In a nutshell, we wanted to introduce better blogging in India. We had seen how massively different international blogging scenes were and we thought perhaps by sparking a conversation through a Twitter chat — we could engage similar thoughts and experiences here in India.
As India's first weekly Twitter Chat on Blogging, we didn't have any definitive purpose. A business flow done on a napkin over a fun dinner discussion became our DNA in many ways later.
But we did have some areas of focus. We assumed that all bloggerscreat good content, it is marketing create good content, it is marketing of it that comes in weakly. So analytics and numbers become our Buzz words.
We started punching our own reach and impressions every week to help break the ice (and fear) in the community.
Seeing these numbers, one of the brands got intrigued and reached out to us with a small campaign. We were surprised, But we thought — hey, why not!
It was at this juncture we realized that the next steps at Blogchatter cannot be a myopic version of what we wish it to be. So we hired a team and also set in a robust listening mechanism deep into the blogging community.
And we heard:
Bloggers want to turn
authors – we created
India's first Ebook Carnival.
Bloggers want to map their own
growth against a standardized tool –
we championed the use of
Amazon's Alexa in helping them
understand their global ranking.
In between we started hearing
soft murmurs of "paid projects."
Before this we were averse to the
idea of paid collaborations but we
quickly concluded that no amount
of growth and 'take your blog to
the next level' can come about if
we do not close the other loop of
ecosystem – the brands.
So we had to do it right; something
that was unique in the industry and
changing. We listened to the gaps in
the system – bloggers were battling
payment issues and brands were failing
to understand how to curate
content that is the exact sweet spot
between their messaging and blogger's
online presence.
We took a few steps back, went to
our drawing board, worked
through our competencies,
figured some levers that
hadn't been tried before,
and came up with our own
copyrighted blogger
outreach program.
The program ensured completion
of payments for bloggers within 15
days of closure of campaign (and
raising of invoice).
We further evolved our approach to ensure
that the outreach generated was not the blip
and miss (as brands often complained
about) but long term advocacy that
benefited them in building longer shelf
lives.
Soon enough we heard "bloggers
want to create videos" and so
we turned around our video blogging
festival – Lights Camera Chatter.
But we hadn't quite finished two
seasons of it, when the chimes of
podcasts came in.
We had to take a pitstop.
In half a decade we had grown so
much with our community that
the purpose of our mission and ideology also had to evolve.
We had to go back to our drawing
boards and after some
brainstorming what came out
clearly was one simple thing : we had
assumed in the beginning that
bloggers knew how to create
content, but with so many new
kinds of content flooding our
internet space that assumption
was fast failing.
So Blogchatter 2.0 (or
#BlogchatterReloaded) had to
grow into How to Create and
Market. The focus had to shift
from blogger's marketing and
community story to further add to
blogger's personal growth story.
Here we are, with more tricks
in our bag than you can discover
—Blogchatter is ready to talk about YOU.