How we wanted to “troll” Artemy Lebedev, but got his “respect” and a post in LiveJournal



    The blog of Artemy Lebedev is visited daily by about 100 thousand users. Every week on Mondays, a “300 by 300” column is devised by him on the site - advertisers send Lebedev advertising modules with links, and he publishes them for money. A few months ago, as part of our marketing activity, we decided to place our banner there. 3 months after payment, the banner appeared in a “cozy zhezheshechke”, but this did not bring us any result: there was little traffic, but there was not a single request. Before we post there, we re-read a lot of enthusiastic reviews from advertisers on the corresponding pages of his LiveJournal, but in reality (at least for us) everything didn’t look so rosy. We wondered - something is wrong with our banner, offer, website, or is the reason in the wrong choice of target audience or a poor advertising platform as such? And we decided to check it out.

    To do this, we went through all the banners that had ever been placed under the heading “300 by 300” (since April 2014), and thus gathered an email database, which consisted of 234 addresses. An interesting point - when navigating through banners, we found at least a few sites that had already ceased to exist in a year. Our main competence is to collect feedback by means of trigger e-mails, therefore it was not difficult using our Mneniya.Pro service to send a personal invitation by e-mail to each advertiser to leave a comment about placing a banner on Artemy Lebedev's blog.

    How We Collected Feedback from Advertisers Themes

    For the most part, people are reluctant to write reviews, but the human nature is such that people like to give advice to help others - that’s what we “pressed” on. The goal was to collect as many opinions as possible from advertisers for analysis. For this, the headline of the letters “Regarding your 300 x 300 banner” was chosen, and as the name of the sender we decided to use the name of the blog “tema.livejournal.com”. If we mentioned in the text of the letter that each review would fall into the LJ Topics (as it later turned out), I’m sure it would significantly increase the “response”, but we couldn’t give such guarantees, so the standard wording for the call to recall was chosen. In the header, we added a photo of Artemia to enhance the effect. Below is an example of what a review request looked like that was personally sent to each theme advertiser:



    When you clicked on the “Leave a review” button, a person got into a form on our server, where it was possible to describe the advantages and disadvantages of the publication in an expanded form, leave an additional comment, evaluate the advertising campaign on a 5-point scale, and also asked “Yes / No” "To the question" Do you recommend this to other advertisers? "



    We did the newsletter in stages over the course of 3 days. A total of 234 letters were sent, 223 of which reached the addressee. For several days we managed to collect and calculate the results. As a result, every seventh advertiser left his review:



    And now the most interesting thing - the number of positive and negative reviews was distributed approximately equally. On the graph below, negative reviews are marked in red and positive reviews in green:



    Some advertisers praised the ads on Topics in LiveJournal and said how many applications they managed to collect after the banner was published, while others, on the contrary, expressed their discontent and said that the site was bad, the CA was unsuitable and they did not recommend being placed near Lebedev, despite the huge traffic on his blog.



    How Lebedev reacted to the collected reviews

    So, we received feedback for our own analysis, as we wanted. After analyzing, we came to the conclusion that most likely the problem of the failure of our advertising campaign at Theme, like many other advertisers, in the incorrectly selected target audience - all the same, its platform is more suitable for B2C projects.

    However, we did not stop there, because It’s foolish to have such information and not try to disseminate it. The first thing that occurred to us was to write a letter to Lebedev, show the results and offer to publish not only positive, but also negative reviews from advertisers in our LiveJournal. However, to be honest, we were very skeptical about this venture - it is unlikely that he will publish reviews of dissatisfied customers on his site. At best, it will simply ignore our letter. We decided to do the following: we will send it as it is, and then we will look according to the circumstances - if there is no answer, we will try to “troll” Artemy in the comments of his blog, disseminating information that he deliberately hides negative customer reviews, publishing only positive ones, good evidence we have.

    Not counting especially on the feedback, we sent Lebedev a letter with the collected reviews, and what was our surprise when a few minutes later he answered:



    With bated breath, we began to wait for what would happen next. And then the most interesting thing happened and what we did not expect - after some time, the store manager of the Studio Artemy Lebedev contacted us and asked how our service could be useful for their site. It is incredible, but Tyoma was so pleased with the work that we did that he found it necessary to give a recommendation to his employee to talk with us about collecting feedback on studio products! We immediately began to discuss with the store manager the technical details, and the very next day in the “cozy zhezheshezhek” appeared an extensive post, where Lebedev published all the reviews we collected of his advertisers, mentioning us: “The reviews were collected by the mneniya.pro service on our own initiative. The guys tried hard, for which they respect. ”

    What ultimately brought us this idea

    Thanks to this publication, our site’s traffic grew 4 times and immediately received several interesting offers of cooperation, including applications for connecting to the service.



    Initially, when the idea arose to collect reviews for Lebedev, we did not think about such an effect. Now, we not only lit up for free to his vast audience, but also in the process of connecting his studio’s online store to our service on his own tip, although we ourselves tried repeatedly to contact them, filling up with commercial offers that I had never followed response.

    To summarize this story, I can distinguish 2 insights:
    • If your product can solve the problem of one of the opinion leaders, an excellent strategy would be to first do it a favor and then demonstrate it, but not vice versa. If we originally wrote to Theme, if you would like to collect feedback using our service, I think there would be no answer. Since we initiated this process ourselves and really did a lot of work, the probability of being noticed by him was much higher.
    • Do not be skeptical of seemingly unrealistic ventures. If we hadn’t written to Lebedev directly, but would have immediately started to “troll” him in the comments, it is obvious that this would be pointless. In turn, Lebedev once again emphasized his professionalism by publishing reviews in his LJ including dissatisfied advertisers, for which he was also “respected”.

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