The media landscape is now in a state of flux with the continual emergence of new nontraditional media besides the traditional media forms.
Now there are newer media options emerging, such as, blogs, podcasting, Internet discussion forums and comparison sites. These present exciting challenges and opportunities to marketers and companies.
These changes are fuelled by technology, which has now become a lifestyle and personality statement of a very tech savvy consumer audience. Online discussions that are on the record and blogs are immensely influential besides being credible sources of information. Podcasting is the latest way to catch niche audiences.
The consumer is the catalyst to these developments and explosion of these new information channels.
The Evolving Media
Tracking and analysing communication channels like blogs, RSS, podcasts, consumer discussion forums, new online media, citizen journalism, new constituencies of worldwide real-time bloggers, consumers, and users give interesting as well as useful insights into consumer minds.
As such, companies are no longer in control – messaging and the task of setting the communications agenda is now almost totally controlled by customers, employees or sometimes even competitors.
There are many examples of consumer-generated media. Blogs, podcasting, RSS feeds, wikis, collaborative publishing, instant messaging (IM) and smart mobs are the latest ways people receive, publish and even make news.
A study of blogs gives companies a better understanding of who their audiences are and what it is that interests and motivates them. This in turn helps them to come up with attention-grabbing marketing/corporate messages and programs.
Paramount Studios for instance have been immensely successful with a niche film, Hustle & Flow, which they promoted through music blogs and fan sites. According to thirty five percent of viewers, online discussions were what motivated them to see the film.
The Latest Tool
Blogs are growing at lightning speed. Technorati, a blog search engine, reported an average of 1.2 million blog postings per day during November, 2005. On December 13, 2005, Technorati reported that there were 22.9 million blogs around the world with about 80,000 new blogs being added daily.
Gen Y, Gen X and the Boomers, looks as if almost everyone has jumped onto the blog bandwagon. Very simply put, it is ‘Word of mouth’ media, consumer-controlled and self-publishing that can be very effectively used to a company’s advantage.
Company blogs have also been developed. The company strategy towards blogs may vary – some respond whereas others do not.
Yet if we take a serious look there is no stopping a forward-thinking company from taking full advantage of the digital sphere. Time Inc. prepares a morning report summarising mentions of the company on an extensive list of websites, including blogs. GM and Boeing run official blogs bylined by executives.
Microsoft allows employees to write their own blogs discussing company matters. “If anything, blogging is another channel to have a direct conversation with customers and partners, in addition to what we do with the media”, says Larry Cohen, GM of corporate communications for Microsoft.
The implications of blogs for corporate communicators and researchers are far reaching. Acording to PR Week Corporate Survey 2005, only roughly 22% of corporate respondents say that they monitor the Blogosphere for mentions of their company, either “a great deal” (3.9%) or “a moderate amount” (18.4%).
On the other hand, 45.6% admit they don’t monitor blogs at all. At the same time almost all of the in-house corporate communicators recognise the Blogosphere and its potential to impact their own brands as “an efficient and effective way to quickly disseminate a lot of information on a regular basis.”
Another survey, the Technorati Blog Analyst Firm survey 2005, takes a look at the blogging community to see why they blog and whether the bloggers know whom they are interacting with.
Most of the bloggers surveyed blogged to create visibility as an authority in the field (33.8%) many others blogged simply to create a blog of their thoughts (31.5%). More than half of the bloggers surveyed (56%) were unaware of which company representative they were interacting with most of the time.
Most of the time they do buy products before blogging and the most significant is the revelation that the company PR people often do not contact them. The common thread between both surveys, PR Week Corporate Survey and Technorati, is the fact that blogging as an activity and bloggers as a community are still not taken very seriously.
A monitoring of the blogosphere will keep companies updated on what this consumer-generated media is saying about them so that proactive and corrective measures can be taken to seize opportunities and avert any potential damages.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg! As Mike Spataro, EVP of web relations, Weber Shandwick said, “Clearly, ignoring the blogging community today would be like not paying attention to the World Wide Web 10 years ago.”
Shoma Bakre, Managing
Partner & Aparna Pande,
Research Consultant,
EmPower
Research LLC
