OPENINNOVATIONSTUDIO

2

5 2013

17

19

6SUMMARY 23

10 26

Introduction Regulations & Connector policies

How brands select bloggers forcampaigns

How and when to disclose payment or

sponsorship

How to make good sponsored content!

PR agency V

digital agency

Measurement & reports: What and

Why?

Press release V

sponsored content

How to make a media kit

36About Connector

54

Hello!

We want to help you become a more professional blogger!

We have prepared a best practice guide where we will share our experiences in this exciting market. We invite you along to learn a little more about how brands work with bloggers and digital influencers for digital campaigns.

Our objective is to promote best practice, promo-ting ethical behaviour and transparency while at the same time helping you make some money from your blog. Here you’ll find general tips and an honest overview of the market for bloggers work. This includes pu-blication of sponsored content, how to approach brands, ways of disclosing ads and relevant case studies. You will also get to learn a little more about the Return On Investment (ROI) for campaigns in your blog! Ready?

We hope you enjoy our guide and that we can work together soon! Conor & IvanThe Connector Team

76

PR AGENCYV

DIGITAL AGENCY

PR AGENCY

The PR agency is responsible for acting as an intermediary and strengthening the relationship between the client and the media.

Among the functions of the PR agen-cy is the production of press releases, sending photos, press kits, invitations to events and sharing details of the pro-duct or advertised service. They work as a link between the company / brand and the media outlet to which the infor-mation is intended, either for traditional media (magazines, newspapers, radio) or for online media (websites, portals) and bloggers / influencers. It’s impor-

tant that a PR agency knows how to identify who to work with and their audience so their campaign goals can be achieved. In this relationship, there is no adver-tising or media buying, any and all re-leased content can and should be pu-blished by the free will of the blogger or influencer. What few people know is that not all PR agencies are responsible for the management of bloggers and influen-cers on the web. Often, digital agen-cies like Connector manage this task.

98

DIGITAL AGENCY

In addition to maintaining the rela-tionship between their brands and the media, an agency seeks to oversee the market and to find media opportuni-ties to promote the brand. These channels are hired for publi-cation of content prepared by the in-fluencer or the brand as agreed betwe-en the two parties. Example - Activation campaign for Huawei where Connector sponsored bloggers to invite their followers to discover what #OO was all about rea-ching over 100,000 interactions! Besides the work of media buying, many digital agencies have an internal department specialising in digital PR. Here they develop campaigns to en-

gage with bloggers and influencers, which can involve anything from in-vitations to events to sending press kits. Ideally these are personalised for the profile of the recipient. Regarding the hiring of spaces on blogs and other digital platforms, materials are sent as a suggestion and the blogger can decide whether to get involved or not.

1

4

32

For Nupo, Connector developed boxes of product samples so that in case of an emergency, the blogger can crack open a box and test the fast diet products.

For Cooks Academy, we sent edible invitations to food bloggers to invite them to a unique foodie event.

For Huawei we were Irish pioneers in using Snapchatters as media to disseminate the Huawei video Ad.

Activation campaign of #OO paid bloggers to share some content

1 2 3 4

1110

PRES

S REL

EASE

VSP

ONSO

RED

CONT

ENT

Now that the difference between the work of the PR agency and digital agency is clear, it’s time to understand the function of the press release and sponsored content!

PRESS RELEASE A press release is generally a text document which contains detailed information about the product or ser-vice offered by the brand. In some cases it can come with a press kit with the product itself.

The press releases are sent so that the influencer is aware of the brands news. However, it’s up to them to de-cide whether the information is rele-vant enough to make a post about it when the publication is not paid.

The suggestion must work as a foundation for the content creation. It’s worth mentioning that simply copying the press release in full is considered - almost unanimously - unprofessional and unimpressive. The blogger can (and must!) share their personal impressions about the product in their review.

Rozanna Purcell in our PR Campaign to promote the Huawei Snapys

1312

SPONSORED CONTENT One of the main goals of sponsored content is to promote news from a brand which it wants to share with a specific audience. It’s important to make it clear that, in this case, the publication only happens after the contractual and financial agreement. It’s important that the contracting agency knows the correct guidelines. The idea is that the blogger receives a briefing containing all information and details on the subject to be dis-closed.

No! Unlike the sponsored content, the release is a way to spread news and may be published freely by the blo-gger. That is, if you liked the sugges-ted news and thought it was relevant enough to turn into content on your blog or fan page. If so, then feel free to share!

“But if I publish a post based on the press release, am I not

working for free?”

HOW BRANDS SELECTBLOGGERS FOR CAMPAIGNS

This is a common question from bloggers and influencers when they sometimes get disappointed when they are not invited to campaigns related to a brand that represents the profile of their readers. So to help you understand the rationale, we’ll explain how our selection

process works.

