Blog Marketing

I googled quite a bit about it (top 20 results) and I was relieved to find out that no one has actually done it till now. Finally there is something that I can take credit for considering that various things in the past, which I thought were my ideas, were actually used by people earlier.

The first example that I can remember is of Sin^2 Theta + Cos^2 Theta = 1. Our teacher, Ms. Latika Das, taught us about the various trigonometry angles and she also gave us a formula to remember it, “Pandit Badri Prasad, Har Har Bole.” It helps us to remember the values of various angles such as Sin = P/H, Cos = B/H and so on. When I came back from school I used the properties of Pythogoras theorem to prove various equalities such as the one I mentioned above. I was so thrilled about it that I can’t explain. I thought that tomorrow I will go and show this to my madam and then she will pat my back in front of the whole class. Ah, being happy was such an easy task in those days. Fate took a twisted turn and I was saddened when I found out that some bugger had already done that and it was the basis of trigonometry. She was one of my favorite teachers and I never referred to her with her popular name but it changed on that day. Her popular name was Sada Katil, it is a reverse of her name if you write it in Hindi.

Coming back to the topic, Blog marketing has been used in the following forms:
a) Advertising on blogs.
b) Companies maintaining blogs.
c) Heads / workers of companies maintaining blogs.
d) Movie directors maintaining blogs.
There are a few other versions also but I could not find an example of the one that I am talking about. What I am saying is that suppose you are about to launch a particular product, you gather a group of bloggers and launch your product to them. You should have faith in your product and the presentation should be such that you get favorable reviews from them. If you do not have the means to use MSM for your marketing this can prove as a very effective strategy. It relies on the principle of word-of-mouth publicity. It is extremely cost effective in nature. Obviously it cannot be used for FMCG and automobile products but can be a great success with Books and Movies. Technorati has divided the blogsphere in three compartments. If you go to homepage, you see News, books and movies. It means that majority of people write and read about this stuff on the blogs. In US this idea might be successful with Indie movies which generally fail to get an audience and they do not have big studios backing them to promote them. In India, the blogging community is very small but the whole IIPM issue tells us that people do get worried about –ive publicity on blogs and so a +ive campaign can work too.

One product which I personally think should utilize this is, “One Night @ the call centre”. The target audience for this book is the 20ish urban crowd most of which is tech-savvy. Chetan also hopes to sell it to his fan base which he built by “5 point someone” which majorly comprises of engineers. The corny title ensures that a lot of “call centre” crowd will be buying it. When I started blogging around a year and a half back the two most discussed books on Indian blogs were “Da Vinci Code” and “5 point someone”. I have said it earlier and I will say it again that I do not like Chetan as an author and at most he can come in the category of mediocre but he knows how to market his product. Considering the fact that he blogs himself(its pathetic), he might just look into it.