Blogging for customers
Advertisers striving to attract web customers have a new frontier – the blogosphere, the cyber-realm where millions of web loggers or bloggers exchange ideas, diaries, news accounts and more daily.
The blogosphere’s potential as an ad medium is undeniable. But it’s also largely unorganized, unpredictable and untested by traditional marketing standards.That’s why most companies have shied away from advertising on blogs — so far. "It’s something to watch for but it’s still in the germination stages," says Shari Worthington, president of Worcester-based Telesian Technology Inc., a marketing, sales and e-business company.
Kel Kelly, president of Hopkinton-based marketing company Kel & Partners LLC, says most people are still trying to determine the blog’s marketing niche. But, she says, it’s gaining marketing traction.
The first weblogs — user-created web sites that are updated daily — began in the late 1990s as on-line personal diaries kept by a handful of people. In 1996, there were an estimated 100 diaries. By 2005, there were more than 19 million weblogs, says Kelly.
Companies can tap the blogosphere by advertising on others’ blogs or creating their own.
Worthington and other experts see little risk and considerable potential benefit in company-created blogs. Tied to a firm’s website, blogs can help a company get better placement in search engines like Google because they increase content and site links. But advertising on outside blogs, at least now, is more complicated and risky.
Blogs’ focus on specific subjects gives them great niche marketing potential, but the free and open nature of blog exchanges can be a marketing minefield. "You have to be careful," Worthington says. "There are a lot of lunatics out there running blogs."
A prospective blog advertiser should use search engines and some of the various blog-tracking websites to find and review blogs. If a blog seems like a good fit, the company needs to contact the blogger about whether it accepts advertising, and at what price. Worthington says some of her high-tech clients successfully advertise on reputable technical blogs that are more like on-line magazines, but most others aren’t ready.
Kelly, who sees blogs as a cheaper, more targeted alternative to traditional advertising, says the challenge is determining their credibility and their audience. "Some lady blogging on her cat is not an opportunity," she says.
That’s where a new type of participant in the blogosphere can help. Emerging companies assemble data on blogs and the audiences they are reaching. Boston-based Gather.com, a two-year-old "umbrella brand" for blogs, is bringing together bloggers and providing content information that can help advertisers sort out marketing opportunities. While Kel & Partners hasn’t done a lot of blog ads for its clients as yet, Kelly expects that to change. "So few blogs have established credible audiences, we just haven’t switched gears yet," she says.
Mark Venezia, founder of Gather.com, says his company brings together 18,000 member bloggers and has some 100,000 "page views" per day. Gather, operating full force since February, has 50 advertisers who pay fees based on a bidding process and expects to up that to 1000 in the next few months. Ads are linked to blog subjects and target various consumer profiles.
Other business people are succeeding on their own with blog marketing. Pete Caputa IV, principal of Westboro-based WhizSpark, says blog advertising is a key tool for his company, which helps venues and event planners increase attendance and organize events. He says he has some 15 bloggers who run banner ads for his clients’ events on their blogs to help increase exposure. Some he pays and some he just has a relationship with.
An avid blogger himself, Caputa writes blogs for other companies when he’s not scanning some 500 blogs a day. He advises business people who want to promote their companies this way to develop a relationship with bloggers and learn from the feedback they get from the collaborative process.
Micky Baca can be reached at mbaca@wbjournal.com.
WBJ Web Partners
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