Marketers send “agents of influence” to the Internet
Russia, with 10.8 million Internet users, ranks 14th in the world, according to comScore marketing agency. According to “Yandex”, there are about 800,000 blogs and forums in RuNet. The most popular server for posting online blogs is American Livejournal.com (LJ): it accounts for about 25% of all blogs. The volume of advertising in the global blogosphere (the community of those who write and read online diaries) increased almost doubled to $ 20.4 million in 2005. This year it will grow to $ 49.8 million, predicts PQ Media. Using search on blogs, companies track attitudes towards their brand: “Yandex” receives about 30,000 requests for brand search on blogs every day.
History lessons
“The most brilliant ballerina of the beginning of the 20th century. “This is Anna Pavlova,” I thought, pulling out another bottle of the amazing Velle from the refrigerator, “a certain Istorik writes in his online diary. Mention of this product is in his arguments about the emperor Paul II, the murder of Rasputin or St. Petersburg ghosts. And next - a link to the site www.velle.ru . This is no accident: in real life Istorik - Vadim Rutkovsky, head of the online communications department of Velle. He admits that he started his blog in April of this year to promote a new product, similar in taste to yogurt, but cooked on the basis of oats with the help of oatmeal ferment.
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Sergey Vykhodtsev, creator of the Invite and Bystrov brands, and now the owner of Velle, told Vedomosti that the company paid attention to blogs and forums because of the decline in the effectiveness of direct advertising. However, Velle will not give up on direct advertising - about 30 channels will be involved to promote the product, specifies Vykhodtsev. However, he admits that he did not read the blog of his subordinate.
Rutkovsky notes that he considered it boring to talk about the prevention of dysbacteriosis and the benefits of oatmeal yogurt and decided to mention Velle in stories about historical events and characters. The diary reads every day from 100 to 200 people and they are not embarrassed by the irrelevance of references to the new Vykhodtsev invention: during the existence of the diary, the attendance of the Velle site has grown one and a half times, Rutkovsky says.
“This is an example of a rather clumsy use of a blog,” Gleb Sakhray, director general ofPR-Technologies , criticizes the project. “To promote a product, it's like a dead poultice,” agrees Dmitry Ivanov, marketing director of AksionBKG. In his opinion, it would be more effective not to mention the name of the product in an abstract context, but to give readers the knowledge associated with it - about proper nutrition, diets. However, according to Sakhrai, Velle was not mistaken in one thing: it is wiser to create your own blog, and not to go into an alien monastery with your product — the already established Internet communities. For example, participants in the popular women's forums Woman.ru or Devichnik.ru are very suspicious and in disgrace expelled from their company those who go about extolling or scolding a brand.
Blog, but not the one
Attempts by companies to promote their brand with the help of virtual characters very often end in failure. This is proved by the L'Oreal story in French newspapers. In early 2005, the cosmetics manufacturer announced the launch of the blog “My Skin Diary”: a certain Claire had to record her impressions of using Vichy scrub for three weeks. But just a few days later, L'Oreal was outraged by Internet users. In their opinion, the character looked unreal: the girl complained about the early aging of the skin due to the bohemian lifestyle and praised the scrub with the language of advertising messages, while publishing photos that looked like a professional model. “The number one company in the world of cosmetics was disrespectful to the rules adopted in the blogosphere. As a result, Vichy's brand manager was forced to publish his apologies on the L'Oreal website to an Internet audience, ”the newspaper Figaro wrote. The project had to urgently collapse.
L'Oreal decided to correct the mistake and in May 2005 hired French Sophie Kyun, a famous cosmetics consultant, the author of her own popular blog to promote the scrub. Kyun confessed to Vedomosti that L'Oreal paid her fees, the size of which she did not disclose. “I tried Vichy products, described my impressions and explained how to use them,” she said. According to Kyun, if she didn’t like something, she honestly informed the readers about it. According to her, the joint project with L'Oreal was designed for three months. Now Kyun writes reviews about the cosmetic brand Dior in a blog specially created for this.
Network community
Companies are convinced that creating a diary that is interesting to a large number of users is not easy. In April 2006, the Stockholm School of Economics tried to advertise its program “Branding - Corporate Religion” in a blog on the server Livejournal.com, said the vice-president of SSE Margarita Adaeva-Danish. In the diary, the school’s marketer talked about the features and benefits of the program. However, it was not possible to turn the blog into a platform for communication, and a month later it had to be abandoned. “While we do not understand the laws of the genre and do not know how to lure into the blog our target audience - business owners, top managers. After all, as a rule, these people have no time to sit on blogs, ”explains Adaeva-Danish. The company really made a mistake with the choice of channel, says Dmitry Komendantov, director of customer service for Imageland PR: to lure managers, you had to use sites likeE-xecutive .ru, on which they communicate. However, SSE is not going to completely abandon blogs and is considering the possibility of promoting MBA programs in them designed for a younger audience.
