Blogs are rapidly changing the channels available for guerrilla marketing. While the popular marketing technique has always been about effective marketing on a budget, never before has a low-cost tool with such a massive target audience been available.
Changing the Channel
Conventional websites provide the same low-cost outlet, but only blogs generate the large-scale buzz sought after by marketers and online strategists. Companies have always offerred free products and services to influential media magnates in hope of a favourable review, but media savvy companies seem to be quickly replacing newspaper and website journos with popular bloggers in the list of potential reviewers.
Blog Reviews vs Traditional Reviews
The countless technological advantages of blogs over conventional websites have made blogs a popular channel, but the benefits don’t stop at technology. Popular and engaging bloggers have personality and are trusted by their readers. Their opinion can often count more than the opinion of a faceless website, and of course the results of this respect can be twofold; if the review is favourable the marketing is even more successful, but if the review trashes the product or service the readers won’t touch it. This is an interesting dynamic, because bloggers tend to be extremely honest and usually don’t have any vested interests in the results of the review.
Some websites and print media depend on intimate relationships with companies in their industry. They can be trapped into pumping out favourable reviews for bread and butter. Most bloggers, on the other hand, don’t really care; so engaging bloggers in guerrilla marketing clearly has risks but can potentially be a lot more rewarding. I have great respect for Georgia Tech blogger Paul Stamatiou, who recently wrote a very open review as part of the Sprint Ambassador program. It was a great piece of honest journalism. Even Robert Scoble is feeling the heat from countless companies, and hasn’t been reviewing products because it doesn’t interest him.
The Big Company Buzz
Launching a company and creating mass hype and hysteria has never been easier. Two of the best comany launches in the past months have been Newsvine and Riya. Both companies issued private invitations that were the talk of the blogosphere, and way before invitations were sent there was plenty of hype and buzz. Riya’s success probably has a look to do with the appointment of Tara Hunt as chief blogger. She’s the online and guerilla marketing guru who is also behind Pinko Marketing, the ‘commons based unmarketing’ strategy.
Creating workflow
Blogs are also a great vehicle for self promotion and can potentially create many opportunities for work and sales. If I ran a company I’d be blogging before trying conventional advertising and marketing channels. When it’s done right it’s generally cheaper, more effective and touches a much wider target audience than traditional means.
Guerrilla fighting in the Aussie bush
If you’re based in the US it’s easy to start your guerilla marketing campaign. Crank technorati and google and then you’re away. In Australia (and plenty of other countries) it’s often hard to locate suitable blog platforms for executing a guerrilla strategy, and it’s also hard to find the thoughts and opinions of fellow countrymen, meaning that any regional companies can’t harness the same power from the blogosphere as our US counterparts.
There is a clear need for an Aussie blog search and index engine. Only then will guerrilla campaigns and company bloggers come into force, and only then we’ll be finding out what our neighbours are blogging about. Trying to find out what someone in your Aussie city is blogging about? If they aren’t dumping heaps of location keywords into every post, good luck.
I’m glad our very own entrepreneur, web 2.0 evangelist and in my opinion Australia’s most entertaining blogger Ben Barren has seen the need. In fact he saw it well before most of us did. Gnoos will resolve the issues facing Aussie bloggers and will prove that sometimes google, technorati and other US based heavyweights just don’t cut it down under. You’ll see, just wait until it launches. In the meantime, submit your blog to get in on the action.
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thanks man, where do i send the cheque !!! bb
Blogs also fall under far, far, far more scrutiny and basic criticism than traditional marketing methods (which also says something about the kind of people who are into blogging, podcasting, etc, but I digress…) and, if they don’t cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s… twice… are likely to get crucified far more than traditional marketing ever would.
Because, the thing is, traditional marketing is out there saying, “Hey, I’m marketing! You can like me or hate me!” whereas a blog can have several shades of grey and people, frankly, don’t like being taken for a ride when they think a blog means one thing, but is really pushing another agenda alltogether.
If not done right — and I really don’t think it is as simple as someone thinking, “I’m gonna start a blog and fight The Man!” — they’re also a recipe for a complete disaster.
Very true Rob. Using blogs for marketing requires cautious execution, and I see what you mean about blog marketing being prone to more scrutiny and criticism that traditional means. After a few hard lessons learned the ‘framework’ for successful blog-driven guerrilla marketing will probably become clearer.
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