1514

The first step is to define what the focus of our cam-paign will be. For you to understand this process, we have prepared two brief considerations:

Now it’s time to line up the profile of the blog with the product / service to be released, so we can connect directly with the target audience. We conduct a thorough search online and make a shortlist with the people considered most appropriate for the campaigns. We will also create a rationale stating the reasons for each choice that will be submitted to the client.

QUANTITATIVE:Bloggers with the largest audience and reach are invited to share informa-tion to a wide audience.

Remember that the final decision is always up to the company, who can approve people or request alternatives. In the case of sending personalised press kits, we will often customise the gift in line with the main char-acteristics and personality of each influencer.

QUALITATIVE:Influencers, with a strong presence in their niche, are invited to join campaig-ns that need engagement, creating ‘word of mouth’. This is not always rela-ted to who has the biggest audience or largest number of followers, but rather to those who have the power to influen-ce people who follow them, literally.

1716

AUDIENCE:Page views, unique visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.

CUSTOMISATION:In some campaigns, a search is performed on the preferences of each blogger or influencer, so that we can prepare custom products according to their characteristics.

Example - The Huawei Snapys activation campaign presented bloggers with 3D glasses pre-loaded with their most liked photos on Instagram.

DEMOGRAPHICS:Demographic of visitors: What is their gender? What age group? What social class? What education level?

RESULTS:How many readers/ followers will be engaged? If available, what were the results of their previous campaigns?

One of the reasons for the massive growth of blogging and social influ-encers is the fact that the posts are made by real people who give their opinion about what they are passion-ate about in their own lives. However, in recent months, we have noticed a deterioration in the relation-ship between the bloggers, readers

and consequently, brands, often in-volving stealth ads. And who likes to be deceived? To help you understand this area better and make your channels as transparent as possible for your readers, we’ve prepared a short (but effective!) expla-nation with suggestions on how and when to signal each type of post:

HOW AND WHEN TO DISCLOSEPAYMENT OR SPONSORSHIP

1918

SPONSORED CONTENT: Influencers, with a strong community, are invited to campaigns that need engagement, creating the sought after ‘word of mouth’. They can be given the content to share or to customise themselves but it has been paid for. Must be tagged and made aware that it’s sponsored content. Tag posts with #ad or similar.

You’ve been asked to do some sponsored content and you don’t know how to engage your readers. Are you in doubt on how to write it? To help you with this task, check out the following tips

and see how we love bloggers to adapt sponsored content.

BE TRANSPARENT

As much as you identify with the brand, avoid suggesting it as a “tip from a friend” to your readers. You are being paid to share information and this is a type of advertising.

BE CLEAR

Be honest with your readers. In the case of posts involving reviews and tutorials, give your real im-pressions of the product. The post should take place naturally. And once again: flag it. If you don’t like a product, either say that or don’t post about it.

ADD VALUE

Good blog content should add new in-formation and knowledge to the read-er despite being an advertisement via a brand. Get involved with brands you like.

ATTENTION TO GRAMMAR

This tip goes for all posts in your channels, but it is worth mentioning here as well. Write a rough draft in MS Word or install a spell checking plugin on your browser and review as many times as needed. The free Grammarly plug-in is a great solution for checking grammar and spelling!

HOW TO MAKEGOOD SPONSORED CONTENT!

RELEASE: This can be published without any tagging or signaling.

PRESS KIT: Like a product you received and want to publish a piece about it on your blog? It’s only polite that you make it clear, at some point in the text, that the product was sent to you by a brand.

2120

Connector policies

Regulations

uch of digital adver-tising isn’t officially regulated. The ASAI - Advertising Stand-ards Authority of Ire-

land– still doesn’t have the power to stop the publication of online piec-es. However, there are ethical rules that are strongly recommended and based on the consumer protection code.

The ASAI state all marketing com-munications should be legal, decent, honest and truthful. Advertorials should be clearly identified and dis-tinguishable from editorial. They also state that a free product given should also be disclosed by the blog-ger / influencer.

M

&

2322

SPONSORED CONTENT ALWAYS FLAGGED:All posts purchased by Connector on be-half of our customers should always be marked both in the categories / tags and through phrases at the beginning and end of the text.

APPROVAL:All sponsored content of the Con-nector clients must receive prior approval from the client and may go through amendments before being published.

CONNECTOR POLICIES

Measurement & reports:What & Why?

Your campaign has been published, now what? Measurement!Why is the measurement of results from the blog important?

