Marketing Roadmaps

Archives for March 2009

Blogger Relations: Connect with passions & values, not products

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My posts earlier this week about Pepperidge Farm’s Fishful Thinking initiative focused on the errors in execution of the blogger outreach. I’m done with analyzing these errors.

Pepperidge Farm has personally apologized in email to at least some of the affected bloggers, the marketing agency spoke to a number on the phone and via email, and at least one attended today’s symposium in White Plains as an observer. Let’s let things play out.

Nevertheless, there is one more important lesson for us, so bide with me a while.

One of the reasons the situation erupted was because the pitch was perceived as valuable by the mom bloggers. On its face, the Fishful Thinking initiative accomplishes one of the things I regularly preach in blogger relations; it connects with parents over a shared value – the desire to raise optimistic kids. Especially in this economy, when we are all faced with the necessity of telling our children they can’t have something that in better times we might have been able to give. Throw in the stipend, and it’s no wonder the response was so high.

But, by their own admission, they didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what sort of mom they were looking for when they started the outreach.

Here’s what I would have done differently. Yes, I know I am in the comfy chair of an armchair quarterback, but if you know me, you’ll recognize the general approach.

As I’ve noted above, I believe the Fishful Thinking program would be attractive to quite a few parents simply for its content — without the enticement of the trip to White Plains and the stipend.  Since the company is also planning on building a wider network of parents (1000 according to Mr. Youth CEO Matt Britton), my question is: why didn’t they start there?

With a broad outreach to parent bloggers about the program on its merits. Perhaps with an offer to send one of the expert’s books. Or offering a conference call with the expert on a specific topic.

The Fishful Thinking program might not be everyone’s cuppa, but it definitely connects with parents around passions and values, not simply Goldfish. That’s such a good start; it makes all the execution errors even more of a shame.

I am certain — dead certain — that potential candidates for the “faculty”, really good candidates (and that’s not to say that the 10 they’ve picked are not good) would have self-identified by taking the company up on its simple offer. The women would have written because the information offered intrinsic value to them, their blog, their readership.

That would have been a far better and more defensible pool of candidates for the influencer program. Execution would still be critical –it always is — but there wouldn’t be so many questions about the criteria.

That’s what I would have done. Start simple and progress to the complex. YMMV.

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Stepping into the circle of shameless self promotion,  if you like the general approach and you’re planning a blogger outreach campaign, call or email me.  I’d love to help you develop a program that connects with the passions and values of your customers.

Blogger relations: a fishful update

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Earlier today, I spoke with Matt Britton the CEO of Fishful Thinking agency Mr. Youth about the #fishfulthinking commentary on the Internet. To his credit, he responded immediately to my outreach for more information.

He clearly stated, and I believe him, that the agency had no intent to misrepresent or deceive mom bloggers about the Fishful Thinking opportunity. He also admitted that the program could have been handled better.

We talked a bit about why.

Matt explained (as David Wescott hinted in his comment to my earlier post) that they felt they had to reach out to approximately 120 (not 200 but the number doesn’t really matter) bloggers to have a large enough pool to find 10 who met the criteria and could meet their requirements.

But what were the criteria? A clear statement about the filtering process would have made it much more clear that they were recruiting for general interest, not making a final selection. The email language was unclear if not misleading.

Matt said that the criteria for selection evolved as they interviewed candidates and submitted them for client approval. This, in my opinion, is a fatal design flaw in the program. When you do an influencer panel program like this, it is critical that the selection criteria be clear up front to everyone involved. In the outreach. For company, agency and potential participants. Floating selection criteria offer nothing but problems.

If you can’t take the time to delineate the criteria upfront? Don’t do the program. I don’t know what “it” is, but I’ll know “it” when I see “it” doesn’t cut it. Sorry.

As David pointed out in my comments to the earlier post, far better to get to know the bloggers first, and then issue well targeted invitations.This was not done (possible?) here. Perhaps because the team was trying to leverage the public symposium date and moved faster than true relationship development allows? I didn’t think to ask Matt that when we spoke.

This lack of clarity was compounded by not getting back to people in a reasonable timeframe. Matt said that things just took longer than they expected — to interview potential participants, to make the selection, to get client approval. Fair enough, but an email saying the process was taking longer than expected would have been a whole lot better than silence. And that doesn’t explain the scheduled calls that were flaked on more than one occasion by the PR team. Something broke internally at Mr. Youth and I really truly hope that it wasn’t because they didn’t value the mom blogger’s time.

