Blogfrog Social Brand Marketing: Blog Not Dead

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With the influence of the blog and the construction of the user community, Blogfrog explored a new way of social brand marketing.

Article | Jennifer Wang

In the digital advertising and digital media innovation campaign, the mother of the influence of the warlords. A new generation of moms is not only a highly educated network of people who control nearly 85% of household income, but also social animals--if they find something they like or dislike, they will hear something.

Now many companies want to enter this area, but one company has broken through the traditional advertising methods, found its own infiltration channels.

In Boulder, Colorado State, USA, Lasting Banks (Rustin Banks) and Holly Haman (Holly Hamann) jointly created Blogfrog in April 2009. Blogfrog mainly provides free tools for MOM bloggers to form their own communities, discuss online and post video podcasts, and then combine these platforms with Coca-Cola's brands that are willing to pay for these discussions.

Banks and Haman don't look like partners at all. The Blogfrogt shirt looks like a standard entrepreneur, with a leisurely temperament, with two hands and a very warm handshake. Haman wears a neat little suit, neat, gentle and professional.

"The brand is very welcome because we can get them to move from the corner of the page to the main page." "Blogfrog, the website's CEO, says that the problem of attracting users to click on Web ads, which has long been a headache for online advertisers, is seen as a distraction when users browse the site. While the placement of social media is sometimes too strong, large-scale blog comments have also attracted users. Blogfrog's "discussion marketing" has broken the industry's normal, providing advertisers with the opportunity to impress consumers through the "branding community" and "sponsorship discussions".

The Blogfrog platform promotes a new social network in which users build relationships based on interest rather than previous friendships. Currently, Blogfrog has attracted about 125,000 active users, as well as 65,000 bloggers, who can influence 10 million American parents a month, making it the biggest MOM blog in the United States. On this platform you can build interactive communities based on rich themes, common themes such as food and fashion, but also more serious topics such as serviceman, infertility and special children. Many communities even transcend the virtual world, and Blogfrog members organize offline gatherings and eventually become real-life friends.

"Moms are the most powerful consumer market, but they are also one of the most marginalized and misunderstood consumer groups. "No one has ever taken them seriously before us," said Harman, the current vice president of Web marketing. ”

Organized Word-of-mouth Marketing

Blogfrog is based on the theme of interest and impact size (Blogfrog collects bloggers ' post quality, blog traffic and Facebook rankings, etc.), carefully weighing the brand community to the right blogger or "community leader" team to lead. Businesses pay fixed monthly fees based on the number of bloggers, bloggers ' influence and type of publicity. Brand sponsorship discussions are usually made by a larger group of bloggers who issue a question and then summon the reader to participate, such as providing their own stories and comments, voting or sending photos. Users ' responses are uniformly published in branded pages and Blogfrog's "discussion-oriented advertising plug-ins"-both to drive discussions and to drive the spread of the web.

Now there are many services on the web that look very similar to Blogfrog, such as Ning and go Social, which allow users to create niche social networks and make profits through advertising; the idea is to aggregate blogs in terms of traffic and search engine advantages, resulting in higher advertising revenue. Blogfrog but further, through the brand into the blog content itself provides a profit method.

The cost of the sponsorship discussion also depends on the influence of bloggers and the type of publicity, such as the 40 bloggers who hire a total readership of around 2 million to do 4-week publicity costs about 20,000 dollars.

"How do you ensure that your family's diet has enough omega 3 (milk is high in omega 3)," Deepwater's signing promotional campaign for organic dairy products? 30 bloggers were asked to publish articles about picky eaters, which led netizens to share recipes for children. Of all the discussions, none of the words are "advertising words" provided by the enterprise. The event eventually brought together 2.1 million social media discussions and 3.7 million ad exposures on Twitter and Facebook. Since then, Deepwater has sponsored three Blogfrog discussions and signed a 2012-year contract with the website.

Caitie Ramsburg, director of customer service, Keti Ramsburg that Blogfrog's strengths lie in the degree of personalization. "We'll dig deeper into what the brands want to get out of the hype, and then combine the topics women are talking about and come up with a topic or question that is likely to arouse enthusiasm." She deliberately stressed that Blogfrog's brainstorming sessions often lasted a few days.

