Business: Every year in the United States, there are approximately 2.5 million weddings. Weddings have grown to become a $40 billion per year industry.

Brides: They’ll spend more money on that one day than they will on any other day of their lives (with the exceptions of buying houses and paying for their kids’ weddings).

Blogs: In social media words, such a large business segment translates in a broad community of wedding bloggers/twitterers aggregating an audience of millions who are going through their wedding process. That is, approximately: 2.5 million weddings * 2 brides/grooms * 2 helping mothers * 40% who read blogs.

For brands playing into the wedding industry, understanding the key voices and the nature of the conversations taking place in social media represents a critical knowledge in support of any marketing activities.

Let’s have a look at the blogging piece of the SM wedding puzzle. For that purpose, we’ll analyze our tribe of 699 wedding bloggers, 80% of whom are located in the US and 20% elsewhere.

Who’s Who? The Top 20 Wedding Blogs:

Rank	Title	URL	Twitter	Tweet..
1	Style Me Pretty	http://www.stylemepretty.com
2	Once Wed	http://www.oncewed.com
3	100 Layer Cake	http://www.100layercake.com/blog
4	Wedding Chicks	http://www.weddingchicks.com
5	Ruffled ®	http://www.ruffledblog.com
6	Green Wedding Shoes Wedding	http://www.greenweddingshoes.com
7	Weddingbee	http://www.weddingbee.com
8	Elizabeth Anne Designs	http://www.elizabethannedesigns.com/blog
9	Snippet & Ink	http://www.snippetandink.com
10	Brooklyn Bride	http://www.bklynbrideonline.com
11	Weddings	http://www.elizabethannedesigns.com
12	Southern Weddings	http://www.swsmag.net
13	The Bride’s Cafe	http://www.thebridescafe.com
14	Ritzy Bee Blog	http://ritzybee.typepad.com
15	kiss the groom	http://www.kissthegroom.com
16	classic bride	http://classicbride.blogspot.com
17	Hostess with the Mostess®	http://www.hostessblog.com
18	The Broke-Ass Bride	http://www.thebrokeassbride.com
19	Project Wedding Blog	http://www.projectwedding.com/blog
20	Utterly Engaged	http://www.utterlyengaged.com

In term of audience, the top 3 have a cumulated audience of more than 200k unique visitors per month as indicated below; alltogether, this community is well above the millions unique visitors per month:

How are they connected? A look at the network formed by this tribe shows several clusters (clockwise: green/yellow, red, light blue, salmon, magenta, green, orange/yellow) corresponding to smaller networks within the community:

What’s the conversation about?

The cloud above shows 3 main topical categories:

• Wedding Planning
• Critical components of a successful wedding: Cake, dress, invitations, photography
• People: Bride, Groom, Friends and Family

If we drill down in the planning category, we find that it’s all about:

1. making that day special (see keywords like fun/beautiful/party),
2. understanding it’s a complex process (details, help, planner)
3. being inspired (inspiration, idea)
4. friends and family (guest, friends and family)

Brands in the wedding industry should pay close attention to the new breed of movers and shakers:

1. Know who they are and what makes them unique
2. Understand what is hot and important
3. Engage and help them in their activity by doing something buzz worthy
4. Build long term relationship with them. It’s a network economy

The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?

Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.

Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.

The video game blog community is large and extremely active.

• Collaboration and sharing has never been better with the new annotations.
• Finding the information you really care about has never been easier with the new filtering mechanism.
• Our combo of ‘finding blogs’ features has been greatly enhanced.

