Personal Blog Marketing: Chapter in book on Marketing in the Cyber Era

A new book titled "Marketing in the Cyber Era: Strategies and Emerging Trends" has just come out. The book is published by IGI GlobalQuite excited as it has a chapter which I co-authored with Dr. Ezlika Ghazali, titled 'Personal blog marketing".

I have extracted this chapter from my PhD thesis and expanded on some of the key issues.

Here is the abstract:

This chapter looks at the commercialization of personal blogs and also defines some of the key terms that have emerged as a result of this phenomenon, including “sponsored posts.” Despite their importance, the authors feel that not enough attention has been paid by academics to the development of marketing in the blogosphere. The chapter also examines the concerns that marketing communications on blogs may be contributing to the shadow economy around the world. The uniqueness of this new form of advertising medium is emphasized, and it is hoped that this chapter will also add to the understanding of why the study of blogs and their commercialization is absolutely essential.

Working with Bloggers - The Cambridge Satchel Company

The Cambridge Satchel Company - an amazing British company success story. Now a World famous fashion brand, it started out from necessity - a mother's desire to send her daughter to a better school which she could not afford. The company was founded in 2008, in Cambridge by Julie Deane with just £600. Initially targeted at school children, the brand suddenly developed a cult following, thanks to young fashion bloggers. They now have their own factory in  Wigston near Leicester.

The company opened their first permanent store in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. The store has a 'Bloggers Lounge' a space for the blogging community who are credited for the brand's initial success.



Working with FedEx:



Their Google Chrome ad:



Check out their blog as well.

Coventry University Blog Project 2013

I started teaching the E-Marketing postgraduate module this semester. At Coventry University Business School, this is a core option module for the MSc Strategic Marketing Management, MA Marketing Management, MA Sport Marketing, MSc International Marketing, MSc Event Management, MA Sport Business Management and MA Advertising and Marketing course. I have a few MBA students as well.

Part of the assessment of this module is via a group coursework and as I was preparing for this module right before this semester, I had several fantastic ideas. However, in the end I decided to go with something which was based on my area of expertise and with the objective to equip the students with hands-on experience of using relevant social media platforms and tools and teaching them how to practically apply the e-marketing theories learnt in class. Thus was born the Coventry University Blog Project 2013.

The students were required to work in groups with each group creating a blog based on their areas of interest. They were then given a series of tasks to complete. Besides creating compelling content, the students had to promote their blogs - both offline and online, with special emphasis on social networks.   They were also required to keep track of their visitor statistics and post them weekly on a forum on the module Moodle page  (the  e-learning software platform used by Coventry University Business School). In the end, they will be required to hand in a 8000 word long report based on the project.

Several of the groups have done exceedingly well and I am quite proud of what we have achieved.

Given below is a list of the blogs which the students have created :

1. Inspiration for Travellers
2. Extravagant Globers
3. Take A Trip
4. Movie Mania M21
5. Cookery Budgetary
6. Everyday Solutions
7. Offers, Deals and Sales in Coventry
8. Facts About Marketing
9. Student-Assist
10. Beer Oh Beer
11. Conquering Coventry
12. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service
13. GLO Sensational Music
14. West Midland sport
15. Sports Light

Ordinary Consumers as Brand Ambassadors

We normally associate Brand Ambassadors with actors and actresses, models and sports personalities. However, you might be surprised to learn that Edaran Tan Chong Motor, the official distributors of Nissan cars in Malaysia have recently selected four lucky people out of hundreds of applicants as Nissan LEAF Ambassadors. These lucky guys are using the Nissan Leaf for six weeks and are sharing their experiences.

However, when I looked at who these lucky ambassadors were, I noticed a few familiar names. they are definitely not ordinary - at least two of them are well known bloggers in Malaysia. Jason Goh who blogs at Smashin' Popstar and Daniel Yap who blogs at Eternal hobbyist.

It does make perfect sense and is not something new as companies have been using bloggers to review (and promote) their products (and services) for a while. Bloggers are opinion leaders and several blogs have readerships that run into thousands. Studies have shown that they are perceived as more credible than even traditional media, including newspapers and may be the reason that websites of newspapers are increasingly looking like blogs. And unlike other celebrities, they do not require you to pay them millions to become a brand ambassador. Plus you get fantastic original and creative consumer generated content followed by online word-of-mouth marketing.

However, it can be risky as well. Many bloggers are known to be quite independent and speaking their mind. They might end up rubbishing your product and your brand name, if they had a bad experience using them.

Blogging statistics

A number of people have asked me about the blogging statistics and I realised that the data I used in my PhD thesis is already outdated. Given below is some information which I presented in my Thesis:

According to the report by Universal-McCann (2009) on the impact of social media, 71 percent of active internet users read blogs. Blog participation has also increased with more people leaving comments on blogs (an increase to over 50 percent in 2009). The report also shows that over 29 percent of internet users have blogged about a product or brand.

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, approximately 133 million blogs (Winn, 2009) were indexed by Technorati, as compared to approximately 70 million blogs in 2007 (Sifry, 2007). Interestingly, the 2008 Technorati report also mentions that a majority of bloggers (54 percent) had advertising on their blogs (White, 2009).

Another report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2008 (Smith, 2008), reveals that 12 percent of internet users have created or work on their own online journal or blog, while about 33 percent of all American internet users read blogs.

In Europe, around three percent or four million internet users actively write blogs (Forrester, 2006).

