A Force to be Reckoned
If you’re a marketer and you still think social networking sites and blogs are the cloistered domain of computer geeks and something you can ignore…think again…or start polishing up your resume.
Fast-forward to today with consumers of all types flocking to social media sites to share brand experiences. Social Media such as blogs, wikis, forums and user-generated content sites like flickr, delicious, MySpace and YouTube have become both a source of information and entertainment. While this new age of digital word of mouth is dramatically shaping the way brands are perceived, many marketers and business managers are still amazingly unaware of the influence of social media on everything from brand reputation to purchase behaviors.
The influence traditional media and marketing have over consumer perception is waning as people use the plethora of digital technologies to circumvent traditional sources to obtain information and entertainment from each other. Simply look at the recent comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for the likes of sites like YouTube and MySpace, and you quickly get a lesson in the power of user-generated content in endorsing or condemning a product or service.
According to Technorati CEO and founder, David Sifry’s most recent “State of the Blogsphere”; there are now 57 million blogs (about 55% of which are active), about 100,000 new blogs created each day, and 1.3 million posts a day (that’s double the volume of this time last year). At the current growth rate, the blogsphere is doubling every 236 days or so.
The interesting number that really caught my eye is the number of “authoritative” blogs (authority is a ranking assigned by Technorati based on tracking the number of distinct blogs that link to it over the past 6 months). The fact is there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.
There are 30,488 “high authority” and “very high authority” blogs. (This “authority” level means they each have more than 100 other blogs linking to them in the last 6 months.) For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research) That’s a lot of voices, a significant readership and a lot of influence.
Rueters reports that blogs are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent). But blogs still lag behind newspapers (30 percent) in the credibility department. This according to a survey commissioned by Hotwire, a public relations consultancy working in the technology sector.
The evidence relative to the influence of blogs on everything from public opinion to purchase decisions is growing. In this article, on the impact of blogs in the b2b sector, a KnowledgeStorm/McCann survey of purchase behavior found that 53% of respondents said blogs influence their purchase decisions. That influence looms even larger over regular blog users. Of the respondents who said they read blogs daily, nearly 69% said blogs influenced their purchase behavior.
As a marketer, if you don’t have a program in place to monitor your brands in the social media, put one in place. Because detecting influence and understanding its role in how people perceive and adopt your product or service online can give you a powerful tool for marketing programs, advertising approaches and competitive business intelligence.
This post was written by: Kim Mickelsen