This morning we’re delighted to welcome some of the most influential British bloggers to LBi for our Meet the Bloggers event – part of Social Media Week London.
As a company, LBi is heavily involved in all aspects of social media, However, it’s consumers who have largely driven the far reaching changes in marketing and conversation through the widespread adoption of blogging, YouTubing, Facebooking, Twitter – and let’s not forget Linkedin and foursquare.
Meet the Bloggers is being hosted by Eva Keogan (EK), LBi’s Head of Social Media, who says: “Bloggers are influential independent individuals with highly engaged and strong digital followings who are able to change the habits and lifestyles of their followers, whether they be in niche or mainstream audiences.
They are not journalists, most of them have day jobs, a lot of them have families, but what they all have is a passion for what they post about. This knowledge is something that many people crave and these bloggers have spent hours honing their skills and learning how to produce digital content.”
Please meet:
- Cybermummy founders Susannah Scott (SS), Sian To (ST) and Jennifer Howze (JH).
- Krista Madden (KM) and Debbie Djordjevic (DD) from beauty, fashion and gossip site Beauty & the Dirt.
- Liz Scarff (LS) from Debate Your Plate and also Save the Children.
- Dil Uppal (DU) from SCforM.
Follow our coverage of Meet the Bloggers here as the event unfolds.
What made you want to get involved in blogging in the first place?
KM: Beauty and the Dirt is more than a blog and Handpicked Media has become my life. I knew I had a loyal bunch of readers and I thought if I could reach out them, together we could provide engaging content that was so much better than that provided by a lot of the magazine publishers. We specialize in making it easy for brands who want to reach out to bloggers by ensuring the blogs in our network have good traffic and are going to add value.
DU: I launched Skin Care for Men because a lot of high-street retailers aren’t independent and you have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt. Skin Care for Men is totally independent and provides advice that is unbiased. I send products out to family members and friends to test products before I review them so there in no hidden agenda. Skin Care for Men is the world’s largest blog of its kind so I have a really good relationship with brands. There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from the US and they way brands reach out to bloggers there.
DD: My background is in journalism so I’m not really a blogger. Over the last few years the publishing world has been transformed by social media so moving over from magazines to blogs at Handpicked Media made perfect sense for me. We work hand in hand with brands on blogger events so they actually get to meet bloggers and build up human relationships with them, which is crucial for the partnerships to work. Bloggers are already outspoken, but I think they’re going to become braver during 2011, using things like video to push even more content out there.
LS: We started setting up Debate your Plate a few years ago when I was working as a freelance journalist. I found that the sorts of stories I wanted to write weren’t getting commissioned so I thought I’d launch my own platform with a friend of mine. We find the most popular content on our blog is either informative or funny so we try to produce posts along these lines. Brands are finally starting to take this kind of communication seriously because they realise the importance of connecting directly with audiences and getting direct feedback.
ST: My blog is called Mummy Tips. I’ve been blogging for about two years so I guess I’m the least experienced blogger here. I started my blog as a product review blog because I realised that no one was really doing it. But I quickly got fed up with blogging about baby products and started writing about life in general and that’s when my blog really started to take off.
Over the last six or eight months brands and PRs have started getting their approach to bloggers right. They are picking out a smaller number of bloggers to deal with and are providing them with products and content that will make their blogs stand out.
JH: I worked as a journalist in Texas and New York before I came to the UK where I was hired a lifestyle editor of Times Online and lead blogger on Alpha Mummy. Cybermummy started with us getting a few pals together to talk about how we could replicate the huge success of ‘mummy blogging’ in the US over here. In the States mummy blogging is a lot more advanced and brands are really getting behind it.
SS: I hail from Silicon Valley so technology is in my blood. I had three children In quick succession and decided I couldn’t work because I was too busy changing nappies. At this time in the U.S mummy blogging was just starting to explode. A while later I came to the UK – just when LinkedIn and Twitter were really starting to take off – and I thought: ‘I know I’ll start a mummy blog’. That was about three years ago. I started looking for UK mummy bloggers and quickly built up a handful of contributors. Cybermummy now has thousands of people writing for it.
Bloggers and journalists are two totally different beasts. Journalists get paid for what they do where as bloggers do it for love. They are their own editors, sub editors and IT people. Brands need to realise this and treat bloggers differently.
How do you think the cross over from blogging to vlogging (video blogging) will play out?
SS: Just because you’re a good writer doesn’t mean you’ll be good at video. Mummy bloggers have a lot of energy so they will clearly have some success in this area.
DD: Beauty bloggers will certainly be using video to enhance their experience and bring in new audiences. If you do a ‘how to’ video it will go global.
How much traffic do you get from social networks?
UD: I get far more traffic from Twitter than from Facebook. As soon as I post something I can tweet about it and make it more personal – and this drives traffic.
KM: Once you post something and talk about it on Twitter people get involved and a conversation instantly builds around your content.
Should brands bypass PR agencies and go straight to bloggers?
ST: Every brand is different but I think there’s still a place for PR agencies in managing relationships. The bloggers that work well with brands are the ones that are given everything they need to write a post – and PR agencies can add this value.
KM: Bloggers will write what they like about a brand’s products, but if brands don’t supply bloggers with all the correct information, images etc they need they’ll simply go and write about something else.
How do bloggers feel about online social media regulations?
KM: I’ve seen readers complain about blog posts that are sponsored. You need to be careful as a blogger that the content of your blog doesn’t become compromised.
EK: Disclosure is key. You need to compare it to an advertorial in a magazine. As long as it’s clear that the content is sponsored then it tends to be ok.
UD: I always put a disclaimer on my blog that clearly states that I receive a lot of products for free from brands.
DD: There are a lot of blogger blaggers and we make sure at Handpicked Media that we don’t work with any of them.