Blogging has also gained wide acceptance in Asia. Take a look at Malaysia for example. A survey by Microsoft Malaysia revealed that nearly half (41 percent) of Malaysians online are actively blogging (Microsoft, 2006 ).

While in China, the number of bloggers is expected to cross the 100 million mark (SinoCast, 2006).

The word ‘Blog’ was chosen as the top word of 2004 by Merriam-Webster (BBC, 2004).

BTW, Blogs are “interactive websites with posts that are updated frequently and may contain links, images, video or music clips, of interest to its author or authors that are archived and arranged in reverse chronological order” (Mutum and Wang, 2010, p. 249).

Anyway, here are links to some updated statistics:

Look Who’s Blogging [STATS] by Brenna Ehrlich

Explains some of the findings of report from research company Sysomos. I found it quite interesting because the results indicate that there are slightly more Women bloggers as compared to men - similar to my own findings which were unexpected.

The State of the Blogosphere 2011 by Brian Solis. The results show that most bloggers were between the ages of 25 - 34 followed by the 35-44 age group. So most bloggers are not teenagers.

However, I could not find any good estimate of the total number of blogs around the World - it may be due to the fact that this is simply not possible.

References:

BBC. 2004. 'Blog' picked as word of the year [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4059291.stm [Accessed 18 September 2007].

FORRESTER. 2006. Profiling Europe’s Bloggers: What Marketers Need To Know Before Entering The Blogosphere [Online]. Forrester Research. Available: http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1112,00.html [Accessed 15 July 2008].

MICROSOFT. 2006 Women Rule in Malaysian Blogosphere. Available: http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/press/archive2006/linkpage4337.mspx [Accessed 25 June 2008].

MUTUM, D. & WANG, Q. 2010. Consumer generated advertising in Blogs. In: EASTIN, M. S., DAUGHERTY, T. & BURNS, N. M. (eds.) Handbook of research on digital media and advertising.: IGI Global.

SIFRY, D. 2007. The state of the live Web [Online]. Available: http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html [Accessed 11 September 2008].

SINOCAST. 2006. China's Blog User Base Expected to Approach 100mn Next Year [Online]. AsiaInfo Services Available: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5562/is_200607/ai_n22733639?tag=artBody;col1 [Accessed 18 July 2008].

SMITH, A. 2008. New Numbers for Blogging and Blog Readership. Retrieved March 16, 2009, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2008/July/New-numbers-for-blogging-and-blog-readership.aspx/.

UNIVERSAL-MCCANN. 2009. Wave 4. Accessed at http://universalmccann.bitecp.com/wave4/Wave4.pdf [Online]. [Accessed 12 December 2009].

WHITE, D. 2008. Day 4: Blogging For Profit [Online]. Available: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-4-blogging-for-profit/ [Accessed 12 January 2010].

WINN, P. 2009. State of the Blogosphere 2008 [Online]. Available: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-introduction/ [Accessed 12 July 2010].

What is a blog?

I was quite surprised when I found out that a number of people including academics, are not aware what a blog is. Here is an article I wrote on my old website at the University of Warwick. It was first published on Sat 16 Feb 2008.

In 2007, Technorati was tracking approximately 70 million weblogs, with about 120,000 new ones being created worldwide everyday - around 1.4 new blogs created every second (Sifry, 2007). By 2011, the number has gone up to 182,397,015 (Matthew Hurst, 2012).

The word “Blog” is derived from “Weblog”. It was Jorn Barger, who first coined the term, on 17 December 1997. In April or May of 1999, Peter Merholz, came up with the word “blog” after breaking the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com

Though some authors argue that the word is not a portmanteau of the words 'web' and 'log,' the terms ‘blog’, ‘weblog’ and ‘web log’ are often used interchangeably.

There are several definitions of the word blog and most refer to it as a “personal online journal”. However, this may not be correct considering the fact that blogs are “public” and interactive in nature. In fact most of the blogs on Technorati's Top 100 list are collaborative blogs with several contributors. Most companies have also realised the importance of connecting and interacting with their customers - both external and internal. This has given rise to the growth of the so called "corporate blogs". Some of these blogs are accessible only to the employees through the corporation's Intranet and are called an internal blog.

I personally liked the short definition provided by The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, which defines it as ‘An Internet website containing an eclectic and frequently updated assortment of items of interest to its author’. However, this definition does not really give you an idea of a blog.

Our definition recognises the interactive nature of blogs and define blogs as an “interactive website with posts that are up-dated frequently and may contain links, images, video or music clips, of interest to its author or authors that are archived and arranged in reverse chronological order” (Mutum and Wang, 2010).

There are a number of free blog publishing systems on the net. The two most popular are Blogger (owned by Google) and Wordpress.

I started blogging in September 2003 and have been blogging ever since. My oldest blog is ah ok lah, which is hosted with Blogger.

Reference:

Mutum, Dilip and Wang, Qing (2010). “Consumer Generated Advertising in Blogs”. In Matthew S. Eastin, Terry Daugherty and Neal M. Burns (Eds) Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption (Vol 1), pp. 248-261, IGI Global: Pennsylvania (ISBN13: 9781605667928).

On the Knowledge Centre website

Just found out that I am on the University of Warwick Knowledge Centre site. Check out my short video clip of an interview on blogging, which I have uploaded on YouTube.

Related link: "What type of blogger are you?" Quiz.