Archive for September, 2008
Honey, I’m not home: Sci Fi’s 08 digital press tour
cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles
Readers of Marketing Roadmaps may recall a series of posts I wrote about a year ago on the Sci Fi Channel’s digital press tour. Sci Fi invited members of the digital press up to Vancouver for a weekend at which the network’s current shows were featured – Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Stargate Atlantis and the then new, now cancelled and extremely horrible Flash Gordon.
The representatives of the online sites were treated to tours of the sets of the shows, Q&As with the some of the stars and a chance to break bread with Sci Fi executives Mark Stern and Bonnie Hammer. By all accounts it was a success for both the digital media and the network.
After I completed the case study, I half jokingly told Courtney White the PR rep from New Media Strategies that she should be sure to invite me next time.
And she did. In part perhaps because I have a feature on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles that covers science fiction television, but mostly I suspect because I recently pinged her to follow up on the case study for the blogger relations book I’m working on.
So here I sit on a Southwest Airlines flight to Denver. This year, the focus is on SciFi’s unreality show GhostHunters and the premiere of the new Amanda Tapping series Sanctuary on October 3rd. Apparently there was a big GhostHunters event already planned and Sci Fi decided to combine this year’s digital press event with it. The event is being held at the Hotel Stanley in Estes Park Colorado which horror fans may recognize from Stephen King’s The Shining.
Red rum anyone?
I’ll be covering the event in three places, with three slightly different perspectives.
On Marketing Roadmaps, I will be focusing on the outreach program itself. How successful is it for the network and the writers? Is everybody getting their full value. I noticed some repeat attendees from the first one, but the sites I spoke with for the case study will not be there. Is it a content issue – they aren’t interested in GhostHunters and Sanctuary as much as they were in the content of the previous event?
Or a cost issue? Sci Fi is reaching out to a population it refers to as digital press. Some of these are blogs, but many are online portals. The writers may even be paid and, paid or not, many consider themselves journalists. This is a very important distinction when discussing blogger relations. Not so much from the content or hospitality perspective but definitely from the expense one. Attendees pay their own travel expenses.
As a result a purist might argue that this isn’t really blogger relations. Well, I’ve never been a purist. Online engagement can take many forms. The term “blogger” in fact is already a misnomer, as we may be reaching out to customers on Twitter or through Facebook or even a branded community. As long as the blog/site in question has an element of community, where readers can comment or converse with each other in some fashion, it is social media.
On Snapshot Chronicles, I’ll be writing about the hotel and the general experience of the event, with an emphasis on photos. I saw two elk on the way into town and grabbed a quick snap from the car, and the scenery is just gorgeous. I’ll also have a review of Sanctuary after it premieres. I’ve seen the screener but those don’t always have all the effects. I’m not really a GhostHunters viewer so not entirely sure what I’ll do with that content, but I’m keeping an open mind.
I’ll also be doing a guest post over on BlogHer about the trip. Among other things, the post will cover a breakfast scheduled with actress Amanda Tapping, formerly of the Stargate franchise and now the star and an executive producer of Sanctuary.
Most importantly though I plan to have fun, and wash last weekend’s Las Vegas dust right outta my hair.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
7:26 pm |
Hiatus
Marketing Roadmaps is going on a little break. Just a little one - I expect to be back with you on or before October 1st.
Here’s the scoop.
First, we are shifting over to self-hosted WordPress sometime in the next week or so. I’d rather save the really great stuff I’ve got in the pending file for the new URL, not this hosted TypePad one.
Second, I’m pretty busy at the moment with client work and new business development, plus trying to find time to work on my blogger relations book and a new business I am putting together. I don’t have the time to devote to the posts here that I require to keep the quality high.
Finally, I’m feeling just a bit burnt out on social media "stuff," in part due to last weekend’s BlogWorld Expo. My post about that is on my personal blog, Snapshot Chronicles.
It’s time to step back, just a bit.
I’m going to spend some time catching up with the bloggers I love to read and pursuing my other interests, on and offline. Friday the 26th I’ll be going out to Denver for Sci Fi Channel’s digital press tour, and the following weekend I’ll be at the big terrier dog shows in Montgomery County Pennsylvania. Reports from both of those will also be on Snapshot.
