DISQUS

Scott Rafer · 1 year ago

I answered the Poll in the WOM area, but I didn't intend my answer the way you meant the question. TC and Om barely count when I'm out doing blog marketing. It's the thousands of smaller pubs that matter. As Lookery ramps up PR around the search keyword services that are coming out this month, I'll spend hours a day responding to blog posts from people i would never have otherwise encountered. It'll be worth every second and can be sustained indefinitely.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

got it. Plus I think B2B's are different... you can focus on serving thousands of customers, and it's not as important to figure out how to scale into millions of people!

Scott Rafer · 1 year ago

Was MyBlogLog a b2b? sorta. sorta not. It was true there too.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

for the sake of making my argument work, I'll consider it b2b ;-)

simonhk · 1 year ago

Agree with you Scott. Blog marketing doesn't mean just TC of the world. Would be good if there was an option for "community engagement" (or maybe it's covered within WOM), because in our case it's where most of our user activity in early days will be - forums especially (forums are huge in Asia)

someone · 1 year ago

It would be interesting to find out what kind of a readership you have. Maybe your readers are usually targeting the technical user-base, in which case, tech-early-adopters and bloggers will have more value than Email marketing or MySpace/Facebook etc.

ameyer32 · 1 year ago

Andrew,

(BTW - that is such a great name), let me give you my take on it.

How one operates depends upon how you approach business. If you're B2C, then you need to reach large numbers of people and SEO/SEM/Facebook etc. make sense. But if you're product operates inside a corporation, none of those forms of marketing make much sense. You're trying to reach particular people in a particular type of organization.

To succeed offering a Web2.0 product for use within an enterprise, you need to reach a visionary within a company. In "Crossing the Chasm" style, that person is your entry point in and they can see and articulate how your product offers value within their company.

What is key about blogs is the blogger. That person is probably a visionary and if they're interested, they know how to present and position your product and more importantly, lend their credibility. Going in by way of intro from a fellow blogger/visionary, you're not positioned as a salesperson, you're an expert who can solve a pain that organization's feeling.

On a good day, I might get 100 people reading my blog. What's more important for me, is that the right people (visionaries) are following my blog and we have common ground and shared experiences. That is why I believe word of mouth and blogs are so important. They allow you to define a niche and reach the right, target people in that niche.

Or maybe I'm just deluding myself...

Andy

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

nice to meet you Andrew! I think I figured that most of the folks reading my blog are B2C folks, whereas all the B2B people are off reading something with fewer pictures of lolcats and myspace celebs floating around ;-) But perhaps I'm assuming incorrectly

Shayan Zadeh · 1 year ago

i totally agree with you on this. It boggles my mind that all types of entrepreneurs are so much after the bloggosphere's mind share. For some businesses it makes sense (i am a startup building a service for foo-bar industry and i want endorsement of foo-bar-daily-blog). But what is strange is that so many consumer services companies are so focused on this acquisition model.

I think one of the hidden factors in this fascination might have to do with how valley operates, or we think it does! Many entrepreneurs look for funding before they look for customers (some argue without funding you can't do it, but i am not sold on this argument especially these days but i digress). so they think "i need to get my awesome new thing on the map so VCs accept my calls and listen to my pitch."

Ironically, at least in all my dealings with VCs, they tended to get a lot more excited about your product and what traction you are getting with consumers out there than whether or not TC has blogged about it.

Obviously appearing on the map is almost always good for your business. But I think building a product to appeal to the 1% blogger population while missing the 99% of consumers could cost you a company. What would happen if Facebook had decided to build their system for scoble rather than the rest of us ;)

Pokin · 1 year ago

Interesting survey results. What would have been cool to see alongside is perceived payoff for effort / time spent too.

Wonder how much of a difference there would be in tactics between by B2B vs B2C or by industry.

My favourite is hope and pray :p Where's the raindance option? :)

Bryan S · 1 year ago

Andrew, I would love to hear your feedback on each of these techniques. What is most effective? What are average cost-per-visitor, etc.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

i don't know if you can rank the effectiveness of these techniques against each other - too much apples to oranges. I tend to go for scaleable techniques that don't cost any money. In general, only viral, widgets and SEO fall into this camp (which explains why they have all gotten so much attention). I'm pretty anti-blog, PR, techcrunch, etc. as a sole strategy for gaining traction.

Mike Gowen · 1 year ago

I'm interested to see where strategic partnerships fall in the mix, for example Picnik's integration with Flickr, and some of our (scrapblog) partnerships. I'm sure they are more uncommon than the above practices, but they can definitely provide big bursts of users. Great post, thanks!

Pierre Henri Clouin · 1 year ago

Very interesting results, post and comments on user acquisition strategy.

I wonder if a time element might be at play here: people might have understood "where do you put most of your efforts?" as "what user acquisition activity do you spend the most time at?" Since WOM and blogger relation is more time-intensive than SEO, that might explain its greater prevalence.

Along the same lines, it seems to me that WOM and blogger relation provides greater instant gratification than SEO, while SEO efforts take a while to pay off, which might help make it more "popular".

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

i like that distinction, and agree that some efforts are more time intensive.

In fact, I'd also add that they take time from specific types of employees - viral and SEO are typically more engineering centric whereas PR/blog outreach can be facilitated by nontechincal types

Engago Team · 1 year ago

If you want to know who is reading your blog for a B2B company or product, you need to identify every reader by the company name in order to separate residential (B2C) readers from company (B2B) readers.
Within the group of company readers, you have to count those who are from potential customers and those who very unlikely to become a customer.
Thus you will have 3 groups:
- Residential surfers
- Company readers - unlikely to become customer
- Company readers - target group of companies
We do this for our website and found we got a large presence of marketing and SEO companies, so we have to adjust the content of the blog to our market.

In oder to be able to analyze this a web service that identifies your website visitors by company name is required. A web service we provide ...

Greg M · 1 year ago

I think that if a project makes a return on each "converted" user then you can use paid marketing and other methods like that. But if your project is essentially free and ad-supported, you need a viral component because you can't just scale-up the marketing budget in the first efw years ... unless yo have millions of investment to blow.

I discuss more about this at luckyapps.com -- the Business Strategy section :)