Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Last week, I was privileged to participate on a panel about blog monetization at the inaugural Family Travel Conference . In my presentation I talked a bit about the different ways to make money with your blog as well as some of the considerations if you decide to go the advertising route, including the advantages of working with an ad network. My fellow panelists were Steve Bookbinder of   Digital Media Training, Tim Springstead of Travora (formerly the Travel Ad Network), and moderator Michael Theodore of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

In the Q&A there were a lot of questions about Google and SEO, as Steve had talked a lot about this in his prepared remarks. Now my position on this has remained relatively unchanged for the past 15 years.

You should absolutely optimize your content for search. After all, you do want to be found. Content written for search engines however is not necessarily good for people, whereas smart, compelling content written for people is perfectly acceptable to the search engine. Tweak a bit here and there, use keywords, absolutely. I don’t recommend you make your blog HARDER to find.

But, write for people, not search engines.

And don’t make your business decisions based on whether Google will reward OR penalize your site. Search is only one of the ways your audience finds you.

During the panel the audience and panelists discussed this at some length. One of the examples we discussed was syndicating your work, and whether Google will penalize you if the same post appears in multiple places.

No one knows exactly how Google “does its magic” but if there is proper attribution, usually a link back to the original, Google does not penalize syndicated content.  I think its algorithm will get even smarter as time goes on, as it gains more understanding about reputable aggregators/syndicators  and slime balls. Syndication is becoming an important business model on the web and Google will (if it hasn’t already) figure out the best ways to distinguish between syndicated content — when my post appears on another site with my permission — and content farms , which steal other people’s copyrighted works.

BUT even if it did not — even if syndicating your content to another online publication WOULD be penalized by the search engine, it still might be the best choice, if that site delivers more traffic or helps you establish your expert reputation. I advised the folks to look at the whole picture, not just one tool, one source of traffic.

Toward the end of the panel, we delved a bit into social promotion –Facebook, Pinterest etc. All the panelists felt that Pinterest would be big in travel, and were in general agreement that one didn’t have to be engaging in all the social sharing sites, just the ones that mattered to your audience (something you’ve all read here more than once!) Then one of my fellow panelists said something to the effect of: he wouldn’t advise the audience to abandon Facebook for Pinterest, to which I replied, “I might,” but never got to circle back and explain what I meant

So conference attendees, if you are wondering what I meant — here’s the gist. Far too often folks (whether bloggers or marketers) equate “having a digital/social marketing strategy’ with having a Google and Facebook strategy. A Twitter strategy. Next everyone will be asking, what’s your Pinterest strategy.

This is like nails on a chalkboard to me. What you need is a marketing strategy, and then you look at the toolkit to figure out which tools are the best ones for the job.

Searching (Google) and sharing (Facebook et al) only matter when there’s something to search for or share. Without content, they are irrelevant. So, focus on your content first. Tell your story.

Because if Facebook, Google and all the rest disappeared tomorrow, you would still have a story.

That’s what matters. And what your readers come for.

Related articles

• Online Marketing News: Pinterest’s Sneaky Tactics, Keeping Leaders Honest, 100 Million Videos Watched Per Day (toprankblog.com)
• Pinterest quietly profits off its users’ links – Feb. 10, 2012 (exitbusiness.wordpress.com)
• Pinterest: 10 reasons why it will be bigger than Twitter (umpf.co.uk)

This weekend is the Super Bowl, and while I will be paying slightly more attention to the game because the Patriots are playing, my main interest is in the advertising. This year, I will be watching closely to see how many commercials drive to Facebook pages, in addition to or instead of, a website.

Because Facebook is clearly where so many brands are going these days. It reminds me a little of the “web rush” in the mid/late 90s when mainstream brands realized what many tech companies had grokked since the first browser in 1993, that the browser had changed the marketing equation for good. It was a little like a gigantic penny drop. Suddenly every brand had a website, and URLs were promoted everywhere.

Now it is Facebook. Everywhere. Marketing strategies built around Shares and Likes.

This makes me very nervous. Your marketing strategy should include Facebook. With its user base edging every upward to a billion, you would be foolish to not use the social network in your marketing plan.

BUT, your marketing strategy shouldn’t be a Facebook strategy. No matter how small or large you are, don’t put all your eggs, even just for a single promotion, into one basket.

Especially this basket, over which you have no control. All those fans you are spending so much of your budget acquiring? Your connection with them relies almost entirely on Facebook. Sure, you can sign them up for email lists and such, but the community aspect? That happens on Facebook.

