Blekko Makes Influencing the Influencers Easy

Custom influencer searches for PR and marketing professionals who lead brand-reputation programs

Blekko is a new search engine that includes some time saving features for PR and marketing professionals who want to track a narrow set of online publications or domains. By allowing you to select only the domains or pages that you want searched, it helps you stay focused on the people who really influence your business and reduces the spam in your coverage scans.

Blekko uses what it calls Slashtags that allow you to "slash in" or "slash out" what you want in a search. This easy-to-use process allows you to create a complicated search, publish it for others to use and then repeat it quickly. For example, a Blekko user named Max created a list of advertising publications. If you wanted to do a search to see if your company was mentioned in AdAge, Adweek or MediaPost, you would search in Blekko like this:

Company Name /max/advertising

That string searches for "Company Name" using Max's predefined list of advertising domains. A snip of those publications can be seen below.


Instead of getting back a bunch of spam blogs like I do with a Google search, Blekko only gives me back results from the 21 publications that matter in the advertising and media industry. If you add a /date Slashtag, it will sort those results by date instead of relevancy. Another great tool when you are monitoring the web daily for news on you or your competitors.

Additionally, Blekko allows you to publish these searches in RSS so you can share them with your teammates or with your client. Pop them into Google Reader and you have a searchable archive of your news that is easy to read, process and report.

The current downside I'm finding with Blekko is that some of the less-popular domains are only searched every 14 days. Hopefully Blekko will address that issue as they come out of beta and put together the computing power to crawl the Internet faster.

Blekko has been in a super stealth mode for more than a year. They seem to be on solid financial ground with $20 million in financing. I'm not going to call them a Google killer because that would surely doom them. They are building some steam and they gave Robert Scoble a peek at their product in this long, but informative 45 minute YouTube video.




Blekko is really a lot more than the simple features that I've outlined. For example, the SEO rankings are radically different because they are completely open. I'll leave it to others to give you the feature-by-feature review. If you're a PR or marketing person managing the reputation of a brand, you really must give Blekko a try.

You may find that my Blekko links in this post don't work for you. You may need to get an invite to Blekko before you can access them. On Twitter, Follow @blekko and then ask for an invite and they'll direct message you in a day or so. Or you can email your request to scoble+at+ blekko.com (I lifted this address from the end of the Robert Scoble video).

What is the Value of a Brand Advocate?

How much is an enthusiastic advocate of your brand worth to you? It turns out that it is 5X their lifetime value to you. For example, if they spend $500 buying dinner at your restaurant over a few years, then you can estimate their value at $2,500 according to a recent white paper from Zuberance. A simple definition of this powerful consumer is someone who is willing to recommend your brand their friends or advocate on your behalf.

I've found these people difficult to find, but once they are found they are even more difficult to engage. You'd think in this world of email and Facebook I could capture them in a database and message to them. The problem is that they don't like that. According to a study by Deloitte, 53 percent of advocates (vs 33 percent for consumers) want to be recognized as an individual with individual needs. The second challenge is that brand advocates tend to believe they are busier than the average consumer, so convenience in use and access is important. The good news is that advocates tend to be more social and outgoing and are much more likely to share. Deloitte's research also found that brand advocates are more likely to be perfectionists, and more likely to be the first to buy new products.

So this is where the campaign to build 15,000 advocates for your successful software start-up fails. Most marketing and PR departments simply don't have the resources to interact with the large influx of advocates over a long term. You can find them with email surveys, but then what do you say back to them? Sure, you can send them a tin of mints (I just got some from one of my favorite brands), but what you really need is to help direct their efforts in a positive direction that they see as valuable. Just like a bunch of volunteers who show up with hammers to a Habitat for Humanity house building project, it is critical that you give each person a job that they see as meaningful so they will want to come back. Similarly, the energy emanating from your brand advocates needs to be focused like a laser to help them share that excitement with others. In the restaurant example, you can ask each of those advocates to share their honest reviews on Yelp. Or you could ask them to share your restaurant's Facebook Fan page with their friends.

There are lots of simple ways to build that word-of-mouth, but I still see most of these efforts fail for some simple reasons. First, many advocates will find it too time consuming to go home, find your Yelp site and then write a meaningful review. You have to harness the enthusiasm when they are actually in a position to write something. Today that is likely to be in front of their computer. Second, they need a variety of places to advocate. Once they have posted on Yelp, they can't post there again. You have to continue to present them with fresh opportunities to talk about you. Third, managing this stuff in spreadsheets and direct email systems simply won't work. You never learn more about what the advocate does and it is impossible to measure. This all comes down to something I say often about advocacy building - It simply does not scale.

“It is what companies do with fans that create value, not merely that a brand has fans,” says Forrester’s Augie Ray in a blog post.

Zuberance has build a platform that helps companies identify advocates, direct them to places where they can contribute and then track the results. They are currently working with large consumer and tech brands on campaigns that would crash my spreadsheet and email methods of the past. These types of CRM systems for advocates are exactly what is needed to overcome the scale issue. Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance CEO, tells a story about how they recently responded to a crisis with a brand that was receiving lots of bad online reviews. Using unpaid advocates, they were able to settle down the issue by activating the advocates to balancing out the negative comments.

With the right systems to focus the efforts of your brand's advocates' enthusiasm you can unlock their 5X value and create a cost-effective word-0f-mouth campaign.