• So you can optimise the activity to boost the results.• To justify the invested budget and see the proof of return on

investment.• To improve the strategy and future communication campaigns.• To support decision-making and risk assessment.

COMPETITORS: We ask influencers to avoid sponsored content from direct competitors timed too close to each other.

2524

REACH:

Reach refers to how many people see or po-tentially see some con-tent. For example, your tweet impacted 3,000 readers and your post achieved 30,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. To measure your results, simply use Google An-alytics and the built-in analytics tools of the re-spective channels.

ENGAGEMENT:

Engagement refers to the degree of participation and involvement of a par-ticular profile or group of people regarding a topic or subject. For example: how many people com-mented or shared?

INFLUENCE:

Influence refers to the degree of attention and action that a particular profile or content may generate in others. For example: how many people have expressed a desire to buy a product after your post?

WHAT SHOULD YOU MEASURE?

• Unique visitors / Page views• Clicks on the tagged link • Comments on the blog• Interactions on each channel

These metrics are not fixed and depend on the campaign! Show ‘screengrabs’ of the posts and some of the key metrics.

Suggestions for metrics that may be presented after the end of the campaign:

2726

mediakit What is a media kit

and do I need one?

media kit is a document provided by websites, blog-gers and influencers, pre-senting all key features, statistics and other relevant

data for a possible advertiser. Its pur-pose is to assist those interested in finding all the information required thus improving the buyer experience. The media kit works as a showcase, where you highlight your best fea-tures, persuading the advertiser to purchase advertising space and other forms of paid media within your site. Therefore, it’s essential for blogs that want to monetise their activities!

The first step in building a media kit is to create a specific contact page on your blog. This page will be like an exclusive channel for business contacts and should only contain relevant data to the advertiser. It’s important that your forms of contact (email, phone, etc.) are pres-ent and clearly visible on the page. A full media kit can be reproduced on this page or general information with a link for viewing and / or down-loading the full media kit is usually in a PDF or PPT file. Let this link be visible for future contacts.

A POSITIONING

What does your blog talk about? This information may seem obvious, but is often overlooked in the process of making a media kit. It’s essential to describe the overall objective of your website, specify what you usually talk about especially if your blog is a niche blog. In this way, advertisers have a better understanding of your blog and about the kind of audience it attracts.

SEGMENTATION

Inserting information about your read-ers like demographic data (gender, age, location, etc.) is important because the brands want to know if you can connect with their target audience through your website. The most relevant information for mar-keters is gender, age and location. Oth-er information of use to advertisers are the online habits of readers. Data about the number of hours that readers stay online, if they buy on the internet and

2928

STATISTICS For agencies and advertisers, we want to know exactly what audience you are reaching; that’s why it’s essential to provide actual statistics of your blog’s traffic. You can get this information through tools such as Google Analyt-ics, Clicky and Quantcast.

The statistical data most requested by agencies are visitors, unique visitors, page views, bounce rate and average session duration. These metrics are usually published at intervals of one month (unique visitors per month, for example). According to Google Analyt-ics the metrics definitions are:

Visits - Represents an individual ses-sion initiated by a visitor to a particu-lar site and expires within 30 minutes.

If the user returns to the site within that period it will appear as a single visit.

Unique visitors - Indicates the num-ber of unique visitors (unique people) on your site for a specific period.

Page views – Represents a page viewed by a visitor to a site. Every time a page is loaded by the browser is counted as page view.

Bounce Rate – Represents the per-centage of visitors that came to your site, viewed only one page (called “entry page”) and left without click-ing on any other page. Rates below 65% are considered positive because

2

what type of products they buy are very useful when deciding whether or not to align a campaign with your blog. If the number is considerably high, you can even include a percentage of how many readers bought a product recom-mended by you, raising your profile as a potential spokesperson for the brand or company.

it means that users are interested in your content and are seeking more in-formation on your site. Average session duration – Indicates the time spent by a visitor on average per session. You can also share the number of sub-scribers to RSS, newsletter etc. if the number of subscribers is worth shar-ing. Never disclose false information or falsify the quantity of stats. It’s recommended to always keep an honest relationship with your adver-tisers (and readers).

SOCIAL MEDIA

Inform potential advertisers of the social media platforms your blog uses. Disclose the number of fol-lowers of your blog via Twitter, Face-book and Instagram and show the other sites you have an active com-munity of followers. If you have already done a cam-paign that has involved social media it is worth mentioning the number of tweets, likes and other shares, showing the type of exposure that the next advertisers can expect in future campaigns.

3130

ADVERTISING SPACE AND RATES

A media kit should clarify the options of advertising space offered, the siz-es available for the ads and their po-sitions on the site. There is no exact formula to calculate the price of ad-vertisements and the most common procedure is to search the values charged by blogs in the same niche and do the calculations based on this benchmark.

