Insanity

Insanity is often defined as "doing the same things over again but expecting a different outcome."

Using that definition, we, marketing and PR professionals, are most definitely insane. F*****g nuts.

While I’ve written about a few blogger relations SNAFUs in the past week,  this rant is not about them. In fact, having spoken or emailed with many of the players on both sides of those blogstorms, I have no doubt that everyone in those specific examples was sincerely trying to make a contribution, do a good thing, build relationships, offer constructive criticism, etc. No bad guys. Not the companies. Not the bloggers.

No. We — the collective we — are nuts because we keep trying to impose mass media models on online social networks. In some cases,  like the media outreach numbers game —  throw as much at the wall as you can and see what  sticks — the models are badly broken and dysfunctional in their natural environment. They just suck more when applied to bloggers.

Advertising messages that are just a little "off," or even mildly offensive, are at best amusing in their badness, but easily ignored regardless. We stop watching, We don’t buy. We make fun of them on our blogs.

Other mass market tools, like demographics and pychographics and "targeting" and models of consumer behavior are useful but not sufficient in themselves. Think about it. Engaging in online social networks is more like making friends than anything else. Do we make friends based on their demographic profile? I sure as hell hope not. If you are, please return to a previous century immediately.  Don’t get me wrong — there is nothing wrong with using these tools in your marketing efforts. But they are simply a place to start. If you go no further, please, go no further in social media because we don’t need any more insanity. Just keep using direct mail and infomercials or whatever else puts your controlled message in front of your target audience.

Because we don’t need blogstorms. They are scary. Think about it. You are a marketer who developed a blogger outreach program with the very best  intentions, but made some errors along the way — perhaps a few design flaws in the program or a junior staffer doing outreach who didn’t handle an objection properly or maybe just bad assumptions. All of a sudden, your program blows up. And not just one or two unhappy customers. All over the blogs, all over the ‘Net. And more often than not, it’s a case of simple mistakes. I can only imagine how it feels (and intend to keep it that way) but it must be an awful feeling. It must be so hard to understand why people are so upset when it is often an easily fixed issue or simple misunderstanding.

Here’s why. It’s a cumulative effect. Yours isn’t the only pitch a blogger receives or hears about in a given day. A mommyblogger might get 10 or 20 in a single day. If every single one of those is just a bit off — poor targeting, poorly written pitch, addressed to the wrong person or the name of the blog instead of a person — it’s like an escalating bad day.

You know, the kind of day when you oversleep and the kids miss the bus and you forgot to give them lunch money and then you are late for work. And once you get there, the day just spirals downward. Or if you work out of the house, the dog pukes on the carpet and email doesn’t work and Twitter is flaky. Then the kids come home and everybody is in and out of the family room, which just happens to be your office. Some telemarketer from a political campaign calls, but it’s for your spouse’s insanely conservative party not yours. And then in all of this, your partner or one of your kids says something perhaps a little clueless. Maybe not the worst thing ever, but just enough. You go ballistic. Nuclear even.

That’s why blogstorms happen. It’s not just your pitch. It’s your pitch in context of everything else, of an ongoing problem of marketers applying mass models to social networks.

Remember, a blog is not a media vehicle. Even if it looks like one, with advertising and everything. A blog is a personal publishing platform, and is driven by the passions of the blogger(s), not products and promotions. This is true even in the case of group or company blogs; without people and passion, they never get off the ground.

When you reach out to a blogger, he or she is also part of a social network, of which the blog is one piece. Everybody emails everyone else. They are also on microblogging platforms like Twitter and social nets like Facebook and Utterz and ooVoo and God knows what else. People are talking,  the shot really is heard ’round the world in a matter of minutes and nothing snowballs faster than bad news. Trust me. It’s what I do for a living.  It takes twice as much effort to spread good news as bad.

Recently I lost a piece of business that I really wanted. In part because I didn’t do enough self-promotion, which I am working to correct. And in part because I didn’t give easy answers. In the interviewing process, one of the questions asked was what small business bloggers would I reach out to on behalf of this potential client. I told the truth, which was that I didn’t know yet, because we needed to match the client’s messages with the bloggers who covered small business. The competition provided a list of bloggers and forums.

Now I suppose I could have sent them a list of SMB sites and bloggers. I have one, and it wouldn’t have taken long to "puff" it up. But I am absolutely convinced that the mass media numbers game is not the right approach for the long haul. The social media payoff for anyone, for any company,  is in doing the upfront research to figure out who you want to know, who wants to know you. It’s about building relationships with your customers over time, not overnight.

Repeat after me. Mass consumer models do not work in the blogosphere. We aren’t going to get a different outcome the next time. Thinking we will is insane.

Stop the insanity.

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Some additional resources:

• Marketing Roadmaps posts on Blogger Relations. There are TONS so rather than list them all, I’ve linked the category search.
• Some Advice on Reaching Out to Mommybloggers. An article I wrote for Media Bullseye earlier this year. BTW in case anyone cares, I asked them to donate my fee to charity.
• Stop pushing start pulling, from Geoff Livingston at Now Is Gone
• SNCR Blogger Relations Tip Sheet (free to members, $25. donation, non-members)
• State of Blog Relations (APCO and Council of PR Firms)

Tags: blogger relations, marketing, mommybloggers