Mango Business

In recent years, blogs and social media monitoring have become a fundamental part of the press office operation and many PR agencies’ bread and butter services.

As social networking has matured, companies need to engage proactively to ensure their brands are effectively supported.

Traditional media such as magazines, newspapers and TV channels have increasing numbers of journalist-written blogs as part of their online presence, meaning a top tier of blogs are seen as being just as influential in the media landscape as their e-zines and print media counterparts. There has also been an increase in the number of business-led social networks, business users of blogs and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and Google-owned Jaiku, and multimedia social sites like Flickr.

However, a huge portion of the blogosphere and social media landscape is not professionally produced and individually these sites do not have huge audiences. Collectively though, these smaller outlets comprise as much as 99 per cent of the social media landscape and together form a powerful force that the PR industry is looking to harness. As the majority of blogs and social media sites contain personal content written in the first person, viral issues and stories can spread quickly. The sites connect people and when issues spread virally across social networks, they become big news for organisations that they affect. This is why tracking blog buzz across the whole of the web is critical for reporting on brand image, online coverage, and building a picture of customer perceptions.

An example of how effective a viral campaign can be, was when an online grass-roots campaign was formed on the social network Facebook. Protesting against an overdraft charge that the bank HSBC was imposing on recent graduate accounts, thousands of students joined forces online through a viral Facebook group which generated massive media attention, and forced a u-turn at HSBC. Within just a few weeks of the group launching, the bank scrapped the overdraft charges.

Over the last year, the fact that blogs impact a company’s brand image online has become more established. Marketing, PR and communications departments are increasingly exposed to the impact blogs have on a brand’s reputation, whether that’s negative coverage of a product or an online petition or a campaign across social networks. As this issue has gathered momentum, companies have realised that blogs and social media need to be actively managed not just monitored.

Some progressive brands are already doing this successfully. US retail bank Wells Fargo for example has a team dedicated to responding online to bloggers’ issues and complaints in order to increase positive sentiment around the brand online and reduce the amount of negativity that might emerge.

What caused the need to move from monitoring to engagement?  Early adopters have led the charge. And the masses have followed. We are seeing social media’s evolution in the business ecosystem move from early adopter to mass market status and web tactics are rapidly becoming better understood tactically and strategically as part of the PR mix. The challenge is to turn the opportunity into action.

Blogging is a fairly new social media platform that is fast becoming a popular form of marketing for many businesses.  As a professional blogger myself, I believe that every business should participate in blogging.  Just like every business should be following what people are saying about them via social networks and social media, every business should be blogging as well.   

Many business owners believe that having a company blog or participating in social networking is a waste of time and provides no return on investment.  Tell that to Dell, the computer company that attributed $3 million in sales due to Twitter.

So, why should your company have a blog?  Here are a couple reasons:

You have more of a chance of being discovered in a search engine like Google.  Unlike regular websites, blogs are on the search engines’ radars because blogs are updated more often.  Search engines love fresh, relevant content.

Blogs enable your company to interact with your customers, plus you can build a community of loyal customers who appreciate your services and what you have to say.  By providing value via tips, news or articles on topics related to your business, you establish a relationship with your customers.  They will remember you the next time they need your product or service.

A good example of a business that provides value via their blog is this San Diego Cosmetic Dentist…

Dr. Timothy Collins and Dr. David Landau are dentists who own a practice called Complete Dental Health located in San Diego, California.  Besides owning a regular static website that contains a host of information about their business, they also own a blog that offers dental health tips and advice, plus news about the dentistry field. 

Let’s say that someone in San Diego was searching for a dentist, but this web-savvy person wanted to find a dentist with a blog.  He/she does a Google blogsearch for “San Diego dentist”.  Guess what blog shows up in the top results?  That’s right – the Complete Dental Health’s blog shows up near the top of the list.   So the potential customer reads the Complete Dental Health blog and likes the information.  This potential customer then decides to call Complete Dental Health to set up an appointment. 

Although this is a very simplistic example of what happens when you blog for business, maybe it will banish any of those thoughts that blogging is just a “trend” and isn’t worth exploring as a way to attract new customers.

If you want to make the most of social media marketing today, you better sign up with Facebook. According to a recent report from the Orlando Business Journal, Facebook has far outpaced its competitors in the first quarter of 2009, garnering 78 percent of US social network participants against MySpace’s 42 percent, LinkedIn’s 17 percent and Twitter’s 10 percent.

Worldwide, Facebook was reported to have 307.1 million unique visitors in May 2009 while MySpace had less than half with a mere 123.2 million unique visitors. According to Facebook, its members are sending each other one billion chat messages each day.

As early as 2008, a study done by Internet Retailer and Vovici showed that most online retailers in the US chose to use Facebook as a social media network to help boost sales. A separate study done by Rosetta among the top 100 US online retailers showed that 59% had set up a Facebook fan page. Among these retailers were Best Buy, Kohl’s, Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us.

In order to make the most of your company’s Facebook fan page, though, you should familiarize yourself thoroughly with social media marketing as a whole, and with the way Facebook itself works in particular. It would be wholly counterproductive to make an online faux pas and earn ill will. Each social media network has its own temperament, after all, and its own set of rules and online etiquette. Members and users also have certain expectations from other members and users.

Perhaps it would be best for a company not to risk experimentation by assigning this task to a newbie. Learn from the mistake of the New York Times whose new social media editor had no extensive knowledge of Twitter before diving in. As a result, her repost meant to point other Tweeter users to an online article ended up taking them to Ebay instead. Do not make the same mistake in Facebook or you will get a lot of negative comments instead of the favorable ones you need. It would be best to leave the task of handling your company’s social media marketing efforts to the experts.

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