Buzzgain

The only qualification I have to make this blog entry is that I have been a VP of Marketing before and have managed a annual PR budget of about $1.2 Million. I dont claim to know the business of PR well, but when has that stopped a blogger from giving his opinion right?

The question I want to address though is one asked by my friend Jennifer and another PR professional Michelle.

“Where do you think that line should be drawn? Subscribers? Alexa rankings? Google page rank? Technorati? Which bloggers make the list of desirables? Tell me…”

The question is one of which bloggers should you target – the “A list” ones with many readers or the other list – who have very little readership.

I think the question fundamentally should be a different one.

Web masters in the late 90’s (every marketing team had one remember), have now evolved into Internet Marketing functions whose role includes SEM, SEO, site design, buying optimization etc.

The PR professional has to go away from answering the question “How can I generate the most Buzz” to “How can I impact the marketing goals – be it for a company or a client“? Many smart PR professionals are already doing this.

The Buzz question prompts you to look for more PR mentions, or get your CEO on the cover of Forbes or get mentioned in EVERY local newspaper.

The Impact question begs you to measure the net result or “ROI of that buzz creation” to the bottom line. What that means is that you have to come with reports not that state the # of mentions and press clips of every mention, but reports that indicate “What % of the registered users came because you got a mention in a blog” Or “What was the conversion ratio for prospects when we got a mention on NYTimes vs. the Wall Street Journal”. I am the first to tell you that this is difficult currently to do, but you have to get there.

If you set out to address that question however and you are convinced that’s the way to go, then you’ll spend your time on 3 metrics through the customer acquisition pipeline:

1. Awareness generation: How many people were made aware of your products / offerings? This could be a simple case of taking the # of publications and bloggers you pitched to & got written up in and adding them up. Its not a great number but its a start. This is what you are probably most familiar with.

2. Actionable intent: How many people visited your website after that mention in that blog OR media publication? This is MORE possible to do now than ever. Granted you wont get EXACT metrics, but you will get close enough numbers. Become friends with you web analytics person and they’ll give you a good start.

3. Converted prospects: How many people from the previous number actually performed the call to action. This is also an important metric to track. Again this metric is being tracked by the analytics tools – you just need to be more familiar with them.

You need these three numbers because only then is it possible to justify your time spent on bloggers outside the “A list”. Why?

Its is our contention that the conversion ratio (# of people visiting to taking action to converting) is BEST in the niche blogs. Their audience is specific, tailored and is passionate about the only thing that blogger covers. That blogger usually has a GREATER influence over his niche audience than a blog network does.

Second, niche bloggers are more likely to give you good links that will improve the organic ranking of website in Google searches. This is huge since organic traffic is literally “free” or minimal cost to your company.

The large A list blogs and blog networks give you great traffic (i.e. awareness) BUT the conversion ratios are correspondingly poor.

You can argue if conversion ratios matter. That’s question #2.

It does. The  reason it matters is the MOST EXPENSIVE method to generate leads and conversions currently is Google SEM (Or Search Engine Marketing) or Pay Per Click (PPC) as they call it in the industry. As an alternative organic search results (which are obtained with more links to your website and good content) are a lot less expensive.

So if you can prove (with real reports and numbers to your VP Marketing) that you can generate better conversion ratios and deliver leads at a lower cost, you will never have to justify talking to B list bloggers or justify your engagement with any type of social media.