If there ever was any doubt on the power of the blogging in Kenya, then Stefan’s blog post on Google’s alleged mischief should lay these doubts to rest.
After the Mocality-Google saga broke on Friday, am not sure even the CEO envisaged that it would go viral so fast. Several days after the buzz is still on. There are now several blog posts made across the blog sphere giving varied opinions of how various people view this saga, and provide their followers and opportunity to engage on it.
From my point of view Mocality should choose to look at the silver lining – the publicity it has gained from all this focus on it. I looked at the various blog posts and reactions, and yeah these are some of the numbers I got on how wide it spread: –
- From Stefan’s Mocality blog – 7956 tweets and 455 responses
- Nelson Matoos Google apology on Google +320, 177 shares and 117 comments
- At TNW – thenextweb.com – their post has been shared to 693 times with several comments on the page
At Topsy – I found even more interesting analysis where they have managed to capture the traffic on the Mocality blog, showing a spike on traffic on 12th, 13th and 14th and the almost negligible traffic before all this saga. 0 traffic to an amazing over 5000 links in a day. Talk about inbound marketing, surely Stefan it can not get better than this.
The Silver Lining for Mocality
After going through the Mocality blog, which I must confess just visited it today for the first time like many others who have in the last few days, it is evident that it has not been used much. The last posts being months apart. So shouldn’t this saga change the way Mocality engages with its clients.
Mocality is presented with an opportunity to take advantage of this traffic and continue to engage this audience not only to update all of us on the continuing soap opera with Google, but also address other issues that may have cropped up as a result.
A Blog is a powerful tool for enganging clients, without necessarily pushing products in their faces. It creates a two way conversation between the blogger in this case Mocality and the web users who choose to comment. This enable brands to create communities around their products and hence built trust, which is a major motivator to clients when buying certain brands.
So Mocality, will you embrace this once in a lifetime opportunity and keep blogging to get us coming back to your site for more or will you let us just fade away?
Mocality is a directory listing not a blog, they dont need to inrease the number of blog articles. They use the blog to communicate critical issues like they just did on friday. Why is it that everybody thinks Mocality wanted publicity? These guys have spent millions building the database and they need to protect it. Mocality want you to come back and search for businesses and not read their blog only.
I disagree with you Pnzasi. What mocality were protecting was not their database, coz for crying out loud, their database is free! The beef mocality has with google is that they were misrepresenting their collaboration or lack thereof, and also misrepresenting mocality. Google might just leave their site and get the numbers from the Postel Directory Instead! It would amount to the same thing.
And no, despite the fact that Mocality is a directory listing, ignoring the publicity that the site is getting is just naive! This publicity can be quite beneficial to them, if they decide to utilise it. It would be unwise not to make the most of the publicty.
And I do agree with pauline that although this publicity was scandal based, blogs can be quite powerful tools, if you know how to utilise them properly. It would be interesting if the next blogpost from mocality is on how their listings have impacted an actual Kenyan business grow or achieve sales, and not just an advert of how many page views they get or how many ads they have or something akin to that.
Mocality is first and foremost a business which has a bottom line, and it is this bottom line they seek to improve by putting up bill boards on all our major highways. This is out bound marketing a very expensive mode of marketing. This saga has created publicity for them whether they wanted it or not. So why not take advantage of it?
Blogs on the hand provides businesses an opportunity to engage their clients on a more personal level. This saga has offered Mocality an unrivaled world wide audience which they should engage. More of us can then not only consult their database for business contacts but also they should be better than the yellow pages by providing a human touch to their online presence and provide an interactive platform for their clients who have concerns they need addressed.