean — blogging is still an “early adopter” phenomenon, I think.
Well, I’m going, so I’ll let you know if it was worth it.

Still, I’m a little less excited about it now that I read that a few lucky “A-listers” will be getting a ride in a private jet at the conference. Jeez, let’s widen that gap even more, why don’t we?

Well, I’ll be there to represent the “Z-listers” who just want to get an answer to the question “What can blogging do for my business?”

I have to say that - even with my blogosphere-savvy - my first impulse was to get snarky with Sabine. “How dare she impugn the good name of our ‘Grapes on a Plane’ event?” I thought to myself.

Then I took a step back, which is what Scoble always advises his readers to do. After all, I didn’t want to be accused of having a “ready, fire, aim” mentality.

Also, and very fortunately, our excellent conference co-chair Maryam Scoble jumped into the conversation and smoothed things over. After reading her post, what I came to realize is that with an event like “Grapes on a Plane” does have a ring of exclusivity to it. And yes, a lot of the folks on the plane could be called “A-list.” Sabine had some pretty understandable misconceptions about the event Grapes on a Plane.

But the bottom line is that this is an event with two primary goals:

1. To provide our client Greenpoint Technologies with exposure to influential bloggers who are interested in what they’re doing.
2. To thank the people (speakers, sponsors and attendees) who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to make our conference a success.

We think we’ve walked that line pretty well with this event, and we’re proud of that. We’re also proud that just about anyone can get a seat on this jet if they work hard and are innovative. If you’re a speaker, a sponsor or an attendee and you’re interested in getting on the jet, e-mail me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com. We’ll hook you up.

Update: Broback’s hypothesizes that Google has created a self-reinforcing system of influence that perpetuates an “A-list.” That’s a problem and it needs to be fixed.

Update 10/11/06 10:10 a.m.: I’ve had a conversation with both Sabine and Liz via e-mail. Apologies for making the original interaction bigger than it needed to be. I wanted to provide it as as case study, but sometimes we all forget we’re dealing with real people. Sometimes it’s better to have these kinds of conversations more privately. Live and learn.

Yesterday I wrote about NBBC, NBC’s new spinoff responsible for online distribution of content produced by NBC and its affiliates. I saw a number of things wrong with the system, chiefly that it wouldn’t allow users to repost the content elsewhere. If your goal is widespread distribution, you should allow others to disseminate your content as they see fit. That’s just common sense.

Jeff Jarvis continued that theme yesterday, mentioning that the biggest problem with NBBC is that they would only distribute content from NBC’s producers and affiliates. User generated content would not be a part of the site. In short, they want complete control over their site, what gets posted, and where their content goes.

That’s a problem. Part of the massive popularity of YouTube is that users can easily respond to content produced by others. With no way to respond, interact, or upload content of their own, NBBC’s users won’t stay interested for long.

If NBC really wanted to get people interested, it would open up a user-generated portion of the site where independent filmmakers–like those responsible for the recent lonelygirl15 phenomenon–could submit their content. The most popular content would receive consideration for a show on NBC.

NBC and its affiliates have launched a new company, the National Broadband Company. The NBBC will be responsible for disseminating content from across the NBC network on the Web.

Already, the NBBC is facing criticism from some quarters, who say that its ban on reposting of content on weblogs and other sites will hinder its goal of widespread Web-based distribution.

I have to jump on that bandwagon on this one. More than half the point of distributing your content this way is so that people can experience and share that content in a way that works for them. If your goal is widespread distribution of your message, the last thing you want to do is restrict how people can spread it.

If New Line was truly disappointed with the performance of the much-touted Snakes on a Plane, they should consider making it available for download over the new iTunes store, which is equipped to handle full-length motion pictures.

The impulse buy/content on demand factor alone would probably bring in more money for them than the box office did.

It’s been said a million times that the bloggers who are passionate about your product are your best sales force. But when it comes right down to it, a lot of companies aren’t really sure how to leverage that particular power. That’s why I’m so impressed with Music Today, the company that handles Christina Aguilera’s fan club.

Today, an e-mail went out to all fan club members offering us a 5% discount to pre-order Christina’s forthcoming double album, Back to Basics. They also announced a contest in which each fan club member received her own personalized 5% discount code to share with “friends and family.” The Christina fan who pre-sells the most CD’s before Friday, August 11 at 3 PM ED wins an autographed iPod nano.

