For the casual person, the more emails you receive, the more popular you are: normally be a boost to your ego. You’d expect that popular bloggers will be thrilled by this as a recognition of their popularity but 300+ “PR Spam” emails a day can be a little much.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is one journalist/blogger that has got fed up. In addition to filtering and blocking out emails, he has made the addresses and domains of these ’spammers’ public in the bid to shame them. This sparked a wave of imitators the most recent being a wiki of PR Spammers by Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker.

Tom Foremski has announced he will only accept pitches via Facebook as has Robert Scoble. Both went as far to say they’ll only listen to their list of friends on Facebook. Bad news for hopeful PRs. On the other hand short ‘twitpitch‘ messages on Twitter are being hailed as the new way of getting bloggers attention without infuriating them.

Stowe Boyd, who coined the idea term twitpitch, has certainly found it effective for him during his recent visit to Web 2.0 Expo. Together with Brian Solis, they are pushing for the idea of MicroPR, where PR and marketing pitches get more personal.

The trend suggests PR will have to change tack in getting their message out. As Jeremy Toeman observes, “relationships are more important than ever”. Knowing who to target with your message will be key to the success of future PR campaigns.

This is a simple, useful “how to” from Boris Mann on how PR and marketing professionals should interact with bloggers:

• Use permanent links (and make them intuitive)
  
• Provide product information (as much as possible)
  
• Project personality (don’t be a robot)
  

The full link is here.

(via Steve Rubel)

Thomson holidays are blogging. It seems to be a mixture of news, jokes, diary items and other interesting stuff. It’s pretty well designed and it has a brand feel about it, without being too stuffy. There are a lot of useful links. After all the conversations we have had with brand owners who are worried about the bad things that might happen if they blog, it is good to see Thomson diving in. It is a confident performance. [via Suw Charman’s British corporate blogs list]

An excellent survey of “citizen journalism” and the switch of news consumption to being a) continuous b) online by Stephen Quinn of Deakin University, Australia, writing in Ohmynews. The key stats:

• Internet advertising in the United States jumped 38 percent to a record $3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year as more marketers moved to the Web (IaB, PwC);
  
• UK Internet advertising will surpass newspaper advertising in 2006, at 13.3% of total $23bn. (Guardian);
  
• 39 percent of men aged 18-34 surveyed got their news from the Internet compared with 5 percent who read newspapers (Carnegie Foundation)

Julian Smith of Jupiter Research highlights the increasing influence of blogs in a piece for the BBC website in the context of the WeMedia forum. He mentions Market Sentinel’s Dell case study as an example of evidence showing that bloggers can be influential.

“For marketers,” Smith writes, “this has the potential to significantly impact brand communications if consumer content refers to experiences with products or services that are incongruous and misaligned with official marketing messages.

“When a company’s marketing story differs from the one being told by online consumers, a credibility gap will emerge that could have dire consequences on brand perception and favourability. “

The last few days have seen us talking to a number of different companies about whether it is possible to measure the success of marketing campaigns using our tools. It is.

The traditional way of measuring marketing success is:

1. Sales of the product. This is the point of the exercise after all. But sales numbers are a crude tool. How and why did these folk reach you? What were they responding to? The original campaign, or word of mouth generated by it? If they are buying it, are the also recommending it?

2. Consumers seeing the campaign. In offline this would include estimates of people seeing the campaign in papers and on TV, in online you could measure how many people reached any of your pages, downloaded your collateral.

3. Numbers of links to your campaign. This is the primary traditional buzz measurement. A campaign needs links from those who are qualified to endorse it.

4. Numbers of citations (how many people mention your campaign). The secondary traditional buzz measurement. If they are talking about you more after the campaign then you know the campaign is working at least on some level.

All these metrics deliver some value, but they don’t really tell you enough about the campaign itself. If you are a mobile operator the retail returns on handset sales tells you what is hot and what is not, but it does so retrospectively. You can’t predict the success of a product on the first day it is sold by a competitor.

The numbers of customers seeing the campaign is a weak indicator of whether a campaign will be successful. The bubble era was strewn with campaigns which were seen by millions but acted on by very few. (Remember the ISP “Breathe”, whose beautiful, but baffling advertisements were hard to avoid?)

The number of links to a campaign and the number of citation of it form the beginning of an important measure. But both these metrics are incomplete in themselves. Firstly not all links have the same value: some links are more equal than others. If a link is from someone who is authoritative in the area of the product, it is worth far more to the campaign, brings more Google influence and hence more prominence in natural search and therefore more sales.

Natural search is the key target for this kind of buzz measurement. Why? When customers go to Google, their eyes disproportionately linger on natural search. Consumers consider natural search authoritative. The image below is courtesy of Eyetools and demonstrates this in practice.