Ivanov from AksionBKG assures that there are also examples of successful corporate blogging in Russia - weblogs that are kept by employees or managers of different companies, not hiding under pseudonyms. Success, in his opinion, brings the presence of educational elements in blogs. Thus, the employees of the advertising agency “Two pilots” talk about the designer kitchen, the head of the franchising department of the “Stardog! S” network of eateries - about current issues in the restaurant market. And the diary of the owner and CEO of the Gameland company Dmitry Agarunov is a wealth of information about publishing and management. The blog of the network of shops “Respublika”, owned by the company “Dymov”, informs readers about book updates.
We must meet more often
There is another way to promote the web - creating with its help fan clubs of their product. This is how the Fayur-Soyuz company acted, having created the vodka in the subject community on the Internet in the fall of 2005 to popularize its Wheat Teardrop brand. At first, the diary was kept by Irina Bigday, PR manager of Fayur-Union, and two employees of the Mask Creative Group agency. They invited readers to a party with free vodka and snacks, to participate in which it was necessary to register in the community. Already after the first party, the “Wheat Tear” brand appeared on the 6th place in terms of the popularity of “vodka” requests in “Yandex”, although before that the brand was mentioned on the Web only three times, Bigday is proud. Now the fan club includes 286 people. In the blog, they talk about their meetings, poison jokes and post poems about vodka. “Fayur-Union” does not pay for communication on the blog, but the organization of friendly meetings themselves.
Among the first members of the community was one of the most famous characters of the Runet - Ruslan Paushu, leading under the pseudonym Goblin Gaga his diary on LiveJournal, which was visited, according to LJplus.ru, more than 500,000 people. Paushu says he joined the Fayura project to express himself and expand the readership of his own blog. In his opinion, the Wheat Vodka brand became recognizable precisely because of the network stories of members of the community. “If the daily audience of the readers of the online diary exceeds 1000 people, the author’s preferences become equal to the advice of a good friend for many,” explains the commandants from Imageland.
Paushu said that he was not averse to cooperating with other companies: he is now negotiating with a tobacco company, offering him to promote her brand for a monthly reward of $ 1,500. According to him, there are about a hundred “salary” bloggers in RuNet. “True, these are mostly political projects,” he notes. According to Paush, such work is estimated at $500-5000 per month.
Network secret
However, so far not “honest bloggers” are more popular with marketers, but secret network “agents of influence”. The cellular operator UTEL, owned by the Ekaterinburg-based Uralsvyazinform company, with their help brought its brand to the market. “The agents' work was to respond to any unfriendly statement on Internet forums regarding the new operator and reduce the discussion to a positive conclusion or to a neutral topic,” explains Tatiana Khizhnyakova, creative director of the Newton group of companies who led the agents to the Network One month before the start of the UTEL advertising campaign. According to her, this, in combination with other methods of partisan and game marketing, helped UTEL to occupy 45% of the market of cellular communication services in the Urals in four months. And the recognition rate of the new brand reached an average of 58%, while Beeline a year after the start of its work in this region, it was about 48%.
The “agents of influence” on the Web were connected to the promotion of the next book by Oksana Robski and the novel “Duhless” by Sergey Minaev. The Rosman publishing house, which released Robsky's novel “About love / on” last December, instructed several of its employees to post messages about the book in forums devoted to books, fashion and other interesting questions for ladies, said publishing director Alexei Shekhov. Messages tried to best adapt to the interests of each community. For example, the topic “We have not been sleeping at night for many months, but this Robsky is worried about repainting the doggie in a crimson color - I would have her problems!”. Sales of the last book Robski were 15% higher than in the two previous novels. The publisher believes that this result helped to achieve the secret agents.
In blogs and forums you can find more than 4,500 reviews about the novel “Dukhless” by Minaev, published by the “AST” publishing house. The publishers agree that the Internet was one of the main tools in promoting this book. Minaev himself is a network journalist, a blog under the pseudonym Amigo 095, said Svetlana Polyakova, director of the advertising and PR department of the publishing group AST.
The Newton Agency had to use “agents of influence” in the competitive struggle of two gas station networks. “In Yekaterinburg, gas stations of a large oil company, our client, were less popular than the competitor’s petrol stations, and we set a goal - to change the situation,” Khizhnyakova specifies. However, the client didn’t want to bite off a share from competitors so much as disaccustom drivers to buy gasoline at unnamed gas stations, so the action was intended for rather poor consumers. “Newton” has created five virtual characters - visitors to automotive forums. “Among them was a girl in the top ten, which her parents gave her, a pensioner in a penny, a taxi driver,” Khizhnyakova lists. All of them complained that they were flooded with “some kind of crap” instead of gasoline at a nameless gas station. “Discussions boiled down to the fact that it is safer to refuel at gas stations of famous brands,” adds Khizhnyakova.