The management team then organizes the bloggers who best meet the promotional goals based on the size of the influence calculated by a precision program, and all bloggers have the opportunity to be selected. "A brand may want to look for healthy bloggers who come from a certain income group and have children under the age of 10," Harman said. We have this information because we've looked at bloggers and bloggers from multiple levels. ”

The advertising industry is still testing the future of social media in the advertising industry. "In advertising, you have to cling to the customer's emotions," said Elaine Marino, a senior account manager, Elaine Marino, the traditional approach is through television and video. Now, she says, "We're going to blog space." ”

Many advertising agencies that want to use the power of social media are fond of Blogfrog's ideas. Reactiveness 214 is a boutique marketing agency in Boulder, whose founder Clark James Clark introduced deepwater to Blogfrog and recommended similar activities to other customers. "It's better for brands, because they can be sure bloggers are really willing to work with brands," he says. "Clark believes that the discussion of marketing methods than to send samples to bloggers, hoping to get a few compliments, more to drive the activity and brand loyalty."

This method is also considered to improve the authenticity of feedback. Community members are more willing to respond and participate in the discussion by netizens, and the discussion process gives the brand the opportunity to listen to the user's ideas, participate in improving their popularity and build goodwill. Deepwater, for example, brings nutrition experts and food scientists to answer questions from readers. "We've got community celebrities in the chair, we'll tell them what we like and tell them if we're interested in getting something, but community participation is spontaneous," says Mr Clark. ”

Other blog networks also have cooperation with Blogfrog. Chack Molin (Chuck Moran), chief marketing officer of Burst media, which represents multiple vertically independent web sites, is using the Community platform technology to integrate the content of his Momiq parent-child channel.

"From a brand-building perspective, there is nothing more effective than getting the target audience involved in the discussion, regardless of whether or not a particular product is being discussed." "he said. Readers responded to brand sponsorship discussions so well that burst recently launched the platform on its own Ella Channel (a group of highly disposable women for 18~35岁) and is planning to apply to other communities. #p # subtitle #e#

Start with MOM Blog

Speaking of the formation of such a company, or 7 years ago.

In 2005, Banks worked as an engineer at Ball Aerospace company. He and his wife, Tara, took a one-and-a-half-year-old child to a stranger in Boulder, and the housekeeping Tara was so bored that she began blogging and soon attracted many readers. Banks noted that while readers left a lot of messages to encourage, they couldn't communicate directly. He came up with a simple solution: develop a plugin that allows his wife to build their own network community.

At the age of 12, Banks wrote his first kong-based board system (similar to the previous chat rooms and forums), so after spending a few evenings and weekends learning the HTML language, he quickly wrote a small program to insert his wife's blog. As a result, the program was so hot for other bloggers that banks suddenly realised they had an entrepreneurial opportunity.

He met Haman through the local entrepreneurial circle in Boulder. Haman moved from Maryland to the West 18 years ago with all his possessions. She found herself in an entrepreneur's paradise, where you can "have a good idea today and start to realize it tomorrow."

When banks came to see her, Haman (a 16-year-old mother) had his own team and had been in charge of marketing in 6 startups, several of which had been successful. Banks ' idea of using technology to help mothers communicate is a "boon" to her, and after months of discussion, Haman resigned from a marketing vice president at a music event to invite a service company (now defunct) to draft a business plan full-time. One months later, in 2009 of May, Banks also resigned.

"It was fun at the time," Banks recalled the lengthy discussions at the café, and the experience of being squeezed out of free Wi-Fi on the steps of a central library. They worked very hard to attend a meeting of MOM bloggers to visit all the brand agents they knew. In February 2010, they raised 300,000 dollars in VCs-enough to hire several employees, test concepts, and find a small office for the company. The company's name, Blogfrog (literally a blog frog), is taken from the idea of a "constantly jumping blog".

As sentiment grew, Blogfrog attracted the attention of David Cohen, founder of TechStars's hatchery venture, which won $600,000 in the second round of financing in early 2011. At this time, the Blogfrog team, which has focused on the community tools and branding communities, has launched the first brand sponsorship discussion event.

In less than 1.5 of the time, Blogfrog has signed the ABC News, the United Nations Foundation, Lego, Procter and Gamble, Intuit and the aforementioned Coca-Cola and other major customers. Annual income will reach $ millions of trillion (the second half of 2011 was doubled). At the end of 2010, Blogfrog had only 5 employees, now 4 times times more. In addition, the company's new third office has 9500 square feet, which is Chine compared to the 600-foot space at the beginning of the start-up.

"Consumers want to know the relevant brands they are interested in, but most of the ads they see are irrelevant." Blogfrog hopes to fill this gap and really help. The main task of the 2012 website is to expand the scale of our products and expand it beyond the mother market, with other influential internet reds, such as YouTube stars. "said Haman.

Banks agreed, "Yes, a real original article launched by a brand led to discussion is the future direction of advertising industry." ”

Transparency is the gate of life

Blogfrog bloggers can also benefit from them. Some of the most successful bloggers have even surpassed reality TV shows, bringing a 6-digit income to bloggers. In addition to flow-driven advertising revenue, brand-sponsored posts and product referrals, the blog Reds can also make money from social media consultancy activities, E-book sales, and brand-sponsored discussion activities and communities in Blogfrog.

