Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Blogger Survey Result #3: Is The Social Media Release Relevant? Bloggers Are Talking About You.

July 13, 2008 – 12:00 pm | by Daryl Tay

Bloggers seem to know what the social media release is about. Or at least 60% of them do (Fig 1), and 72% of those who do, find it an effective communications tool.

Fig 1 – The social media release

The social media release results I take with a little pinch of salt purely because of the small sample size. It’s easy to look at it and say “Wow Singapore understands the social media release!” but remember we’re talking only 14 bloggers in Singapore.

Let’s add on a second bit of information, that 88% of bloggers aware of the social media release would use the related material in blog posts (Fig 2).

Fig 2 – Using social media release material in blog posts

This makes the picture a little bit clearer. Bloggers don’t have a lot of time to write lots of original stuff about you. Providing them with the right quotes, videos, pictures, etc can make their life easier. Think of it as how you submit a ready-to-print press release to a journalist, compared to the bare minimum and expecting the journalist to write the rest himself. Not gonna work right?

Here’s where it’s easy to put two and two together. Bloggers are receptive to using your material, and bloggers like using video.

Need I connect the dots for you to say what you should include in your social media release? One thing though, if you’re not confident of your video standing up to scrutiny, you should just skip on it, because the focus can very quickly turn to “look what a joke this video is” instead of focusing on your message.

Fig 3 – Sources of information about companies

Finally Fig 3 tells us that more than one in two bloggers talk about companies. Also, the accompanying caption in this slide points out that social bookmarking sites are the lowest ranked for bloggers to find out more information about a company. I’d like to point out that “other bloggers” is ranked first. So bloggers turn to other bloggers for information about your company, and generally speaking, one in two bloggers talk about companies (maybe yours). Does that scare you?

Before I end, I’d just like to drop off a couple of quotes that I saw in the survey about what bloggers feel the contact person should be saying/doing.

“Keep it short and to the point – lay off the extreme glorification of companies”

“Information in advance is crucial so the blogger has time to consider, research and develop the content into meaningful posts”

“Few corporates and almost no PR companies have websites that provide regularly updated, easily searchable press release archives”

How’s that for some Sunday afternoon reading? Tomorrow I’ll close up this topic with a few more quotes and a ball park figure for how much time bloggers spend blogging.

This is part three of an analysis of a blogger survey conducted by Text 100. Here are links to part one and part two, as well as the social media release template.

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