Ben Ayers

At last, five minutes to write about Shiny Media’s excellent Brands and Blogs seminar today. Jeff Meers from Shiny kicked things off with a fascinating presentation about the “new world order” created by the explosion in blogging.

He talked about how the ‘push’ form of marketing where you chuck everything at consumers in the hope that something sticks is being rapidly replaced by conversational marketing. The consumer has a direct say, something which traditional marketeers need to get their heads around in order to survive. Jeff described bloggers as New Influentials or ‘Mavens’ (Hebrew for one who understands) and said that engaging with them should be a number one priority for any marketeer.

According to his latest research, these ‘Influentials’ can be split into two broad groups - New Influentials and Classic Infuentials. In a nutshell, New Influentials will build buzz around a brand or product and Classic Influentials will drive sales (or viewers in our case).

In the context of television, the combination of old media PR and a decent online stratgy will help generate the buzz around shows, and a strategic attempt to engage with the Classic Influentials who write with passion about our shows will be the icing on the cake. It’s in these areas that I am increasingly very interested as they often inform decisions taken. If we can start to form a rich relationship with the connoisseurs of our shows then we will undoubtedly reap the rewards in richer brand engagement.

There were loads of lessons to be learnt about marketing spend. Notably, blogs offer up an incredibly niche and targetted audience - much more specialist than many mainstream outlets. That means marketeers can be much more strategic when it comes to targetting their audience - and spending their money!

There were loads of great points made today with presentations from Helen Norwicka from Shiny Red, Neil DuLake from the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Canadian Jeremey Wright from global blog network B5 Media, Richard Rocca from US fashion blog network Glam and Shiny co founder Ashley Norris. All of their contributions were blogged and well worth a read. Also, I was collared (in a nice way) by Shiny’s Susi Weaser and her cameraman for a soundbite about blogging. Despite being hot and sweaty after just getting off my mardi gras bike (its new name owing to being electric pink in colour) I managed to get in a plug for my pal Stephen Davies’ excellent blog prblogger.com. Damn, there I go again. He’s so good at the dark arts that he can make me plug his blog at a blogging conference when he’s not there! Marvellous.

NB: The headline is a reference to how the Internet has changed what we do beyond belief but in a way it hasn’t. It’s still about creating a buzz and building up brands. It’s just that there are many opportunities to do it in a different way. And that’s so blimmin’ exciting I can barely contain myself.