In April of this year, an agency specializing in secret promotion on the Web, Hidden Marketing, even opened in Moscow. Today, he already has 50 clients and about 700 agents on the Web, says the owner and CEO of the company, Aleksey Krihalev. Most often, according to Krikhalev, he receives orders for software promotion, although there are alcohol manufacturers, insurance companies, banks, car dealers among the clients. A standard order costs customers around $ 1000 and includes 200 messages.
Vedomosti, 10.08.2006
History lessons
“The most brilliant ballerina of the beginning of the 20th century. “This is Anna Pavlova,” I thought, pulling out another bottle of the amazing Velle from the refrigerator, “a certain Istorik writes in his online diary. Mention of this product is in his arguments about the emperor Paul II, the murder of Rasputin or St. Petersburg ghosts. And next - a link to the site www.velle.ru . This is no accident: in real life Istorik - Vadim Rutkovsky, head of the online communications department of Velle. He admits that he started his blog in April of this year to promote a new product, similar in taste to yogurt, but cooked on the basis of oats with the help of oatmeal ferment.
')
Sergey Vykhodtsev, creator of the Invite and Bystrov brands, and now the owner of Velle, told Vedomosti that the company paid attention to blogs and forums because of the decline in the effectiveness of direct advertising. However, Velle will not give up on direct advertising - about 30 channels will be involved to promote the product, specifies Vykhodtsev. However, he admits that he did not read the blog of his subordinate.
Rutkovsky notes that he considered it boring to talk about the prevention of dysbacteriosis and the benefits of oatmeal yogurt and decided to mention Velle in stories about historical events and characters. The diary reads every day from 100 to 200 people and they are not embarrassed by the irrelevance of references to the new Vykhodtsev invention: during the existence of the diary, the attendance of the Velle site has grown one and a half times, Rutkovsky says.
“This is an example of a rather clumsy use of a blog,” Gleb Sakhray, director general of
Blog, but not the one
Attempts by companies to promote their brand with the help of virtual characters very often end in failure. This is proved by the L'Oreal story in French newspapers. In early 2005, the cosmetics manufacturer announced the launch of the blog “My Skin Diary”: a certain Claire had to record her impressions of using Vichy scrub for three weeks. But just a few days later, L'Oreal was outraged by Internet users. In their opinion, the character looked unreal: the girl complained about the early aging of the skin due to the bohemian lifestyle and praised the scrub with the language of advertising messages, while publishing photos that looked like a professional model. “The number one company in the world of cosmetics was disrespectful to the rules adopted in the blogosphere. As a result, Vichy's brand manager was forced to publish his apologies on the L'Oreal website to an Internet audience, ”the newspaper Figaro wrote. The project had to urgently collapse.
L'Oreal decided to correct the mistake and in May 2005 hired French Sophie Kyun, a famous cosmetics consultant, the author of her own popular blog to promote the scrub. Kyun confessed to Vedomosti that L'Oreal paid her fees, the size of which she did not disclose. “I tried Vichy products, described my impressions and explained how to use them,” she said. According to Kyun, if she didn’t like something, she honestly informed the readers about it. According to her, the joint project with L'Oreal was designed for three months. Now Kyun writes reviews about the cosmetic brand Dior in a blog specially created for this.
Network community
Companies are convinced that creating a diary that is interesting to a large number of users is not easy. In April 2006, the Stockholm School of Economics tried to advertise its program “Branding - Corporate Religion” in a blog on the server Livejournal.com, said the vice-president of SSE Margarita Adaeva-Danish. In the diary, the school’s marketer talked about the features and benefits of the program. However, it was not possible to turn the blog into a platform for communication, and a month later it had to be abandoned. “While we do not understand the laws of the genre and do not know how to lure into the blog our target audience - business owners, top managers. After all, as a rule, these people have no time to sit on blogs, ”explains Adaeva-Danish. The company really made a mistake with the choice of channel, says Dmitry Komendantov, director of customer service for Imageland PR: to lure managers, you had to use sites like
Ivanov from AksionBKG assures that there are also examples of successful corporate blogging in Russia - weblogs that are kept by employees or managers of different companies, not hiding under pseudonyms. Success, in his opinion, brings the presence of educational elements in blogs. Thus, the employees of the advertising agency “Two pilots” talk about the designer kitchen, the head of the franchising department of the “Stardog! S” network of eateries - about current issues in the restaurant market. And the diary of the owner and CEO of the Gameland company Dmitry Agarunov is a wealth of information about publishing and management. The blog of the network of shops “Respublika”, owned by the company “Dymov”, informs readers about book updates.