And what Facebook gives, Facebook can taketh away. Not literally of course. But it can change its terms or add fees. I am not saying it will hold your brand hostage, but it could.

So, when you are integrating Facebook into your marketing strategy, think about how you can leverage its benefits while protecting your brand’s assets and consumer goodwill.

Go Patriots!

This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

The social media “industry” is built on the back of people doing “stuff” for free. The business models of most social networks — Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube etc. etc. — depend on consumers using the free/”freemium” services and thereby creating both the free content that attracts and retains users, and more importantly, a mine-able database. People. Topics. Linkages (who are your friends, what do you like, where do you go). Marketing gold. And the companies are reaping the benefits of our “work” in potentially ginormous valuations, as discussed in this Businessweek article.

You could argue that posting on Facebook or sending a tweet isn’t work per se. We, the users, are getting something in exchange for our activity — the use of the network to accomplish a personal objective. The question is whether the value is balanced — are we getting enough from our participation in exchange for the value we are helping these companies build?

Honestly, that’s a question that each person must answer for themselves. Participating on Facebook DOES mean that you are surrendering some of your personal privacy, and a great deal of personal information that is going to be aggregated, analyzed, mined and sold. Every Facebook item you post, link or share is going to earn money for Facebook and its investors somehow. Maybe ad revenue. Maybe data mining revenue. But certainly revenue. Facebook is a business, not a public service.

Is it worth it to you? If yes, play away. If not, don’t.

And of course, you can figure out ways to monetize YOUR participation in the networks. Use them to promote your business. Or yourself. It’s all about extracting the value you require from your participation.

The other “work for free” model prevalent in the social media space is influencer relations, which owes its structure to the earned media model inherited from public relations. I’ve written about this before – Is earned media an anachronism?

In a nutshell, the idea is that companies and brands can have such compelling stories that consumers will write about them, share them on their social networks, for free, without compensation. And you know, sometimes that’s true.

Sometimes a product is so compelling that we are happy to harness our word of mouth for no other reason than we love the product. Perhaps Apple products are the only ones that can generate widespread mass word of mouth at the mere whisper of a new version, but we all have things we love that we’re happy to share just because we love them.

I’ll use myself as an example. Recently I bought a SpotBot Pet, a little spot carpet cleaner from Bissell that I first learned about at the BlogPaws conference. It is TERRIFIC, and eventually I will get around to posting a review on my personal blog.

But… products we are intrinsically passionate about are few and far between. Certainly far fewer than the number of firms reaching out to bloggers asking them to work for free on behalf of the brand. To write about a new product. Or attend an event and tweet it up. And so on.

So here’s where I draw the line. If it is work – if you are asked to do a specific thing in a specific fashion or to a deadline — you should be compensated for your time and expertise. Because if you are not paid for your work, it is volunteer work, and if you are going to volunteer for something, it should be something that you care about personally and passionately. I’m pretty sure cereal and motor oil don’t qualify. At least for most of us.

Is a free product adequate compensation? In my opinion, it all depends on what you are being asked to do. Try the product and participate in a short survey? Or leave a comment on a Facebook page? Probably yes. Try the product and write a 500 word blog review? Unless it is use of a car for a year or some other equally large “in kind,” probably not. It’s your call, but remember that the FTC and the IRS do not distinguish between cash and “in kind” compensation. You get a free product, you must disclose, and if you get enough of them, you probably should be reporting the “income” on your taxes. Disclaimer: not a lawyer, not an accountant, consult yours if you have questions about your legal obligations, especially for taxes, which unlike the FTC guidelines, DO have defined penalties for getting it wrong.

So, if you are working in exchange for free product, whatever it is, best to make sure it is something you actually want. Because you may have to pay taxes on it. If it is not something you need or want, cashy money probably would be more useful.

A final point on working for free. I am not saying you shouldn’t volunteer your time, skills or blog content to causes — or even brands — that you care about and want to support. Everyone has to make their own decision on that score. However, if you do work for free, if you give it away, don’t expect the recipient to turn around in future and say, wow, you are so great I should be paying you. Volunteering in the hopes of a paying gig is a losing proposition. It is VERY unlikely to happen.

So when someone asks if they could just pick your brain, or could you just post about this thing on this day and include the following three points, or whatever, understand that you have just created a non-paying customer. And no one can afford too many of those.

