Bloggers in the service of brands’ online reputation

On the internet, the playing field is vast, with no set boundaries. Brands therefore have every interest in identifying the active users whose voice carries — the influencers — and in using them as a powerful relay in the service of their reputation.

Among these influencers, bloggers stand out. And when it comes to online reputation today, the relationships that bloggers and brands maintain often play out in a strong interdependence. Bloggers in the service of brands’ online reputation? Brands need bloggers to talk about them, and bloggers are on the lookout for what brands can bring them to set themselves apart from their peers. They also need to fund their online adventure, to be sponsored — because blogging is no longer just a hobby, but a profession.

Bloggers: media influencers in the service of brands’ online reputation

Companies’ Public Relations (PR) teams are always connected to journalists and to media influencers. But from now on they are also adding to their mailing lists the bloggers and online-media professionals who will be receptive to their messages. Careful, though — this is no longer about summoning them to sterile, cookie-cutter press conferences, but about offering them useful content1, proposing events, product launches, breakfasts, and so on.

For brands, cultivating their relationships with bloggers is therefore becoming unavoidable. In the fashion and beauty sectors, on YouTube, LilithMoon 2 meets with more than a million subscribers every week to offer them her advice. L’Oréal regularly and generously gives her its products to test, and while there is no guarantee she will name them, when she does, the recommendation effect is very significant.

Bloggers in the service of brands’ online reputation A presentation of a Lilith Mode video

An event organized by a brand can generate numerous pickups in online and offline media. An impressive example of mastery is the one staged every year since 2012 by Kontiki, a travel-video site3. The European roadtrip organized by this brand with 13 video bloggers who are very well known in the United States — including the famous BFvsGF / PrankvsPrank(2 billion views on YouTube and 12 million subscribers) — allows them each year to accumulate millions of views on the videos posted online and to gain thousands of new subscribers to their YouTube channel4. Here, the brand created the event and knew how to convince bloggers with a large audience to sign on in order to benefit from their reputation.

As soon as bloggers and YouTubers proved capable of generating large volumes of qualified audiences, some brands stopped hesitating to build them straight into their marketing or communications plan.

Bloggers in the service of brands’ online reputation: how to recruit star bloggers?

Here we move into a more directly commercial aspect of the relationship between brands and the bloggers in their world. In this case, brands most often identify their potential ambassadors thanks to their strong reputation. Brands will try to tie their image to that of the blogger by giving them a strong incentive, whether a unique experience or the guarantee of enjoying previews — when it is not simply payment5.

Thus Splendia, a web platform offering stays in luxury hotels, created a particularly successful campaign on Instagram 5. In particular, it convinced @qorz, with 172,000 followers, to be one of the Instagramers who traveled for six months to discover some of the world’s most important cities in order to design a travel guide made entirely from Instagram photos, “Splendia Instagramers City Guides”6. The only constraint Splendia imposed: publish 2 photos a day on Instagram and cite their brand. After 6 months, the campaign allowed the luxury-hotel booking platform to become the most-followed hotel brand on Instagram, surpassing Booking and TripAdvisor there, thanks to the 800,000 interactions generated and the recruitment of 40,000 subscribers7.

Splendia Instagram blog brands online reputation The Splendia web platform

Some bloggers, by dint of blogging on a topic, become stars themselves, beyond the reputation gained on specific subjects. Among the video bloggers who have won a certain form of celebrity in France is Norman Thavaud, each of whose short humorous videos has been viewed millions of times. The Crunch snack brand therefore did not hesitate to create a partnership with him to send him traveling across every continent, with the campaign “Crunch gets Norman out of his room”8. Norman’s audience showed up: the Crunch fan page went from 2,000 to 100,000 fans, there were around 100,000 votes per poll on Norman’s next destination, and Norman’s videos rack up a million views in a week9.

Preserving one’s independence is something that PewDiePie, the most-watched YouTuber in the world, can afford. It must be said that his video-game commentary videos total billions (!) of views. This position of strength serves him today in opposing the ad-revenue sharing system that Nintendo wants to impose on YouTubers who use footage from its video games. For PewDiePie, the exposure games gain through videos on YouTube is unmatched. But by proposing to share this revenue, Nintendo has already shifted its position, because in 2013 it wanted to receive all of it, sparking a monumental outcry among video bloggers. Will PewDiePie manage to move the position of the Japanese video-game giant? To be continued…

Blogs are an integral part of the media plan

From then on there is a risk that a dependency relationship sets in between bloggers and brands, following a logic where the bigger the gift, the greater the chances it prompts a post. Bloggers thus receive incentives or economic compensation that partly offsets the time and cost that running a blog represents, as well as ideas for their publications.

On many blogs, you can now buy ad space just as on any online advertising network. In fact, blogger ad networks have appeared and partly fill this role10. But for bloggers who try to be more independent from brands and from the ads YouTube publishes on their videos, a crowdfunding platform called Tipeee 11 has recently been set up, which lets internet users “tip” — from the English “to tip” — a “coin” to the video bloggers and authors of their favorite videos. Among the well-known “YouTubers” on this platform, we can mention le Fossoyeur de Films, a film critic.

Tipeee Le Fossoyeur online reputation blog Le Fossoyeur de films’ Tipeee page

However, brands that give themselves the means to benefit from a blogger’s popularity can be very persuasive. So, to do things right, bloggers looking for an economic reward for their efforts will take care to choose the brands and campaigns most in tune with the tastes of the audience they have patiently built. And often the interests of the brand and of the bloggers tend to merge. YouTube understood this perfectly when it launched the first advertising campaign in its history in France13. Google’s video platform relied on the most popular French video bloggers. The “YouTubers” Cyprien, Andy and EnjoyPhoenix thus lent the video platform their image. While they gather millions of subscribers on their channels, they also know what they owe to YouTube, since without it their reputation would be quite different.

bloggers brands online reputation enjoy phoenix youtube The YouTuber EnjoyPhoenix

Cyprien first started out on an independent path, notably by sharing humorous videos, then became a brand in his own right. His image allows him today to be associated with films like X-men12, with Ubisoft for video games, or with Parrot, the drone maker.

Endless tactics to benefit from bloggers’ goodwill

In general, and to conclude, for a brand’s online reputation to benefit from the boon of the exposure offered by well-intentioned bloggers, the possible tactics, campaigns and actions are endless. You will need to know how to press the right buttons, and to position yourself upstream, at the opportune moment, so as not to burst into a blogger’s world without respecting its codes. Finally, relationships with bloggers are living things — they evolve over time, depending on the reputation of the blogger as well as of the brand.

Many brands are turning to brand journalism

To manage this relationship as well as possible, some brands have understood that it is easier to control what you have created yourself. If you can’t find the stars or the bloggers to team up with, you can create them yourself… Many brands are therefore turning to brand journalism13 or trying to develop blogging in-house to produce content in a journalistic way around their brand’s world. This approach complements, but is not to be confused with, traditional business blogging — that is, writing articles on a company blog about the brand’s area of expertise. An example masterfully executed is that of Décathlon, which developed its blog platform in three languages, Hikingonthemoon, very discreetly linked to its Quechua brand. It presents itself as a blog about the mountains, outdoor sports and travel “made by and for mountain enthusiasts,” but it is also a website, a web TV and a print and online magazine. The content, written by professionals but also by the brand’s 170 employees, is aimed at enthusiasts and establishes a relationship of authenticity and closeness through a singular and distinctive approach compared with the other players in the market.

Certainly an example to reflect on, but of course it is not simple to replicate.

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