This is authority is inherent to a brand and it is something that Market Sentinel can measure. What can be measured, as the saying goes, can be managed.

Secondly these measures leave out the quality of the citation - is the reaction positive or negative? A citation is not necessarily an endorsement.

We have recently been looking at a clever viral campaign for Sony Bravia on behalf of the agency Tonic.

The campaign’s origin was a commercial shot in San Francisco on 26th July 2005. Thousand of brightly coloured plastic balls were dropped on a street in Telegraph Hill. This spectacle was so astounding that passers by stopped to photograph it. They posted their pictures on Flickr. This photo has been viewed 245974 times. The agency spotted the opportunity for a viral marketing campaign, and created a site using high quality assets from the photoshoot, as well as making the commercial itself available online.

We were not able to give Tonic all the help we would have liked to, because they only came to us in the last couple of weeks, and benchmarking this in retrospect would be time-consuming. However: this is what you would do to measure the impact of a digital campaign like this.

1. Benchmark the “approval rating” of the product. Compare it with two or three direct competitors. How many people recommend and how many disparage the product? Measure this before the campaign, during the campaign and three months later. If you have changed sentiment about the product relative to the competitors, the campaign has had an impact.

2. Measure the influence of the Sony Bravia brand in relation to the sector as a whole (LCD TVs). That is: how many authoritative commentators in the area of LCD TVs give authority to Sony Bravia. To do this you need to use our proprietary software. Again benchmark this against competitors in the sector. Repeat during the campaign and six months after (these effects take longer to worth, and are themselves longer lasting). This is the key area. If the campaign is successful Sony Bravia will rise up the Google natural search returns for “LCD TV”.

3. Undertake a stakeholder analysis of Sony Bravia itself, before and after the campaign. Look at who were the key influencers before and afterwards. Examine the actual words which are used by those influencers. Examine the context of the conversation - what other websites were cited in that context? These subtle and sensitive measurements help you measur how the climate of opinion around a brand has been transformed.

4. Measure search volume for crucial terms. How many people are looking for the campaign, or for the brand in the context of the campaign.

The preliminary work we did looking at this Sony Bravia campaign identified some interesting methods by which the campaign achieved traction as well as throwing up some interesting lessons about what the brand should try to achieve next time. Tonic will be publishing more detail in the next few weeks and when they do we will return to this subject.

Neville Hobson reports on Firefox’s advertising campaign. User made commercials for the product and Firefox gave the best one a prize. The winners are here.

This campaign works on so many levels.

• It involves customer endorsement;
  
• It makes use of the customer’s understanding of the product - what they see as value (often different to what the marketeers might choose to stress);
  
• The campaign leverages the power of online endorsement, building Google ranking for Firefox.
  

Last night at the Mandrake Club I heard Simon Gulliford, ex-marketing director of Barclays Bank UK talking about how he make a Honda dealership a success. One notion to offer older drivers who were willing to demonstrate a model a £200 discount on their next car for every sale they achieved. One guy got 46 sales for them in a year. Not only was this cheaper than incentivising a salesman, it carried more weight.

Tomorrow I am on the blogging4business panel in London and talking on the topic of “what blogs are saying about your business”.

So what are blogs saying about your business? In the US, where blogging has become a widespread phenomenon, blogger Eric Mattson has just demonstrated in an anecdotal survey that top US companies are much discussed. [Hat tip to John Cass of Backbone media for the link]

The UK situation is different. Athough the last few months has witnessed a huge growth in the use of community sites like mySpace, the majority of bloggers are either hard-core early adopters, or younger people. That still leaves blogs as a smaller scale phenomenon in the UK than in the US as far as most brands are concerned. Pick a UK-focussed brand like John Menzies and the comment count on Technorati is pretty anaemic. 79 comments in the database, and most cut and pasted from online news sources like Reuters and the Scotsman.

The truth is that for most UK industries the bulk of commentary happens in message boards or in other traditional sites. This kind of commentary is technically harder to get at than blog commentary (Technorati won’t be much help) but it’s also less susceptible to infestation by keyword spammers.

Market Sentinel has a number of automotive industry customers and our automotive database is comparatively light on blogs. The majority of these sources are sites which allow customers to review cars, or simply message boards. For the automotive sector at least, blogs are a rather small part of the story thus far.

This is not to say that the automotive industry shouldn’t itself use blogs to communicate with its consumer base - of course it should. And the most enterprising of the online brands are either doing this already or have plans to do so in the near future. But as far as listening is concerned, brands need to spread their nets a little wider than the blogosphere.

