Is there anybody out there? Not always. We recently carried out a feasibility study for a B2B software company evaluating whether to engage with bloggers in three target vertical markets around the world. Blogger engagement (and other social media) seemed an appropriate strategy. The client’s software is tailored to each vertical, they have credible customers around the world, and the client has enough experience to credibly contribute to the conversation.
Confident in our virtual search we set off to find a community of bloggers. Surely the ‘long tail of the internet’ gives even niche commentators a voice? Surely there would be a handful of bloggers covering almost any industry?
Um, no. Here’s what we found:
1. In one industry, the only people with blogs were trade publication journalists whose publishers had jumped on the blogging bandwagon. The content differed little from their print opinion columns and there was little community conversation. We may as well continue to treat them as journalists using traditional media relations techniques.
2. In another service industry, there was a lot of talk about their customers’ customers’ experiences but no talk about running a business in that industry (and therefore little opportunity to talk about software to better run your operations).
3. In the last, our product was touched on occasionally, but always as a tangent in conversations about a competing kind of software. We would be members of another ‘camp’ interrupting in hostile territory.
So, what can we learn from this?
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The Niches along the Long Tail ain’t that Big. To be fair, Chris Anderson in the Long Tail never claimed they were. Over time, the long tail has been caught up in the myth that there are websites and online conversations ‘out there’ forming a viable market for ‘almost anything.’ What he actually said is that the combined volume of many unique (hard-to-find, not necessarily popular) items in relatively small quantities adds up to a viable market (if you can sell variety, like Amazon or TradeMe). However, when you’re measuring the influence of blogs some degree of popularity is desirable. If it can’t even be found by Google then it can’t be influential in our customers’ eyes.
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Industry dynamics affect the conversation. Bloggers with particular ‘roles’ seem to dominate in different conversations, depending on the market dynamics. Eg, journalists dominated in one industry (maybe because the topic is so dry you’d have to be paid to find anything to say) and consumers in another (service providers were probably shy of ‘lifting their skirt’ for fear of criticism from their consumers).
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Find your voice in the conversation. You can’t just wade in as a vendor. In some cases it would require finding something to say to your customers’ end-users and positioning yourself as an expert in their needs. This would involve talking to the whole ecosystem, not just your (service provider) customers. The result: an indirect conversation with your customer, which alters some of the messages you can get across (you may have to complement your blogging with talk about efficiency and effectiveness via a direct communication campaign).
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Start the conversation yourself. This requires more resources, and ‘build it and they will come’ is harder than joining an existing conversation. What this research suggested is that sometimes a potential ‘gap in the market’ might actually be ‘no significant market’ – so do a proper feasibility study and have a blogging strategy that integrates with your integrated marketing plans before you leap.
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