DorisRon
Member
Nowadays there are several names for the same technology of marketing which we'll discuss in this theme: guerrilla marketing, crowd technologies and crowd marketing. I'll use the last one as the most suitable in my opinion.
This article is not a campaign for "a new stage in linkbuilding" and here will be no defeat of the "newfangled trends" to the nines. Let's talk about:
what a comprehensive approach in crowd marketing is;
who first began to use it;
whether it is possible to advance in the search engines by means of crowd (and how it relates to Google);
what is the most difficult in crowd marketing;
when crowd marketing brings results.
Opinions in the industry are diametrically opposite when it comes to crowd marketing. They say about it more than use. Already more than one lance were broken in online discussions about its usefulness and uselessness. At the same time almost no one keeps track of the effectiveness of "crowd marketing" in long-distance races.
Why do some sing odes to crowd-marketing, while others openly ridiculed "the ephemeral trend"? Perhaps the fact is that we have interpreted the term in different ways and do not always use the tool for appropriate purposes.
I delude myself happy!
Do you remember, what the hype was around social signals of promotion? I do not remember too. But social signals and marketing crowd are if not twins, but exactly close relatives. Then why did the "theme" of crowd marketing shoot?
On the one hand, the search engines toughen requirements for external links, so probably, with each update crowd-marketing will be at the peak of popularity in SEO-blogs. On the other, it is the search engines draconian measures which force us to look for a cure, a straw, for which you can hold on to the shifting sands of the requirements of Google "just-do-site convenient-to-user."
Initially, everything works
The first banner ads on sites in the dense '98 had CTR exceeding 10%. It was new, users have not yet developed immunity. Now only Internet marketers and novices do not turned off them in the browser.
Before familiar to us search engines, users carefully preserved links in text files and shared them with friends. Then every useful resource was its weight in gold. Now, users rarely advise to visit other sites with unselfish motives: every second link on the forum is a blatant advertisement.
Now it is the era of spam on the forums and in comments below the articles. But that's not all - "professional" crowd marketers first create a thread in the forum under one account, and then respond to this post under a different name, leaving cherished links. Even special forums are created for spam.
Back to the roots
As you can see, crowd marketing rolled up to spam, and it happens because of the narrowing of the concept itself. Often crowd-marketing is understood as a placement of links for reference: act and evaluate the results according to this criterion.
But what it should be in reality? The fact is that crowd-marketing is a hybrid of several types of online promotion:
reputation management,
sales promotion by means of communication with the audience,
SEO optimization.
Crowd marketing is the symbiosis of the three approaches, but it is not one of them in pure form.
Tautology: guerrilla crowd marketing
Classic marketing with zero budget is advertising of your products or services on the discussion forums teeming with the target audience. Show yourself where people ask for advice to get additional sales.
Utopia: communication with the customer
Ideal crowd marketing is closely related to reputation management, when an expert advises users unobtrusively promoting your product. This increases the credibility of the business and brand awareness.
Crowd-marketing fits into the content strategy and takes over the function of the proliferation of materials, drawing attention to the content. It is possible that you are reading this article because you've followed a link from a social network or blog comments.
Crowd marketing is useful in promoting of info-causes; the opposite is true too - the creation of info-cause serves as a platform for the launch of a crowd-marketing campaign.
Oxymoron: natural SEO-links
We need to realize that your crowd marketing does not replace the reference promotion, so do not expect the growth of your position in the short term. The first tentative results can be seen after 3-6 months of hard work.
With the right approach you will get more traffic and dilute reference profile with "natural" links. One feedback will cause a one-time surge of traffic and the other will provide a steady flow of new users. But it is not the winning strategy to hope only for ratings in the hope to earn the love of the search engines.
Crowd-marketing is difficult
The approach, as you see, is not tricky: become a consumer or an expert, get the confidence on the forum, accumulate credibility and advice. But the simple circuit is actually a long labor-intensive process. There are several explanations of it.
It is not suitable for all subjects
It will be difficult to use crowd marketing for local themed business, and it will be very difficult to do it qualitatively: simply there are not enough grounds and reasons for placement reviews.
Specific niche
There are areas for which crowd marketing is not only complicated, but also often ineffective. For example, heavy industry or selling of specific equipment that is interesting to a narrow circle of specialists.
Hence there is the problem with an expert: professionals have no time to get involved in long discussions and for bloggers, who do not understand the subject, it is difficult to earn credibility.
The laborious process
Business has to choose: either to sacrifice precious hours of a professional or train and advise the staff of freelances. During the first couple of days of work, this may seem simple and amusing, but soon obvious sites for placement will end. Disappointment will increase when part of comments with links will be removed by a moderator, and a new account will fall into the ban.