[Update] My colleague at our partner Onalytica Flemming Madsen draws attention to a phenomenon which can be made use of in the blogosphere today, and that is something he calls “statistically improbable links” and which we deliver in a branded form as “Stakeholder Spotlight”. That is to say - what urls are disproportionately linked to by the stakeholders in a particular topic? We have found this to be a fascinating predictor of trends and an early indication of problems. Flemming has identified that the Vodafone stakeholders are highlighting a blogger who has a complaint about data charges. For other Market Sentinel customers we have found that this functionality throws up interesting links to companies that might be considered acquisition targets, with the stakeholder group serving almost as a focus group of what might be considered cool and interesting on the web.

Google has reported that the UK population as a whole now spends more time online than they do watching TV. This is an epochal change for marketers. It means that they must finally get to grips with a medium (the internet) that has remained largely resistant to their wiles.

Think of an online marketing campaign that has impressed you. I bet you that you can’t. Think of the online products that you use and value: iTunes, Amazon.com, Skype, Google. I would bet that you did not find these products as a result of a marketing message. Someone recommended them to you. You may have followed a link on a web page. And if you did I bet that link was contextual. It was not an advertisement.

Old school advertising is good for awareness, but it has not been a major part of the success of internet-era marketing. Internet era marketing is about testimonials, about peer recommendations, about serendipity: stumbling across something interesting whilst looking for something else.

It is no surprise that the way to internet marketing success has been shown by paid search. Paid search has the huge advantage of being contextual. Advertisers choose when to give you their message. They give you their message only when they think you are likely to transact. They are only going to communicate to you if they feel their communication is welcome.

But there are other products waiting in the wings behind paid search. These products, too, will depend on marketers opening a conversation only when they know that a consumer is responsive. It is one reason internet marketers are using our products at Market Sentinel. They want to find out what is being said online in ongoing conversations, conversations that are (or could be) relevant to their product. And then they want to join in with those conversations.

And that joining in process is one of the hardest things to pull off. Years ago, when I was at the BBC, I was one of those responsible (with my current colleague Sheila Sang) for launching the BBC’s message boards. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn about how communities worked. One thing I learnt good and early is that if an outsider comes into a community with an irrelevant marketing message, they will be shunned. It is as if an insurance salesman were to wander into a snug bar and suddenly pitch into a sales spiel in front of eight surprised drinkers. Such a conversation only works if it is relevant. If someone is discussing where to go skiing, and you happen to mention that you know a good place, they will be keen to listen, particularly if you seem to be impartial.

That is why we work with our customers to identify where the appropriate conversations are taking place online, and to identify the authorities. That is the beginning of understanding where a conversation can begin. Is there a strategy for beginning a conversation that always work? No. Conversations of this kind are like pick-up lines, nothing quite works twice. But honesty helps: “Hi I know you like my product because I noticed you talking about it. I am keen to hear your reaction to some new features I am planning to introduce.” This is the strategy that Intuit used to get their QuickBooks blogging strategy underway.

You might call it contextual marketing, and, as a science, it’s in its infancy. We are taking baby steps to figure out how it should work. As ever in this new world of marketing communications, it is going to be all about permission, about honesty and about relevance.

It’s good to see the success of Kellogg’s new chat website to support their Drop a Jeans Size campaign.

Drop a Jeans Size - a smart name for what was the Special K diet - advocates a simple two-week diet where two meals a day are replaced with a bowl of Special K (in any of its varieties).

To support the campaign, the site uses online message boards and blogging groups to drive mutual support among dieters - and powerful word of mouth for the Special K diet.

Kellogg’s clearly understands its audience.

There are now nearly 1,000 postings in the public message boards alone, fuelled by a mostly female audience from around the country. The tone is familiar from message boards on sites such as handbag.com and ivillage; open, supportive and interactive, (though it’s a shame Kellogg’s have set up their boards in a way that doesn’t allow threads to be followed or commented on).

Perhaps the most innovative element is the fact that Kellogg’s appear to be using blogging to allow dieters to form small support groups, inviting friends to join them. A great idea for engaging the audience, offering a helpful support tool - oh, and it also spreads the word about the diet and the Kellogg’s site.

Michael Nutley makes some interesting points about the viral power of blogs in this week’s NMA.

‘In the early days of blogging, it was all about an individual voice - using the Web to publish your journal. As the number of blogs has risen, their function has changed, becoming less about micro-publishing and more about being part of a network. As well as generating unique content, bloggers are increasingly directing their readers to stuff they find interesting elsewhere on the Web or in other media. Add to this the effect that name bloggers have in attracting information from other people, not necessarily bloggers themselves, and what emerges is an incredibly powerful filtering and reference tool.’

