Tip of the hat to Sandy for this one. All it is missing is hot stock tips and deceased Nigerians.
Archives for June 2007
Ghostwriting, Warren and Yippee
As I wrote last month, I strongly believe that ghostwriting is not appropriate for blogs. Others disagree, and while I was out of pocket the past week or so, the conversation took flight again
Let’s be crystal clear: ghostwriting is when someone writes for another person and the item is published under the other person’s name. In books, you might see it as "By Very Famous Person, with Known Ghostwriter," although you may also see the "By, with" construct with co-authors when one is more well-known or made a greater contribution than the other. In blogs, you are not likely to see the ghostwriter’s name at all; the item is posted by the "author."
While ghostwriting is a legitimate approach to communications vehicles like the CEO letter in the annual report, magazine article or a speech, it is not a good approach for blogging. As Shel Holtz points out, blogging is a new communications channel that is supposed to remove barriers, not create new ones:
[But] a blog by an identified senior executive is different. By blogging, the executive is specifically saying, “This is me engaged in a conversation with you.” While everyone knows that the quotes in the press release are fabricated, and that the speech was penned by a speechwriter, there is an expectation when someone reads and comments on Jonathan Schwartz’s blog that he’s engaged directly with Sun Microsystem’s CEO, not some anonymous proxy. When people learn that somebody other than the CEO is the blog’s true author, it will serve only to deepen the distrust and cynicism that characterizes most peoples’ existing perceptions of business.
That doesn’t mean that if your CEO can’t or won’t write, you can’t have a company blog or participate on blogs. You just need to take a different approach. Shel mentions some possibilities in his post. Here are a few others.
- Hire a writer specifically for the blog. It can be a staff person or an outside consultant. Depending on the "editorial mission" you pick for the blog, she can post as a more impersonal "Company Name" or under her own name. If you choose "Company Name" you should disclose the approach and contributors somewhere on the blog. That readers can actually find. When I blog for clients, I prefer to write under my own name, but will do the "company name" approach if that suits the blog better.
- Look around. See if there is a good blog on your company’s topic already in existence, and consider sponsoring it. It can be written by a customer or expert. Maybe even an employee writing on his own time But remember: becoming a sponsor doesn’t mean you now own it. The blogger should retain her independence. Note: this could be slightly different if the blog were written by an employee. In this case, you might want to acquire it outright and make it part of the employee’s job.
- Develop a group blog, with an editor responsible for the editorial calendar. Much like a magazine. Contributors can be employees, customers, outside experts, etc. etc. This can be a challenging task but well worth it. The group brings diversity of opinion and distributes the posting burden among a larger number. That generally means more posts and ultimately more visibility. It’s no accident that the top blogs are group blogs. Your editor can be internal or external, and post under his own name or the company’s.
All these approaches are legitimate ways to engage with blogs without resorting to the artificiality of ghostwriting.
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Two shout outs
To Grace Davis for her post "Enjoy Every Sandwich" A little Warren was just what I needed today, thanks for the reminder.
To Mary Schmidt for her Yippees and Yawns. Excellent advice for anyone embarking on a Web site project. Or wondering why no one ever visits their site 🙂
Defining Social Media Success
How do we define success in a blogger relations campaign or blog initiative? WHO defines success?
In yesterday’s post on Blogola, I mentioned a post by Mack Collier that criticized both the recent Nikon outreach to PR and marketing bloggers and CBS TV’s outreach last spring to a group of parent bloggers. In both cases, Mack’s criticism wasn’t of the blog outreach itself, which I should have made clearer in my previous post. Rather, he chastised both groups for not going far enough, for reaching out without soliciting feedback from the bloggers. As he stated in the comments to my Blogola post:
My problem is in the execution, because I think both initiatives have/had a golden opportunity to collect valuable feedback from bloggers, and aren’t taking advantage of it. Apparently all CBS did was smooze some mommy bloggers on the set, and throw freebies at them and hope they go home with stars in their eyes and gush about how great the show is. That’s fine, but why not ALSO actually TALK to these bloggers and ask them how CBS can utilize social media effectively? Is throwing freebies at bloggers a feasible social-media plan for the long-term?
I respect Mack, and quite often agree with him. This isn’t one of those times.
We have to get over the idea that we are "doing social media" and that there is a prescribed, preferred way of "doing it" that defines the effort as successful. We are doing marketing campaigns or PR outreach or customer evangelism using social media tools. We are reaching out to customers who blog. Hopefully, we have a marketing plan that uses all the appropriate tools and tactics, new and old, not a social media plan that focuses on social media tools even if they aren’t the most appropriate or effective for a given objective.
Now, I know that wasn’t what Mack was suggesting in his comments or his post. He saw it as lost opportunity to get customer feedback, and he is by no means the only person to express this viewpoint. To some extent he is right. Both campaigns could be viewed as opportunities to gather customer feedback and it seems they have not done so. However, just because they could have asked for feedback does not mean they should have. At least in these specific efforts.
The measure of success of a program, whether social or traditional media, is whether it achieves its objectives, not whether it meets an observer’s expectations.
Successful marketing programs have focus — a clear, primary objective. The best ads make one point, not many. Why? Because it is generally more effective to do one thing well, really well. Trying to do too much, be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster. A jumbled Web site with no clear path or call to action. A direct marketing piece that never gets to the point because it is trying to make all of them.