Last year, Blogfrog paid more than 500,000 of dollars to its bloggers, who decided to pay monthly based on their community and promotional activities, with the highest impact and active bloggers earning more than $10,000 trillion. According to the data provided by the company, some bloggers who joined Blogfrog increased by an average of 50%. Blogfrog's user data also showed that the average user stay time of the platform's blogs increased by 5 times times, and the number of page clicks per visit increased 10 times.

Lauri Teck (Laurie Turk) is a blogger from Tipjunkie.com, which brings together DIY and manual tutorials, with nearly 7 million clicks per month. She stressed that the blogger's income depended on skill, influence, flow and number of friends, but there was no upper income limit. When banks first came to her, she refused, until later the platform began to promote products related to her community. She also admits that it is doubtful that brand sponsorship will affect the real sense. But she said: "Now I also through Blogfrog to participate in Ken because they have been very pertinent." ”

She felt that the most important thing was that the company offered mother bloggers the opportunity to master their own strengths and influence. "They are trying to help ' mother bloggers ' become a profession. Mommas Schaeffer (Shannon Shaffer), who worked in the accountancy business, agrees. As a Blogfrog community celebrity, she has been involved in a number of branding activities every month-bringing a lot of revenue to her web site of nearly 500,000 independent visitors a month. Schaeffer says she only accepts activities that she thinks readers will like, such as the recent Kraft Foods, and she shares some simple recipes, some of which use branded seasonings.

"Blogfrog's brand activities are really appropriate for bloggers, so they form a very good relationship, unlike the ad nets you don't have a chance to reject," he said. "I'm a gourmet and I like to save money," she said. Blogfrog did a good job of introducing the brand to our readers without disturbing the normal discussion. For example, Kraft brand activities, we will never call readers to buy Kraft products-but to provide readers with recipes, simple daily recipes, to provide resources for everyone. It's really just original content. ”

The bloggers themselves-and the trust they bring to their readers-may be the most decisive factor in the Blogfrog model. Prasante Malavia Prashant Malaviya, associate professor of marketing at Georgetown University's McDonough Business School, said that while Blogfrog's approach to increasing advertising information and consumer distance could lead to more credible feelings, it does not guarantee authenticity. Authenticity depends on the transparency of the blogger-brand relationship, the loyalty of the reader, the relevance of the discussion to the reader's life, and even the reader's discovery of the community's channel-through the brand itself or elsewhere on the web. If blogs are found to be "fake", they lose influence and those who discuss "deeper issues" are considered more authentic, says Malavia.

On a refreshing winter afternoon in Friday, banks and Haman showed people Blogfrog's new headquarters in Boulder. There is a runway at the back of the office building, just east of a trendy shopping district in the heart of the city, with people with Shiny MacBook Airs, even in fancy restaurants.

The new office has a rooftop, perfect for summer parties and ample room for expansion. But now, most of it is empty. At present, there are 21 people in the team, all sitting in a big room (voluntarily), the name of the conference room is taken from the famous Frog doll image, such as Kermit and Jeremiah, written on the white paper with tape glued to the door. The folder was put in the animal cookie box. The wall is decorated with frog-themed paintings, the work of the staff and friends at the last holiday party-most notably the frog version of the Van Gogh Starry Night (Harman)-and the frog's surreal work, which was the probe from a blooming flower, was drawn by Banks ' wife.

The temporary simplicity of the office is a hint of the company's bright future (though not very clear). "The competitive landscape is changing every day, and the market needs are huge." "Doug Gordon, deputy director of engineering," said Doug Cotton.

For consumers, this platform also needs to be more flexible, intuitive, cross-browser use across devices, for enterprises, must have data to prove that the system is really effective. Blogfrog should constantly look for ways to expand their influence-designing more promotional campaigns, more branded products and tools. This January, Blogfrog released the latest tool, conversation NX, to help bloggers integrate small communities into a large community. Tousse Stone Titus Stone, the company's Prophase developer, likens development to a moving target.

"We accept customized requirements, and when we first pushed live discussion, we started writing programs to promote them, answering the phone calls from bloggers and asking if we could achieve this or that," he said. ”

Although headquarters is still in Boulder, the Blogfrog team plans to set up an office in New York in the summer to attract customers on the east coast. They are also preparing to expand the network from their mom blogs to food, fitness, fashion, entertainment and technology blogs. The 2011 Social media advertising market is 1.59 billion dollars, and the Forester Institute (Forrester Research) is expected to jump to 5 billion dollars in 2016, with banks and Harman confident. Translation | Jinsheng