Into the Blogosphere

Retailers have grappled with the role of their web sites during the Internet’s short history—is it merchant, marketing vehicle, customer research venue or PR tool? By putting their own spin on a new electronic publishing tool initially used by consumers, online marketers have found something that can combine all these functions into one feature: the blog.

Some 62% of Americans still don’t know what a blog is, according to recent data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But if that 62% includes online retailers, they better learn fast. Blogs, personal online diaries or journals and short for “web logs,” have become highly influential in American society and can affect a retailer’s brand faster than the retailer can react. “The power of web logs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them,” notes Technorati, a search engine that specializes in crawling and indexing web logs.

While they were started as ways for individuals to post their rants online for the world to see (see box, p. 37), consumer blogs have given rise to marketers’ own blogs hosted on their own sites. The idea is that the personal diary format provides a forum for conveying the company’s values, attitude, positions and additional content that other communications vehicles don’t. And a blog—reduced to its technology underpinnings, an online publishing tool that easily handles frequent content changes—makes presenting such content simple.

Giving voice

Blogs are being used in business to give a voice and personality to corporations and industry issues, and companies have begun to use blogs for external communication as they would other forms of marketing or public relations, says Dana VanDen Heuvel, CEO of web consultancy BlogSavant.

Take GourmetStation.com, an upscale food and gift site that launched a blog in June. “Before I even knew what a blog was, we were planning to put a feature on the web site where we could post entertaining ideas and food and wine pairings. The blog gave us a vehicle by which we could implement that strategy,” says founder and president Donna Lynes-Miller.

The number of company blogs like GourmetStation.com’s is growing. It’s been estimated that the blog universe, or blogosphere, is doubling every five months. While they represent a fraction of the estimated 10 million blogs created by Americans—92% of them by bloggers under age 30—corporate blogs now number about 5,000.

GourmetStation.com’s “Delicious Destinations” blog, which focuses on travel and entertaining, is a way to entice new and return visits from the kind of shopper the site targets for gourmet food sales. The blog is penned by T. Alexander, a fictitious character who represents the collective writings of Lynes-Miller, Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing, and Cara Barineau of creative partner Blue Marble Media. GourmetStation is upfront about identifying the blog host as the creation of writers, but Lynes-Miller says the concept nevertheless took some heat from blogging purists. The upside, she adds, was that the controversy gained the blog a lot of exposure.

Why do it?

Organic yogurt maker Stoneyfield Farms is another business blogger. A full-time employee writes three of the four web logs at Stoneyfieldfarms.com. The fourth, a chronicle of daily life on an organic farm, is authored by the farmer.

Only about 1.4% of visitors to the site, which sells souvenir items such as T-shirts and alarm clocks but not yogurt, read the blogs, raising the question of why Stoneyfield puts resources into the effort. Chief blogger Christine Halverson, who notes that the company’s New Hampshire location gave founder and CEO Gary Hirshberg an up-close view of how blogs were used during last year’s presidential primary, says it’s a brand-building effort. “We’ve never had the money to put into mainstream advertising. It’s always been guerilla marketing,” she says. “We do this to build relationships and create positive feelings toward the company.”

For a retailer of premium coffees, job one in the marketing arena is to differentiate the offering from that of industry behemoth Starbucks. At Stone Creek Coffee, a nine-store café chain and web site headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., a blog helps to get the job done.

“We wanted to bring out that we are a hands-on company and not a big corporate chain. We are trying to reflect the personal nature of what we do and how we make our coffee,” says Tom Pionek, marketing and technology director. “The blog lets us bring that out by letting our people post information in their own words.” The blog, launched on StoneCreekCoffee.com in June, will eventually let team managers, executives and store managers post content live and for the most part unedited by Pionek, who oversees the initiative.

The company’s bloggers will receive guidelines on what kind of information they can post. Pionek will review the blog posts when they go live and make adjustments if necessary. An RSS feed that pushes the blog out into the online blogosphere sends it to his desktop in real time.

Pionek says Stone Creek Coffee’s primary objective in blogging is to express the voice of the company and that a blog lets the company do that quickly and in a timely manner. For example, the company cups, or evaluates, new coffees and coffee roasts every two weeks. “The blog allows us to cup coffee in the morning and post the results that same day. It reduces any bottleneck about getting content on the web site, just by making the ability to change the web site more accessible to more people,” Pionek says.

