Today’s marketers need to step down from their pulpit and become active participants in the growing online conversation taking place around their brands, says a U.S. expert. The explosion of “social media”-which includes blogs, podcasts, online communities such as MySpace and virtual worlds like Second Life-is transforming how consumers receive and disseminate information about brands, says Shel Holtz, a principal in California-based Holtz Communication + Technology.
A carefully crafted and sanitized monologue is no longer adequate, he says. Instead, marketers need to engage in a truthful, even occasionally messy, dialogue with the public. “(Marketers) have to learn to stop standing on the summit preaching to audiences who are merely consumers of information, and figure out how to start engaging them in the conversation,” Holtz said at a recent Association of Internet Marketing & Sales (AIMS) event in Toronto.
Holtz says marketers can’t afford to downplay the significance of the blogosphere. It is doubling in size every five-and-a-half months, with an estimated 175,000 new blogs and 1.6 million postings every day.
That’s in addition to virtual worlds like Second Life, which currently boasts roughly 740,000 registered users and is growing “like gangbusters” says Holtz. Short of their ability to fly, Second Life’s avatars (users’ online personas) conduct themselves much as they do in the real world-shopping, attending concerts and even having virtual business meetings. Advertisers with a presence in the Second Life environment include 20th Century Fox (which held a screening for X-Men: The Last Stand), Adidas, Reebok and American Apparel-which boasts a duplicate of its Tokyo store where Second Life users can buy replicas of its clothing for their avatars.
Maggie Fox, a partner in SocialMediaGroup-a Hamilton, Ont.-based company specializing in online communications-says her company is getting “a lot of curiosity and interest” from marketers. Many, says Fox, realize that involvement in social media is more a case of “how” rather than “whether.”
But potential clients also have what Fox calls a “laundry list” of concerns about blogging, chief among them time and resources. In a recent conversation with Fox, one would-be client listed “time required” as his number one worry about establishing a corporate blog. “The e-mail itself was almost 300 words long, and well-written,” she says. “So I asked him how long it had taken him to write me, because the same missive could easily have been published as a blog post. That was a real eye-opener for him.”
Jim Estill, CEO of Synnex Canada-a computer equipment wholesaler in Guelph Ont. that does roughly $1 billion in annual sales-launched his blog, “CEO-Time Leadership,” roughly 18 months ago. Originally conceived as a means of communicating with Synnex employees, the blog now attracts roughly 3,000 readers a month.
Estill avoids any overt mentions of Synnex on the blog, choosing instead to focus on general business principles (with an emphasis on time management) and even his personal life (a recent post focused on his participation in the Scotiabank half-marathon in Toronto).
Estill and experts like Holtz all agree that blogging should not be viewed simply as an extension of the marketing function. “As soon as you start thinking of it as advertising, you take away the idea of it being genuine,” says AIMS president Bruce Powell. “If you don’t believe in it, and you can’t speak with the sincerity and a genuine voice, then you’re not going to be effective.”
