vietnam national university, HANOI
hanoi school of business

Nguyen Van An

A STUDY ON BLOG MARKETING
THE CASE OF BAAMBOO.COM

Master of business administration thesis

Hanoi - 2007


vietnam national university, HANOI
hanoi school of business

Nguyen Van An

A STUDY ON BLOG MARKETING
THE CASE OF BAAMBOO.COM

Major: Business Administration
Code: 60 34 05

Master of business administration thesis

Supervisors: dr. nguyen viet anh

Hanoi – 2007




Significance ............................................................................................................................................. 8

8.

Limitation................................................................................................................................................ 8

9.

Expected results ...................................................................................................................................... 9

10.

Outline ................................................................................................................................................ 9

CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL FOUNDATION ................................................................................ 10
1.

2.

3.

Blogging basic ....................................................................................................................................... 10
1.1.

Blog definitions ............................................................................................................................. 10

1.2.

Types of blog ................................................................................................................................. 11


3.4.

Step 4: Design for readers ............................................................................................................ 21

3.5.

Step 5: Publishing Blog ................................................................................................................ 21

3.6.

Step 6: Launching Blog and Getting Noticed ............................................................................... 21

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

3.7.
4.

5.

Step 7: Monitoring and Managing Blog ....................................................................................... 22

Marketing with blog ............................................................................................................................. 22
4.1.

Talking with customers ................................................................................................................. 23


1.

Introduction to Baamboo ..................................................................................................................... 37

2.

Baamboo blog structures ..................................................................................................................... 37

3.

4.

5.

2.1.

Baamboo blog ............................................................................................................................... 38

2.2.

Baamboo blog design ................................................................................................................... 38

2.3.

Main features ................................................................................................................................ 40

2.4.

Additional features........................................................................................................................ 43


4.4.

Findings ........................................................................................................................................ 67

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 68

CHAPTER THREE: SOLUTIONS TO IMPROVE BAAMBOO BLOG ............................................... 69
1.

Content solutions .................................................................................................................................. 69
1.1.

Building comment policy .............................................................................................................. 69

1.2.

Improve entries content quality .................................................................................................... 73

1.3.

Improve Blog design, layout ......................................................................................................... 75

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

2.

Marketing solutions.............................................................................................................................. 76

Figure 3.16 Percentage of Returning Visitors ..................................................................... 61
Figure 3.17 Growth of returning visit .................................................................................. 61
Figure 3.18 Percentage of loyal visitors .............................................................................. 62
Figure 3.19 Number of commnents ..................................................................................... 63
Figure 3.20 Average pageview for all visitors ..................................................................... 63
Figure 3.21 Average Time Spent on Site ............................................................................. 64
Figure 3.22 Percent of Visits Greater than 180 Seconds ..................................................... 65
Figure 3.23 Percent of Committed Visits (> 2 page views per visit)................................... 66

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

List of table
Table 3.1 Baamboo blog entries contents ............................................................................ 41
Table 3.2 Numbers of comments by entries on Baamboo blog ........................................... 42
Table 3.3 Baamboo Mp3 comments categories and subcategories ..................................... 51
Table 3.4: Part of Baamboo Mp3 comments list after categoried ....................................... 51
Table 3.5 Baamblog key performance indicators from June to September ......................... 56
Table 3.6 Percentage of bounce rate for new and returning visitors ................................... 60

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

INTRODUCTION
1.



A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

With these above objectives, this thesis aims at giving a basic theoretical
foundation for other companies in general, and internet companies in
particular to implement blog marketing for their business activities.
3.

Research questions
The complete list of research questions is as follows:

 What are definition, type, common features of blog and business blog?
 Why is blog important to business?
 What are steps in blogging?
 How blog is used in marketing?
 How to measure blog marketing performances?
 What has the Baamboo blog done so far?
 What are Baamboo blog‘s results?
 What are Baamboo blog‘s problems?
 What are solutions to improve Baamboo blog performances?
4.

Scope of work
For the theoretical foundation, this thesis will study the blog theory in

the world of internet companies since 2005 when blog became a worldwide
phenomenon.
For the case study, this thesis will choose the first area of blog marketing
– taking with customers – to study because this is the most popular area that
exists in Vietnamese internet services industry now. Baamboo blog case

8.

Limitation
The biggest limitation of this thesis is due to the freshness of internet

services industry in Vietnam in general, and blog in particular, therefore few
academicals reviews have been applied and proved. In case of the Baamboo
blog, it has just run for four months, so it may be early to measure and judge
its marketing performance.
The other limit is from case study method. This method cannot cover all
the theoretical issues of blog marketing. Thus, later this case, this thesis only
studies one out of five areas in blog marketing and applies some related key
performance indicators to analyze performance for the Baamboo blog.