Try to delegate this task to a staff member as the additional duties and see that there are reasons to shirk the new work. Chances are, if your crowd marketing will not be performed by a separately hired employee or outsourcer, the quality is lame.
The result is not visible at once
Moreover, there can not be a significant result for a particular subject. Therefore, before you spend your resources on your crowd marketing, make sure that there is no higher priority tasks: for example, works on internal optimization of website content or implementation of the plan.
The algorithm of work with a "difficult" theme:
Create a list of demands to the sites and links.
Choose a list of resources to accommodate.
Create and feel accounts.
Constantly monitor your network for the emergence of new themes, articles, answers.
Analyze the effectiveness of links on various resources.
Remove from list sites that do not work, or where your posts are constantly removed.
Try to create your own themes.
Whom to delegate?
Consider the pros and cons of delegation of a difficult task of crowd technologies.
To post by yourself
Mass "attack on the crowd" will not work if you deal with it optionally, but of course, you can get a small increase in traffic and a few dozen of natural links. In this case, a much more effective approach to the problem is from the point of view of reputation management.
A staff member
If you have an inhouse copywriter or SEO specialist, commission him to create a certain number of posts per month, describing the criteria:
useful and relevant comments,
contains no open advertisement,
text motivates to follow the link,
attendance of the resource is at least a certain number of unique visitors per month,
article age or date of the last comment in the topic on the forum are not older than specified.
Plus of this approach when your crowd marketing is performed by your employee, is that accounts are owned by your business, even if he is fired.
A freelancer
Depending on the professionalism and experience of a freelancer, you can get plausible comments to relevant topics or ordinary spam anywhere. When ordering services according to the principle "he is cheaper" you risk to harm your reputation.
Drawback of cooperation with "freelancers" is that not every copywriter will conscientiously study subjects before starting work.
Outsourcing
Drawback of work with the contractor is the price, it is cheaper to hire a freelancer. But the undoubted advantage is the professionalism of the performers who are engaged in crowd marketing on a permanent basis. Plus of their work is that before starting to work the agency explore the specifics and analyzes the prospects of crowd marketing for the themes, not to spend money and efforts in vain.
Why will crowd marketing die?
If the trend continues, crowd marketing will degenerate into spam. But this does not mean that users will no longer share sites with each other and optimizers will leave attempts to get links that are similar to natural. Ultimately, all artificial eventually dies, and the useful services and content are always in demand.
Approaches to crowd marketing can be classified by analogy with SEO. "White" way will serve us for a long time, and the "black" one will soon cease to work and turn into information noise.
This article is not a campaign for "a new stage in linkbuilding" and here will be no defeat of the "newfangled trends" to the nines. Let's talk about:
what a comprehensive approach in crowd marketing is;
who first began to use it;
whether it is possible to advance in the search engines by means of crowd (and how it relates to Google);
what is the most difficult in crowd marketing;
when crowd marketing brings results.
Opinions in the industry are diametrically opposite when it comes to crowd marketing. They say about it more than use. Already more than one lance were broken in online discussions about its usefulness and uselessness. At the same time almost no one keeps track of the effectiveness of "crowd marketing" in long-distance races.
Why do some sing odes to crowd-marketing, while others openly ridiculed "the ephemeral trend"? Perhaps the fact is that we have interpreted the term in different ways and do not always use the tool for appropriate purposes.
I delude myself happy!
Do you remember, what the hype was around social signals of promotion? I do not remember too. But social signals and marketing crowd are if not twins, but exactly close relatives. Then why did the "theme" of crowd marketing shoot?
On the one hand, the search engines toughen requirements for external links, so probably, with each update crowd-marketing will be at the peak of popularity in SEO-blogs. On the other, it is the search engines draconian measures which force us to look for a cure, a straw, for which you can hold on to the shifting sands of the requirements of Google "just-do-site convenient-to-user."
Initially, everything works
The first banner ads on sites in the dense '98 had CTR exceeding 10%. It was new, users have not yet developed immunity. Now only Internet marketers and novices do not turned off them in the browser.
Before familiar to us search engines, users carefully preserved links in text files and shared them with friends. Then every useful resource was its weight in gold. Now, users rarely advise to visit other sites with unselfish motives: every second link on the forum is a blatant advertisement.
Now it is the era of spam on the forums and in comments below the articles. But that's not all - "professional" crowd marketers first create a thread in the forum under one account, and then respond to this post under a different name, leaving cherished links. Even special forums are created for spam.
Back to the roots
As you can see, crowd marketing rolled up to spam, and it happens because of the narrowing of the concept itself. Often crowd-marketing is understood as a placement of links for reference: act and evaluate the results according to this criterion.
But what it should be in reality? The fact is that crowd-marketing is a hybrid of several types of online promotion:
reputation management,
sales promotion by means of communication with the audience,
SEO optimization.
