You can't really control what the blogosphere says about your brand, but with these simple steps you can exert more influence. The NextStage CRO explains.
You can think of this column as a follow up to Bloggers, influence and your brand, but you don't have to have read that column in order to understand this one.
Two kinds of bloggers
As we learned, there are essentially two kinds of bloggers that are relevant to your brand marketing, which we call Holmeses and Watsons. The Holmes blogger is a subject matter expert (SME) with deep knowledge in a narrow field. The Watson is not an SME, but does have an incredible breadth of audience. The two bloggers really need each other in order for either to be successful. Every Holmes needs a Watson in order to distribute his knowledge, and every Watson needs a Holmes to provide him something to say.
People who've worked in companies with strong engineering and sales departments will recognize this same dichotomy. Without engineering sales has nothing to sell, without sales engineering's genius inventions go nowhere.
NextStage monitored some 150 blogs of all types over a nine-month period. Blogs were kept as research elements regardless of activity levels and even (in some cases) changes of principle authors (the designated "blogger"). This part of our research revealed some solid takeaways for bloggers:
- We learned how to determine if someone would be a Holmes or a Watson
- We learned how to train someone to be a Holmes or a Watson
- We learned how to determine if someone would gain dominance in certain geographies, in certain topics and how large that audience would be
- And most importantly, we could train them as required.
A major and unexpected takeaway from the research was that the Watsons tend to be the powerbrokers in the blogosphere. (Personally, I'm not happy with this result. It essentially means sales are more important in the engineering-sales paradigm and, as R&D has more ties to engineering than it does to sales, I apologize to my engineering peers).
The status of a Watson as powerbroker is important going forward, especially if you want to get an unreliable or unacceptable Watson out of the way. In the end, the Holmes or Holmes-designate (a corporate marketing department) wants to control the conversation. They might lose control without even realizing it and become some Watsons' platform, which is not a useful marketing place to be.
Being able to control or eliminate comments isn't a solution, either. A belligerent Watson will find another outlet and, because of his or her greater audience reach, pollute your message.
Here are some ways to influencing, using and -- when necessary -- usurping unacceptable Watsons when they pop up in blogs.
Who controls the conversation? Frequency of posts
It turns out there are several ways to control the conversation. The first is to have the Holmes post frequently. This is a typical power vacuum proposition. A Holmes who posts infrequently will leave room for someone else to control the conversation.
Posting "frequently" means posting often within a given message or conceptual thread. It does not mean simply posting often. A Holmes who posts frequently when there's no real conversation going on may be reaching a loyal audience: in this case, the Holmes is controlling the conversation simply because it's a monologue, not a conversation. You need to post both frequently in terms of time and in terms of concept.
Holmeses who post both conceptually and frequently are controlling the conversation.
Here we show an example of a Holmes that lost control of the conversation and how to win it back:
We start with a chart of how often this Holmes posted over a 90 day period. This Holmes originally posted once a day and increased to three times a day only when the conversation on his blog was completely out of his control.
In contrast, the following image should be compared with the above:
Note that the Watson doesn't post every day. In fact, he often doesn't post for several days in a row. What he does, however, is post often within a given conversation thread.
Here we see the number of comments left by all other visitors over the same 90 day period:
Note that Watson's posts pick up dramatically once an audience gathers.
The following chart shows Holmes', Watson's and all other comments over the same 90 day period:
Looking at this chart, it might seem that the Watson isn't contributing all that much to the conversation, but looks can be deceiving.
Who controls the conversation? It's HOW you talk that really counts
Right up with how often someone posts is how someone communicates what they're posting. I talked about this in my previous column, and the phenomenon concerns psycho-linguistic and semantic similarities between one person and another.
Influencers are adept at matching their audiences' communication styles and methodologies. The result of this close psycho-semantic matching is that the audience doesn't have to "think" much in order to agree with or follow the information being given to them. This is a core part to the science of selling, litigation, profiling… more fields than most people care to know about.
And here is where the Watsons tend to reveal themselves:
A Watson originally matches his Holmes psycho-semantically. However, as more and more people come to the blog and an audience forms, the Watson shifts his communication methodology and style.
In this chart you can almost see the Watson learning the commenters' communication styles and testing the facility of each:
It is important to note that often Watsons will gain control of a blog with no intention of doing so and no malice aforethought. Innocent and conversationally adept Watsons are merely examples of corporations and blog platform owners selecting the wrong individual to "own" the blog.
What's important, however, is that when a Watson started to comment on the comments he took control of the conversation going on in the blog. The Holmes became a contributor rather than a thought-leader or guiding voice to their own marketspace.
Advertisement