The Politics of Promoted Content in the Kenyan Blogosphere
Audiences have gotten used to adverts in other forms of media, so why do they feel betrayed when bloggers write promoted content?
The content war that has been brewing on the Kenyan blogosphere has come full circle. Where bloggers previously produced content as a hobby, many have turned to it as a possible form of self-employment. The problem, it seems, is that audiences often feel betrayed when bloggers write or post promoted content.
On Twitter, the often divisive #KOT often barrage bigwigs (online celebrities with thousands of followers) for posting promoted content. The circle starts with an individual opening a Twitter account and growing an audience to thousands of followers. Corporate organizations, eager to build an online identity, then seek out the person and pay him or her to tweet. NGOs and even government agencies are now doing it too.
First, the step towards cash payments is a big one for content creators. For almost a decade, content creators have been trying to fight the notion that all they need is status, food and drink. Organizations would often invite people to product launches and furnish them with food and drink, and ask them severally to tweet about the event. This worked, and probably still does, for traditional news reporters. For them, the event is part of the job, and they get paychecks at the end of the month. But what about the self-employed blogger?
For this paradigm shift to happen, Kenyan bloggers and content creators had to refocus towards creating more content and valuing themselves. This discussion has been had many times, especially among writers like yours truly. The question is how to value the work you do, the number of tweets you write and their value to the brand. How do you defend a certain quotation to a client, and are you sure that you deliver the numbers? Retweets and Favorites on Twitter may surprise you, and yet you have to cater for that too.
The blogosphere differs from traditional media in another key aspect, impressions. Where newspapers have traditionally defended their impressions by saying at least each paper is read by three people, a blogger knows the exact number of people who visited his or her blog. He also knows how long they stayed, and what they read. Unlike a billboard company that estimates that people look at billboards for 3 seconds, there are online metrics to tell you exactly how long a reader stayed on your site, and a specific post. Corporates did not take this as seriously as they should have, mostly because marketing managers were still attached to the three primary television stations and newspapers.
The Digital migration expanded the field, slashing the audiences for leading television stations. It did something else, by forcing corporates to rethink their digital brands. It was, and still is, cheaper to advertise online for a week than for a week on prime time television, and you can gauge your brand strength better online. Bloggers took time to know this too, and while they did that, they ate free meals and got free movie tickets, and had to hold two or three jobs.
The blogger who wants to be self-employed has to first build an audience, and thus a key primary audience. He also has to be ready for something else, getting ignored by that audience, or out rightly called out for being a ‘paid pen.’ But what is wrong with that? If audiences have been watching television for decades and have not had a problem with promoted content and adverts, what is different about online media?
The problem seems to be a personal attachment. When blogs started in Kenya, as, in the rest of the world, they were mostly online diaries where people posted their thoughts and experiences. They built audiences in specific demographics, mostly those who shared their interests. The audiences felt they owned the brand, and rightly so, and would find ways to get the blogger to write more. But they didn’t pay for anything, and that helped. It helped the blogger build and audience and only meant they were separated by costs of connecting to the internet.
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
But the blogger couldn’t survive on that goodwill forever. Blogs cost money to maintain, and while some can comfortably do it as a labor of love or as a hobby, the blogger is now a cultural icon. Like a musician or an artist, he has to find a way to live off his art. To do that, he must find a way of teaching his audience to read and experience promoted content. For that to happen, he must find a way to recalibrate the personal attachment.
Consumers get attached to brands. That is the specific reason for which we build them anyway. Coca-Cola prints names on cans to get consumers to feel the brand cares about them, the same reason why Equity Bank will email you a personalized Birthday card every year. Personal service is what keeps brands in dominance in niches. Media houses build brands too and find ways to get audiences to feel a personal attachment. Blogs are brands too.
As the new face of content marketing, bloggers need to become businessmen. Business means finding a way to give your audiences and clients what they need. Kenyan corporates want brand visibility, and they need it particularly online. Audiences need content, and they are increasingly hungry for more and better content. More and more people are diverting their newspaper money to buying Internet bundles and paying for subscriptions.
There is no perfect way to train your audience to read promoted content. The golden rule though is that you must never try to trick your readers. Don’t. You’ll be tempted to, but you are not smarter than everyone. This doesn’t mean that you should be blatant about it though, as that will lose you even more readers.
Readers feel betrayed because bloggers are showing a little effort to integrate content marketing into the niches they have built. They tweet and write about interests they have never cared about before, and do little tweaking to obey the brands they have built. Audiences feel betrayed because the blogger’s brand voice becomes inauthentic when they talk about other brands.
Promoted content thus lacks the brand elements that brings audiences to your site. To do content marketing and build our audiences, we have to first define and internalizes the blog brands we want to build. We have to be true to them, and not be too greedy about the offers coming our way. For your brand to make an actual difference in the brand visibility of a corporate or NGO, it has to be a deliberate and organic effort.
To do so, Kenyan bloggers must understand the value of content marketing over traditional media. Where content publicity in traditional media is disruptive and only serves itself, content online can be shaped to offer the audience more than just press release material. Where content publicity only holds attention for a short span, the internet never forgets. There is value here, but it needs to be more proactively managed and shaped to offer audiences anything of value.
Always remember, blogs are brands.
Image from http://revel.in/content-marketing/
Owaahh, 2015.
