Comment and Community Marketing
I have noticed the appearance recently of two “new” social media marketing terms; Community Marketing and Comment Marketing. These new labels seem to be used interchangeably with conversational marketing.
While conversational marketing is part of an overall marketing philosophy and strategy, community marketing and comment marketing appears to be simply a tactic that you would use.
For those unfamiliar with the terms, community marketing refers to the tactic of engaging customers in online communities. These communities can either be hosted by a brand or can take place on 3rd party sites. Comment marketing is a tactic used on blogs, forums and sites like Yahoo Answers.
The tricky part for any marketer with either Comment or Community Marketing is that the marketer is not in control of the message. Not in control means that someone else is driving the topic. And if you are not controlling the topic then how do you measure success?
Unlike many marketing campaigns which are simply plug and play, CM marketing takes a lot more ongoing effort. Brian Solis was recently talking about the effort needed to be successful with comment marketing:
Some have even hired community managers to track related discussions and have them participate as new opportunities arise. Others start the dialogue through their own blogs. But comment marketing requires a no BS approach to prevent peers from banishing you in disgrace. It requires knowledge, understanding, the ability to listen, and most importantly, the experience to provide an unquestionably relevant comment that is either informative, insightful, helpful, intellectually disruptive, or undoubtedly witty.
My concern about comment marketing is that it is simply not scalable. Keeping track of conversations across hundreds of blogs, social media sites, and forums is really difficult and takes a lot of time and effort. In order to do it well, a business needs to provide its marketing personnel with the time they need to participate fully in the community.
What is at stake it your don’t allocate sufficient resources to CM? As Brian said:
Why? Because there are risks….and the stakes are high. This is YOUR reputation. This is your company’s brand. Respect the communities you engage in and they will respect you. The cost of entry is participation and information. The cost of failure, is well, not only embarrassing, but could spark a sharp decline in sales and brand credibility.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (9) : Mar 13th, 2007
March 13th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Comments are really important if you are not out there in the community, you cannot rely on just writing your blog. Some people can just blog and an audience will follow. If you are going to build up a following connecting with your audience on their blogs just makes sense. Plus it is a way to build relationships with colleagues in your industry. You do this on forums, why not blogs?
March 14th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I agree John. The point I was attempting to make was that comment marketing is important but it takes a lot of time to do is successfully and I do not see many companies willing to devote the resources to this.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:23 am
First off, I’ve had the good luck of meeting Brian Solis here in the Bay Area a few times. He’s got smarts and passion, something that shows in his cutting age role in Social Media Release (along with others like Chris Heure).
You’re definately right that commenting on every blog is simply not scalable. That’s where software and services like BuzzMetrics come on, which can help give guidance on which blog you should participate in, which critic should you pay attention to first, etc. But of course, if you have tons of community websites that you need to respond to - that’s still not scalable.
As for Comment Marketing term, I dont see a need for this term. Community Marketing is a two-way street, which means being involved with the community as a legitimate member and stakeholder - be it at a blog, a forum, or on Yahoo Answers. Whereas Comment Marketing has none of that connotations; it is the tactic of commenting on blogs, forums etc - which can sound spammy without the key word “community”.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:23 am
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March 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
David, you might be right there, though I would suggest to most businesses that if there is not the willingness to devote enough resources to monitoring the web and to conduct commenting for corporate blogging, you might not want to get involved. As the results will not be very substantial.
Dell, Microsoft, Adobe, SUN are all examples of companies that do have bloggers who are regularly monitoring the web for conversations surrounding their brands. Dell has gone so far as to devote a group of customer service people to monitoring and responding to customer service issues published by customers on the web.
I don’t know if every company will eventually do this but I think most large companies will have too.
March 25th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
One thing that nobody talks about John is what happens when a company starts blogging and then stops. What sort of damage would that do to their brand in the market?
March 25th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Hi Daniel
Great definition of community marketing. I like it.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
I think it all depends how a company stops blogging. I’ve seen a few corporate blogs stop. Maytag was one, General Motors has another, and Randy Baseler at Boeing is going to stop blogging. The main reason for the silence of these blogs is retirement and movement to another job. In these cases where the people leave a company to retire or for personal reasons, I think most readers can understand why the blog is shutting down.
But the question arises why not replace those bloggers with other people?
There I think is the problem for a company if you don’t have anyone to replace the person who left it indicates that either you don’t have anyone with the ability to blog or the company is not prepared to dedicate the resources to blogging.
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:10 am
Comment Marketing is hard to track, you’re not really building relationships, but can be an effective addition to your overall marketing strategy.
Steve