Best Practice: Blogging

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Best Practice Blogging
June, 2006
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The Wild Wild West
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Not just a load of hype !
Source - Wikipedia
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The 4Cs why do users like blogs/communities ?
Create
Communicate
Control
Challenge
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Two fold opportunity for advertisers
Real-time focus group
Conversation with consumer
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Trust is fundamental to these environments
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Evolving how we monitor interpret

• Technology alone not sufficient
• Requires humans to understand context READ
• positive or negative ?

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How to initiate or improve the conversation ?
Develop a bespoke website (blog)
Invite feedback
Provide engaging content
Encourage creativity
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Advertising can work but not as we know it

• Simple text, headline to encourage debate
• Avoid animation, blend in with environment
• Gather blog comments in to ad, link to blog
• Bring conversation to the fore

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Anyone can do it

• Challenge
• Open up Stormhoek to a larger audience with
  virtually no budget
• Solution
• Blogger employed to write diary behind the
  grape
• Samples sent to bloggers, asked to post comment
  (good bad)
• Results
• Doubled sales
• Over 350 links on Google

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In the words of the business owner
Blogging has been really, really fundamental to
whats happened over the past year, Our retail
buyers say customers go into their stores and
supermarkets and say weve heard about this
through blogs. It hasnt just seen our sales rise
strongly, its totally disrupted the business
If they dont like something, that is of
more value to us than praise Posts most
successful when they ask a question
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Dos Donts

• DO
• Research your topic
• Be prepared to respond
• Expect negative comments
• (lends authenticity)
• Learn from the comments
• Be true to your brand
• Trust the consumer

• DONT
• Stick up a standard banner
• Force the conversation
• Place blog on standard website
• Expect your blogging efforts to fit seamlessly
• Forget to participate
• Abandon without dialogue

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A small step from blogging to collaborative
marketing

• One-to-One
• E-mail, Instant messaging, SMS,
• One-toMany
• Blogs, Podcast, Video, Webinar
• Many-to-Many
• Wikis, Flickr, Collaborative news sites, Ebay

Opportunity to create brand advocates who work on
your behalf
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Thank You