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New way to hit target
Sunday, December 07, 2008
The recent phenomenon of social networking is replacing blogs as a means of influencing consumers, writes Bryan Collins.

Irish firms are constantly being told to start blogging. The problem is that it's not really clear just who reads blogs. With only about 30 regularly updated business blogs going in Ireland, it hasn't taken off as a medium.

Now, there is a new game in town: social networking. But can this offer any measurable return to a firm's bottom line? According to some Irish firms who are engaging in it, the answer is yes. Pat the Baker is not what most people would regard as a Web 2.0 company. But in September, the bread company launched a campaign on Bebo to compliment its ongoing press, radio and television campaigns.

The Pat the Baker Bebo profile already has more than 3,000 friends. Brand manager Oliver Durkin said the Bebo campaign cost 1.2 per cent of the bread maker's overall marketing budget and its impact on the brand's visibility has been a ”phenomenal success'‘.

“It takes a lot of time,” said Durkin. ”You can hire out other companies to do it, but I don't think it works. I do it with four staff. We all take turns. We are on it 24/7.We respond to every single request and comment personally.” More than 4,000 users have downloaded the company colours to their own profile pages and the bread maker is releasing seasonal skins for Christmas, St Patrick's Day and the summer to keep members interested. Even though the bulk of Bebo's users are under 25, Durkin is confident Pat the Baker is targeting the right audience.

“The minute you say ‘Bebo' people are familiar with it. I don't believe there is a media impact stronger than your child saying to you when you are going shopping: ‘Will you buy Pat the Baker's Multigrain?”‘ he said. The bakery is using Bebo for a competition inviting members of the public to record and submit video versions of the 52year-old Pat the Baker Jingle. The winner will receive a €10,000 prize, and visitors to Bebo can see clips of the current entries and find out how to submit their own.

“The quality and the level of entries is astounding. I thought it would be more kids in the bedroom. We have immediately had content generated by our very talented customers,” said Durkin. One of the more popular submissions is by Dublin dance music act Robotnik, which is releasing its take on the Pat the Baker theme song as a single, before Christmas.

“It is so rewarding, from a brand manager's point of view, being at a gig where somebody plays your song and 3,000 people go mental,” said Durkin about a recent Robotnik's gig. The company is also giving away Pat the Baker t-shirts to Bebo members who send in a picture of their “mammy, granny or a borrowed little old lady holding a Pat The Baker product'‘. A quick scan through the 900-plus comments reveals dozens of postings from users like Kate D who wrote:

“Thanks a mil for the t-shirt, I got my boyfriend to wear it around!“ According to Durkin this kind of brand advocacy is invaluable and really gets Bebo members involved with the brand.

“I have begged for this t-shirt, I have written a poem about it. They sent me the t-shirt and I loved it and I took a picture of myself in it and I sent it on as a picture and now I am up there [on Bebo],” he said about a typical Pat the Baker Bebo friend.

“It is a bread site, let's put it in context.” Blogs and social networking sites can be a great way for businesses to get their message out or they can be tremendous time sinks. Either way, they are as popular as ever with web surfers here - something many Irish businesses overlook. No Nonsense Car Insurance, a trading name of FBD Insurance, is currently testing a widget that Facebook members can install on their page. Users receive a €20 discount on their next year's premium or a €40 donation to their chosen charity for every person who takes out an insurance policy as a result.

“If it works [the widget] it will certainly be extended to FBD,” said Brendan Hughes, e-commerce manager for FBD Insurance.

“The other extension of it is for charities or for people who are advocates of charities to put it on their website.

“Irish businesses don't know where [blogging] fits within their marketing and communications mix and they don't understand the potential,” said Hughes, who is also chairman of the Irish Internet Association's Social Media working group.

“Blogging is not advertising and it is not traditional PR. It is more akin to having conversations with customers - albeit informal and public conversations - and this is a new concept.” Last August, Hughes wrote a post for the No Nonsense Car Insurance blog about how to drive during a flood. Web surfers concerned about driving under such conditions visited the company's site after this blog post appeared in their search results. These niche posts will never attract huge audiences but they will lure people relevant to a company's product or service.

