coverage of the Kryptonite bike lock scandal gained attention of the mass media. Someone posted a video of how to crack an apparently lockpick-safe Kryptonite bike lock in only a few seconds with a bic pen. Thousands of customers held Kryptonite accountable. Ever since, marketers have tried to penetrate the ‘Blogosphere’ with more responsible marketing messages. Has it worked? Hardly.

Popular bloggers who dared endorse products were subject to massive scrutiny from the blogosphere, which considered itself a grassroots movement unspoiled by corporate sponsorship. ‘Sellouts’ were probably the nicest reaction of them all, so bloggers became wary. However, still some PR and Marketing departments of companies realised that actively participating and engaging in the conversation helped the brand and the company reach new levels of user attention. So corporate blogs came along, and they enjoyed, and are still enjoying quick acceptance and a following in the highly critical world of bloggers.

However, with blogs as a niche on the internet, the blogosphere isn’t one big block of people I could easily reach as a marketer. And the effort of identifying and targeting the right people is massive compared to the value of the outcome, especially for a mass product. This is why one form of advertising that has been around since the very beginning of the internet prevailed – display advertising, banners.

Advertising networks, after some time, started to unify the major bloggers and blogging platforms to create a doubleclick-equivalent for the blogosphere. If you wanted to reach bloggers, you would go through platforms like federatedmedia.net, which holds relationships with a majority of the A-List blogs.

We think the blogosphere is good for marketing niche products to a very specific group of people. Quality is always relevant, but the ROI is probably higher than a big banner campaign on classical media outlets. This makes it possible for small and medium enterprises to actually reach an audience at a decent price (advertising on blogs doesn’t cost as much and the volumes to pay for are logically not as high). Big companies with mass products are better off sticking to the big networks and, under circumstances, to networks like federated media. Some bloggers enjoy cult following, but if your product is good and your advertising campaign is fantastic, it will grab someone’s attention and compel them to write about it.

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