A post with the title, Mind the Conversation Gap at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion caught my eye today, not only because TomorrowToday.biz uses a framework with a similar title (see Mind the Gap), but because in the post he has supplied solid emperical backing to the school of thought that encourages companies to think long and hard about possible opportunities to connect with customers and stakeholders via blogs on the Web.
To generate the data, one needs to employ the services of blog trend tools (like IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tools), and the process can be a little cumbersome, but the results are staggering.
Consider the following graph:
The blue line represents a search I ran for all mentions in blogs that included [“South Africa” and banking] WITHOUT any mention of Nedbank (1,528 results). The pink line is the same search, INCLUDING all mentions of Nedbank (33 results). That translates to an average of 16 potentially useful conversations about South African banking, taking place in blogs, that Nedbank is missing out on DAILY!
The exercise reveals that companies and organisations should be concerned, not only about what stakeholders might be saying in blogs – but perhaps even more so – the potentially overwhelming absence of any given company’s voice in those conversations.
If you’re not part of the conversation, get cracking. Contact us to tell you more about developing a blogging strategy for your organisation!
How are you losing out?