Taking music as an example, Nutley goes on to cite the power of the blog in introducing new audiences to unknown bands (taking Arctic Monkeys as a case in point), comparing this revolution with its peer-to-peer downloads predecessor.

Echoing the past, it appears that the traditional marketers in the music industry are not willing to engage with this powerful new influence. However, there can be little doubt that in a broadband world, bloggers will be wielding increasing influence which PR and marketing should not ignore.

An interesting article by Jim Meskauskas in iMedia Connection, points out the significant dynamic that blogs have added to traditional word of mouth recommendations and discussions about products.

“Blogs have become a phalanx of information on the internet. Marketers know this and want to harness the power blogs have demonstrated as the embodiment of the notion that, as the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed, ‘markets are conversations.’”

As a case in point, Proctor & Gamble learned about problems with early samples of a new single serve coffee maker through feedback from a panel blogging through BzzAgent. P&G’s prompt action to replace all faulty machines created a small group of brand advocates who would proactively further the company’s reputation through word of mouth.

We launched our “Search is Brand” whitepaper at the end of June, discussing how customers experiences of brands was increasingly dictated by search - and pointing out that the search gives a lot of prominence to detractors. Our means of publicising the white paper was to blog it, and to email the key opinion-brokers such as Steve Rubel, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Elizabeth Albrycht, Rok Hrastnik and Guilllaume du Gardier. We also talked to our good friends at New Media Knowledge, e-Consultancy and Net Imperative. The cash budget was zero (although it helped to know who the opinion-brokers were).

Prior to the publication of the white paper the “Search is Brand” search on Google turned up citations like “Yahoo search is brand new” in about 50-60 results. As of Thursday 11th August 2005 there are 846 results. 90% are references to our white paper. This process has taken six weeks. References are growing geometrically - when we checked on Monday the number of results was 737.

Our experience suggests that if you if you identify a unique idea or “meme” and decides you want to colonise it, blogging is a highly effective way to do so.

Conversely, although the white paper received coverage in PR week and Campaign, the influence of coverage in these publications was far weaker, partly because the journalist, writing in an offline format, didn’t link to us or use our exact terms, and when the article was published online, it tended to be cut and pasted, again without links or keywords.

To spell out our conclusions (at the risk of stating the obvious):

1) blogs offer you total control over your message and keywords;

2) blogs reward other bloggers for reusing your words and keywords because a) it is easier to link to something than copy or paraphrase it, and because b) linking offers a fellow blogger a chance to associate their comment with the original material and boost their own traffic;

3) off-line media tends to weaken your message because a) they paraphrase it, and b) they choose keywords reflecting their own agenda, and because they are off-line;

4) the combined effects of a number of different sites using the same keywords to link to your site powerfully impacts your Google algorithmic ranking on the message and keywords you have chosen.

Monday night saw the excellent Seth Godin address the Geek Dinner at London’s Texas Embassy. His theme was that the era of interruptive advertising was coming to an end. He argued that people were less and less susceptible to buying products as a consequence of being forced to stop what they were doing and wait to absorb an advertising message. He cited the increasing use of pop-up blockers online, and TiVO on TV. (One might also add those who use RSS readers to that list) He demonstrated declining response rates from such advertising.

Instead Godin argued that all marketers were, as he put it, “in the fashion business”, and that the job of companies was to design and sell things that were, of their nature, remarkable, and which created word-of-mouth commentary. The example he uses here is his famous Purple Cow. A Purple Cow is a creature so extraordinary that its very existence is a matter of comment. As consumers comment on it, they spread news of its existence. The real world analogy is the comparison between BMW and GM’s Lincoln Mercury. GM spends 15 times as much marketing the Lincoln Mercury as BMW spends marketing the equivalent model. BMW don’t need to promote their car. The customers do that for them.

He said (if I understood him aright) that the future of marketing success lay in growth driven by a) remarkable products, b) permission-based advertising media.

This argument does not suggest that conventional advertising and marketing has to disappear. Far from it. It suggests that in order to succeed advertising and marketing messages have to change. They adopt more of the characteristics which were previously the preserve of publishers and broadcasters. Marketing and advertising messages have to take on the characteristics of content. They have to become stories - stories that are interesting enough to pass on. Otherwise they will simply be blocked by our increasingly efficient spam filters.

Seth Godin’s argument relates directly to the use of blogging and RSS. RSS is of its nature a permission-based source of information. I will only subscribe to a feed which is delivering me high-quality information. I will only pay attention to information which is timely and relevant to me. In the blogosphere I will give more attention to blogs which are endorsed or linked by people whose values I trust. In both cases the “story” needs to be strong enough to get me to opt-in to the communication. My finger is permanently hovering over the click which will take me somewhere else, possibly forever.