In EConsultancy and Big Mouth Media’s most recent “Social Media and Online PR Report,” 50% of companies surveyed said that they had directly contacted those within social media that had given their brand a bashing. Interestingly the survey showed that after this solution, the second most popular way to keep their brand seen in a positive light was ultimately to improve products and services, demonstrating just how powerful the collective voice is online to shaping consumer experience.

The research also showed that one area that was lacking was for brands to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions, with only 12% of companies engaging in this solution. With brands having so much to talk about, surely this is an easy win for companies?

The research highlighted that Twitter was used to monitor brand sentiment, however Tweets from brands were used more widely as a tool for publicising new content e.g. product, service e.t.c.
A quarter of brands surveyed said that they used the micro blogging service to gather information and for customer service, an area that I feel has a huge amount of potential, especially when recruiting for and announcing winners of brand led competitions.

What is a concern is that more than 20% of the companies surveyed said that the risk of negative brand sentiment was a major influence in not creating more effective social media engagement. Surely the rewards from engaging with social media heavily well outweigh not? With benefits including; creating positive brand sentiment, SEO efficiency, audience segmentation, sentiment segmentation to name just a few, engaging with social media offers a brand so many more rewards and even if a brand isn’t engaging heavily negative views can still be aired, with the power of the collective voice as mentioned in paragraph one if you can’t beat them then you might as well join them.

eMarketer predicts by 2011, user-generated content sites will attract 101 million people in the U.S, that’s a pretty big figure when you consider that the US online audience is just over 300 million.

With this in mind you can understand the numerous blogger outreach programmes that are launching, making a good little penny from providing access to these influential environments. As this offering sits somewhere between display, PR and in some respects SEO enhancement it’s interesting that there aren’t more sector specific blog networks. I would presume that this would not be cost efficient? Just concentrating on one sector probably won’t hit revenues conducive to a company staying afloat, however when you consider that these blogger outreach programmes have to build up relationships with the bloggers and then make sure that the advertisers they use don’t devalue the blogs it makes sense for them to be sector specific.

With this in mind I believe that publishers and sector specific media agencies have the opportunity to fill this niche, due to their contextual relevance and a business model that does not just rely on social media outreach. Publishers generally have an existing relationship with bloggers, where bloggers reference and support their posts with a publisher’s content, relying on the publisher’s heritage and standing within its verticle. With this trust established and the list of publisher’s advertisers suiting the audience and context of the blog, this makes for a great business model. The relationship is mutually beneficial, with the publisher extending their commercial offering and the blogger benefitting from exclusives from the publisher, invites to events, mentions of the blog on the publishers site and commission/cash money!

With sector specific agencies offering access to the right brands, this relationship makes sense for sector specific blogs, as the agency work as a PR company providing relevant exclusives and stories for the blog and its audience. Include to this social media work the fact the agency will also look after the clients, SEO, SEM and display activity, a completely cohesive digital strategy is established, where all elements of the digital communication mutually enhance, providing the most efficient use of the clients budget.

It will be interesting to see if this is an area that publishers move into, as ad revenues drop and competition is upped from these blog networks, which generally trade on very low CPMs, will the big publishers and niche publsihers look at their most influential verticles and concentrate on building blog networks to that specific interest?