Blogs and Products
Posted by Chris Tippie
Ran across this on Technorati’s State of the Blogshere. It is a good read and has some interesting demo and revenue data. The thing that just jumped out at me was this quote:
Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the Blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). …Companies are already reaching out to bloggers. One-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.
Four out of five bloggers write about Proper Nouns/Brands/Products and 37% of them do it frequently. I mean, there is a “no duh” factor here to some extent. Sure, you pull up Paid Content, TechCrunch and Boing Boing and that-is-all-you-see, posts about Proper Nouns. But I guess I didn’t really expect that to translate to your run of the mill blogs. I expected that there would be a whole non-commercial sub tier devoted to… well… talking about ideas and concepts, belief systems and values. However, to get right down to it we’re humans and humans need context. So, even if we’re blogging about something nebulous as “values” we need context and to get context we talk about stuff. Stuff, for most people, involves products and brands. I once read a fantastic blog post on trust and how ultimately extending an altruistic flavor of trust to everyone you meet is at the end of the day profitable for you. Easy concept to grasp - hard concept to live by. To bridge this gap the author referenced two brands: Target and Craftsman Tools as evidence of just how right he was. So there you have it - inexpensive consumer electronics and hammers in a post about altruism.
With this as an underlying truth in today’s world - if I were a product company why wouldn’t I pay more attention to what people are saying about my company and my products? In large part, they are. However, there is one segment that characteristically doesn’t engage in this proactive outreach: the media. Seriously, car companies take issue with blogs who give unflattering reviews of their new models. Software makers reach out to bloggers around releases and new product launches. However, the media is vilified and misrepresented each and every day in a multitude of blogs. My question is this: how are media companies managing the perception of their products in the blogsphere? For the longest time, there was a reluctance to “stoop to their level” implying that bloggers generally are one step below tabloids. Is that changing? I hope so. So look above at my quoted text for the highlighted portion. I wonder it that applies to bloggers who review and discuss media?
Other posts by Chris Tippie
Tags: blogsphere, media