Every year, public relations firm Edelman conducts a survey, in 18 countries, to determine the level of trust people place in organisations, institutions, the media and various other groups. The 2008 Irish Trust Barometer found radio is a well-regarded source of information, with 59 per cent of respondents trusting the medium. Newspaper articles on individual companies ranked at 55 per cent, while 27 per cent of those surveyed trusted a company's own communications. Only 14 per cent of those surveyed said they used and trusted blogs as a source of information.

The survey also looked at who people trust most to act as a spokesperson, with 57 per cent citing a doctor, healthcare specialist or NGO representative. Only 7 per cent said they'd trust a blogger to act as a spokesperson. This figure is down 5 per cent on 2007, suggesting fewer people believe what they read online. “Some people come in for a while,” said blogger Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications.

“Then they do other things, they move on, they change jobs. The usual things. It is all to do with their jobs, their free time and whether they can keep a blog going.” Several Irish bloggers explained that Technorati only counts the number of links from blog to blog. As people can be slow to take down old links, Technorati's rankings don't update quickly with new blogs. The Sunday Business Post contacted Technorati about its results for Ireland and did not receive a response.

In fact, more Irish people than ever are writing blogs. Ten years ago, there were 30 regular bloggers in the country, now the Irish Blogs Directory (IrishBlogs.ie) has discovered more than 2,500 blogs. “There is just so many now that you can't keep count of them. Every time you go to the front page there is all these blogs I've never read before. There is a lot of new stuff there,” said Mulley. Mulley and fellow technology blogger Donncha O'Caoimh receive more than 5,000 visits a month to their pages - more than twice the number of Irish people who write blogs. People also read blogs on social networking sites like Facebook, rather than on the blog's webpage - something which skews the cited readership of blogs.

The real problem is the majority of new bloggers are not coming from the Irish business community. Some of the country's biggest companies - such as Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank, the Quinn Group, Vodafone and NTL - still aren't posting online. In fact, the Irish Blogs Directory estimates that there are only about 80 business bloggers in the country, with about 30 posting regularly.

“There are lots of opportunities for bloggers to offer an alternative source of information or a more in-depth resource,” said Piaras Kelly, Edelman's main Irish blogger.”While bloggers will never rank as themost trusted source of information for the general public, what you will find is that a number of bloggers have built audiences that regard them as more informed sources of information on certain topics.” The readers of blogs often leave comments supporting or disagreeing with the poster or even providing further information to support their arguments. While there is no measurable bottom line to any of this - and some comments can even be unhelpful - Hughes argued business bloggers needed to think of their readers as potential advocates.

“Advocacy ultimately leads to the bottom line,” he said. ”Consider social media not as a money maker but as a relationship builder. You won't make money through your social media activity, but because of it. There does need to be a return on investment, but how the return is measured needs to change to ref lect this new way of connecting with customers.”

Interacting with consumers on the internet can reduce the level of control business people have over their message. However, if firms don't interact with people online they can't defend their message in that space. Recently, Hughes found a negative post about No Nonsense was actually ranking higher in Google than the firm's website. He decided to engage the blogger on his page to see how they could address his problems.

“His response was overwhelmingly positive because we did that. We were the first insurance company that had ever interacted with him in this way, actually listened to him and responded to him. By interacting with the guy it left a positive message,” said Hughes.

A business blog doesn't need to be as formal as typical company literature either. Barry Mehan, owner of the Tipperary-based company WorldWide Cycles, writes a popular cycling blog and many of his postings are about race meets or how to care for a bike. However, he also writes engaging posts that appear to have little to do with the business, such as how a cyclist recently failed a Breathalyzer test after using some mouthwash.

“People are sick to death of the old style of doing business, where people broadcast what they are doing and send out brochures to the public. It's no longer about connecting to a business. It's about connecting to business people,” said Mulley.

The conversation between a blogger and his or her reader is generally good for the business. However, sometimes readers may leave negative or potentially libelous comments which the blogger may disagree with or even want to delete.

“Most of the comments are people disagreeing with me constructively or agreeing with me or pointing me to new information,” said Mulley.

