Blogging: The Bedrock of Advertising 2.0

Last month we kicked off a series of Web Smart newsletters about how Web 2.0 is affecting advertising and marketing. Advertising 2.0 includes activities like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and online PR. Believe it or not, these activities are already old school when measured in web time. The focus these days is "conversational media" sometimes referred to as "social media," or "the new attention economy." Whatever it's called (I'll use "conversational media") it is a very real and rapidly growing marketplace of voices, opinions, influence, distribution, and attention--all the things marketers and advertising professionals strive to attain for their clients.

Problem is, the conversation can't really be bought, at least not with dollars. Sure, many blogs have advertising opportunities which can be bought, but placing an ad on a blog where the community resents the advertiser will only buy a very vocal and negative reaction from the crowd--and there's no turning it off once it begins. While dangers exist, so do opportunities for positive momentum which can have impact far beyond the cost the ad. In fact, positive effects can happen even without buying advertising.

Because the world of conversational media is full of pitfalls, some companies feel safer staying away. Unfortunately, this just means that the conversations going on about their brands happen without their voice. And silence is itself a statement in the conversation, usually a negative one.

The biggest conceptual adjustment that brand marketers need make in the Advertising 2.0 world is that the conversation can't be controlled like other forms of marketing. This is of course scary. It's also exciting and potentially very powerful--if engaged properly.

Blogs are currently the primary outlet for conversational media. But before jumping directly into the subject of blogs and blogging here are a few considerations to motivate an embrace of blogs and conversational media.

Several years ago I wrote a book report newsletter about one of my favorite marketing books, Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. One of the lasting principles I took away from that book is what he called "getting better reality." Before putting great effort into calling attention to a product or service, spend time honestly evaluating how good the product or service really is. It's human nature to tune in good feedback but selectively tune out the bad. Or, more often the case, people vocalize compliments (and even exaggerate them) while keeping complaints and frustrations to themselves. Few like to be the bearers of bad news. The cumulative effect of wearing rose colored glasses is that the perception of our strengths get overstated while our flaws drastically underestimated.

The closed loop of traditional marketing often leave our blindness unnoticed. Not so with conversational media. Highly regarded bloggers have no reservations speaking their mind when evaluating a product or service. And even if they were predisposed to lob softballs (perhaps due to an advertising relationship), readers who post comments will counterbalance the conversation by calling attention to any kindly overlooked flaws. So if getting an unbiased review of products and services is important (and it should be), conversational media will provide it. Getting better reality is much easier when we hear the unbiased, albeit painful, voices of the crowd.

Related to getting better reality is the opportunity to measure goodwill. How consumers and clients really feel about products and services is critical knowledge for brand building. The blogosphere reveals these undercurrents if you study the conversation. For example, suppose a small eruption occurs in a popular blog about a flaw in a product. As the community adds to the fire, the degree of heat can be gauged. Is the crowd truly enraged or just disappointed? Is their language full of final-straw statements and threats of brand abandonment, or are they hopeful that a solution will be forthcoming? If something bad happens to a company, is the crowd sympathetic to their plight or quietly happy to see them getting their comeuppance? Knowing how much or how deep your goodwill goes is an incredibly valuable bit of marketing information.

Being aware of and engaged in the conversations where your brand is being discussed is in itself a brand-building, confidence-establishing activity. Consumers welcome and reward companies that pay attention and respond to their collective voices. There are few ongoing, real-time opportunities for brands to activity engage their customers. Blogs regularly provide such great opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization - Both having an active blog and participating in the conversations of other bloggers extends other online marketing efforts. Search engine optimization is 10% getting your web pages structured and set up properly, and 90% adding new and relevant content regularly. Blogs provide a relatively informal way of regularly adding pages to a site. Postings don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is often long enough. Additionally, participating (non-anonymously) in blog conversations create external links which both lead to visits and contribute to overall link popularity which can favorably impact search engine results.

Search Engine Marketing - Placing advertising on blogs can be an effective advertising venue. As already alluded to, it can also be disastrous. It all depends on how appropriate the ad is to the blog and the conversation. A mismatch can really hurt, but a good match can create cumulative effects. By being active on industry blogs, discovering and evaluating such opportunities will be much easier. By the way, when it comes to advertising on blogs, blog owners often have the last say on whether or not they'll accept a particular advertiser or advertisement on their site. So in some cases, if there is a mismatch or simply lack of good will, you might not be able to buy onto a blog.

Onto an overview of blogs...

The word Blog got its name from its original moniker - "weblog." Blogs started out mostly as the online journals of hobbyists and aficionados. It was a way for people to socialize online and share what might have previously only been expressed in a locked diary. The rapid growth of blogs was first felt in the political arena.

There is no technical definition of a blog. Any website can function as a blog, though most blogs have similar traits and features. Usually blogs are displayed as a sequential posts sorted by date, the most recent on top.

There are many popular blogging tools, most of them free, including WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger (which is currently struggling with significant spam issues), and Xanga.

Blogs usually allow readers to add comments to a post. These days, to avoid comment spamming, most blogs require either registration, or a "captcha" field (which requires poster to enter the graphic letters into a field - something an automated spam bot can't do). In order to minimize the number of user names and passwords we use for commenting on blogs, some blogs have adopted the use of TypeKey. Setting up and logging into a TypeKey account grants you commenting access to all blogs that support TypeKey accounts.

