Controlling a brand conversation

You can't really control what the blogosphere says about your brand, but with these simple steps you can exert more influence. The NextStage CRO explains.

You can think of this column as a follow up to Bloggers, influence and your brand, but you don't have to have read that column in order to understand this one.

Two kinds of bloggers

As we learned, there are essentially two kinds of bloggers that are relevant to your brand marketing, which we call Holmeses and Watsons.

NextStage monitored some 150 blogs of all types over a nine-month period. Blogs were kept as research elements regardless of activity levels and even (in some cases) changes of principle authors (the designated "blogger"). This part of our research revealed some solid takeaways for bloggers:

We learned how to determine if someone would be a Holmes or a Watson
We learned how to train someone to be a Holmes or a Watson
We learned how to determine if someone would gain dominance in certain geographies, in certain topics and how large that audience would be

And most importantly, we could train them as required.

Who controls the conversation? Frequency of posts

It turns out there are several ways to control the conversation. The first is to have the Holmes post frequently. This is a typical power vacuum proposition. A Holmes who posts infrequently will leave room for someone else to control the conversation.