Blogging influencers could be music to a marketeer's ears

In the ever-changing digital landscape, bloggers have risen to prominence as influencers, playing an important role in helping consumers pick and choose the products and services on which they want to spend their time and money. However, even with the many disparate social media apps that distract consumers from "traditional" blogs, there remains a huge number who have influence across many different spheres and represent a useful resource for marketers.

The problem remains how to identify and classify the many, many bloggers for best impact in a marketing campaign. A research study in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising shows how a comprehensive framework can classify consumer bloggers based on their unique content creation approach.

Beatrice Ietto and Federica Pascucci of the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, Italy, have drawn on social-practice theory to construct their classification framework. In this theory, content creation is viewed as habitual behavior shaped by socio-cultural contexts. The team has focused on an extensive netnographic analysis of Australian music bloggers to offer new insights into the critical factors that influence a blogger's content creation approach.

The work shows that blogger in this niche create content primarily driven by their subjective evaluation of four key dimensions: personal influences, audience influences, community influences, and commercial influences. These dimensions play a pivotal role in shaping the blogger's content creation strategies and determining the nature of their engagement with their readership.

With the details of these insights to hand, the team created a multidimensional framework for the classification of bloggers as "passionate," "hype followers," "sophisticated and sub-cultural," "celebratory and overly positive, and the "professionals." The framework could offer marketing practitioners a useful resource for identifying and collaborating with the most appropriate bloggers that mesh well with their promotional strategies. The framework goes beyond the simplistic metrics of site "hits" and "reach" and looks at how the blog functions and how that would seamlessly work with a marketing campaign.