Finallly, there’s a fine distinction that I don’t want you to miss. Doing something of your own volition — whether writing a blog, sharing a link or posting on Facebook — is very different than working to someone else’s specifications or timeline. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference when the email box is overflowing with “opportunities.” All I can advise is to consider the value to both parties in the exchange. If it is an even exchange of value, if you are getting what you need to make it worth it (whether cash, products, connections or feeling good about helping out) and so is the other party, go for it.

If not, you may just want to say no.

–

Disclosure: I work for BlogHer. We pay the bloggers who write for us.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the launch of BlogHer’s new consumer panel, Visionaries. I’m very excited about the possibilities we have with the panel to connect the BlogHer audience with brands.

Once or twice a month, we’ll be sending panel members a survey or perhaps even an offer to try a free product. The first trial offer is in the field — sign up for Visionaries now and get a full 12-ounce bottle of Dove® Body Wash with NutriumMoisture™.

Click  here to join.

I’m back! You had to know I would not be able to resist commenting on the ConAgra/Ketchum “Sotto Terra” blogger events in New York last month that went so horribly, tragically wrong. So wrong that the fallout made it to the pages of the New York Times. Ouch.

I’m not going to rehash the details here, because this post is not about piling it on. The company, brand and agency have been thoroughly schooled in the blogosphere already. Instead, I am going to focus on a few lessons that have nothing to do with the specific brand, that anyone involved in blogger outreach can learn from.

However, this post will make more sense if you know the basics about the ConAgra program. Short version: blogger event in New York. Promoted as an exclusive opportunity to experience a chef-prepared meal. On the day, entree and dessert revealed to be frozen meals. Ooops.

For more details,  please take a moment to read the NYT article and the links below to read the blog fallout after the event.

Lesson Number 1: Don’t fall so in love with your great, clever idea that you can’t see its flaws. Every idea has flaws; every message, detractors. You have got to be willing to be your own devil’s advocate. Ask yourself — what can go wrong? Where can this idea fail? Who might not like our idea and why?  I’m not saying be Debbie Downer on your own creativity. I am however advising you to think it through. Understand that there will ALWAYS be someone who doesn’t like your concept. The question is, are they outliers or your target? If your target audience ain’t gonna like it, don’t do it. That’s what happened with MotrinMoms a few years ago, and it’s clearly part of what happened here.

Poke holes in your own idea. Better you than a bunch of bloggers and the New York Times.

Lesson Number 2: People don’t like surprises. Especially when they make them feel foolish. Think about it. If you are old enough to remember Candid Camera, you’ll know what I mean. The audience of the stunts enjoyed them. The victim, not so much.

More proof? Ever read the back page of a book before deciding whether to invest the time? Ever visit a spoiler site for your favorite TV show for a sneak peek at what’s coming? Ever shake your holiday or birthday presents? Or try to sneak a corner of the tape off and then rewrap it? Yes, brother dear, I am talking to you. Or ransack your mom’s gift closet to see if there’s anything new there? My son did this.

People want to know what to expect. We like to be prepared. In fact, recent research from UC  San Diego suggests that knowing the ending of a book increases our enjoyment.

And we don’t like to be embarrassed.  It is really bad form to embarrass your customers.

Remember this when planning your blogger programs. Building around a big “reveal” is a dicey proposition, and if the reveal might disappoint instead of enchant? Seriously. Go back to the drawing board. Create something that will appeal to your target audience without deception. It may not be as alluring or sexy, but it’s far less likely to backfire. The Sotto Terra backlash was not “bloggers gone wild” by any means. It was people feeling betrayed and deceived. Not a good way to build a relationship.

Lesson Number 3: Disclosure. Do not do programs without disclosing your brand’s participation. EVER! Strictly speaking, I don’t think the Sotto Terra event violates the FTC disclosure guidelines, as full disclosure of the brand’s involvement was provided when the exchange of value (the meal) happened. However, I am not crazy about the ethics here. Bloggers were encouraged to promote an event as a prize, apparently without full information about the sponsor of the event. Could the bloggers have done a little research and learned that the two hosts were ConAgra consultants? Sure. But they shouldn’t have to. That’s your job as the sponsor.

What did you take away from the Sotto Terra story? Please stay away from brand-bashing. I want to focus on what brands, and bloggers, can do better to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes, not on pointing fingers or trashing the participants in this tale.

