Panelists:
Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends. PR and marketing folk are calling her to try and get to the market that reads your blog. “But for my blog, these people would never take my call. Some of those people may be you.”
Evelyn Rodriguez from Crossroads Dispatches: “There are 2 ways to look at branding and blogging. I use my blog to use my personal brand, but a lot of what I’ve done is applicable to larger companies. It scales whether you’re one person all the way to someone as large as Sun and GM. It starts with being clear with what you stand for and what community you’re trying to reach.”
Dan Taylor from the Mobile Enterprise Alliance: “The challenge for our organization is to get people involved. Our blog is designed to help us to relate to other brand and media relation alternatives. To be known in our part of the industry. As I look at blogging and social networking. It’s important for us to be a Community Of Interest. That’s core to our daily business.”
Andy Lark from Andy Lark: “Branding is an act that reflects on a company or product. I have a firm belief that brands themselves are something that exists solely inside customers brands. They buy products based on that impression. Many people have flown with airlines and will never fly with them. That is the company’s brand. Branding is trying to influence that idea. In that respect, blogs are the first mass way of influencing the images in people’s minds (ie: brands).”
Now, to the live blogging!
[10:29]
Anita Campbell
Network maps will become incredibly important. As the blogosphere grows, this is one of the few ways to gauge who teh influential bloggers are. She’s showing one of the Northeast Ohio Bloggers. “I’m talking about the blogosphere defined by geography. But you could do this from any cross section of the blogosphere.”
The left side shows cores of influence and how those cores interconnect. The right side shows the most influential blogs that everyone talks about and interlinks to. There are only 20-30 of these, in spite of more than a few thousands north east ohio blogs. One blog is easily identifiable as the single most influential blog in the geographical area.
There is a difference between linking and influencial, particularly in the segment you’re looking at. The data was used to identify the “Connectors”, “Mavens”, etc (see “The Tipping Point”). Connectors are the ones who connect people. Mavens are the ones who are the authorities.
[10:42]
The people who create the content and the people who disseminate the data to the world at large are often very different people.
“More links do not for greater influence make, in all market segments.”
“Eric Meyer is one of the creators of Cascading Style Sheets. He’s very well known in the design world. If you were to look at Technorati, you might think that he would be a maven in his geographic community. Even though he has more links than anyone else in his community, few (if any) are from his community. His influence in the world at large is huge, but at the local level is minimal. The circus doesn’t always tell the story.”
“If you’re trying to promote your brand, you might be looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Virginia [last name], a non-Cleveland blogger, isn’t even from the area, but all the Cleveland bloggers read her and link to her. She’s one of the key Mavens for the area.
Analytics and measurability like this will help define who is influential. It isn’t perfect, however it provides a cross-section, point in time view.
My issue with this is that the techniques used are very point in time. In addition, because the links that were measured were mainly from the blogroll,they don’t really reflect what people feel about this.
This is why analyzing things like BlogLines reader lists, delicious and Technorati tags is more timely, and therefore relevant, than this particular exercise.
That said, if you could watch the links between blogs and then cross-segment in some way (geographically, industry, etc.) you’d have value. Right now we can watch the blogs and their interlinking. But we have no clear way to segment them. Maybe the various tagging systems will allow some of this at some point so that we can categorize posts and blogs and therefore segment portions of the blogosphere in a truly useful way.
[10:50]
Mmmm…. Coffee…
Sorry, I’m wearing down, and it’s just a few minutes until my session. More coffee!
Evelyn Rodriguez
“If you can tell who influences me based on my blogroll, I’d be amazed. Ask me who influences me and I’ll tell you.”
The ultimate goal of these technologies and techniques is to find out the people that other people trust. Isn’t that what everyone wants to know? I have yet to see a technology that actually does this for me.
Elizabeth Albrycht
“We’ve always communicated with the gatekeepers. What is the essence of brand, and how can we protect it?”
[author's opinion: you don't need to protect it. You can't protect it. You don't own it. If it's in people's head, you need to give your customer the space to think positively about you. Conversation, individual contact and feedback allow that more easily than anything else]
Andy Lark apparently agrees. He mentions Virgin. It’s not strong because of the logo. It’s strong because of the love consumers have for the product. He says that as soon as you talk to a company, they think they own it. People decide what they want to do with it. Companies get to do branding.
[author's note: some of this is semantics]
Andy Lark
“I would have taken offence at someone taking the piss on an ad. I can protect my trademarks which I have to protect. I pour money into protecting that trademark. That’s different from protecting my brand. I have a right to state to the world that we did not create.”
“I get tired of companies trying to blur the lines, blur the blogosphere and abuse the nature of the viral blogosphere.”
When Volkswagen saw the offensive ad, they didn’t stand up for the trademark out of fear of what the market would say.
A commenter says brands are products. It doesn’t matter about the logo. It’s the message you convey to your audience. Andy and the commenter are arguing about this. Andy believes conversations are product. They’re arguing semantics. Elizabeth is stopping the conversation. She says “when anyone can do whatever they want to your brand, what can you do?”
[11:00]
Dan: “The use of understanding the blogosphere helps to build out the brand instead of trying to maintain advantage of something so central.”
Elizabeth: “Trying to get testimonials is a critical part of understanding your brand. Blogs offer a new way for us to do that more economically.” She asks Anita if this is a particular advantage of getting your customers to talk about you in public.
Anita: “This is why you are seeing so many small businesses. There is no more effective and powerful of a way to communicate. In my view, small businesses can get more benefit from starting and having their own blogs because it’s a way to get their brand, it’s a way to get their brand out there, in a way that they couldn’t otherwise do. In my view, large corporations get more benefit from being mentioned in other people’s blogs than by doing their own blogs.”
A Commenter: “You should always be afraid when nouns become verbs. The whole “branding” thing is an indication of something. In the age of broadcast media, the company was telling the market something and expecting it to affect them. In the time of the social media, a brand becomes a conversation. That means that for the communicators in this group, you don’t need to control the brand because it is out of control.”
Evelyn: “I would engage in a dialogue first. Nike spent 4 years dialoguing with golfers before launching their product. I don’t see a lot of blogs doing this, but I see blogs developing better and better products.” (Microsoft is doing a lot of this with MSN Search) “I see this as creating a dialogue very early with the market. From that dialogue, you can create a product which addresses their needs as perfectly as you can in this world. I’ve noticed Microsoft doing this in their blogs - asking for feedback.”
[11:05]
Andy: “There is a massive opportunity for PR people to measure and analyze the market (blogosphere). Typically you only heard what you ask. There’s a huge opportunity for PR to become the big ticket item on the marketing agenda by identifying the market and facilitating it. Where do our communities live and how do we talk to them?” … “The conversation is a different one than happens with a sales force or an engineer.” …
[Author's note: It's a social conversation instead of a directed conversation.]
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