Some blogs post all comments so long as registration or captcha entry is successful. Others require editorial review and approval before posting.

Blogs grow in popularity in part by how many others read, link to, and subscribe to them. Therefore they often include "link bait" for each post. These are short cuts that allow readers to add the posts to their bookmarking services (like del.icio.us, Diigo, and Furl) or recommend it to news and blog aggregators (like Digg and Technorati - more on Technorati later).

Most blogs allow readers to subscribe to the blog by receiving new posts in their RSS reader (you have an RSS reader, right?).

Blogs typically include a right column containing navigational and indexing tools such as latest posts, archives, search, tags, and blog roll (other blogs that blogger reads and recommends). Sometimes this column includes a "recently read by" widget using the MyBlogLog service.

Aside from the visual elements that make up a typical blog, there is something more fundamental that defines blogishness. That is, its culture of openness and transparency. Even though many blogs and blog comments are not personally identifiable (they're usin' code names) the nature of the postings is often very personal and transparent. Bloggers are not afraid to let the world know what they think, what they like, what they read, and what they listen to. In fact, the latest trend in blog accounts is to use real names rather than aliases. I've opted for this approach, so if you ever see my comments on a blog you'll see my real name next to it. I find that being transparent about identity increases the weight a comment since it's not speaking from behind a veil of anonymity. It also makes me a little more conscientious about my language and tone before posting since I'm using my real name. I think this bit of accountability improves the quality of posts and comments, which benefits everyone.

As of this writing, Technorati (see below) is tracking over 70 million blogs. Estimates show that the total number of blogs doubles every six months. It should be noted that this trajectory includes all blogs, including every random posting by millions of MySpace users. With regard to more professional (is that the right term?) blogs, the increase may be more like a doubling every year.

In the past year I've written quite a bit about the concept of the "Long Tail" with regard to Web 2.0 and search engine optimization. There is, of course, a very long tail of blogs. There are a few blogs that make up the head of the blog charts - sometimes referred to as "A-List" blogs. For every niche, there are the most popular A-List bloggers. They have become media voices in their own right, even rivaling their offline competitors for attention of readers and advertisers. But because the bar to entry is so low in the blogging world, there are many voices, and not all achieve superblogger status, but they do all garner some attention and so contribute to online conversations.

To get started with blogging, it's helpful to begin by finding and reading other blogs. Good news! This is the web, so finding stuff is really easy. In fact, the biggest challenge isn't finding blogs, but rather keeping track of them all and staying in touch with so many. Technorati is currently the leader in blog search, though Google's Blog Search is on their heals. Technorati lists search results either by date or by authority. Authority is an important measurement in evaluating blogs. The higher the authority/popularity of a blog the more impact their posts and comments with have.

Once you've found a relevant and authoritative blog keeping up with them is really simple--subscribe to them via RSS (really simple syndication). Some blogs actually support subscribing to the comment string of an individual posting. This is very useful when participating in hot posts when your client is in the sights of the crowd. When posting potentially controversial comments, the ability to subscribe to the comment thread helps keep up on any important turns in the conversation.

TIP - Both Technorati and Google Blog Search allow blog search results to be subscribed to vis RSS. Search requests that contain keywords and phrases related to products and services can be subscribed to, so that whenever new items show up, the new search result listing is picked up via RSS. This is an excellent way of discovering new blogs or blogs with comments that relate to areas of interest.

Bloggers that have not quite attained a level of readership to merit direct advertising/sponsorship will usually add Google AdWords or other automated ad networking tools on their blogs. But as blogs become more popular and garner lots of attention, more sophisticated advertising relationships are usually established. Sometimes these relationships can be established directly with a blogger, but more often they are handled through a blog ad intermediary. These intermediaries perform a helpful function in making sure blogs and blog advertisers (and the specific advertisements) are a good match. They're not afraid to tell a potential advertiser that they can't place ads on certain blogs or that a particular ad is not fitting for some blogs. Clearly the dynamics of buying and selling ad space has shifted, but making good matches is so much more important in blogging because the environment is so open and uncontrollable. Once the genie is out of the bottle, he's not going back in.

There are currently three big players in the blog ad network space and more enter every day.

Blogads - In addition to being Newfangled's new upstairs neighbor, Blogads was a real pioneer in the blog advertising market.

Federated Media - John Battelle, author of The Search, and contributor to Business 2.0 magazine founded Federated Media which groups bloggers that share common ground into advertising groups a.k.a federations.

AdBrite - I'm not as familiar with AdBrite but from my research when Blogads and Federated Media are mentioned/compared (on blogs), AdBrite is often mentioned as well.

Well that will just about do it for this month's newsletter on blogs. And just a reminder... now that you have an RSS reader (you have one, right?) you should be subscribed to the Web Smart Newsletter, but now you can also subscribe to the Web Smart Blog, which will regularly add the latest information to past newsletters to keep them current and helpful to our readers. By the way, if you like this newsletter, why don't you give us a little link bait love and recommend us to Digg, tag us in del.icio.us, and favorite us in Technorati? Comments also welcome...