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The non-blog blog

REI Inc. is putting a different spin on a web log scheduled for a limited rollout in July. REI was looking for technology that would make it easier for local REI stores, which already have their own pages on REI.com, to post content about store news and events and to distribute that content to local e-mail lists. It also wanted to bring a standardized look to the grassroots efforts some stores already had undertaken on their own. It found the solution in blogging technology.

Blogging software developed for the program by Seattle e-mail technology developer What Counts will, in effect, make bloggers out of store personnel who use the tool to post local events and schedules. But while that content reflects the personality of REI as a company to the extent that it supports company values and mission, it’s not, at this point, intended as an extended platform for the personal attitudes of the individual blogger.

“We’re using blogging technology, but it really will not be presented as a blog,” says Meg Reynolds, director of e-mail marketing at REI. “We are not educating the 50 or so users that they are going to be blogging. We’re simply creating a new user interface that makes it incredibly simple to post content.”

Marketers who blog say that with web sites already up and running, it’s time, more than hardware or software, that’s been their primary investment. Even so, whenever new initiatives compete for resources of any kind, consideration quickly moves to the question of ROI. But that’s an answer the pioneers of company blogging are still trying to figure out.

Pionek says that when StoneCreekCoffee.com launched the blog and announced it in the company’s e-mail newsletter, a click-through to the new blog was the top-used link in the newsletter. For now, though, Stone Creek is not applying traditional sales metrics to the blog. “Eventually, we’ll look for standard metrics such as click-through from products mentioned,” says Pionek. “We expect during the course of working with the blog to identify what those metrics should be.”

A new success metric

One such metric is emerging. Google’s algorithm is believed to favor fresh content, and because blog content changes frequently, it’s expected to help boost a web site’s placement in natural search results on Google. Pionek says that’s already happening. “After we started the blog, our search rankings for a couple of terms went up. We were nowhere to be found and then suddenly, we were on page three,” he says. Web analytics packages can capture click-throughs from any products mentioned in the blog to purchases on the site, but sales don’t tell the whole story when the company blog’s objective is to build brands or relationships.

At GourmetStation.com, Lynes-Miller attributes a 5% increase in traffic to the blog launched in April. While she plans eventually to be able to track click-throughs off the blog to purchases on the site, Lynes-Miller isn’t currently looking to sales as the primary measure of the blog’s value. “In the beginning, it can’t be,” she says. “This is a brand extension. It allows GourmetStation to extend itself to being more than just a company that sells food, and that’s what we wanted to be.”

REI planned to initially blog-enable the web pages of 15 of its northern California stores in July; the other stores will be added shortly. Once the stores send the blog content to their subscribed local e-mail lists, REI will employ the same metrics on click-through and conversion for these e-mails as for its other marketing e-mail and it will track through from the blogs to purchase by REI members in stores.

But, as with others using blogging technology in marketing applications, success at this point is less about traditional sales metrics. “We do have some opportunity to look at a dollars per e-mail kind of success mark, but we don’t have the same expectations that we do for our other marketing e-mail,” says REI’s Reynolds. “This is part of our education outreach and what we are hoping to do is increase visibility and attendance at our store clinics and events.”

Engage

Marketers are just starting to probe the marketing applications of web logs. For those who are watching them to see what others are saying about their products and brands, blogs have been called the world’s largest free online focus group. For those who take the next step and enter the dialogue by putting blogs on their sites, they’re an easy way to post fresh and fast-changing content that offers the prospect of conveying corporate attitude and opinion beyond traditional marketing messages—if the blogs are handled transparently, if they’re compelling enough to garner readership, and if the marketer is willing to risk taking some lumps from others who respond with posts of their own.

Either way, “You need to engage,” says VanDen Heuvel of Blog Savant. “If not, a disconnect will form over time. There’s the status quo part of the market, and there is the opportunity segment of the market. If we don’t chase after that with new media and the new ways consumers want to communicate with us, we are going to lose out.” l

mary@verticalwebmedia.com