But I’ll be back in October, with a shiny easier to manage WordPress blog. Perhaps not tanned or rested, but certainly ready to talk about blogger relations, marketing and social media again. In fact, if you are in the Boston area, consider coming to BlogHer Boston on October 11th at the Burlington Marriott. It’s shaping up to be an excellent conference.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
10:45 am |
Dunbar’s, blogs, fans and community
Over the past few weeks, a few of my blogging colleagues have raised the issue of Dunbar’s number in the context of establishing relationships with bloggers and communities. Among them Kami Huyse, Jen Zingsheim and David Wescott.
Dunbar’s number? You may not know it by name, but you certainly do by reputation. The general gist is that the upper limit of a social circle is 150. It is often cited in discussions about community building; if 150 is an upper limit for relationships, how can social media scale? Of course, Dunbar’s number has its origins in the study of primates and grooming circles, which is not completely extensible to human relationships and certainly not to online relationships, which are not subject to the limitations of the physical world.
Even online, though, one to one relationships don’t scale. On either side, company or blogger. In this respect Dunbar’s number is correct. We cannot be “best friends” with everyone.
Kami recently suggested that we think about social media outreach as building relationships with communities.
But we don’t build relationships with entities; we build them with people.
A relationship with a person may be extended into the community if the reputation of the one merits it, but I’m hard pressed to call that a relationship in the strictest sense. The strength of the one person’s relationship with the rest of the community dictates whether this works. It all depends on how much the others in the group rely on her opinion, model themselves on her behavior etc.
The question isn’t, are they her friends? It is, are they her fans?
That’s why I think Kami is onto something, but I would cast it in a slightly different light. When we aim for scale, the answer isn’t to focus on the community as an entity. It’s to understand that what we want are fans.
When we aim for scale, it is a one to many relationship. We will probably use some one to one relationships as the building blocks for the larger effort, but net net, it will be an entity – a company – trying to build or influence a community.
And really, what we are trying to do is turn our customers into our fans.
In order to do that, we have to tap into what makes people care. What makes them love.
Because community isn’t just about group dynamics, although they are part of it. Or the need to assemble in a collective, what Francois Gossieaux calls tribalism.
What brings, and keeps, a community together is love.
This is why when I think about building communities, no matter how dry the product may seem, I focus on what makes people care. What inspires them.
And why I think we can learn a lot about building communities from studying fandom.
What’s fandom? In the simplest sense, it is the informal and formal groups that spring up around entertainment — an artist or a team or a television show or a movie franchise. It’s the passion that makes people paint their bodies red white and blue before a Patriot’s or Red Sox game. Dress up as Mr. Spock, Princess Leia or John Crichton for a “con.” Read and write fan fiction and spoiler sites. Buy boxes of pencils to send to media moguls during the writers strike.
Even though people have been collecting due to shared interests for as long as we’ve had society, fandom as we are discussing it here is mostly a 20th century phenomenon driven by mass entertainment like the movies and organized sports.
The shared interest and relationship to a franchise – show, artist, athlete or actor — brings people together. Over time, the members develop relationships with each other. Sometimes those relationships last longer than the fan relationship, leading to a community that interacts on multiple dimensions – the initial thing that brought the folks together, and then all the other shared interests that the members find they have. As Shrek might say, like an onion, with layers.
While fandom existed well before the Internet, the Net and particularly social media have most definitely accelerated and expanded the fan effect.
If companies want to achieve a similar impact, by either building a new community or influencing an existing one, we need to understand more about what makes a fan.
Why are the fans so passionate?
It starts with the product – the quality TV series or the top sports team or the great band. But it’s more than just the entertainment value that builds the passion of fans.
It’s the relationship that the fan has with the franchise, which doesn’t have to be “real” to have tremendous power. The fan doesn’t “know” the artist, character or athlete, but she feels she does. The perceived relationship, the one way relationship is enough.
Not because she’s delusional. Because the artist reaches out to fans in numerous ways that create a sufficient relationship for the fan. Starting with the performance and moving from there. Fan clubs. Conventions. Sports teams thanking the fans for their support.
Celebrities make personal appearances, attend conventions, authorize fan clubs, set up their own websites for communicating with fans. They share what they can to encourage the fan to feel like they know them, to stay invested in them, to appreciate their work. Joss Whedon is a great example of an artist who does this exceedingly well. Among other things, he participates regularly on fansite Whedonesque; his fans feel connected to him and every project he does has a built-in audience of viewers before it even hits a screen.
Even though we don’t really know the artists, athletes or actors, we know they value and care about the fans. That they strive to deliver a good product that we will enjoy.
So the first two elements a company needs to deliver if it wants fans are:
- have a good product that meets their needs - Value;
- show you care about the fan and walk the talk – Engage.
