Sustainable Marketing - are Bloggers "Buying" what You're Saying?

Toyota's 17% of the conversation, captured talk about their green image. GM's 6% of the conversation, captured talk from skeptics and neutral responses.

Just who are the market influencers? How do they think? Are they buying what you're selling? Is your green message resonating as authentically as you had hope? Are you ready to back it up?

Last week, Umbria Listens put on a timely webinar that captured not only the state of the blogosphere, but the state of things to come when creating a tipping point for market influence. The full webinar is free to download at their site.

Umbria is a research company that scans social media. For this webinar they scanned for key GREEN phrases like eco-friendly, Sustainable, green... and then analyzed the discussions around them. Here's where it gets interesting - they can also get a good idea of if the writers are male or female and part of the Gen X, Y or Boomer crowd. It's not an exact science, but it's an indication of things to come. For the sake of this study, they identified 160,000 blogs to monitor.

Here's what you need to know:

• Activists or champions of Climate Change and all things green, are few and far between, but growing. Only 18% are in the ACTIVE role which means you have a lot of people for are waiting to be impressed by you. Find yourself on the chart below. Now locate your dominate customer...
• The conversation has shifted from "is there Global Warming" to "What can we do about it". Conversations around Sustainability are up 65% from January-December 2007.
• Energy - saving theirs or saving the world's - resonates the most.

Your buyer, whether it's a consumer or someone in purchasing, may fall into any of these quadrants. The webinar provides a full breakout of each. The important thing to note is that they broke it into two levels of action, Personal and Social.

Personal was just that, bloggers reacted personally. Social was on a higher level of conversation and more important as it influences others, not just them.

This is a big deal. Old focus group research looked at how the individual reacts to a product or campaign. Measuring online influence adds a whole new discussion to marketing. It's why having a Life Cycle Assessment and a standard to back up what you are saying is so important. This crowd doesn't suffer fools or worse, it makes fools, suffer.

How's your industry being talked about? See below.

Much can be learned from bloggers that can help you fine tune your marketing message, such as:

Oil companies are bad, but energy companies are good (how are you saving them and your company, energy?)

Electronics get more buzz than appliances (tackle electronics first if you carry both)

Packaging is a BIG deal. (It's personal as people have to touch it and then personally dispose of it.)

The final takeaways were this: keep the message simple, personal and VISABLE. Show your green side in a distinctive way and be ready to back it up.

Contact: Mary@EcolutionarySelling.com

About Mary

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Comments

[Bea Kunz]

Mary,

I am so crazy about your blog!
Tons of useful information.

I shall spend some time reading and tapping into some of the things I see here.

Thanks for all you obviously do.

Bea Kunz
http://www.sagehillfarmsandvintagestore.com