A picture is worth a thousand words so here it goes:

Annotations:

Choose the action you want to take and view a record of all actions:

• Recommend a post (To share with your team members)
• Add notes (To keep a record of your own analysis)
• Track comment (For your record and to do some follow up later on)
• Forward (To notify someone in / outside of your team)
• Plan action (To record a ‘todo’ )
• Star a blog

Filters

Thanks to filters, you can narrow the posts’ list to what you really care about (it’s helpful when you have created a project to listen to x00 blogs and you have x00000 posts in your database). You can refine the results even more within a specific filter (for exemple, in a filter on social media marketing you could refine on twitter to get all the post talking about twitter). We also provide an RSS feed to those filters. With them, you can share with a broader audience on specific topics or create some very cool widgets or get an alert whenever something new has been publishing within them.

Add Blogs

mmm I think we should call it Add pages with an RSS . Though our primarily focus is tactically on blogs, it’s possible to add other type of content sources into Conversation(tm). We have users adding stock ticker headlines like Yahoo AAPL healines or twitter search like Obama or McCain twittering.

The key addition this time is what we call ‘preferred search’. You can now save your searches (save only those that have brought back enough relevant results). When you do, Conversation™ will run them in the background and create a ranked list of suggested blogs that you can analyze at any time. We recommend you find 4 or 5 good searches combinations, save them and come back to check your suggested blogs once or twice a week.

So here is the new Add Blogs page:

The information could be very valuable if you’re trying to estimate the time & resource you will need to put in listening and engaging with many relevant blogs in your target segment.

On a sample of blogs’ lists that we manage, we looked at the number of posts we received in the last week and, by dividing by the number of blogs in the list, we arrived at a rough estimate of the posting frequency for each of them. Here’s what it looks like:

So the average is .35 post per blog per day. Indeed each list has an average number between .30 and .40 post per day. Note the 2 exceptions in blue: For wireless and premier league soccer, its more around 1 blog per post per day.

Blogs are definitely something that any company looking at listening to social media should have on their radar screen. If you want to do it well, you have to go through a huge amount of content (look at the size of the blog list above) in order to:

• spot what’s going on your communities.
• engage in relevant conversations.

Make sure you are ready to invest the time required for it. It does take time!

As we saw with social network profiles, the numbers are quite different across topics. Here’s the skinny on the topics’ percentages using the same topics as during our previous analysis:

• At the top is Personal Finance blogs – ~60% – We found quite interesting that this was the ‘worst’ topic in our social network profile analysis but it’s the top one for advertising network. Are personal finance bloggers more eager to monetize their property than others?
• 2nd is Blogging with aroun 50%.
• 3rd ex-aequo are Wireless and Gaming with about 40%.
• 5th is Cosmetology with 29%.
• Then we got Enterprise Security (~20%), Social Media Marketing (~15%), Enterprise 2.0 (~13%).

Conclusion: It’s clear that advertising is widely present on blogs. What’s truly interesting is that the order above is almost the reverse order that we got when we did the social network profile analysis.

One interpretation is that bloggers that are targeted toward ‘consumers’ have a tendency to try and monetize more than those targeted to ‘business’ but on the other hand put a lower priority on being social network friendly: For example, Personal Finance and Blogging blogs are mostly targeting consumers!

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?

Well, one critical aspect of advertising is relevance. If you advertise on the right blogs, you automatically get relevance assuming you pick those who are related to what you want to advertise. And if you can find a lot of them for your campaign (fyi, we ran a campaign on 900 blogs once), you get the same traffic as you would for a top website. Sweet!

The 7 lists we used for our empirical study are Personal finance (1501 blogs), Blogging (968 blogs), Social Media Marketing (698 blogs), Gaming (429 blogs), Cosmetology (400 blogs), Wireless (240 blogs) and Enterprise 2.0 (35 blogs). A quick note to state that we don’t pretend having found all the blogs in those categories , we found a lot of them but we don’t know where the end is.

