eThos from Hemant Soreng

Who would’ve thought that the web will change so much in so little time?
Who would’ve thought that it will become so participative?
Who would’ve though that the big content houses will be given a run for their money by the insignificant net user like you and me?

Its time to stand up and recognize the silent revolution of UGC or User Generated Content.
More and more people are reading blogs and reviews by people while making their purchase decisions(esp. in the PC industry its so rampant). Ads are being just reduced for just building awareness, the rest of the brand metrics in the purchase cycle – Consideration, Preference and Purchase is heavily influenced by UGC in the online world.

Today entire businesses – platforms like social networking, blogging and even portals incl. ecommerce are heavily dependent or entirely based on UGC.

Here is one good article from emarketer on this silent revolution.
Can User-Generated Content Change Your World?

An amazing website I discovered….guess this will weed out the bloggers who do(?) the hard work (with copied articles)…..oops…puts me in the scanner…
 http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

Won’t this be great for us blogging clan…

Roovno Web Networks has launched Roovno Ad Marketplace, an online ad space market where bloggers can choose the price they think is right for advertising on their Blog space. According to the company, bloggers can choose the category and keywords, key-in a description of their web page and set the price they would like to sell their ad space for.

Bloggers can also choose the duration, size and location of the ad on their web page. Roovno also allows the bloggers to decide who gets to advertise on their blogs. “With our system you get to approve an advertiser before their ads start displaying on your web space,” the company has said.

Waiting with bated breath.

Are you sure you want to do it? If not, do not even tread there.
However, if you are one of the brave ones, please be prepared for the “program” to be not very successful.
Here are some tips on how to reach out and NOT “market” to bloggers
Continuing on my quest to define relevant Blog metrics (Read my first post)

Classical STP approach i.e. Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning

Segmentation is very important as there are millions of bloggers out there, it is important and viable to reach out to only those who are relevant, popular and most importantly the opinion leaders.

Segment the bloggers on the basis of
- Relevancy : subject/theme of the blogs and content (frequency of posts/comments, knowledge on the subject)
- Popularity (in terms of no. of readers, presence in news)


Targeting the segments differently while reaching out. e.g. one to one interaction required for blogs which are relevant and popular. While the ones which are not so popular still relevant (would be larger in no.), communicating en masse would be feasible. The segments which are not relevant, to be ignored.
However, it is important what to communicate initially and continuously to develop engagement.

Positioning yourself as someone who wants to TELL the blogger your story (product or service in this case) and not SELL your story.
- Neutrality is of utmost importance.
- Freedom of speech : Leave it to the blogger to write his/her views.
- Engagement : Once the contact is made successfully, rapport or engagement is to be built, by NOT flooding them with press releases, but discussing these releases, features etc.
- Exclusivity : Bloggers should get some exclusivity as incentive i.e. they should not be treated as any other journalists and should be given information (of launches, new features, innovations etc.) maybe in advance, just for them.
- Product sampling : Bloggers need to use the product to write about them.

eMarketer has a related article on this subject with some research thrown in. Click here to read.

I have been interacting with Karthik (www.itwofs.com) from Lenovo’s PR agency Text 100 to track/monitor/measure Lenovo and its competition presence in the discussion forums, user reviews and blogging sites. We have gone one step forward to engage with users to tell our side of the story *completely neutral*.
We have a perspective, but its a challenge to define the metrics for this activity.
Some possible ones

1. Presence – in terms of quantum of posts/mentions
2. Tonality – positive, negative, neutral
3. Share of voice – vis a vis competition
4. Readership/eyeballs – estimated no. of readers/pageviews/visits/subscription to feeds/traffic based on alexa ranking etc.
5. ROI – no. of queries, no. of queries answered, no. of leads/sales, Cost per lead, no. of satisfied/dissastisfied users etc. etc.

Watch out for more and a structure in days to come. Would welcome collaboration/inputs to put these metrics in place to be used by all.