Blogging began as a journal of thoughts and daily activities to add depth to people’s profiles online. Soon it replaced personal web pages and began attracting a lot of people on board. Importantly it also shifted from being just a journal to a page of conversations with comments. This gave space for people to build relationships on the web and thus sowed the seeds of social media.
I don’t really need to talk a lot on the growth of blogging over the years. It is just enough to say that it is the face of social media for a lot of people and carries the most impact. In that sense, blogging also needs to take the responsibility of making social media monetisation worthy. Yes Facebook is huge, Twitter is getting bigger everyday, Wikipedia is perhaps second only to Google in terms of visits for information. However, blogging isn’t dominated by just big names. Blogs when compared to social networking, wikis, etc. is a larger industry sector (in the larger field of social media), has larger inventory of products and has a larger scope and scale. In some way it is the bridge between the traditional websites and the social media ones.
And for this reason while it can rely on regular form of advertising online, it also needs to look at a newer way to be the medium of communication between brands and their customers. It is the backbone of conversational marketing (although I still belive Twitter to be its flagbearer) and therefore in my mind it needs to imbibe the conversational aspects of marketing in the way brands use it. In that sense, just putting up banners on the sidebar might work but it can deliver better value if it offers more.
Brands need to work on investing more in the creatives – not in terms of money, but in the time spent as well. Invest in testing better media of banners, those that create and build conversations. Blog owners on the other hand need to create media space and opportunity for brands to build conversations. Of course, this is true only for blogs that have the audience to build enough conversations. It needs a wide scope not just to meet the requirement of interactions but also to give proper weight to different voices. So say a blog about kittens and pets with a few thousand visitors a day might still not be enough to build conversations and for them a regular banner ad might be better.
I will continue this topic on a different post in terms of some of the blog marketing tactics that have been tried till now beyond banners.
WATBlog has quite a strong readership. Do you have any examples of conversational advertising you’re practising on WATBlog?.
Personally, I think “Conversations” and “Advertising” don’t mix very well. Conversations should be an authentic attempt by Brands to listen and talk and not “sell”. Advertising is all about selling. The moment a consumer sees an attempt to sell, the motivation to have a honest conversation degenerates. What do you think?.
Hi Tej,
WATBlog in my mind has an active readerbase, but our niche being small doesn’t have a strong one.. if you see we have 1600 subscribers. what’s the amount of conversations it can have in that.. that’s what I meant by volume of conversations – It needs a wide scope not just to meet the requirement of interactions but also to give proper weight to different voices (for instance there is just one comment on this post.. there might be other reasons for it but the fact is volumnous conversations isn’t happening) .. We still have a fair way to go before engaging on what I said above and for that digital media as a niche also needs to grow
And on your view – yes it is true fundamentally.. but my whole point of conversational advertising itself is not to seel but talk through banners – I am a fed media fan so I will give you another example – Dice.com and FM had another campaign tht ran on all tech blogs – basically in place of a banner they put a branded Dice wall (like FB) called rant board with the question – does your tech job suck .. it was targeted, and interactive – it gave the idea of Dice’s brand properly and had a lot of interactions with their TG.. it’s a very good example to understand conversations n advertising going well.
Hi Maneesh,
I understand your POV. I had taken a look at most of Fed Media’s campaigns. I thought of those campaigns either as “sponsored blogging” or as “interactive advertising”. I felt that “conversational advertising” wasn’t the right way to describe those, given how the word “conversation” is being used in the context of social media. We’re in a industry that is choc-a-block with jargon, so a bit of semantic juggling is bound to happen
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thanks!.