With the growth of the blogosphere, several agencies specialized in “blogging relations” have been created during the last year, answering the new need and opportunities presented.

Agencies like Ebuzzing, Mybuzzbox, Blogbang or Wynotu are now developing a new market, the one of BUZZ marketing, or what we could call now BtoCtoC. (Business to Customer to Customer)

With 9 millions of users that consult blogs in France alone, companies are conscious of the need to integrate blogs into their communication strategy, but quite often without knowing how to use this new tool.

So what is “Blogging Relations”?

With blogs, companies can find a way to communicate online for nothing if they generate good relations with users. Also, it is in the interest for the bloggers to get links and feeds as it is generating more and more traffic on their websites and boosts their own page ranks on the search engines.

Nowadays, certain agencies give several choices to the bloggers to participate to the communication campaigns of their clients through different strategy:

Depending of the success of the blogs, agencies can suggest remunerating the bloggers per clicks on the article or per number of views (if it is a video for instance) the articles would have provided. This is particularly an interesting way to charge clients for the creation of video / YouTube channels.

In terms of publishing news. Agencies can suggest sending the news to the bloggers who will be free to publish or not. However, agencies can suggest paying the blogger for each article he will choose to rewrite and publish on his pages from the text that would have been sent to him before.

Another strategy is to send an “attention” to the bloggers. This is purely marketing action but some big companies that can afford it could actually think twice about this idea. It is purely about seducing the blogger to make him fancy writing about the product or the service.

This could be translated by sending a sample of the product you would like to promote or amusing him with some other presents.

For instance, the brand Celio has been sending a sample of underwear to each blogger of their choice that have published or promoting their products on their blogs. Ensuring a personalized contact is also a way to starting making up a strong blog contact list!

Re sending out gifts – this backfired spectacularly when Microsoft sent pre-release editions of Vista to Bloggers. The new software was so unpopular that by the time it was released to the general public there was already 100s of negative news pieces about Vista. This was a missed opportunity to generate some genuine goodwill towards Microsoft – only if they had re-worked Vista in response to the feedback from the bloggers.

A new model

Some other agencies suggest the creation of platforms where companies can leave a brief about their activity giving freedom to creators to conceive an advert for them, and bloggers to publish those on their blogs.

Briefly, it is about getting companies working closely with inventive designers, by means of competitions. The users can therefore have the possibility to realize an advert from the brief they have been given. And the best adverts will be paid for by the company.

Then, bloggers will have the leisure to publish the creation on their blogsphere, and again with some remuneration to get.

It is either the company that gets in touch with the blogs via the platform, by selecting a target and by accepting the prices suggested by bloggers;

Or, the company just leaves his brief opened in the platform, and this is the blogger that answer to the offer, while accepting the conditions and prices suggested by the company.

What can it bring to communicate with blogs?

1/ Generating buzz and start a word of mouth, thus boosting the brand name on the search engines, gaining in visibility through the web and generating more SALES!!
2/ Exploit different sides of a same campaign simultaneously; each bloggers can deal differently with the information received.
3/ Create a scoop! And gain visibility in the big Medias
4/ Obtain more feedback and draw the consequences of them to improve the next campaign

But a serious point has to be taken into consideration:

The company really needs to think about generating a grapevine naturally, and consider the work of bloggers. In other words, not to force the buzz by suggesting or publishing their news or adverts in any kind of blogs.

How to measure the effects of those campaigns?

There are several tools that can measure the effects of such campaigns. For adverts or videos, some usual tracking tools are used. For measure the online press impact, it is possible to track the number of links that the campaign produced, or realize a qualitative and quantitative report of the comments generated.


Please if anyone used one of those strategies before, could you give any tips to approach the best the bloggers!!!!

How to get a good response from bloggers?

There are loads of articles on the subject linked here

http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.....PitchingBlogs

It pretty much boils down to -
be personal
choose the right blogs to approach
be really, really nice to bloggers!