Blogs are more influential than social networks

So says the latest Technorati digital influence report anyway.  It should be noted as a caveat of course that Technorati are a blog search engine, so they might be accused of looking out for their own with the report.  There are however some interesting findings.

The report marks a shift from their traditional State of the Blogosphere report, branching out to analyse the full range of social media.  It saw them survey 6,000 influencers, 1,200 consumers and 150 top brand marketers.

An interesting finding was that despite spending on social generally rising, just 11% of social spending went towards blogger outreach and general influencer engagement.  This is despite their belief that blogs influence consumers more than any other form of social media.

In other words, where brands spend money and where consumers are influence is rather disconnected.  A fundamental reason for this is the relatively poor ROI attributed to content marketing and blogger outreach.  This is underlined by the most common metrics used to judge success.

As you can see, most fall firmly in the vanity metrics camp, with no mention of anything directly attributable to the success or otherwise of the brand.

If content marketing is to achieve the results it is capable of then it needs to start both delivering and proving grown up results that benefit the business.

Republished with permission