“You need to let people know there is comment moderation in place. People can get quite annoyed if you start deleting some person's comment and leaving another person's comment.” Similarly, if a business person decides to comment on someone else's blog they should use their real name with contact details and post constructively. If the business representative wants to respond to a specific post on the blog they should indicate this by including the @ symbol followed by the poster's name, in their response.

“A lot of companies are coming along and thinking comments on a blog space are some sort of free advert where they can talk about their company and completely ignore what the conversation has been saying. That doesn't work,” said Mulley.

Businesses should also consider Twitter, which is a form of micro-blogging. It is a great place for firms who have to provide regularly updated information to customers. Posters write a comment in less than 140 characters. This is then delivered to ‘follower's' mobiles or e-mails. Setanta Sport uses the service to update its followers about the latest sporting news.

While some people may question the power of the blog, there's no ambiguity about social networking sites in Ireland. Bebo and Facebook are the fifth and seventh most popular websites with Irish surfers, according to internet rankings site Alexa. Bebo has more than one million Irish members and Facebook, which is more popular with Irish people over 25, has seen its Irish membership jump from 7,000 to 340,000 since the start of 2007. “An awful lot of people are spending less time on traditional websites and more time on social networking websites like Bebo. If we want access to [these people] we need to be in those spaces,” said Hughes.

The easiest way for businesses to build their presence on Facebook or Bebo is to advertise. It is very easy for businesses to reach a target audience as members of social networking sites enter detailed personal data when registering and this is usually available for all to see.

“That results in your ad being far more relevant than a Google ad. You can target a profile base. You can target a 19-year-old UCD engineering student,’' said Mulley. Social networking sites work on the principle of having connections or friends who link to each others' pages. Users also participate in groups, the membership of which can stretch into thousands, such as the alumni groups of third-level institutions. Businesses can join these groups or they can set up one more relevant to their customers.

Popular social networking pages feature quizzes, information about events, competitions and polls. Firms who post blogs to their pages should also maintain a dedicated blog website, as the search engines do not crawl all the pages of social networking sites.

“Putting up brochure profiles is not going to get any traction,” said Kennedy. ”We use [Facebook] as a supplementary tool. If we are doing a launch we use the event invitation function. We upload photos and texts. We've started doing a lot more video and podcasts. You need to have good, strong interesting content for people to keep them interested and keep them commenting.” Businesses can easily find out if their page is working by looking at the number of page views, connections and the amount of people who have ”shared the love'‘. And those employees who have wiled away the hours developing their own personal sites are a great resource.

“If you or your staff members on Facebook have connections to 200 people, that is your foot in the door of 200 organisations. Staff members that are hyper connected to other people in other organisation are going to be of immense benefit to the [business] in the future,” said Mulley. The social networking sites are keen for businesses to get on board. Facebook has teamed up with American software firm Salesforce to build a common network for developers who want to create hosted applications on the social networking site. Facebook hopes the deal with Salesforce, and its 100,000 developers, will allow business users of the social network to manage sales data, organise business events and automate marketing decisions.

Irish companies are getting involved too. Social networking sites, like blogs, can also be an effective market research tool for businesses. Computer manufacturer Dell operates Ideastorm.com as an online community for people to share ideas. It credits the suggestions of an Irish user on the site for the camera upgrades to the Latitude range of laptops. Similarly, public relations firm Slattery Communications recently launched an application on Facebook which al lows marketing and advertising professionals to post ideas and comment on each others' suggestions. Those suggesting ideas have just a few lines to outline their concept, a medium of delivery and the specific benefit of the suggestion.

“You can put in a keyword like telecoms or cycling and it will search for al l the ideas that people have uploaded. It creates more engagement with people rather than just images and photographs,” said Eoin Kennedy, associate director with Dublin-based PR company Slattery Communications. .

Kennedy said he believed that social networks encourage businesspeople to work together, even if they are in competition. As such, the ideas application is for professionals across the industry, not just those at Slattery Communications. He may be onto something. Kelly of Edelman recently uploaded a suggestion that retailers allow artists to use their front window as an interactive medium to communicate with customers.

“The way online works is people - share ideas and creativity can grow. By sharing [the ideas] you can enhance them. It is creating a reason for people to stay in the social network,” said Kennedy.

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