South Carolina State Fair, Columbia, partners with SceneSC.com for local music programming.
Having a blog doesn’t necessarily make you a writer. But in 2013, WordPress, a popular blog platform, estimated that there were over 152 million blogs on the internet, and most people read blogs more than once a day. Some events have gotten into live blogging to create hype and interaction around an event. Recently, some fairs have also started taking advantage of local blogs for coverage, engagement and even programming.
Blogging Boom
As local newspapers and magazines began downsizing their staffs, those writers turned to blogging, and the OC Fair sought to get them involved in the fair’s coverage. For the past few years, Robin Wachner, Communications director for OC Fair and Event Center, has worked with local food and family bloggers, offering them free admission, food and rides, for a chance to cover the festivities during the first two weeks of the fair. Now, bloggers are contacting them, more bloggers than they could possibly work with.
“The nice thing about bloggers is that they’re very accessible,” said Wachner. “Sometimes media isn’t accessible. You’re fighting for a lot more editorial space. The nice thing about a blogger is it’s dedicated, it’s first-person, it’s on your phone, it’s easy to read. Especially with the family blogs, they’re very influential. A lot of moms read through them, and moms make most of the purchasing decisions for the families, so it seems to work out.”
The difficulty can be determining whether a blog will provide valuable coverage for an event. “It’s really difficult to gauge whether a blogger is effective or not,” said Wachner. But she suggested looking at each blog’s social activity. Are they on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? Don’t stop at just checking how many followers they have, see if people are engaging with them through likes, shares, comments and retweets. Some of the really serious bloggers even have media kits. Wachner suggests looking through those to see how much they’re charging for ads and how much they value their blog.
“Sometimes we’ll get an email from a blogger who says, I’m a blogger, and I want to come to the fair,” said Wachner. “Then, we’ll look at their blog and there’s like one post from two years ago. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to sift through and see who would be valuable.”
At last year’s fair, Wachner estimates they worked with over 50 bloggers for fair coverage. The majority of those were food and family bloggers, as they are more selective with the music blogs they work with, since the fair’s concert series is already widely covered by other news outlets. Unlike TV spots and print pieces, it is hard to track the amount of publicity a blog post brings the fair, making quantifiable numbers nearly impossible.
“Unfortunately, with the bloggers, we can’t directly attribute exactly how much in sales goes towards that,” said Wachner. “So at this point, it’s a little more anecdotal. It’s that we’re getting a ton of buzz and we attribute that to the bloggers.”
There have been times when a blogger posts a photo of a new fair food, and it gets a ton of engagement and is picked up nationally. Last year, OC Fair’s new Jack Daniels Bacon-Wrapped Churro was mentioned as part of Seth Meyers’ monologue during the Late Show.
“Sometimes it’s more about things going viral,” said Wachner, “which is not always attributable to a number, but we can definitely tell when it’s getting buzzy.”
In a recent change, a number of family bloggers are looking to get paid for engagement. Some of the more popular blogs are turning into “pay to play,” and if their coverage is important to the event, that cost will have to be planned into the budget. Wachner said she finds that most food and music blogs will still write in exchange for food or tickets. And while the OC Fair has never been demolished by a blogger they invited, Wachner said bloggers are very honest with what they write.
“Sometimes they’ll mention like, oh I tried this and it was horrible,” said Wachner. “But that’s fine, because we understand it’s fair food and you’re not going to drink bacon root beer and say it’s the best thing you’ve ever had. And I’m glad that they didn’t! We treasure the honesty. The last thing we want is to invite someone to come and have them feel obligated to give us a good review because we gave them tickets.”
Music Blog Programs Free Stage
South Carolina State Fair has worked some with family bloggers for media coverage—something they hope to expand on in the future—but their partnership with a local music blog has become a key source of music programming for one of the fair’s free stages. SceneSC covers the South Carolina music scene, featuring album and concert reviews, artist spotlights and news. While also releasing its own music samplers and taking on a major role in downtown Colmubia’s (S.C.) Main Street revitalization, SceneSC reflects the pulse of the local music industry, which is exactly what South Carolina State Fair was looking for in their programming.