Now, once you have fans you have to keep them. This is where Respect comes in.
Some artists and athletes forget that their power, their franchise, is fan supported. They may have the raw talent, but if people stop watching the show because the star is phoning it in or the producers replaced a fan favorite with another performer, it’s hero to zero in a flash.
You must respect your fans. Don’t stop listening and never think you don’t need them. Because the last thing you want is fans gone mad.
Where does the love come in? It runs throughout.
Love your product and make sure it has what it needs to make your customers love it. LOVE IT.
Love and respect your fans as much as they love and respect you. You need them collectively far more than they need you. They can always find somebody to love. Doesn’t need to be you.
So, if we believe that fandom will help us build community, how do we make that happen for our products? Most products aren’t sexy or entertaining or funny, although advertising certainly tries to make us think they are, or that we will be if we buy them.
But that doesn’t fly in social media, right? We cut through the bullshit or at least we like to think we do.
How do we find and feed our fans? That’s the key to community.
And the topic for another day.
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We will probably touch on some of these themes in the Social Media and the Writers Strike panels at BlogWorld Expo on Saturday. If you are in Vegas, hope to see you at one of them.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
1:19 pm |
Not dead yet
September 16, 2008 | Blogging
Just really busy bringing a new client site up and getting ready for BlogWorld Expo, including stepping in as a moderator on a panel due to a friend’s unavoidable last minute conflict.
But, I have been working on a post about community and fandom, which hopefully will be up before I leave on Friday.
Also, heads up, we are very close to moving this blog over to WordPress. I’ll be keeping the Typepad site up so I don’t break other folks’ links, but at some point in the very near future, the blog will move. Hope you come along for the ride.
It may just be a wild one, Mr. Toad.
(image from Wikipedia)
Posted by Susan Getgood @
11:34 pm |
Blogger relations faux pas
Here are a few more pitches that illustrate the points we’ve been discussing in the blogger relations series. Later this week, we’ll take a look at the new incumbent for crappiest pitch ever. Literally.
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Um, no I write about marketing, blogger and public relations and social media. On a blog.
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I love this one. Really I do. I just wish they had included a cover note.
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Oops. You should always get a reporter or blogger to agree to the embargo BEFORE you give her the news.
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Wow! My blog is cool!. But Arthur, do you know what I write about? Have you read my blog? I’m guessing not, because if you had you would know that I do not like unsolicited jpeg attachments and rarely discuss products. Other folks write about the widget du jour. Not me. And.I’m still scratching my head on how you managed to spell your own name wrong. The letters aren’t close enough on the keyboard for it to be a transposition… Could it be that you did not send the email yourself?
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This isn’t the worst pitch I’ve ever received, but it rubbed me the wrong way. The tone was a bit arrogant and didn’t establish the collegial feel I expect the publicist was aiming for. If I interview someone, I want to actually interview them. Not submit three questions for an intern to answer using the messaging document. It’s also a bit off target; the publicist probably got my name from one of the media databases. I don’t write about branding and advertising that much, a fact for which the branding agencies should be generally grateful as they probably wouldn’t be too thrilled with what I’d write. Let’s just leave it that I think branding agencies get paid far too much for what they actually deliver.
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Make sure you don’t commit a blogger relations faux pas. Re-read your pitch before you send it.
Tags: blogger relations, bad pitch
Posted by Susan Getgood @
10:37 pm |
Some Blogger Relations Mathoms
As part of a fresh start to Fall, I’m cleaning out my email box today. In the process, I’ve run across a few blogger relations issues that really can’t support a full post but deserve mention.
Email addresses
Don’t use gmail, yahoo or other free service email addresses to send pitches. People like to know that they are dealing with a reputable person, a reputable organization. Your email address, traceable to a firm or organization through its website, helps convey that information. Related: don’t send the email from someone else’s account, ie the email FROM: field is one name and the signatory on the email is someone else. Nothing says “processed using an email database” better than an email sent by one person on behalf of another.
Media databases
Media databases like Cision and Vocus that include bloggers are an okay place to start building a list for blogger outreach in certain high-profile blog categories like tech, parents and marketing, but don’t just spam releases without a cover note. Vocus offers an opt-out button, and I find I am using it when it is simply a release with no note. While I am sure there is a work-around if someone affirmatively requests materials, once someone has opted out from an entity, the system isn’t supposed to let it send anything else. In other words, no second chances. Now, this might force agencies to actually begin contacting bloggers before emailing them, but I am not terribly hopeful.
Why did you send me this pitch?
