Full Disclosure

I applaud Wal-Mart for reaching out to bloggers and feeding them bits of information, but there are a couple things wrong with their approach, in my opinion: 1) It doesn't appear that they've worked with bloggers to ensure transparency. I would place more of the blame for a failure to disclose on the bloggers themselves, but an agency as smart as Edelman should know better than to take a chance that they will be perceived as puppetmasters.

2) (The biggie.) Edelman shouldn't be handling the relationships with bloggers. Wal-Mart should be doing that. The program in question simply looks like a mere extension of traditional PR, and I think that's selling conversational marketing short. Wal-Mart should ultimately be responsible for conversing with their customers, critics and supporters. Otherwise, how does Wal-Mart ever have a chance to be able to participate in conversations, particularly if they have to coordinate responses through a PR agency and God knows how many other corporate channels?

Of course, I'm assuming that Wal-Mart and Edelman are telling the truth when they say they're not compensating bloggers. If that's not the case, then there's a lot more wrong with this.

Whooshed

Far be it for me to tell someone what their takeaway from my columns should be, but the folks at 180 Solutions seem to have - shall we say - a unique perspective on the Long Tail piece from Tuesday. On their blog, they make a point about partnering with "the right team" for optimization and campaign maintenance, and write commentary that serves as a sales piece for MetricsDirect.

Really, I meant the overview of the workload involved in online advertising to serve as an exclamation point with respect to the work involved in monitoring and participating in conversations across a number of online communities. I wasn't looking to make a point about campaign optimization at all, which is a broadcast-model concept. Think about it - we already have people mired in online campaign data, trying to squeeze every bit of response out of a broadcast campaign. How many folks do we need to dedicate to simply following the conversation? How many more will it require in order to meaningfully participate once those conversations are identified (in a timely manner)? These are the types of questions we should be asking ourselves.

I did get a load of private e-mail on this one, with many folks inquiring about the tools we're building and asking what we envisioned those tools looking like in the near future. But no one was talking broadcast. Except 180 Solutions.

Monitoring Tools

I think it's actually not that tough to monitor relevant conversations in the blogosphere using a combination of search feeds, relevant keyword searches and RSS feed subscriptions to relevant blogs. I find that I can easily identify significant conversations about my agency, my column or my person within minutes of their posting. But there's a big chunk that we're missing. There's a lot more conversation going on, and a good bit of it is happening on bulletin boards and online community sites (particularly the ones with Open Source content management systems). Many of these sites are not indexed by major search engines, and many of them fly under the radar.

I don't mean to imply that every marketer needs to know about every online conversation involving their product or their product category. But I'm convinced that in missing out on many of the underground bulletin boards, we're missing a sizeable chunk of the market conversations. And I'm not sure how to measure how large that piece is, or what remains to be indexed.

There are other components to this, too. Some pieces are more significant than others. Chat room conversations are valuable, but probably less valuable than their BBS counterparts since they have extremely limited shelf life. No chat room conversations are hanging out long enough to influence folks other than the original participants.

What we really need here is community search, an index of sites and communities with conversational capabilities, with the one-way stuff filtered out.

Blog Networks - Not Necessarily an Advertising Play

We've had significant contact with most of the blog advertising networks out there, talking about ad deals with many of them, sponsorships with some and other potential tie-ins with one or two. What bugs me is that when reps pitch me with an ad deal, they're not offering me anything unique that I couldn't get anywhere else. Blog networks aren't big enough to be reach plays, aren't yet polished enough to be premium content plays, and they don't have a common thread that can unify each one of the blogs in the network. (Unless you count the whole "bloggers as opinion leaders" thing, which I don't think holds water. You're advertising to more blog readers than bloggers when you purchase ads on blog networks.)

Truth be told, when a rep comes in with an ad deal we're almost immediately talking about price. A network ad buy is a commodity. Why pay a blog network $5 per thousand when I can get Run of Network inventory elsewhere for $0.50 per thousand?

What blog networks need to focus on is that which no other network can give an ad agency or advertiser - an entry point into the conversation. I'd love to see a blog network come into the office and tell me that they can help us with the qualitative aspect of communications - how to connect meaningfully with the audience of the various blogs they represent without wallpapering the entire damned landscape with 160x600 skyscraper ads.

I'm not looking to pay for non-disclosed coverage or alter a content agenda. That wouldn't make sense. I'd be willing to speak to some relevant bloggers about commenting on something that makes contextual sense (perhaps on another blog), and prompting their audience to chime in. I'd be open to a blogger, or the audience of a particular blog, offering some suggestions to someone at a client company as to how to improve their marketing or tell them what's wrong with their current approach.

But it can't be just another 160x600 wallpapering. I can do that anywhere and I can do it cheaper outside the blog networks. That road leads to blog networks not being able to support themselves because they're giving their audience away while continuing to broadcast "buy my stuff" messages AT them. But if blog networks take on a more consultative approach, helping agencies and advertisers facilitate the conversation between blog audiences and marketers, wouldn't everybody be much happier?

Yes, blog ads do get better response rates than typical banner buys. But that isn't sustainable. It's not very long before people tune out because they're being broadcast TO as opposed to conversed WITH. Can we learn from the past and do this right from day one as opposed to trashing the reputations of the blog networks and having to rebuild them? We know we have to tap into what makes blogs special, and many blog networks aren't doing that.