Blogs Should Spearhead Conversational Advertising – Part 2

Yesterday I started of with the call that blogs should spearhead conversational advertising. “It is the backbone of conversational marketing 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.”

It is not that a different approach to advertising haven’t been tried on blogs. However, most of them revolved around the set notion of advertising which focused again on the traffic, number of subscribers, etc. Blog owners basically just found out newer ways of value addition to revenue through job boards, paid sections, etc. Despite being blogs they didn’t offer the amount of personalization required on a social medium ad campaign. Regardless of that some of the more conversation oriented approach taken on blog marketing included the following.

Paid reviews was an innovation in that regard for it offered a new way to communicate beyond banners. Unfortunately though the more it was sold the more it began to seem more like bigger banners with blocks of text – both stuff not really appreciated by those online. So while the idea was new, it didn’t strike at the core of blogs strengths nor connect well with its users. A lot of people also considered it unethical (I don’t buy that argument however) and with Google penalizing blogs over paid posts and links, it slowly went out of fashion.

However with the advent of rich media, suddenly blogs just like other websites are having the scope to engage users better. While expandable banners, pop ups etc. might still be viewed as impediments by a lot of site visitors, if used wisely they contribute to take conversations on a different plane. For one they can interact based on demand. Videos can add engagement to a whole new level and build conversations beyond the blog (Check Dice’s videos on the Federated Media’s tech network for instance).

The idea is for blogs to use their community to lend their voices to brands. Introduce the conversational aspects that makes blogs different from other sites into the way advertising works on them. Social Media is not just a platform for promotion, but also market research, customer service, product feedback and most importantly evangelism.

All these happen when people talk, and if your aim as a brand is to engage with a blog’s audience use the media asset/space you get on a blog to let people talk. Let them speak on what you want to know from them, or let them speak on what you want others to know about you, and make all this happen on that banner space you put just your logo on.

Virality defines success for a lot of campaigns on the web. If you have a banner ad, or a microsite or even a twitter profile, you would want people to talk about you and share your brand with their friends. Blogs being blogs lends this virality to conversational campaigns automatically and it is therefore best to choose blog campaigns suitable to conversations rather than pasting the image of a TV ad as a banner on the web. Like we once said…