In the case of the Nikon Picture This campaign and the New Adventures of Old Christine set visit, the primary objective was to spread the word. In my opinion, both succeeded.
Should the companies consider further outreach to solicit feedback and opinion from bloggers? Absolutely. But every project doesn’t have do everything.
I wasn’t personally involved in either effort, but I know Liz Gumbinner, one of the parent bloggers invited on the CBS set visit. I thought it would be interesting to get her perspective on Mack’s post and the WSJ article that inspired it.
To start with, she thought the WSJ article was misleading, in both tone and fact. For example, something she wrote on Mom-101 was attributed to Yvonne from joyunexpected.com. As to whether CBS solicited feedback from the invited bloggers, she says:
Just because something isn’t mentioned in an article doesn’t mean it didn’t happen….While there was no opportunity on the set to sit down and critique the show (which..well, duh. When do you get tickets to Letterman and then have a chance to pick apart the opening monologue with him afterwards?) there was ample opportunity to discuss the show with the PR and show contacts afterwards or by email.
She also reiterated that CBS never asked anyone to write about the show or the set visit, only requested that if they did, they include the new date/time of the show in their post. Now if you’ve ever read Liz’s blog, you know that Mom-101 doesn’t gush. Nor did she in her post about the set visit.
To Mack’s point that CBS should have done more, obtained more feedback from the bloggers, she was fine with the fact that CBS was using the bloggers as a PR channel, not a focus group.
As a marketer I know that sometimes opinion leaders are used to guide the product development process, and sometimes they’re used to get the word out when the product is completed. In this case, we were a tool for the latter. I’ve got no beef with that. I think they handled the entire experience very well in fact. It was well coordinated and organized and we all had a really fun day. It certainly beats the “do you want a free sample of my new pudding packs” solicitations we normally get as “mom bloggers.”
Also, for the record, they didn’t “fly us in.” Good lord. We were all in the LA area and the couple who weren’t came in on their own dimes because they wanted to be there. The dvds they “threw us” were just cheaply laid off copies of a few show episodes so we could familiarize ourselves with the show before the visit – certainly nothing we could resell on the black market. And did we “happily post about how we loved the experience?” Yep.
Because we did.
It was fun.
Sue me.
CBS had a goal — to spread the word about the show and the new day/time to the audience. One of the ways it decided to do this was by reaching out to parent bloggers. Most, if not all, did indeed write about the show/visit and came away from the experience with positive feelings about the network. That’s a win all around — happy bloggers, happy network.
And that’s success, at least in my book.
Tags: Nikon, New Adventures of Old Christine, CBS, blogger relations
Blogola?
What is all the fuss about? Really.
A month or so ago, Nikon launched a blogger relations campaign aimed at PR and marketing bloggers. Gave ’em use of a digital SLR camera. Seemed to have covered all the bases for doing blogger relations — transparency, clarity, targeted pitch, etc.
And then whoops, the accusations of blogola started. Eric Eggertson summarizes some of them here. Mack Collier of the Viral Garden also had a problem with it, as well as with a CBS outreach around the TV program The New Adventures of Old Christine (more on that in another post later this week).
I’m confused.
Just exactly what is the problem with asking influential customers and potential customers to try out products? It’s part of Western culture. And has been as far back as we have had commerce.
By appointment to the Queen was all about patronage; merchants supplied goods to the sovereign and other nobles as a way of advertising their wares. And it still happens — the couture houses and high end jewelers like Harry Winston bend over backwards to get the chance to dress and bejewel the big name celebrities and top actresses. Not because us regular folk can afford the stuff we see them wear. But because we just might buy something from company’s "off the rack" product line.
Advertising, for good or for ill, is based on the idea that we, the customers, will buy things used by people like us or people we want to be like. Because guess what? We will.
If a blogger has influence with other people like him, it’s a smart business move to reach out to him. If you sell a tangible product that you can let her try, why wouldn’t you let a blogger try it out? Marketing 101: get someone to TRY something, you are nearly there.
As long as everything is done in the light of day, as long as you don’t tell her what to say, what’s the problem? Calling it blogola, as in payola, implies some sort of secret dealings. Umm, maybe I’m missing something, but Nikon’s campaign seems pretty above board.
Unless of course you didn’t get a camera….
Seriously, if a company has confidence in its products and is willing to put them out on trial, we should applaud, not deride, their efforts. Sure, they are trying to sell something. So what. I’m just glad to see them extending their outreach beyond the glitterati and beyond traditional media.
Even if I didn’t get a camera 🙂
Tags: blogola, blogger relations, Nikon
Comment Spam
Over the weekend, I got slammed with a bunch of comment spam to old posts. I’ve closed comments and trackbacks on the posts and apologize to those of you that read the blog in a feed. I know Typepad republishes the posts, so some of the feedreaders are redelivering some pretty old stuff to you today.
I promise — new stuff, today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here are my wish list items for Six Apart.
Can we have the ability to change the comment and trackback status for multiple posts at once without republishing the posts? Comment and trackback spammers target old (pre-captcha) Typepad posts, and the only way to block them is to close comments and turn off trackbacks, post by post. Which is time consuming.
I’d also love to be able to set a time window for comments and trackbacks to be open.