Crowd marketing is the symbiosis of the three approaches, but it is not one of them in pure form.
Tautology: guerrilla crowd marketing
Classic marketing with zero budget is advertising of your products or services on the discussion forums teeming with the target audience. Show yourself where people ask for advice to get additional sales.
Utopia: communication with the customer
Ideal crowd marketing is closely related to reputation management, when an expert advises users unobtrusively promoting your product. This increases the credibility of the business and brand awareness.
Crowd-marketing fits into the content strategy and takes over the function of the proliferation of materials, drawing attention to the content. It is possible that you are reading this article because you've followed a link from a social network or blog comments.
Crowd marketing is useful in promoting of info-causes; the opposite is true too - the creation of info-cause serves as a platform for the launch of a crowd-marketing campaign.
Oxymoron: natural SEO-links
We need to realize that your crowd marketing does not replace the reference promotion, so do not expect the growth of your position in the short term. The first tentative results can be seen after 3-6 months of hard work.
With the right approach you will get more traffic and dilute reference profile with "natural" links. One feedback will cause a one-time surge of traffic and the other will provide a steady flow of new users. But it is not the winning strategy to hope only for ratings in the hope to earn the love of the search engines.
Crowd-marketing is difficult
The approach, as you see, is not tricky: become a consumer or an expert, get the confidence on the forum, accumulate credibility and advice. But the simple circuit is actually a long labor-intensive process. There are several explanations of it.
It is not suitable for all subjects
It will be difficult to use crowd marketing for local themed business, and it will be very difficult to do it qualitatively: simply there are not enough grounds and reasons for placement reviews.
Specific niche
There are areas for which crowd marketing is not only complicated, but also often ineffective. For example, heavy industry or selling of specific equipment that is interesting to a narrow circle of specialists.
Hence there is the problem with an expert: professionals have no time to get involved in long discussions and for bloggers, who do not understand the subject, it is difficult to earn credibility.
The laborious process
Business has to choose: either to sacrifice precious hours of a professional or train and advise the staff of freelances. During the first couple of days of work, this may seem simple and amusing, but soon obvious sites for placement will end. Disappointment will increase when part of comments with links will be removed by a moderator, and a new account will fall into the ban.
Try to delegate this task to a staff member as the additional duties and see that there are reasons to shirk the new work. Chances are, if your crowd marketing will not be performed by a separately hired employee or outsourcer, the quality is lame.
The result is not visible at once
Moreover, there can not be a significant result for a particular subject. Therefore, before you spend your resources on your crowd marketing, make sure that there is no higher priority tasks: for example, works on internal optimization of website content or implementation of the plan.
The algorithm of work with a "difficult" theme:
Create a list of demands to the sites and links.
Choose a list of resources to accommodate.
Create and feel accounts.
Constantly monitor your network for the emergence of new themes, articles, answers.
Analyze the effectiveness of links on various resources.
Remove from list sites that do not work, or where your posts are constantly removed.
Try to create your own themes.
Whom to delegate?
Consider the pros and cons of delegation of a difficult task of crowd technologies.
To post by yourself
Mass "attack on the crowd" will not work if you deal with it optionally, but of course, you can get a small increase in traffic and a few dozen of natural links. In this case, a much more effective approach to the problem is from the point of view of reputation management.
A staff member
If you have an inhouse copywriter or SEO specialist, commission him to create a certain number of posts per month, describing the criteria:
useful and relevant comments,
contains no open advertisement,
text motivates to follow the link,
attendance of the resource is at least a certain number of unique visitors per month,
article age or date of the last comment in the topic on the forum are not older than specified.
Plus of this approach when your crowd marketing is performed by your employee, is that accounts are owned by your business, even if he is fired.
A freelancer
Depending on the professionalism and experience of a freelancer, you can get plausible comments to relevant topics or ordinary spam anywhere. When ordering services according to the principle "he is cheaper" you risk to harm your reputation.
Drawback of cooperation with "freelancers" is that not every copywriter will conscientiously study subjects before starting work.
Outsourcing
Drawback of work with the contractor is the price, it is cheaper to hire a freelancer. But the undoubted advantage is the professionalism of the performers who are engaged in crowd marketing on a permanent basis. Plus of their work is that before starting to work the agency explore the specifics and analyzes the prospects of crowd marketing for the themes, not to spend money and efforts in vain.
Why will crowd marketing die?
If the trend continues, crowd marketing will degenerate into spam. But this does not mean that users will no longer share sites with each other and optimizers will leave attempts to get links that are similar to natural. Ultimately, all artificial eventually dies, and the useful services and content are always in demand.
Approaches to crowd marketing can be classified by analogy with SEO. "White" way will serve us for a long time, and the "black" one will soon cease to work and turn into information noise.