Placing these values on the media kit is up to the blogger or influencer but is handy for the agency when they’re under pressure to deliver projects. Alternatively you can send the prices in the email text.

PRESS

If your blog has been mentioned in the press, on other established blogs or any other relevant media, it’s rec-ommended that this information is included in your media kit. Positive terms are another proof of the quali-ty and credibility of its content and enhance the value and positioning of your brand.

BRAND AND DESIGN

You should create a media kit that is easy to read with an attractive clear presentation that reflects your blog’s brand. A good strategy is to focus on the same color scheme, typography and any other elements that highlight your brand. Your reader and any ad-vertisers must be able to identify your media kit from the look and feel.

The most common advertising ways on blogs are:

SPONSORED CONTENT

The advertising mes-sage is linked as part of the editorial content of the blog. This content can be sent directly by the advertiser or written by the blogger, depend-ing on the language of the blog. It’s recommended that the theme of sponsored content has a natural fit with the blog. Otherwise, the publication can gen-erate suspicion and dis-comfort for blog readers.

BANNER ADS

A graphic ad which can be a static image that usually has a link to the advertiser’s site. In gen-eral, the cost of a banner is computed for display time (e.g. a month) and for every 1,000 page im-pressions (CPM) or each click (CPC).

SPONSORED REVIEW

Follows the same princi-ples of sponsored post, except that, in the case, the blogger is paid to do a review of a given prod-uct or service. It’s good to make it clear to adver-tisers that sponsored re-views are not necessarily the same as 100% posi-tive reviews.

2 31

3332

SPONSORSHIP SOCIAL MEDIA

You can sell sponsorship to your blog and your so-cial media.

To set the price, consider points like:

What kind of content you are going to publish: Direct Upload, Product Placement, Direct Feed or Link Promotion.

What time of the day / week / year is it? During seasonal and commer-cial peaks it is normal to increase your fee.

Potential Reach? Keep your data up to date!What is your average en-gagement rate?

What is the average en-gagement that you re-ceive for your content?

PRIZE DRAW AND CONTESTS

For brands, prize draw and contests are easy and inexpensive ways to publicise their brand and products to a new audience. For bloggers, the rewards can come in higher ratings and a greater number of fol-lowers on social media, increasing its credibility by future advertisers.

54

The media kit should contain a page with the top brands and companies that you’ve already worked with on the blog. These companies may be represented by their logos, which can contain links to the campaigns on the blog. If the blog has a success case with a particular company and the numbers of the specific campaign are significantly high, it’s worth high-lighting.

In short, a successful media kit is one that clearly exposes the attrac-tiveness of all the best features on your channel. It’s not necessary to include all the information listed in this post and it’s always good to remember that trans-parency and honesty are some of the factors that help to build a solid repu-tation of a blog with its audience and advertisers.

WHO YOU’VE WORKED WITH

3534

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics plat-

form on the market and can help you identify your most

profitable marketing channels.

Cost: Free

Link: http://www.google.com/analytics

HOTJAR

While Google Analytics measures pageviews, Hotjar helps

you analyse visitors, campaigns and optimise funnels. This

platform allows you to understand exactly how

people interact with a web page and how they navigate

through your site.

Cost: Free Starter Plan

Link: https://www.hotjar.com

TOP ANALYTICSTOOLS

visit our siteSocialMedia.ie

SocialMedia.ie leads the way in the delivery of immersive digital, social and mobile marketing training and education.

We specialise in offering our clients customised ‘hands-on’ one-to-one sessions or group sessions.

Since 2010 we have presented to 5,000 people and clients include bloggers, agencies, brands and organisations like Enterprise Ireland and Bord Bia.

Sample Workshops:

Digital and Social MediaMarketing Training

BloggingMasterclass

Social MediaMasterclass

Digital MarketingMasterclass

3736

OPENINNOVATIONSTUDIO

Connector is an open innovation studio.

We leverage a fearless approach to creativity,

a culture of learning and a fast moving

startup environment to design digital

‘real world’ experiences.

Some of these ideas build brand, grow

market share and increase revenue for our

clients while others become business drivers

within our own eco-system.

OPENINNOVATIONGAME

WE INVITE YOU TO OPEN YOUR MIND

AND RE-INVENT THE WORLD AROUND YOU!EXPLORE NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Get the Connector Innovation Game to transform your thinking and help you create profitable new products, services and evennew business models.

Book your free workshop todayconnector.ie/InnovationGame

39

connector.ie18 Eustace Street,

Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland team@connector.ie

+353 1 906 0006

@connector.ie