Many companies struggle with how to respond to bloggers – let alone engage and interact with them. With more than 75 million blogs on just about every topic imaginable, it is overwhelming to think about monitoring and engaging bloggers. The key, like so many things in life, is focus. You need to figure out who the most influential bloggers are and educate them.

Public relations and marketing professionals must recognize this influential audience is not going away. More and more of us are blogging on a regular basis. I am blogging, my mother is blogging, and when I want to sign up for a new service or purchase a product, you can bet I am going to check out what other consumers are saying about it via various blogs.

So what is the right way to monitor, analyze and engage with bloggers on a regular basis? How does a company with limited resources do it? Does a company need special software, tools or dedicated staff for this endeavor?

Read on for a few of my thoughts on this topic.

Monitor & Analyze
1. The first step is to gain a basic understanding of who is blogging. One easy way to do this is to set up a Google Alert. Google allows people to monitor news and blogs. Do this and you’ll begin to gain a sense of how many people are blogging about your company, product and service and what they’re saying.
2. Consider the content of posts and gain a sense of sentiment. Are bloggers positive, negative or neutral about your company or product? Are they highly emotional or more lackadaisical? Are their posts relevant and timely, or not?
3. Identify the reach of each blogger. To do this, you need to know how large his or her audience is. Does the blogger have a lot of links from other sites to his or her blog? How frequently is he or she posting? Where does the blog rank in Googles’ PageRank system?
4. Finally consider how much authority or credibility the blogger has. Is he or she considered an expert? Is he or she an average user? But one with strong, informed opinions?

Engage
As soon as you have done these four things, you’re ready to engage. This is the most time consuming part of the process. Each and every company is going to have different needs around engaging. Consider the following ways to engage:

• Regularly read and post responses
• Invite the blogger to meet with you or others in your company
• Look for ways to build a rapport and relationship with the blogger – make sure you’re sincere. This is critical. If the blogger thinks you are just reaching out to him or her to gain a favorable review or endorsement, it will be off-putting. You need to seriously consider the blogger’s needs and wants. If the blogger has written something negative about your company or product, carefully consider his or her perspective. Does it have merit? Can anything be done to correct the underlying issue? A little courteous diplomacy goes a long way.
• Brief those influential bloggers you’ve identified or targeted in advance of announcements. When possible, toss them a heads up on news so they feel special and included in your network.

So what about tools?
There are a number of companies offering solutions or tools to help with the activities outlined above. Consider Visible Technologies (www.visibletechnologies.com), a Seattle-based start up. It offers a solution which is able to track the constantly growing amount of consumer generated material on the Internet. Visible Technologies’ solution collects posts and allows employees to comment on those posts. To do all this, Visible Technologies uses a proprietary platform and multi-tiered querying technology.

• Resource Interactive is another company which offers social media solutions to companies. We recently reached out to the company to learn more about its resources and methodologies surrounding tracking Web 2.0 and responding to bloggers. Gail Sech, manager of business development, was very helpful in answering my questions.

Other companies providing services around blog monitoring, social media management, reputation management, etc., include:

• Andiamo Systems, brand monitoring and word of mouth measurement services offers a 14-day free trial on its Web site. Its mission is to provide businesses easy-to-use, affordable, on-demand tools that help customers identify, measure, better understand and act on consumer attitudes and opinions of their brands and their competitors brands to increase market share and profits.
• BrandIntel. This company’s services looked interesting as it purports to provide “predictive consumer insight through a combination of proprietary technology, iterative human analysis and proven best practices.” But what I did not glean from its Web site was whether they also provide a methodology for responding directly to individual bloggers, which I believe for most companies is going to be important.
• BuzzLogic claims to “unlock the marketing power of social media. Surface the influencers leading conversations that matter and target your messages to them and their audiences for the highest return.” Sounds good.
• Collective Intellect Inc. Interesting to see that Collective Intellect asserts it is the only real-time provider of data on social media. It provides actionable, data-driven intelligence on the impact of user-generated content across blogs, social networks and message boards, as well as traditional media. I have to say I was impressed with the information on this firm’s Web site. I especially like the focus on making data actionable. After all, what good is information if you are not going to act on it? The only red flag for me was the focus on serving Fortune 500 companies… I am wondering if they will also support the little guy.
• Cymfony Inc. is a market influence analytics company that sifts and interprets the millions of voices at the intersection of traditional and social media to gain consumer insight and develop stronger bonds with influencers. Apparently, its award winning platform, Orchestra, integrates innovative technology with expert analysis to identify the people, issues and trends impacting your business – all at the speed of the market. Clients include: Southwest.com., Verisign, DoubleClick, Jiffy Lube, LG and Hasbro.
• Umbria Inc. is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes social media-including blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites. Umbria delivers not just data, but insights into brands, markets, consumers and trends. Each week, CNN uses Umbria blog analysis to look at a topical issue in the news for insight on what the blogosphere is saying about it.
• Zeta Interactive aims to be the leading provider of integrated interactive services that help marketers realize the full potential of the Internet to build brands, increase sales, improve processes and reduce costs. For monitoring the blogosphere, it offers RelevantNoise. Zeta Interactive’s proprietary technology dedicated to mining the social internet for business intelligence. Again, upon a cursory review of the company’s Web site it is not clear to me if they offer a way to respond and engage with individuals bloggers.

More resources
Clearly the practice on monitoring, analyzing and engaging with bloggers is in its infancy. Many companies are scrambling to come up with the best methodologies and practices for doing this. We will continue to follow trends in this arena. In the meantime, here are some additional articles to check out.

David Pogue, with the New York Times provides insights on blogging and how to take advantage of Web 2.0 in this article http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/are-you-taking-advantage-of-web-20/

Bill Siwicki, from Internet Retailer, looks at word of mouth and how to leverage social media in his article which can be found at http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=25851
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