Related articles

• ConAgra’s Switcheroo Doesn’t Go Over Well With Bloggers (mediabistro.com)
• Advertising: When Bloggers Don’t Follow the Script, to ConAgra’s Chagrin (nytimes.com)
• ConAgra Forced to Apologize for Tricking Bloggers Into Eating ConAgra Food [Public Relations] (gawker.com)

Normally, I’m proud to tell people that I’m a marketer. I love connecting consumers with the brands they love and companies with the products that fuel their business.

Every so often though, someone calling themselves a marketing professional does something that makes me embarrassed for my profession.

More than a few of these instances have occurred in the past few years, quite specifically related to the practice of blogger outreach. You’ve read about them here and elsewhere too — bad pitches, rude PR people, “spray and pray” mass mailings. And so on.

Many of these are mistakes made out of simple ignorance, lack of experience and miscommunication. Some are simply rude; for example, when a blogger says she isn’t interested in the pitch, replying back implying that she’s stupid is the social media equivalent of the classic Saturday Night Live line, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

Most faux pas can be forgiven. There is however one for which there is no excuse. Pay close attention, aspiring and practicing PR pros and marketers.

Don’t pitch on the grave.

It is NEVER okay to pitch someone who has recently had a death in the family or her circle of friends. And particularly on the back of a blog post about the death. NEVER, NOT EVER.

If you know the blogger well, a message of condolence or a donation to the charity in memory of the deceased is perfectly fine.

But if you don’t know the blogger, don’t use the death in an attempt to bond with her, on any basis, about anything. It’s crass, and the social media equivalent of ambulance chasing.

In fact, when I was consulting, I advised clients to do a read-through of the blogs in their outreach list the day they planned to send their pitch just to be sure there hadn’t been a tragedy or death in the family. In which case, they should remove the blogger from the pitch list regardless of how perfect the pitch was.

Obviously, if the blogger hasn’t posted or publicly mentioned the death in Facebook or Twitter, you aren’t pitching on the grave, you’re just the victim of poor timing. If the blogger replies, apologize and move on.

Don’t believe this happens? A good friend has had it happen twice. She posted about a death, someone pitched her on the back of the post, and when she pushed back, the sender was not only NOT apologetic, but also rude.

That’s just terminally clueless.

anachronism – A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, esp. a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned (Source: Google Search)

Perhaps anachronism is a little harsh, but not by much. The whole concept pf earned media, as part of the triumvirate of Earned, Paid and Owned, has always been a little squishy. There’s just something a little bogus in the idea that the story being told was so tremendously good that the brand earned its non-paid media mention in a story, when of course brands, entertainment properties and celebrities spend millions of dollars every month to PR agencies and publicists to obtain these placements. There’s nothing unpaid about earned media.

Nevertheless, earned media  is where “we” have been accounting for the results of blogger outreach and other word of mouth engagement programs. In part because many early social media engagement programs originated in PR agencies for whom the earned media model made sense (or at least as much sense as it ever will.)

Certainly more so than paid media, which was clearly understood to be paid advertising media, and owned media, which is a bit more complex but boils down to the assets that the company controls – its packaging, trucks, website and so on.

The problem is that nothing is that simple. It never was, but social media and the rise of the engaged consumer has changed the dynamic to the point that classifying things into three buckets just doesn’t work any more.

Blogger outreach programs often include freelance fees paid to the bloggers for their work. So that’s paid media, I guess. When readers of those posts leave comments or post to Facebook or tweet about the posts? Earned. What about if the blogger who was paid to write a post, either a sponsored post on her own blog or as a freelance assignment, tweets it out on her own initiative?

Digital ads almost always include Share icons for Twitter and Facebook. So the media is paid, but the sharing is what? Pearned, for paid + earned?

And then there’s Facebook. How do we classify the activity on Facebook? A brand page is owned, I suppose. But are the comments earned? And what about custom promotional tabs? Are those owned or paid? And when someone shares it, is it now earned?

Clearly, we’ve outgrown these simple models of Paid, Earned and Owned.

What matters is whether consumers want to share. It doesn’t really matter whether the story you are telling starts in paid, earned or owned media.

Will consumers share it?

This concept of shared, or shareable, media is easy to understand. Much harder to execute, because it crosses so many functional lines – media, PR, marketing, advertising, creative. Much harder to measure, because it is more than pageviews or Twitter followers.

Up for the challenge? I am, and would love to hear how you are navigating this world.