The differences are huge as you can see and point, most of the time, to a poor level of integration between people’s blogs and social profiles:

• At the top is Social Media Marketing – No surprise, we were expecting it. Bloggers in this category stay on top of the social media wave. Our figures show at least a third of Social Media Marketing bloggers display their social network profile on their blog. Right now Conversation(tm) detects only badges on the home page; but in the future, we will detect them on the about page too.
• 2nd is Enterprise 2.0 with a bit more than 20%
• 3rd is Wireless with a litte more than 10%
• 4th is Enterprise Security with a little less than 9%
• Then we got blogging (~4%), Cosmetology (~3%), Gaming (~2%).
• Last is personal finance (~1%)

Now let’s look a little deeper at what’s happening in our list of Social Media Marketing blogs.

Some blogs are group blogs where we typically don’t expect to find social network badges. If we take a swag at narrowing to only blogs from individuals, it would probably bump the percentage to the vicinity of 50%. Not bad!

But the story really gets interesting with this last experiment: On a small sample (10) of blogs from individual bloggers who didn’t have a social network badge in their blog, we found their profile in LinkedIn and, 8 times out of 10, the blog is listed on it. Honestly we don’t think its that way on purpose (i.e: bloggers don’t want readers to find their social network profiles). It’s more a data integration issue.

Conclusion: There’s a long way to go before we see a tight integration between blogs and profiles so you can go seamlessly from one to the other in order to have a complete picture of the bloggers you like. With the exception of blogs hosted on a social network (niche social network), the infrastructures are separate (blogs powered by wordpress, typepad and so on, profiles powered by social network platforms) thus the issue.

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?
The answer is quite straightforward. Nowadays, when we see a piece of content from someone, we go and google them or check if we find them in social networks because it gives us more information about the author as well as additional ways to build a relationship with them if we desire. We do that all the time and I’m sure you do too! The issue discussed in this post makes it harder than if one little click was all it takes to go from a blog to a profile.

Here, one of our job is to deal with fragmented infrastructure and bring them together in a seamless and meaningful user experience so we see a nice issue to solve. Let us know what you think!

There has been tons of writing about it on social media marketing blogs and, to summarize, the bottom line looks like: They need first to become part of it (not just monitor on the sideline but join them as someone else said) and, second, they need to adopt a new engagement model (listen to people first). And it’s hard work.
Can they ignore it? Nope….it’s not going away.
Social Media is becoming mainstream everywhere, so companies are struggling with:

1. How to find a large number of relevant communities where to engage
2. How to organize active listening; and this spans from product marketing teams to PR
3. How to develop social marketing campaign that mix blogger outreach, buzz, viral marketing and more traditional online advertising on web2.0 properties.

Conversation, our online application to find/listen/engage with communities, enables a marketing team to get better at 1, 2 and 3. Conversation is designed for collaboration and sharing thus its work group ready and you can have multiple users working together and sharing at the same time.
To get started, you create a custom database of relevant social media based on your target. This is done through a combo of blogsearch/bookmark/upload features. Social media is a very dynamic world thus having an integrated way to populate and maintain your list of target communities is critical. For our own usage, we’ve built a database of 600+ blogs talking about social media marketing and it’s growing over time as we discover new blogs we hadn’t seen before.
Once you’ve populating your database, you’re automatically subscribed to all the communities and you can listen to them using a composite view of the content that has been published by them (using the same example as before, we store 20 000 posts in our database and get more than 200 everyday). Of course this is a massive amount of information but the trick is that if you do it as a team with the right tools, it’s doable. Our list is easy to scan and, when you find something relevant, you can read the details and reply to it or just share it with a note. By the way, the list is searchable. You can even set filters to make your favorite topics stand out.
Though the debate is still on, we suspect the right social media engagement model will mix direct interaction with influencers, participation in conversation, and use of buzz/viral and mass traditionnal online advertising mecanism. Conversation provides useful data on social network profiles, advertising network profiles and more so you can plan and manage your ‘campaign’ saccording to your need.

Voila, a picture is worth a 1000 words so here’s a demo of the beast.

And a few screenshot based on a wireless project a client is running on our app:

Blog list —

Post list —