iBlog 6: Respect Blog & Social Media Marketing

iBlog 6 is officially over and before anything let me just give a shout out to Janette Toral and the organizers for pulling off what I consider one of the most educational Blog Marketing events for both bloggers and business owners. I heard from a lot of people that attended that they consider iBlog 6 the best iBlog they’ve been to. Unlike previous years, iBlog was split into two days. The first was for business owners who wanted to explore blog marketing while the second day was the immortal blogging 101 course for new and intermediate bloggers.

I was invited to give a talk on the first day about measuring blog buzz. I’ll do a quick recap and summarize the main point of the presentation.

You cannot measure the success of any campaign if there are no concrete goals or objectives. This is the main problem that a lot of advertising and PR agencies encounter. You cannot just make the measurement of success the number of blog entries written or how many bloggers attended the activity. There has to be a quantifiable objective that you want the readers of the bloggers to do. Otherwise it’s just all up in the air.

In the talk I discussed about how you can use bloggers to act as a funnel so that you can drive list building and sign-ups. This can be in the form of Facebook Official Profile fans, e-mail subscriptions, virtual coupon redemptions, and more. The main point is to look at the blogger as a canvass where you try to make a strong proposition to convince their readers to do something that they can do while they’re on the blog.

Lastly, people need to learn to respect social media and blog marketing. If you look at it as just some form of “extra activity” to spend your left over budget on, then it’s kinda pointless to do because you’ll just waste the money or the effort will just backfire. When agencies and managers create marketing plans, they invest a lot of time and effort in making sure that they plan is perfect. They double check their figures, forecasts, and initiatives so that you get the maximum bang for every buck. This level of diligence should also be the same when you’re planning your social media and blog marketing efforts. These channels can drastically improve your business but you won’t be able to do that unless you properly strategize and align your efforts with your objectives.

The problem is the always the same: highest expectations, lowest effort and budget. If you really can’t afford to increase your spend, the least you can do is to invest more time in thinking your entire plan through.

And that’s a wrap for my talk at iBlog 6.

Here are some photos that I took during the event:

Congratulations again to the organizers, participants, and the sponsors! Looking forward to iBlog 7!

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