We all know there is a lot of discussion around brands getting involved with online social marketing.  The opportunity that has been leveraged the most to date is “blogs”.  In an earlier post I discussed the specific oportunuties that blogs offer marketers (link). Now let’s talk a bit about how to get started with blog marketing.

The first thing you need to do is figure out your brands current level of buzz in the blogosphere.  There are some paid services out there that can help you — I prefer digging into the free services first.  The free services I

BlogScope.net Sxample

use are:

www.blogscope.net -Just type in your brand name and see the blog posts the mention your brand as well as a graph that measures your mentions over time.

www.blogpulse.com -Same as Blogscope with some additional features.

With these two free services you can get a feel for how the blogosphere is talking about your brand, where they are talking, and what the conversation is.

A good practice is to dump the blog post results into excel then apply a “tone” rating to the posts.  This way you can rank the tone of the posts on a scale like “positive for the brand” to “negative to the brand”.  Once you start taking part of the online conversation you can trend over time how your influence improves the tone of the conversation.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, Blog marketing is not easy.  If you really want to get some bang for you buck you need to develop solid goals and a plan to achieve those goals.  It takes time, resources, and analysis.  But your first step is to figure out what the current conversation about your brand is.