Many companies struggle with how to respond to bloggers – let alone engage and interact with them. With more than 75 million blogs on just about every topic imaginable, it is overwhelming to think about monitoring and engaging bloggers. The key, like so many things in life, is focus. You need to figure out who the most influential bloggers are and educate them.
Public relations and marketing professionals must recognize this influential audience is not going away. More and more of us are blogging on a regular basis. I am blogging, my mother is blogging, and when I want to sign up for a new service or purchase a product, you can bet I am going to check out what other consumers are saying about it via various blogs.
So what is the right way to monitor, analyze and engage with bloggers on a regular basis? How does a company with limited resources do it? Does a company need special software, tools or dedicated staff for this endeavor?
Read on for a few of my thoughts on this topic.
Monitor & Analyze
1. The first step is to gain a basic understanding of who is blogging. One easy way to do this is to set up a Google Alert. Google allows people to monitor news and blogs. Do this and you’ll begin to gain a sense of how many people are blogging about your company, product and service and what they’re saying.
2. Consider the content of posts and gain a sense of sentiment. Are bloggers positive, negative or neutral about your company or product? Are they highly emotional or more lackadaisical? Are their posts relevant and timely, or not?
3. Identify the reach of each blogger. To do this, you need to know how large his or her audience is. Does the blogger have a lot of links from other sites to his or her blog? How frequently is he or she posting? Where does the blog rank in Googles’ PageRank system?
4. Finally consider how much authority or credibility the blogger has. Is he or she considered an expert? Is he or she an average user? But one with strong, informed opinions?
Engage
As soon as you have done these four things, you’re ready to engage. This is the most time consuming part of the process. Each and every company is going to have different needs around engaging. Consider the following ways to engage:
So what about tools?
There are a number of companies offering solutions or tools to help with the activities outlined above. Consider Visible Technologies (www.visibletechnologies.com), a Seattle-based start up. It offers a solution which is able to track the constantly growing amount of consumer generated material on the Internet. Visible Technologies’ solution collects posts and allows employees to comment on those posts. To do all this, Visible Technologies uses a proprietary platform and multi-tiered querying technology.
Other companies providing services around blog monitoring, social media management, reputation management, etc., include:
More resources
Clearly the practice on monitoring, analyzing and engaging with bloggers is in its infancy. Many companies are scrambling to come up with the best methodologies and practices for doing this. We will continue to follow trends in this arena. In the meantime, here are some additional articles to check out.
David Pogue, with the New York Times provides insights on blogging and how to take advantage of Web 2.0 in this article http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/are-you-taking-advantage-of-web-20/
Bill Siwicki, from Internet Retailer, looks at word of mouth and how to leverage social media in his article which can be found at http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=25851
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4 Comments
David Alston |
Hi Jennifer,
I great post on summarizing the listening and engaging aspects. Radian6 is also a social media monitoring solution utilized by a number of leading firms and agencies. Just wanted to make sure we were left off your list. 🙂
All the best.
David
Blake Cahill |
Jennifer:
Nice post about the social media monitoring space. Appreciate the mention.
Hope all is well with you all.
Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies
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