We must meet more often
There is another way to promote the web - creating with its help fan clubs of their product. This is how the Fayur-Soyuz company acted, having created the vodka in the subject community on the Internet in the fall of 2005 to popularize its Wheat Teardrop brand. At first, the diary was kept by Irina Bigday, PR manager of Fayur-Union, and two employees of the Mask Creative Group agency. They invited readers to a party with free vodka and snacks, to participate in which it was necessary to register in the community. Already after the first party, the “Wheat Tear” brand appeared on the 6th place in terms of the popularity of “vodka” requests in “Yandex”, although before that the brand was mentioned on the Web only three times, Bigday is proud. Now the fan club includes 286 people. In the blog, they talk about their meetings, poison jokes and post poems about vodka. “Fayur-Union” does not pay for communication on the blog, but the organization of friendly meetings themselves.
Among the first members of the community was one of the most famous characters of the Runet - Ruslan Paushu, leading under the pseudonym Goblin Gaga his diary on LiveJournal, which was visited, according to LJplus.ru, more than 500,000 people. Paushu says he joined the Fayura project to express himself and expand the readership of his own blog. In his opinion, the Wheat Vodka brand became recognizable precisely because of the network stories of members of the community. “If the daily audience of the readers of the online diary exceeds 1000 people, the author’s preferences become equal to the advice of a good friend for many,” explains the commandants from Imageland.
Paushu said that he was not averse to cooperating with other companies: he is now negotiating with a tobacco company, offering him to promote her brand for a monthly reward of $ 1,500. According to him, there are about a hundred “salary” bloggers in RuNet. “True, these are mostly political projects,” he notes. According to Paush, such work is estimated at $
Network secret
However, so far not “honest bloggers” are more popular with marketers, but secret network “agents of influence”. The cellular operator UTEL, owned by the Ekaterinburg-based Uralsvyazinform company, with their help brought its brand to the market. “The agents' work was to respond to any unfriendly statement on Internet forums regarding the new operator and reduce the discussion to a positive conclusion or to a neutral topic,” explains Tatiana Khizhnyakova, creative director of the Newton group of companies who led the agents to the Network One month before the start of the UTEL advertising campaign. According to her, this, in combination with other methods of partisan and game marketing, helped UTEL to occupy 45% of the market of cellular communication services in the Urals in four months. And the recognition rate of the new brand reached an average of 58%, while Beeline a year after the start of its work in this region, it was about 48%.
The “agents of influence” on the Web were connected to the promotion of the next book by Oksana Robski and the novel “Duhless” by Sergey Minaev. The Rosman publishing house, which released Robsky's novel “About love / on” last December, instructed several of its employees to post messages about the book in forums devoted to books, fashion and other interesting questions for ladies, said publishing director Alexei Shekhov. Messages tried to best adapt to the interests of each community. For example, the topic “We have not been sleeping at night for many months, but this Robsky is worried about repainting the doggie in a crimson color - I would have her problems!”. Sales of the last book Robski were 15% higher than in the two previous novels. The publisher believes that this result helped to achieve the secret agents.
In blogs and forums you can find more than 4,500 reviews about the novel “Dukhless” by Minaev, published by the “AST” publishing house. The publishers agree that the Internet was one of the main tools in promoting this book. Minaev himself is a network journalist, a blog under the pseudonym Amigo 095, said Svetlana Polyakova, director of the advertising and PR department of the publishing group AST.
The Newton Agency had to use “agents of influence” in the competitive struggle of two gas station networks. “In Yekaterinburg, gas stations of a large oil company, our client, were less popular than the competitor’s petrol stations, and we set a goal - to change the situation,” Khizhnyakova specifies. However, the client didn’t want to bite off a share from competitors so much as disaccustom drivers to buy gasoline at unnamed gas stations, so the action was intended for rather poor consumers. “Newton” has created five virtual characters - visitors to automotive forums. “Among them was a girl in the top ten, which her parents gave her, a pensioner in a penny, a taxi driver,” Khizhnyakova lists. All of them complained that they were flooded with “some kind of crap” instead of gasoline at a nameless gas station. “Discussions boiled down to the fact that it is safer to refuel at gas stations of famous brands,” adds Khizhnyakova.
In April of this year, an agency specializing in secret promotion on the Web, Hidden Marketing, even opened in Moscow. Today, he already has 50 clients and about 700 agents on the Web, says the owner and CEO of the company, Aleksey Krihalev. Most often, according to Krikhalev, he receives orders for software promotion, although there are alcohol manufacturers, insurance companies, banks, car dealers among the clients. A standard order costs customers around $ 1000 and includes 200 messages.
Vedomosti, 10.08.2006
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/4266/
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