In the days before the blogosphere, these discount codes probably would have been sent out into the e-mail ether and they would probably garner only a few thousand sales at best. But with the blogosphere in full effect, Music Today and RCA records can expect larger sales by reaching out to Web-savvy Christina fans.

That’s not to say that Music Today couldn’t have made this offer better. They should have made a pre-release CD available on the iTunes store and given each fan club member a personalized 5% discount code that unlocks special features on the digital version of the CD.

We’ll be discussing these kinds of outreach efforts and how to maximize their impact at our upcoming conference in October.

And in case you’re interested in pre-ordering Christina’s new CD, you can go to the MusicToday store and use discount code TBLNCBBW for your 5% off. That’s right. I really want that iPod.

In the Wall Street Journal article Social Networking for Bookworms, reporter Aaron Rutkoff cites how librarything.com (a site that aggregates and shares personal library information) has become a minor phenom thanks in part to blogger engagement.

“Mr. Spalding’s book community has grown almost exclusively by word of mouth. Referrals from book-oriented bloggers have helped, but LibraryThing has grown mostly gradually. Mr. Spalding downplays his user numbers, pointing out that fewer people make frequent use of the site than have registered. “The numbers are probably misleading,” he admits. “It is very, very easy to join.”

Thanks to the wonders of iChat, Byron and I often share amusing anecdotes and links throughout our day. The last few days, he’s been at the NewComm Forum talking about blogs.

He was telling me today that he’s been approached several times at the forum and asked, “Byron, how do I submit my press releases to blogs?”

The answer? You can’t. That’s OldComm, not NewComm. If you want a blogger to write about something you’re working on, there are a number of ways you can proceed - but submitting a press release is not one of them.

For some more information on a good way to work with bloggers, check out the interview I did with Free Press Associate Publisher Suzanne Donahue earlier this year.

As Byron says, “the cluetrain has left the station.”

In the article Web Startups Try New Ad Techniques, Janet Whitman (media and advertising reporter for Dow Jones Newswires) says in contrast to the Internet frenzy of 2000, young Internet companies aren’t “tossing away millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads” anymore.

Whitman says “dot-com companies nowadays are trying to catch attention through much cheaper, ‘viral’ marketing strategies, such as blogging and word-of-mouth campaigns.”

“By far the best use of marketing dollars is to see if you can create some kind of person-to-person viral effect,” says George Zachary, a managing director with early-stage venture firm Charles River Ventures.

The New York Times reported today on the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association’s meeting, at which is was asserted that the 30-second television spot was all but dead.

It may seem ludicrous that a mainstay of the advertising world could be so easily overturned - but it appears that the Web is changing everything. Experts at the conference talked about evangelism both on and off the Web and encouraged companies to talk to people who already love their products and encourage them to spread the word.

“People engage in word of mouth because they want to look good,” said George Silverman, the author of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. “Word of mouth is the most honest advertising medium there is. People don’t want to hurt their friends and family and colleagues with bad information.”

The conference touched on the blogosphere briefly, emphasizing some good points like, “always mention that you are an employee of the company that produces the product in question,” and “don’t try to be sneaky” - but they tended to oversimplify the blogosphere. Better blog marketing tips can be gleaned from my podcast interview with Suzanne Donahue.

I was surprised that the Times piece didn’t mention one of the most important reasons that the Web is making the 30-second ad obsolete: online television downloads. It’s pretty easy to envision a not too distant future in which all television all television content - from the news to Desperate Housewives - will be available on demand. And there won’t be any commercials.

According to Brandweek, blogs are one of the 25 worst marketing ideas of 2005. We had to laugh at that. It’s almost as absurd as “Attack of the Blogs.”

Just because blogs are, as they put it, “frequently inaccurate” doesn’t mean you can ignore them or dismiss them. And the fact that they’re too unpredictable to fit the command and control mentaility of traditional marketers doesn’t make them a bad marketing idea - it makes them a revolutionary one.

If anything, the unreliability and unpredictability of the blogosphere means you have to pay more attention - not less. And you can’t count on the end of this “trend” anytime soon. Blogs aren’t exactly going anywhere. As Forbes Blogger Rich Karlgaard so aptly put it, “When a communications medium is both riding the Moore�s Law cost-capability curve and tapping into a deep need, it�s no fad.”

