Sven Marievoet from Adhese gives a presentation about how they have a growing portfolio to advertise in blogs. Currently they manage 60 blogs, and they’ve already ran a number of campaigns which turned out to be successful. Although Adhese got quite some negative feedback when they first started, they’re beginning to make a change in the opinion of those who didn’t think it was possible.
There’s still a lot to be done, but they’re on their way. The main thing that caused their growth is the personal approach they maintained, to contact every blogger single handedly over email and negotiate the ad placement.
(disclaimer, Adhese runs ads on this blog from time to time)
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Kris Hoet from MSN EMEA: Everyone is a customer.
How can a company engage with bloggers? How to connect and build long term relationships? There’s a lot of blog trackers and product trackers out there (technorati, tailrank, …)
The first thing you should do is READ! If you don’t care for reading blogs, don’t bother contacting them to promote your brand. Use RSS readers to track your bloggers, follow links to discover more blogs. Comment on blogs, where it makes sense. Don’t kill a bad blogpost, but stay factual.
Stay on track of your comments with tools like co.mments.com or cocomment.com, don’t comment to never look back. People will answer and expect you to come back and follow the conversation.
Set up meetings, invite people to come over and get to know you and your purposes. It helps to get your message out. Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of brand communication. It’s a natural thing that needs to grow in a natural way. Forcing it, or even worse: trying to force it, will lead you further from your goal than you’ll ever wished for.
Kris closed with some cases like the guy who got to drive with an Aston Martin because he wished for it, the Gillette 5 blades disaster and the famous Dell Hell.