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

9.

Expected results
The thesis expects to give the systematical theory in blog marketing, find

out Baamboo blog performance shortcomings and proposes solutions to
improve it.
10.

Outline
Excluding introduction, conclusion and reference part, this thesis

1.1.

Blog definitions
Blog is not a new word though its history is still short. Jeremy Wright

(2006)3 has listed a number of blog terms:

1

Source />Source />3
Jeremy Wright (2006), Blog Marketing, the revolutionary new way to increase sales, build your brand, and
get exceptional results, McGraw Hill , page 7.
2

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

 Blog A website comprising blog posts or content written by the blogger,
which are typically organized into categories and sorted in reverse
chronological order. Most blogs allow readers to comment on individual
blog posts.
 Blog posts or blog entry Individual items posted to the blog (using
blogware) by the blogger.
 Blogger The individual who maintains the blog and/or writes blog posts
using the blogware.
 Blogosphere The community of blogs, bloggers, and blog posts.
 Blogware Software used to create blog posts and manage blogs.
 The conversation What happens when bloggers, especially millions of


Photoblogs, also called Phlogs are special kind of blogs where a group of
people or individuals share their photos collected from various sources. In
photoblogs, images are the main content; we all know that a picture speaks a
thousand words. The usual subjects of photoblogs are films, wars, herbs,
natural beauty, or even weird images, and so forth; it is impossible to specify
all of them.
These blogs are generally dedicated towards a specific audience such as
photographers, artistes, etc. Most photoblogs are free. And most of photobloggers use popular image-sharing service to share their photos. We can list
out many popular images sharing service such as Flickr (www.flickr.com),
SmugMug

(),

or

Zoomr

(www.zoomr.com),

PicasaWeb ().
1.2.3. Mobile Blogs
Mobile blogs are often known as Moblogs. In this type of blogs, people
access the contents and modify them for their mobile phones or portable
devices like PDAs. Mobile blogs are very popular these days due to the
availability of portable devices. Moblogs are usually developed in Japan
where people have a huge number and variety of portable devices with
cameras. Mobile blogs are often known as gLogs (pronounced as glogs),
when they are especially used as photoblogs.


community grew to more than 1000 members in June, 2005; Apple declared
that its iPod will play video files; and, Apple's iTune store will also serve
videos. These days VlogMap.org shows vloggers from around the world with
the help of Google Earth and Google Maps.

4

Audio format include mp3 (the most popular format), wma, aac, ogg, etc.

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

1.3.

Common blog elements
Blog differs in structure depending on what blog service used. However,

they still have common elements in structures. Each blog has not only
chronological entries and archives but also the following5:
Author byline - A byline above (or below) each entry is less important in
personal blog than in-group blogs. Still, many blogs carry that byline as a
default setting in the blog software.
Permalink - Short for ―permanent link,‖ this link takes the visitor from
the index page to the entry‘s unique page.
Blogroll - The blogroll is not a requirement, but it is a tradition to list the
blogger‘s favorite blogs in a sidebar. The blogroll is usually common to every
page of the blog, so visitors can see favorite blog destinations no matter where
they enter that blog. Blogrolls make the blogosphere somewhat incestuous,

newsreaders, not by visiting the blog sites. Newsreaders pull the content of
many blogs into one window. Within a newsreader, each blog is called a feed.
These newsreaders are mostly free and can be standalone programs that can
be downloaded to computers or Web-based services.
Making blog‘s content available as a feed is crucial. Fortunately, this
fairly technical method of distributing blog entries is effortlessly handled by
nearly all blog software. Using RSS and other syndication formats has
become so simple that this book does not spend any space explaining how to
create syndication links from scratch.
2.

Business blog
From the beginning of blog history, many people know how to used blog

for their business. The business blog, or corporate blog, is a relatively new
experience. A business blog will contain the more ―human‖ side of what is
happening in the business, to show that rather than just being an entity with a
sole purpose of making money there is a more "responsible" side to the
business. Business blogs are all about opening up companies‘ knowledge,
expertise, processes, and goals to their customers.

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

2.1.

Power of blog to business
Though the history of blog is rather short, many companies have tried to

managers can ask—if not the entire world, then at least their entire blog

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

readership, which are probably connected to and/or reading other blogs from
all over the planet. Once companies have insight into what a large community
of readers wants, they can begin delivering it.
2.1.3.