The blogosphere is mistaken if they think businesses owe them something. But on the other side of the coin, businesses - particularly those that rely heavily on buzz marketing and word of mouth - ignore the blogosphere at their extreme peril. BrandWeek may not remain relevant to the conversation if it doesn’t figure that out.

[Steve Rubel](http://www.micropersuasion.com/), writing for iMedia Connection explains how [marketers can use tags and folksonomies](http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/5467.asp) to reach loyal customers. Amazon.com [introduced tagging](http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-5953622.html) a few months ago. As Amazon described it, “Tags provide an easy way for you to ‘remember’ and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall.”

We’ve been trying out tags here in our posts and [archive page](/archives.htm) and in the near future will roll out a Tim Appnel’s [TagSuggest](http://code.appnel.com/changelog/2005/12/000018.html) a tool to search tags. It’s still unclear if Tags are a great usability addition to a blog or a confusing tool for the readers.

In After the Vampire: Knopf Learns to Sell A New Anne Rice, (subscription required) Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has written another article this month describing how blogs and bloggers can be effective in creating buzz for a new book.

Previously Trachtenberg described how Viacom Inc.�s Free Press imprint was able to generate “hype any author would kill for” using blogs. Now he writes about how formerly Vampire-centric author Anne Rice’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf is leveraging the blogosphere to market her new tome. In this instance, the publisher not only had a new book to deal with, but also a new (and somewhat skeptical) market.

“Christ the Lord” is told from the perspective of Jesus as a child. It’s in its sixth printing, with 375,000 copies in the U.S. and has been number 9 on the New York Times best-seller list. This despite the fact that several religious retailers have refused to sell it, mostly due to the fact that it isn’t based on scripture.

Knopf gave away 4,000 advance copies of the book to retailers, distributors and bloggers. They also bought ad space on blogs aimed at a Christian audience such as RelapsedCatholic.com.

Like the Free Press campaign for �The Number� by Lee Eisenberg, Knopf started promoting early:

“…the book is enjoying a good run on best-seller lists, and some of the credit goes to efforts by Knopf that date back almost a year. In addition, they had to find their way in religious publishing, which has its own infrastructure outside the secular book-retailing industry. “We started working on the book in January because the Christian media marketplace and the faith-based outlets were new to us,” says Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf. “It involved detective work on our part.”

Also note the allusion to the Cluetrain’s Markets as Conversations theme:

“In contrast with her previous books, which saw sales spike right after publication, sales of “Christ the Lord” started modestly but have been steadily building. ‘Invariably, people who read it have wanted to discuss it,’ says Bob Wietrak, chief merchant at Barnes & Noble Inc.”

In the article Book Publishers Build Buzz Early, Hollywood Style (subscription required), WSJ Reporter Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports that the new book “The Number” by Lee Eisenberg is garnering pre-release buzz that could send “potential buyers to bookstores in droves”.

Viacom Inc.’s Free Press imprint is releasing the retirement guide on Jan 3, but has spent several months building interest by sending out manuscripts to reviewers and other “influential people” including 300 bloggers who focus on financial issues.

Naturally, the author has set up his own book site with a blog. Notice below how google ranks the blog as more relevant than any of the other 39 pages on the site (including the home page).

Articles in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal today outline how Hasbro and Budget Rent a Car are moving into non-traditional media like blogs to deliver their messages.

Considering (as we reported last week) ad space in the major portals has become extremely expensive and to some degree unavailable, leveraging the less expensive yet highly influential audience that bloggers serve seems like a smart plan to me.

Budget’s agency Impax Marketing Group and consultant BL Ochman executed on a campaign that featured a scavenger hunt which was promoted largely through blog ads.

Scott Deaver, executive VP for marketing at Cendant (which oversees Budget and Avis) said “I can’t outspend Hertz, but I can outsmart them.” He continued “We’ll certainly be back in this space.”

What is most valuable about nontraditional media like blogs, Deaver said, is their ability to “actively engage the consumer,” compared with what he called passive TV spots and other traditional choices.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Cliff Freeman & Partners, a well-regarded but sometimes troubled creative advertising and marketing shop in New York has hired a new CEO. Of the chosen one, Jeff McClelland, the Times writes:

[His] experience in what is known as integrated marketing - that is, campaigns that include nontraditional elements as well as conventional outlets like TV and print - is of particular value as marketers strive to broaden their media selections beyond the usual choices.

My background has always been integrated accounts, but we called it ’survival,’ ” Mr. McClelland said in an interview last week, joined by Mr. Freeman.

