Seihaku’s Blogmarketing Bible

Mental guidelines for management’s introduction of corporate blog

Corporate blog can either be a product blog or a brand blog. The fact that corporate introduces blog brings in difficult situations in terms of managemen. Looking at Korean corporate and its characteristics, corporates hide what they want to hide and notifies the press of only the profitable portion, wanting to take control of and predict the system of client communication. Due to this, corporates have limited their client windows to PR or marketing department and have intercepted further information to remain intact.

In such situation, corporate wants to control all aspects of product or brand blogs, demanding prior approval of individual contents. But what’s important is that corporate and blogs must remain independent. When a corporate takes total control of the blog and use it as an advertising or marketing tool, blog is no more than a corporate department. Today, several firms are proceeding blog marketing is such way where the corporate takes care of contents project and blogger works only to touch up its contents which then gets approved finally by the company executives. As of now, such blogs are called, corprate blogs.

From the corporate standpoint, blog is most safe and ideal yet why do they fail and become extinct? This problem can be condensed down to two core points that the contents quality of corporate blogs are low and that is fails to draw customer interest. In order to get approved by the executives, it must satisfy their taste and this usually means the exclusion of customer benefits. This is no different to the conventional home page which works as an advertising instead as an information and no matter how hard they try and apply by developing various topics of interests, it cannot overcome the generation gap that is between the management, who aren’t aware of the Internet trend, therefore deciding on a textbook like material then posts it.

Also, any responsibilities related to contents are attenuated through internal approval which puts a limit on creating genuine contents and even if they continuously post contents in a short term basis, but eventually need to shutdown like a dried up well.

If so, what would be blog marketing guideline that corporate managements can accept? How should approach in order to achieve the effectiveness of blog marketing?

It must be able to portray a recognition that ‘Corporate and blog are independent” and it should remain independent in real life as well. Corporate should restrict blog contents related intervention and keep it minute as possible. Blog marketer should obtain sufficient prior knowledge of corporate product and brand. Corporate should also try to keep a distance when a blogger is promoting various issues or promotions. This allows the corporate and the blogger to be a separate entity which acts as an element in increasion the blogger’s reliability.

In the process of comparing its product to another competing product, a blogger becomes exposed to an attack from the competing firm. In this process, to protect the firm, a blogger should engage in a fight as a lone entity who should make create values and make a decision based on personal identity.

From the corporate standpoint, recognizing the independence of a blog marketer is the core element of establishing the 2nd brand. There is nothing more foolish than to introdue a content approval system. If your blog marketing introduction has failed, it just means that your firm hadn’t recognized the value of a blogger enough.

Provide sufficient information. Give full authority related to blog marketing. Provide full support in contents development. Announce that there’s no connection between the firm and the blog, stress on it on the home page, tell your competitor. Support your blogger’s creativity, acts of outburst and issues.

Blog will repay you many times over your provided costs. Surely.

Customer keeps on moving. Pick a shotgun; not a sniper gun.

Different to conventional advertising or PR materials, a blog which has an advantage of being able to continuously post various created contents, a time is on the blogger’s side; not the customers side. Customers are bound to spend more time on the Internet. There are people who surfs porn sites looking for arousing pictures; like read gossip articles; causes a senseless discussions by posting garbage postings; and those who scraps necessary information and so on. You can see a various pattern among them.

Generally, ads are traceable and on that basic, you can obtain various data if you analyze the customers reaction. But you need to truly understand that the customer’s interest change fast as it widens. If you understand how the customer isn’t static but accommodates necessary piece of information from a different point of view according to their interests, a totally different approach should be used in blog from that of advertising.

If the conventional marketing methods utilized strategies that analyzed its customers and followed, blog marketing utilizes a strategy that provides a specific concept to draw their interest by customer analysis and use that experience to a customer learning experience. In order words, a customer relationship isn’t one way but based on a two way conversation, so we can regard ourselves as a fanatic fan. From this standpoint, a blog marketer must listen to his inner voice because the essence of human lies in it below the surface of technology.

As the keywords, which show the customer interests broadens beyond individual extent, a shotgun becomes more necessary. You can instantly reap great benefit from the keyword that becomes an issue if only you had created a mixture of product value and various contents that react to diverse keywords and that is why we need to prepare ourselves with many, different bullets. In the end, sniping is hitting only the few target customers out of the whole and using a sniper gun isn’t appropriate due to the fast moving characteristic of customers.

If you are prepared with very attractive shotgun shells and continue to fire them, it is obvious to not only obtain targeted customers; but non-customers as well. And if the customers, out of range, walks in to be shot by the shotgun, blog marketer will survive regardless of the survival of corresponding corporate.

For blog marketing: A snipper gun? or a shot gun?

Looking at the conventional advertising market, you can reason that the “Process is core”. In other word, there is a predictable process according to the conveying property of the contents medium in advertising. This process was built on many people’s know-how and experience so it can measure the effectiveness of advertising to a certain level. In this process, creative contents had no place to stand and the word ‘creative’ itself wasn’t valued highly because it was difficult to measure or verify a creative advertising in a scientific way.

Like so, the approach of advertising had to emphasize a single concept or a message due to many restrictions and the concept created with limited resources had to face a fate of immediate disposal after the advertisement because of its weakness in not being able to convey the whole. Eventually, this process is meaningless in how incomparable it is to the blog contents made with value and essence and it can only take the role of creating a disposable, volatile content. What’s important to note here is that advertising had been recognized of its value just by being an issue regardless of a negative customer feed back since it voices the corporate opinion even though it may be deceiving. But a blog content must be exposed continuously and prove itself through discussion thus remain transparent. It has to be approached with moral standards.

As the Internet media went beyond TVs, conventional media ads or marketing will work faithfully as a Troll and is met by a vague expectation of a click figure compensation at a corporate web site. But users who have experienced deletion or blockage of postings by unmerciful administrators because they engaged in a counter-argument or an objection know best not to use the home page bulletin for discussion; but to rather use a blog to start an objection or a complaint which can spread widely. Corporates won’t be able to take any realistic measures to the individual blogger’s private postings and it could even lead to a threat to their existence if they do so.

Now you probably understand about the limitations on homepage contents and the limitless power of blog contents. Advertising, marketing and blog contents will be challenged by aggressive bloggers in future and if they fail to deal properly, you’ll have to face negative corporate image that will spread quickly all over Korea as a consequence. Any attempts that may deceive a customer with advertising or marketing in order to make a profit should immediately be stopped. It is only a matter of time before the logical, scientific guerrillas who are armed with excellent communication skills will win and eventually rule the Internet realm.