Last week, I was having a conversation with a client of mine. Talking about bloggers and an opportunity we might have in the near future to reach out to them.

As the conversation continued, we inevitably started brainstorming potential approaches to these bloggers. How would we approach them? What would the angle be? What’s in it for them? Would what we’re offering resonate with these bloggers?

All valid questions, right? But all questions that had no answers. Just “educated” guesses from our team.

But it occurred to me–what if we weren’t making educated guesses? What if we were making decisions about this kind of blogger outreach based on answers and input from bloggers themselves?

My thought: What if brands created “blogger focus groups”, for lack of a better term?

The idea: Get a handful of bloggers together a couple times of year and sound them out on potential approaches, offers and programs to see what resonates, and what doesn’t, from their perspective.

The brand would have to compensate these bloggers, obviously. Cash, product, that kind of thing. That would be the brand’s call. But, that would be fair, right? It’s what we do with other focus groups. And in return, the brand would get valuable intelligence–not just about what might work and what wouldn’t from a blogger outreach approach. But, they’d get a firsthand look at how bloggers think (which would REALLY help a lot of brands). In fact, maybe these blogger focus groups could mesh with the “regular” focus groups for economies of scale on the brand side.

So, what do you think? Crazy idea–or a great way for brands to better understand what makes bloggers tick? I’d love to hear thoughts on this…

Note: Photo courtesy of Adam Tinworth via FlickR Creative Commons.