Bloggers are people too!

I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable about all the “power of blogging” chest thumping going around. Look at our muscles, just look at how we bloggers have set the biggies to their heels. Atleast in India, bloggers are a very small, almost miniscule proprotion of internet users, who are a very small percentage of the population to begin with. Then, where is the question of making an impact. And on whom?

On the other hand, thinking about it, no denying that bloggers are making some difference. Take an uncontroversial situation, book reviews for instance. The Jabberwock’s piece in Business Standard says – Publishers and filmmakers are among those looking at web logs as tools of publicity — which could be the first step towards the mainstreaming of blogs. But limited connectivity is still an obstacle. Recently, publishing biggie Simon and Schuster approached a few Indian bloggers, including me – not the biggie lit bloggers – to have them read and review a couple of new titles on their own blogs.

Taking just the blogging world, such promotion is limited in its reach. Along with being cheap and effective. Then why does it make sense to use blogs for promotion and consider bloggers influential? Pardon me if I am stating the obvious here but bloggers are people too. We all have, well, most of us have lives beyond blogging (a fact that we seem to forget in this whole discussion about we the bloggers). And in that life, we meet other people who value our opinions and judgments, just as we do theirs. And what information I gain from reading other blogs, I pass on to people “offline”.

That is what the Power of Word of Mouth is all about. …that finds that consumers are “50% more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads. That was the idea behind this earlier post too – Shopping and advertising on blogs.

Taking a slightly more controversial situation, viz. the recent IIPM brouhaha, I see the issue as being larger than just we bloggers versus the rest of the world, specifically big bad IIPM. In the excitement of thinking about the impact that bloggers have made or can make with their blogs, there has been no mention of the power of negative word-of-mouth publicity that such an incident generates. One blogger tells ten other people (not necessarily bloggers) and each of the ten tells ten others… you get the drift.

9 comments

  1. Hmmm … I know what you mean about the net being miniscule in India. But personally, I think bloggers do have the potential to become quite influential – as you say, it’s not just about blogging, it’s also about offline word of mouth. And if one assumes that a lot of bloggers are people who “have something to say”, then we’re talking about an articulate, expressive and therefore influential community. AND given the potential for micro-targeting, I think marketers have quite an opportunity here.

    By the way, Charu – I’m a qual researcher too … I was pointed to your blog by Sujatha, because of our common background. I’m glad she tipped me off, I enjoyed reading your blog. Will be back 🙂

  2. Internet connectivity and accessibility is a major obstacle. But I agree with you about bloggers’ influence being extremely negligible right now. But I believe it is an incremental and bottom-up process, with few watershed moments (eg. IIPM) giving it a bump upwards. Until then, lets just have fun blogging like the good’ol days 🙂

  3. Anjali, thanks 🙂 exactly what I meant – that if bloggers generally can be considered articulate and capable of influencing even very small set of people, the snowball effect then takes over – word gets spread both online and offline.

    Patrix, both of us sound like wounded veterans when we talk about the good ole days 🙂
    my point actually was less about the negligible impact that bloggers have – it is in fact the reverse – I meant that bloggers do have tremendous influence but only if you consider them as “people”, with blogging being just one part of their lives…

  5. About the IIPM issue
    Times of India recently covered it
    with an article on it
    in Bangalore Times (Metro edition

    After reading it I felt like it was more of a
    paid advertisement put by IIPM

    TOI and IIPM have not yet learnt their lessons

  6. TOI will never learn its lesson. It is upto us bloggers to teach TOI a lesson. As a start, lets all boycott TOI in our homes and convince our friends and family to do the same. Those of us in marketing should ensure that no ads are given to TOI. I, as a doctor, will ensure that I tell all my patients to boycott TOI.

    Bloggers of the World Unite!!

  8. austere, long time 🙂
    saw your comment on the other post on beaches. go for it!

    abhay, docsdope, er, why the TOI here please? am lost.

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