If you get an email like this from me or any other blogger, don’t take offense. When I do it, it means that the item might be of interest, but you didn’t tell me why you thought I’d be interested. Now, if I’m just a name in a database, and you have no clue why you sent me the item, this does have the effect of calling you out, so to speak. The best course is to apologize. But don’t simply offer to take me off the list — ask me what I would be interested in.
Often as recently happened with a junior staffer at an agency I respect, the rep just gets so wrapped up in the pitch that she forgets to identify the WIIFM. That’s why I always advise starting there — tell the blogger, or journalist, why you thought he’d be interested before you get into the pitch for your thing, whatever it may be.
And finally, a pet peeve.
The true meaning of Unsubscribe. It’s the action we take when we have subscribed to something, by choice, and then decide that we don’t want to receive it anymore. It is NOT a synonym for opting-out of a mailing list to which you have been added without your permission. Increasingly, however, I’ve noticed that organizations are using unsubscribe in that context. Even the opt-out mechanism on Vocus has an <Unsubscribe> button instead of <Remove> or some other verb that would be more accurate, and I have seen it used on other PR pitches sent to bloggers.
This really bugs me. Since I did not subscribe to your list in the first place, how can I possibly unsubscribe? I suspect the use of the language is motivated by the CAN-SPAM Act. The thinking probably goes something like this:
Adding these people to our mailing list without their permission is probably in violation of CAN-SPAM, but people get so much email these days, if we imply they subscribed, maybe they’ll forget that they didn’t opt-in to ours and we won’t get in trouble.
Sleazy.
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Related posts:
Tags: blogger relations
Posted by Susan Getgood @
3:47 pm |
Link Exchange Requests are NOT Blogger Relations
I’m working on a longer bad pitch post that will cover some recent faux pas perpetrated on bloggers by marketing and PR professionals in the guise of blogger relations. In combing through my pitch file, I found some link exchange requests, which reminded me to tell you about the "special place in hell" reserved for those that send link exchange spam. [An HP Photo Book for the first reader who correctly identifies the special place reference. Mum, you can't enter.]
Link exchange requests are spam. Full stop. They are sometimes sent by newbies who don’t know better but most often by spammers who just don’t care.
Note the time sent: a sure sign of a mass email program. This one is probably a porn site.
Spelling errors, highlighted in both. Another sign of the spammer. No relevance to my blog other than I mentioned a trip to California.
When you are cataloging the list of PR agency sins, don’t tag them with this one. While there are always exceptions to any "rule," link exchange requests are rarely used by reputable agencies with any online experience — even those that send crappy blog pitches to <insert name here> with multiple jpeg attachments.
What should you do when you get a link exchange request?
If you sense it is from a newbie who just doesn’t know any better, send them a brief email. Tell them that you add people and sites to your blogroll that you find interesting or valuable to your readers, but you do not do link exchanges. If you sell advertising, by all means offer it up as an alternative. If the blog or site is on target to your interests, perhaps offer to check it out but make no promises. Give them the link to this post if you think it will help. If it really was a mistake on the sender’s part, they should appreciate the kindly meant advice.
Spammers? Block the sender in your spam filter and delete the email.
And think about that special place in hell just for them.
Tags: link exchange request, spam, PR, blogger relations
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PS — The reference to my mom is a clue for anyone who has heard me speak recently, as I often use an anecdote about her as an example. And did you know, faux pas is a pun in French. Literally it means "false step" but it also rhymes with "faut pas," as in "il ne faut pas," which translates roughly to "one must not."
Posted by Susan Getgood @
2:54 pm |
Internet stats
Last week, I was a panelist on a Bulldog Reporter audio conference about using social media in public relations. I mentioned some statistics on adoption of various tools, both by companies and individuals. Quite a few attendees asked for the sources of the data, so I figured it might be of general interest to Roadmaps readers.
Universal McCann Research (pdf) is an excellent source on social media usage across all demographics and region.
E-marketer has a report on older Internet users. The abstract is no longer free, but the reports aren’t too expensive as I recall. Report is titled Seniors and E-Commerce
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Subjects: Seniors; Retail E-Commerce
Geographies: United States
Some general stats on World Internet Usage
BlogHer’s study on women bloggers
The Pew Internet and American Life Project is a great resource. Start with this summary page.
The Society for New Communications Research study on customer care has not been published in full yet, but you can find the highlights in the social media 101 presentation I did for SOCAP last spring. Be sure to check www.sncr.org for the final results this fall as well as some other research that might prove interesting.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
7:47 pm |