Starting in 2013, SceneSC programmed “3 Nights, 9 Bands” at the fair, bringing local bands extra visibility and drawing in a younger demographic the fair had been struggling to attract.
“We were seeing that we needed to reach out to that particular age group, college and maybe a little younger, that we were not in touch with,” said Nancy Smith, assistant manager at South Carolina State Fair. “So SceneSC did a really good job helping us get in touch with them and saying there’s more than just clowns at the fair. And it made us realize we needed to do something to get the college-aged students in.”
With SceneSC also promoting the acts on their blog, the event brought extra publicity to the fair. But more important, it brought targeted promotion to a hard-to-reach demographic.
“They did a good job with teasing the public about who the bands were going to be,” said Smith. “Kind of like, come to the fair and see all of your favorite bands. And they brought a lot of publicity to the fair as well.”
The same year they started partnering with SceneSC, South Carolina State Fair also held its first College Day promotion, which gave free admission to anyone with a valid college student ID while also offering a free grandstand concert. The promotion proved successful, with good concession and carnival ride sales increasing, and was repeated in 2014 and will also be included in this year’s fair.
At the upcoming fair, Smith said they hope to expand their partnership with SceneSC by having them program a local lineup to be featured as the College Day Grandstand act.
“It’s something we’ve always wanted to do,” said Smith, “but you don’t want to have a 5,000-seat place and have nobody come. But we feel like this is something we can do now with the success of this partnership.”
A Niche Entrée
In 2014, Minnesota State Fair hosted its first-ever sneak peek event with 19 local “hobby” food, family and lifestyle bloggers. The event came about in response to a last-minute request from local blogger Alice Seuffert, the creator of Dining with Alice. Seuffert approached the fair with the idea, which Christine Noonan, Marketing supervisor at Minnesota State Fair, said they pulled off in a week and a half, 10 days before the opening of the fair. Because Noonan said they weren’t familiar with local bloggers and didn’t have the time to do any vetting, Seuffert came up with the invite list for the three-hour event.
“We pulled it off, but it was a little too tight,” said Noonan, “because it didn’t give the bloggers enough time to turn around their longer stories, if they wanted to do that, and the photos and everything.”
In a conference room, the bloggers were given the chance to network and get to know each other’s blogs before being presented samples of a few new fair food items. Noonan gave a quick presentation about the new things at the fair, then the bloggers were driven around the fairgrounds to a few of the new exhibits and the soon-to-be-opened West End Market for a behind the scenes look.
The bloggers were tweeting out photos and updates during the event, which were usually followed by longer pieces on the blogs or a combination piece with fair-time coverage. Noonan said they also held an admission tickets and Grandstand tickets drawing, which they encouraged the bloggers to give away to their readers.
“It was different for us because we announce our food,” said Noonan, “but we don’t really do sampling and that kind of thing, unless the media wants to approach a food vendor on their own.”
Prior to this event, Noonan said they’ve worked with only a handful of bloggers who have approached them on an individual basis, handling them like any other media request, but never as a special group event.
“In our market at that time of the year, the fair is the thing,” said Noonan. “So we’re pretty well covered by all the major media, broadcast and print. So as far as additional exposure, I can’t attribute an increase in attendance or anything like that to it, but it did give us an opportunity to talk about values at the fair or ways to save or things to do with your kids at the fair. It gave us another way to talk to another group of people about some of those hidden gems for families.”
This year, Noonan hopes to repeat the event, this time a month or more before the fair’s opening. The invite list may also change to include some bloggers from lifestyle magazines and others, though they still want to keep the event fairly small in order to give each blogger enough time to ask questions and experience everything. Another change will be the presentation of the food. Noonan said she didn’t realize how important photos would be and will want to help that process at the next event.
“From that perspective it was really helpful and beneficial for us,” said Noonan. “It gave us an entrée into that niche, because other than these kinds of one-offs, we didn’t have an entrée in. It gave us contacts.”
Interviewed for this article: Robin Wachner, (714) 708-1559; Nancy Smith, (803) 799-3387; Christine Noonan, (651) 288-4338