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Friday, April 04, 2008
Survey says influencers have no influence. Doesn’t reach count for anything?
There’s a fair amount of buzz over a study issued recently from the Canadian research firm Pollara that supports the notion that influential bloggers aren’t really so influential. Eighty percent of the 1,100 adults polled in December reported that they would be more inclined to make a purchase recommended by friends and family compared to only 23% who would consider recommendations from “well-known bloggers.”
Why this comes as a surprise to anybody escapes me. I would have bet real money on this. After all, would you buy a particular new car based on what a well-known auto critic wrote in a daily newspaper or what Uncle Marvin told you after he’d been driving one for six months?
The study reinforces Duncan Watts’ assertions in a recent FastCompany article. Steve Rubel points out that it also supports the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer, in which most people put their trust in “a person like me” while only 14% trust boggers. Edelman’s results also mirror those from Ketchum’s Media, Myths & Realities study.
What’s more surprising to me is the conclusions people are drawing from the study. Rubel, for instance, suggests that outreach efforts that focus on reach miss the big picture. “Trust is by far a more important metric.”
Really? Whatever happened to the importance of building awareness? While the influential bloggers—the so-called “A-listers”—may not have influence, they do have eyeballs. They are A-listers, after all, because people read them. I may have greater trust in my friend in the next cube, but where did he hear about it? And if he heard about it from a trusted friend or family member, they read about it from a source that gets broad distrtibution. The information has to start somewhere.
My goal in reaching out to widely-read bloggers is not to trick them into using their influence to get other people to buy the product. It is, rather, to create awareness and get people talking. Once it trickles down to Uncle Marvin, that’s when the trust factor kicks in. Or are we supposed to just wait for Uncle Marvin to discover the product while poking around in Best Buy?
Has the application of PR in the social media space led us to forget the objectives we’re trying to achieve in the first place? Is it always influence? Or is is sometimes just getting the message out? If a sympathetic blogger agrees with the message and chooses to help distribute it, that’s great. Should I no longer take that approach because a poll states the obvious, that friends and family have a greater impact on a purchase decision? Nonsense.
Rubel notes that Louis Gray found that top bloggers extend their reach among people who subscribe to their feeds (beyond those who just read their blogs), but he opines, “Who cares?”
I do, Steve, and any good communicator should. Reach increases awareness, driving more people to take a look and, if they like what they see, make the recommendation to friends and family. That’s why so many tech companies try to get their products into the hands of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’ David Pogue. Same idea: I may not buy a product based on their recommendation, but their reach and influence will lead me to see what my friends and family—and the bloggers I do trust have to say about it.
In her outstanding book, “Measuring Public Relationships,” Katie Paine repeatedly points to awareness as a key measure of the effectiveness of a public relations effort. “If your objective is exposure and communication of key messages, measuring media content is by far the cheapest, easiest, and fastest form of measurement,” Katie notes in one chapter.
Why does outreach have to be either/or? There is a strong case for targeting B-list and C-list bloggers. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington get hundreds, maybe thousands, of pitches every day, good ones and bad ones. The odds of yours finding its way into their blogs isn’t great. B- and C-list bloggers, on the other hand, are a bit more hungry for good, relevant content in which their audiences will be interested. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, assuming your information is genuinely relevant and would be of real interest to Scoble or Arrington.
There are a number of dimensions to outreach, a lot of nuances, many shades of grey. Does the Pollara study mean there’s no value in reaching out to bloggers with high levels of readership along with smaller groups where there are higher levels of trust? Nope. Those blogs with high levels of readership are one way to kick-start the conversation among the groups of trusted individuals in the first place.