One of the key communications challenges for business and brands is how to identify, engage and build relationships with bloggers. Determining blogger influence, outreaching and measuring impact are critical concerns to communicators. Based on our work in corporate and consumer markets, here are ten tips to help you along the journey to good blogger relations.

1. Conversations about your brand are happening now – and the first step towards making blogs a key part of your advocacy network is Listening. There are many social media monitoring tools available to help you listen and engage with bloggers. (They all do some things better than others, so it’s not a question of one tool suits all). However, here’s a golden rule: use stakeholder mapping techniques at the first phase of listening. You will better define your universe of blogs. It will also ensure you link the goals of the programme to the metrics and ambitions of your brand.

2. Now you’re ready to deep dive…that means devoting resources and effort to research your target blogs. Thorough pre-contact research will help you identify three fundamental things: the end user audience of the blog; the interests and passions of the blogger; and the blog’s personality/tone of voice. Use a scorecard to rate each element of these against your brand: the higher the score, the closer the fit.

3. Within every category there are prolific bloggers and you’ll need to invest time in connecting with them. Therefore, deciding who is an ‘influencer’ is essential. Some obvious information on a blog will tell you, such as, how frequently the blog is updated. More telling are hard metrics, particularly a high number of commenters and the level of user engagement. Read more >>

Historically, social media campaigns in consumer sectors such as retail, media or technology are often more likely to become an overnight success and go rapidly viral. It’s not to say, however, that more restrictive and often regulated environments are devoid of such opportunities. Insurance, financial services, energy or even healthcare may not seem like an obvious ground for social media engagement but their relatively conservative position has brought about innovative approaches, paving the way for successful social media solutions.

Take insurance services: engaging younger consumers is arguably more effective, and offers the potential of decreasing marketing costs and improving customer experience. But any social media programme is only as good as its adopters’ strategy and execution, so it’s vital to carefully look into key considerations for such sectors before making any hasty decisions.

In insurance, trust is everything and the entire industry is driven by customers’ confidence in their advisors, agents and the brand. Consumers are habitually sceptical about insurance and financial services brands so they need reassurance, and to feel that big brands are prepared to listen, understand and engage with them. Equally important is reputational risk because consumers can share their negative experiences. But these conversations are happening regardless whether brands are participating in social media, so organisations that proactively listen and respond appropriately de-risk themselves (Source: McKinsey report, 2011).

So which companies are using social media effectively?

With companies often offering similar products or competing on size, creating an ‘emotional brand’ that socially engages people is an effective strategy.

Comparison website Compare the Market has successfully leveraged its Compare The Meerkat campaign in using clever advertising, humour and social media, many of which tend to stay ‘in character’ and rarely mention insurance. In the first three days of the campaign 75% of the monthly quotes target had been achieved, the year-on-year uplift in quotes was 45% and the Russian-speaking meerkat has attracted almost 807k ‘likes’ on Facebook to date and more than 52k followers hanging on to his tweet. Other insurers adopting the ‘character’ approach are Churchill Insurance and ING in the UK. Read more >>

Shoppers in C&A stores in Brazil can literally discover if people ‘Like’ the items on the rails.

A new initiative by the department store records the number of real-time time Facebook ‘Likes’ for garments and displays the results on the hangers of the actual piece of clothing in the store. Visitors to C&A’s Facebook page click on a virtual hanger and click ‘Like’.

The idea behind the scheme is to help with shoppers make informed selections by harnessing the power of social media to drive in-store purchases. The concept was rolled out successfully to support C&A’s Mother’s Day collection.