I’ve been reading a lot of material lately about bloggers, endorsements, and brand evangelism. One thing I picked up is that the reason why bloggers are credible to their readers is because of their independence. The moment they give that up then it’s literally the same as a paid advertorial on a magazine. Blog marketing is picking up here in the Philippines and we’ve seen several companies do “blogger challenges”, “blogger endorsers”, and other similar activities but the question I’d like to throw to the brand managers is was the campaign effective? Did it actually get the readers of the blogger to buy your stuff and eventually become loyal customers? At the end of the day you’re still running a business and everything you spend money on needs ROI.
Professional blogger Darren Rowse summed it up nicely on Twitter when he said that blog marketing campaigns should be WIN WIN WIN. Win for the advertiser, blogger, and the reader. A relationship with a blogger forcing him to not say anything bad about your products and anything good about your competitors might be a “WIN” for the advertiser but it’s a big “LOSE” to both the blogger and the reader. Nobody really likes reading canned content (copy pasted press releases anyone?). From an advertiser’s perspective, the WIN WIN WIN approach is better because the only way to actually get the readers of the blogger to buy is if what the blogger says sounds authentic, sincere, and genuine.
Trying to create a pseudo environment of credibility also won’t work. There have been several blogger contests lately where bloggers write about how effective the product is for them while they’re using it over a period of time. First I’m pretty sure that you if you ask the bloggers to get the unique number of views those “update posts” you’ll see that it’s much less than what he normally gets. Don’t make it a blogger challenge. Just let them test the product and let them blog on their own volition. If they like it and they sincerely post an article endorsing it without any strings attached then it becomes a huge WIN-WIN-WIN.
Anyway, just something to chew on.