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Chris Kneeland, management supervisor at Rapp Collins, Dallas, servicing the Best Buy account, is a seasoned marketer of blue-chip brands with experience across a variety of multi-channel communications, including direct mail, email, DRTV, print, radio, catalogs, collateral, events and all digital media (website development, online advertising, search, etc.).

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Community has Consumed the ‘Net: But Are Marketers Ready to Open Shop in Them?

Written on
Jun 19, 2006 
Author
Chris Kneeland  |
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Community has Consumed the ‘Net: But Are Marketers Ready to Open Shop in Them?

Consumer controlled media also means consumers are now creating their own content and easy access to each other dramatically reduces their dependence on you to provide information. They consider the advice of their peers to be more objective, trustworthy, and relevant than the messages marketers spend so much time carefully crafting. The challenge has evolved from figuring out how to talk to and with your consumers to now figuring out how to be included in their peer-to-peer conversations of which you may not a part.

Word of Mouth Revolution

Blogs are leading the word of mouth revolution and unless marketers adopt new “tricks of the trade,” they’ll soon be ignored by consumers or surpassed by competitors who are more aggressive at figuring out how to capitalize on the peer-to-peer phenomenon. Here are a few examples of companies that are doing the right kind of experimentation to take advantage of digital conversations:

• Foster Brand Evangelism: Microsoft’s Channel 9 blog is a great example of a company creating brand evangelists by building a blog allowing influential consumers a transparent window into the world of Microsoft. Their blog affords users informal interactions with a host of Microsoft decision makers, as well as behind-the-scenes access to product development.

• Build Advocacy: Blogs appeal most to small groups of impassioned people. Marketers should align themselves with these vocal advocates by promoting their support of specific causes. For example, The Home Depot has a policy against purchasing wood from rainforests for sale in its stores. They could more proactively tout this policy on a myriad of sights created by environmental advocates fighting to save endangered forests.

• Customer Care: Dell built a customer service blog for consumers to share product experiences and provide support to each other. It’s become a community of devoted Dell power users who alleviate much of Dell’s responsibility to respond to customer inquiries. The blog allows for open-ended feedback while still retaining a measure of control on topics and discussions.

• e-Commerce: When it comes to selling stuff on third party blogs, marketers have three options. First, you can do nothing and let aggregator sites scrape your corporate website for content without your control or consent. Second, you can optimize your site to allow for aggregators to find content in the most ideal manner that best represents your value proposition. Third, you can participate in affiliate programs and compensate aggregators to sell your products as a secondary sales force.

• Public Relations: Blogs represent a whole new distribution channel for newsworthy content like press releases. Millions of consumers now frequent blogs, and use technology like RSS feeds, to get their daily dose of news and information. Marketers should find relevant blogs that attract a substantial audience and offer the owner your press releases. Most will welcome the content since they are seeking ways to keep their site fresh.

• Search Engine Optimization: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others all have proprietary algorithms designed to provide users with the most relevant returns to their keyword searches. One critical factor that plays into all these algorithms is the number of links to your site regarding the particular subject being searched. By extending the reach of your product, offerings, and content into numerous blogs, you’re improving the “importance” of your content in the search engine algorithm and your site will score higher — in essence moving your links to the top of the page of search results.

• Sponsorship: Sponsoring blogs allows you to go where the consumers already are, rather than investing significant resources in always trying to get consumers to change their behavior and come to you. Most blog owners welcome advertising revenue and many times display-advertising on blogs produces a far better ROI because of the high degree of relevancy of these niche sites. What a blog may lack in quantity of users they often make up for in quality.

• Research: If you decide not to try to compel or control blog content, you should at least observe and learn from what is being said about you. Several software tools or agencies harvest key words and do contextual and trend analysis to gauge what people are talking about within blogs. By monitoring these conversations you can learn how to better influence public opinion regarding your strengths and weaknesses.

Regardless of what you do, the important thing is that you do something. Just as marketers had to develop new strategies and tactics to conquer cyberspace, big wins are in store for the company that learns how to capitalize on online communities and participate in the blogosphere.





Reader Comments.

Although blogs can help assist with Customer Care; as mentioned in this article, it should not be used to replace routine customer service.

In the article, it mentioned how Dell uses blogs for Customer Card, and it mentioned how The Home Depot uses blogs to Build Advocacy. Unfortunately, both of these companies (Dell and The Home Depot) were just rated very poorly for customer service by Business Week magazine.

That’s a lesson for companies: Do not attempt to use blogs as a means of reducing your customer care costs, or you’ll receive the same poor results which Dell and The Home Depot are now suffering.

David Hurlbert
Pulsar Marketing

Posted by David Hurlbert | 10:09 am on June 20, 2006.

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