“Now for an agency, integrated marketing is the price of entry to compete for clients,” Mr. McClelland said. “You can’t talk to them without the goods.”

Hmm….”nontraditional elements,” that sounds an awful lot like blogging to me. Since public relations has collectively dropped the ball on our little Web phenomenon - with a few notable exceptions - it’s entirely possible that blogging could belong to integrated marketing instead. It seems like the flexible spirit and big picture thinking of integrated marketing could be more in line with the sometimes unpredictable spirit of the blogosphere.

But Shel Israel disagrees. He says that:

Integrated marketing solutions are an attempt to take a series of messages and push them out to a company’s constituency. They are devised and polished by committees, then the work is divvied up by ad and PR vendors as well as internal folk. The key to it is to push the message out, and this is supposed to improve brand awareness.

Blogs are an example of from one-to-many communications. They fail when they push. They are downright assaulted by a great number of blogosphere denizens when they appear crammed with the marketing jargon of yore. Hugh McLeod finds such blogs and gives them Lame Awards, which is as damaging as a bad review of a Broadway play in the New York Times.

Obviously I agree that pushy, contrived blogs that are laden down with boring ol’ marketing content won’t survive in the blogosphere. That said, I think Israel overlooks the fact that in order to use the blogging technology, companies have to accept it first. I predict that the first sector of communications that will broadly accept blogging will be the integrated marketing teams. They’re just nontraditional enough to get it. Some of them will make the mistakes Israel prophecizes, but the good ones will quickly grok the content issues and learn to speak in a more authentic voice.

After another debate about [SEO v Blogs](/2005/11/seo_vs_blogging.htm), I decided to post about Ink Cartridges and see what happens. We don’t sell ink cartridges, but if we did, I’d launch the Ink Cartridges blog and post all about the intricacies of Ink Cartridges, what a marvel of modern technology they are, and how we sell them for less.

Yesterday, I complained on my blog that Metro and SoundTransit - our bus systems out here in the Emerald City - have a bothersome, antiquated and obfuscating online trip planner.

This morning I got an e-mail from Mike, who is one of my readers.

Mike - as it turns out - is also a loyal reader of the Bus Monster blog. He had read my post and thought perhaps I would be interested in looking at the blog and its associated website.

Bus Monster turned out to be one of the coolest freakin’ things EVER. It’s a web app that uses the new Google Map API to show Metro/ST bus routes and stops. It also uses bus schedules to accurately estimate where the busses are in real time. It’s 100 times better and more appealing than Metro’s site. I’m really glad I found it, and I’m sure Bus Monster’s creator, Chris Smoak, is happy I did too. More traffic means more revenues for his very cool, very Web 2.0 app. And none of it would have been possible without the blogosphere.

Now Bus Monster blog isn’t as cool as the app itself. Smoak doesn’t update it that frequently, and his last few posts haven’t really been anything special. Nevertheless, it does go to show that having a business blog with loyal readers, even if it’s not a terribly fancy one, doesn’t just build your web presence. It gets people talking about your products on their blogs, and on other people’s blogs, and over e-mail. And that translates to revenues, in whatever form your business collects them.

What’s more, knowing what bloggers are saying about anything that pertains to your product or your organization gives you invaluable information about your market. If Chris Smoak was out there reading my blog - he might have even told me about his product himself, or commented about it on my blog, thus reaching my readers as well.

Bus Monster’s blog strategy is far from perfect, but it has given them at least one more user. That’s a testament to the staggering power of the blogosphere. Even haphazard steps can create buzz. We will discuss other good ways to increase the online buzz about your organization at our next event - which we’ll be announcing soon.

John Jurgensen, reporter for the Wall Street Journal describes how museums are jumping into blogging as a way to create interest in his article For Attention, Museums Get Gossipy Online (subscription required).

Jurgensen cites several museums that have started blogging recently to drive traffic:

* Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis - Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
* The Walker Art Center
* the Katzen Arts Center

Blog features include the ability to download audio tours as podcasts.

Jurgensen says:

“After trying open houses, audio tours and other traditional methods for engaging visitors, some museums are starting to use Web logs to attract interest. Museum officials say that these blogs, which offer views of installations in progress, chatty stories about staff members and links to the art community, are an effort to make their institutions seem more approachable and less stuffy.”

Classic example of the kind of blog applications we’ll discuss at our upcoming event.