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Stephen Denny
The CMO Council’s 2008 Outlook polled their readership to find out which were the most influential sources of marketing insight, information and best practices. The results showed that “peers” to be at the top of the heap. I guess no one was shocked to read that word of mouth came in first; it usually does in these types of polls. And blogs? Blogs were dead last.
Being a marketer and a blogger, I was a bit conflicted when I first saw this. But having spent a lot of time over the years asking consumers what they think, I can see how the CMO Council got the answers they did. They were probably just asking the wrong question.
Peers are always viewed as one of the most influential sources of information on any topic. Think about the number of messages we’re exposed to on a daily basis – not just push advertising from your local car dealership, but the explosion of cc’s on email that keep you informed of decisions that you just don’t need to be part of. And don’t get me started on “infotainment,” badly executed product placement, and “contextual advertising.” With the explosion comes the need to synthesize all this stuff and then make sense of it all. So we take psychological short-cuts. We turn to other people like us when faced with subjective decision making. What do my friends or peers do in similar cases? How did they select a new agency or find a new contractor? We simply don’t have time to do the heavy lifting of personal research on every single decision we need to make in our personal and professional lives, so we turn to our peers to help shoulder the burden.
Blogs? If the phenomenon is doubling every few months, something relevant must be going on. There are two forces at play here, both of which impact the degree of influence and the reader’s rationale for being influenced.
I Read It Because I Agree With It:
We read blogs the read because we “like” them. Blogs and bloggers fall into the general category of “liking”: we read blogs that typically say the kinds of things we like and agree with. When we come across a blog that we don’t agree with, we don’t read it. This is no different from our traditional media choices. If you watch Fox News, you watch it because you like what Fox News has to say. If you’re a MSNBC fan, you don’t turn to Fox. “Liking” is a core principle of persuasion that is most effectively applied in relationship building. We learn of new blogs and are drawn to them by “liking,” which forms the first bonds of the relationship. And if you aren’t familiar with blogging in general – if you feel that blogging is amateur opinion unleashed – you’re unlikely to see them as “influential.
We Follow Our Own, Similar Herd:
What happens when a blog becomes noticed? It hits traffic and comment thresholds that signal to new readers that we are popular with other, similar readers. The decision trigger of “many, similar others” pushes us into new ground in the language of influence – we reach the “consensus” bucket. We are now attracting new readers because they see many, similar others reading and commenting.
We Love “Experts”:
The great irony in blogging is that we become “authorities” when we transcend “citizen journalism” and become “writers.” In the language of influence, we become “authorities” when we acquire the trappings of authority – usually this means we move from self-publishing to “publishing.” Meaning someone else thought enough of our work to print it out in hard copy and sell it at the bookstore. Once the book is finally out the door, our readership soars. After all, we’re an authority now.
The CMO Council’s study now looks fairly reasonable. Blogs are not homogenous. My blog is different from “A-list” blogs by virtue of my comments and traffic, and they are different from the “A+ List” of best-selling authors. Blogging is defined by its low barriers to entry, not to mention the fact that most blogs are fairly light on content. Add to this the fact that bloggers still represent a 1%-er population and you can see why the majority of director-level, small company readership (the general profile of the CMO Council’s respondent group) fail to be generally swayed by blogging in general. I’d be curious to know how many of the Council’s readership actually read blogs, or know what an RSS feed is, or have ever commented on – let alone posted – a blog entry before. Perhaps fear of the uncertainty itself plays a role.
There is a strong whiff of “rational man” sensibility here, too – how many people have we observed behind the mirror in focus groups swearing that they are never influenced by advertising? Surveys often tell us what our respondents think we want to hear from them. We don’t like to appear to be easily influenced, yet we are.
Clearly, we must understand how decision triggers work and how to ethically break through the clutter that surrounds our target markets so we can get our messages heard clearly.
That’s what marketers are paid to do, after all.
Regards.
Stephen Denny is the President of Denny Marketing, a marketing consultancy helping clients in the areas of marketing strategy, demand generation and outbound communications. He is also the first in Silicon Valley certified to facilitate the "Principles of Persuasion” (POP) Workshop to corporate clients seeking leadership development and training in the science of influence. The POP Workshop is based on the research of Dr. Robert Cialdini, Regent’s Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.
Apart from his consulting work, Denny also writes the marketing blog, Note to CMO: and is a frequent contributor to The Daily Fix.
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