Last week while listening to Pandora, I heard a commercial for VistaPrint promoting “mommy cards” (along with networking cards and dating cards.)

What exactly is a “mommy card,” I wondered (and tweeted.)

Now before, you jump in and think, “how stupid are you, Susan, to not know what a “mommy card” is,” rest assured, I had a pretty good idea of what was intended.  I just thought it was a bit silly and more than a bit sexist.

Unless you also have a separate line of  ”daddy cards,” promoting the “mommy card”  associates the act of parenting entirely with one gender. And that is sexist.  Undoubtedly inadvertent but still….

The term “calling card” seems perfectly suitable if you don’t want to call it a business card due to the more personal nature of the information.  Or if you need to be more descriptive, call it a Family Card or a Parent Card, since it lists important family information that a parent might want to share with a babysitter or the parents of their children’s friends.

But this isn’t a post about sexism or gender bias. If I was going to stop at my rant about “the mommy card,” this post would be over on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

Here, I write about marketing and social media. And I’d like you to take away two marketing lessons from my Twitter exchange about “mommy cards.”

First, if your brand is criticized online, you need to figure out if the critic is a rational individual or a wing-nut. Ignore the wing-nuts and engage with the rational ones. VistaPrint figured out I was a rational human being, and reached out to me on Friday.

The company Twitter persona told me  why they promoted them as “mommy cards” and promised to share my feedback with the product team.

As I said in my tweets, I like the company. I’m a customer. I just didn’t like the concept of the “mommy card.” Full props to them for monitoring the Twitter stream and actively engaging with a customer. Makes it that much more likely that they’ll get my Christmas calendar order again this year.

Lesson number 2: VistaPrint told me that they used the term “mommy card” because the research indicated they should. My reply was that research didn’t make the term any less sexist.I firmly believe you can market calling cards to mothers without calling them “mommy cards.”

Now, you may disagree with me on the “mommy card” point (and I fully expect someone to do so), so don ‘t get too hung up on whether you agree with me that it is sexist. What I really want you to remember is that sometimes the research is wrong. Or more accurately, it is right, but you still shouldn’t do it.

This is particularly true when marketing to moms. Just calling a product “for moms” doesn’t make it so.

Be very careful about playing the mommy card.

I have some serious topics on deck to share with you, including my thoughts on the state of  ”earned media,” but today we have to take a little detour.

Because the press release I received this morning for the “Made for Social Media” attraction fragrance  is just so good bad, in a good way, that I have to share it.

As a friend said in a private email, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

But I’m not going to tell a bunch of jokes about the product, which apparently contains “a combination of human pheromones that have been clinically proven to increase feelings of arousal, excitement, social warmth and friendliness in both men and women.”  You can do that all on your own with no help from me.

I’m not even going to wonder about why I received the release, having never written about fragrances or pheremones, on any of my blogs.

Those two topics are such low-hanging fruit they are reseeding themselves as  I type this post. And I do write about social media, so I guess I’m fair game on that score.

Nor am I going to name the company, an aggregator of online forums, or delve too deeply into the value proposition of the scent, the subtext of which seems to be that social media types are so desperate, we need special help to attract a mate (and yes, I know that sentence will probably resurface the troll that drops in to insult me about once or twice a year. So be it.)

In the release, the company claims this endeavor will launch an entirely new business model for productizing through its online channels. And here’s where I go “What?”

They are going to sell a fragrance — a product that generally buyers like to smell before they fork over their cash — through forums, user bases that are notoriously defensive about any form of commerce occurring ”on the boards?” Really? It seems like a commercial mis-match in the making.

Maybe they are just hopping on the social media bandwagon, figuring that all you need to do is slap a little “social media” on the front of the product and the news will just go viral (option 2).

Not to get too meta on you, but maybe they DID read my blog and know that I tend to comment on absurd things. Maybe their goal is to make us laugh? And they just couldn’t get the release finished in time for April 1? Option 3.

Whether they are serious and just misguided (options 1 and 3) or opportunistic (option 2), it seems like a real long shot to me.

And that’s what I want YOU to think about when you are percolating your really awesome breakthrough social media idea that is so groundbreaking it just has to go viral RIGHT AWAY.

Just because you call it social, doesn’t mean the community will agree.

Use social media to engage your audience in an authentic conversation about mutually interesting topics. Not just as a label to capitalize on a popular trend. It’s a bit like greenwashing, and just as offensive.