Visibility

Marketing is all about visibility—making the right people aware of the
right product at the right time. Companies often use campaigns to attract to
mass of customer. They assume that millions of people will be contacted, but
only a small percentage of these people will respond. This method of
marketing has its upside, but it does not do anything to create relationships
with customers, create positive experiences, or create customer evangelists.
This is where blog can be useful to companies.
Blog create new methods of effective marketing include creating ―viral‖
campaigns, customer-centric events, and otherwise helping customers spread
the word through incentive programs and contests. Readers can decide how
and when to interact with companies. Not only do companies give them
control over the relationship, but also companies encourage them to continue
to engage over time, thus providing a multitude of experiences they can
subsequently share with friends and associates. Customers are encouraged to
become participants and participants to become evangelists. Then, they
encourage everyone to come together as a community.

Brand Blogs

A brand blog is used to communicate marketing messages and extend a
company's brand into new markets and audiences. Some brand blogs are set
up as sponsored blogs written by people outside the company. Many famous
companies such as Boeing, GM Fastlane, Microsoft, and Sun have published
brand blogs.
2.2.4.

Staff blog

Many encourage their staff to write blog about company, cultures,
products, etc. Staffs are let free to talk whatever they want about companies‘
products and services but companies always keep close eyes on their
member‘s activities in order to prevent scandals or bad effects from that.

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

2.3.

Business blog format
Since the use of blog is different, business blog also differ in its format.

Normally, a good blog format contains a combination of these elements 6:
 Name: short, catchy, and humorous phase expresses the blog name
 The latest post: The date, and occasionally the time, display so that reader
know which entry is the latest one. Unlike the front page of most business


3.2.

Step 2: How many blogs needed and how often to maintain them
There are some levels of using blogs as a tool for bussiness marketing.

They are basic blogs, full-time blogs, and companywide blogs. The higher
levels, the more resources the company have to use.
At the basic blogs level, a minimal presence with a free or inexpensive
blog account on a hosted service like Blogger, TypePad, or Blog Harbor is
needed to set up and have someone post as little as three to four times a week.
For a full-time blog, one dedicated person involved, or a team of people
contributing to the site.
At this highest level, companies have taken the ultimate plunge and are
empowering all employees to blog.
Therefore, in this step, companies must decide the resource needed for
business bloggers. Depending on the size of companies and their strategy in
using blogs, they can decide whether they need just one blog (for small
companies) or many blog (usually for big companies). They also have to
consider putting a fulltime team or person on it or just assigning one part-time
staff to manage blog. Lastly, they should consider to post on blog regularly or
occasionally.
3.3.

Step 3: Selecting a Software System or Service
In this step, companies have to decide they should use blog services

provided by other companies, i.e. Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc., or set
up their own blog site. Using a blog service has many advantages: Blogging
quickly, easily, and free from a lot of technical hassles. However, it also

only the problems of service or system used. Companies have to choose
whether use a blog-posting program or do it manually. Other decision to make
is how to post audio, video and photo on their blog.
3.6.

Step 6: Launching Blog and Getting Noticed
In this step, companies have to decide how to promote blog, how to

make it interesting to attract new readers, visitors. After that, they should
know how to make conversations going, how to make blog easily found by
search engines, how to make blog spread out widely.

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A study on blog marketing – The case of Baamboo.com

3.7.

Step 7: Monitoring and Managing Blog
This step is never end. Companies should keep track on blog traffics.

They can use many tool such as Urchin to monitor or use service to compares
such as Alexa. They also have to discover trends of visitors, behaviors, etc
based on the statistics they have from blog log data or such services as
Google, Technorati, and BlogPulse.
Moreover, they have to manage comments and conversation on blog,
know when to let go and manage possible and potential crisis before it may
happen.
4.

discussed in more depth below.
 Blogs that help talking with customers
 Blogs that raise awareness and visibility
 Blogs that sell products
 Blogs that support current (and prospective) customers
 Blogs that build reputation and recognition
4.1.

Talking with customers
Encouraging an interactive audience
Blog enables companies to interact more directly with new, existing, and

potential customers by giving them easy ways to talk with them, stay in touch
and be alerted whenever they post something new. This exchange allows them
to increase their awareness and to sell product directly. Dialog also allows
companies to learn more about what their market wants because customers
will tell what they want right in their blog.
As a marketing tool, blogs are used by companies to enable "virtual
focus group" of customers. Blog will be a place where companies listen and
respond to comments and then use that feedback to improve their products
and support.
To get this type of focus group feedback, companies often enable
comments on their blog, post about their product, and then ask for input.
Usually, blog will encourage lots of comments and reader participation.
Companies then have to authorize comments, eliminate inappropriate
contribution and make sure the site‘s authors are participating in the

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