Lastly, they finalized the 10 “faculty” members on Wednesday, but the announcement wasn’t to go out until today. I don’t even know if it actually did. The Twitstorm and ensuing blog posts sort of stole the thunder. BUT: if they had informed the moms better about the process, the Twitstorm probably wouldn’t have happened at all.

I understand that Mr. Youth is extending an invitation to some of the mom bloggers who blogged/tweeted about this to attend the symposium on Saturday, expenses paid. This is a nice gesture on their part. It makes me hopeful. I *like* Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. But I still think this campaign could have been designed and executed much better than it has been so far.

As always, I will be following up with the company and bloggers who attended the event. Stay tuned.

Too little, too late, too lame? Initial thoughts on #fishfulthinking

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Yesterday morning my friend Julie Marsh sent me an example for the bad pitch file, an email pitch for a campaign called Fishful Thinking from Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. As she notes on her blog this morning, the offer was somewhat interesting, so she had followed up, twice, with the agency to no response.

She thought that a bit odd, that they didn’t bother to respond. I did too, given the tone of the email, but didn’t have any time to do much with it then as we were off to Boston for brunch and the musical Dirty Dancing.[Brief aside, if you have the chance to see it, go. Makes you feel just as good as the movie, the dancing is excellent, and male vocalist Ben Mingay has a voice to die for.]

Checked back in after dinner to see there had been quite a discussion over Twitter during the day #fishfulthinking. Turns out about 200 mom bloggers had received this “special invitation” to participate in the Pepperidge Farm program, many responded positively and most NEVER heard back. That is, until the discussion started on Twitter yesterday.

Representatives from the agency, including the boss,  then contacted mom tweeters and bloggers to explain the situation, but as Julie notes in her post, and others have tweeted, the explanation isn’t terribly satisfactory. Kristen Chase, who also received the invitation and replied to thunderous silence,  has a summary of the sequence of events and some good advice for the agency on what they should have done.

I’m going to break this down even more, using the information I have at hand. I’d love to hear from the agency or company and will be sending an email with a link to this post later today.

All marketing outreach, including blogger relations,  has three components: the target audience or list, the pitch/program and the execution. Success requires careful attention to all three. So where did Fishful Thinking fail?

First, it made what appeared to be an attractive exclusive offer:

“We are recruiting 10 insightful moms to become key influencers in this nationwide campaign.”

to 200 women. Mass outreach, micro tactic. Not a good match.

Reread the email — I have many times. It  reads like the recipient has already been selected. Not that she is one of 200 randomly selected mom bloggers and must pass an interview process to participate. Which was the information that surfaced yesterday.

That’s problem number two. The pitch misrepresents the program. It offers the mom an opportunity for a trip to New York for a training session and a stipend. Sounds good. Except the real offer is to INTERVIEW for the opportunity.

Finally, execution. Bad enough to send a misleading pitch to a large list of mom bloggers. But then, when the women are interested,  to not follow up? Until the mess made it to Twitter that is, when it HAD to follow up or look really stupid.

Unfortunately, the explanations that have surfaced to date don’t seem to be much more than attempts to smooth over the situation with offers of free goldfish.

If you are counting, that’s a failing grade on all three elements: audience, pitch and execution.

The whole mess reminded me quite a bit of Camp Baby, except Johnson & Johnson immediately apologized and made an honest effort to understand where it went wrong. Not saying we won’t see that from Fishful, but so far things seem more like boilerplate and justification.

More importantly, Fishful Thinking had the Camp Baby example to learn from. Same target audience, similar program, at least on its face. The definition of insanity is to repeat the same actions, expecting a different outcome. The Fishful campaign certainly seems to qualify.

Kristen and Julie have already done a fine job telling Fishful what it should have done differently. I’m going to frame my advice for a company considering a similar program.

  • Exclusive offers have to be a a micro tactic. You should never reach out to more than you can afford to fulfill. That means you have to qualify your list very carefully and narrowly. Consumers talk to each other. Bloggers talk to each other a lot and not just in the public channels.
  • You can mix exclusive offers and mass tactics but the mass offer, such as the free goldfish or public seminar, can’t be a consolation prize for a poorly executed exclusive offer. That just sends the wrong message to everyone. What you can do is make the exclusive offer to a highly targeted, narrow population with a very clear criteria and then have a mass offer to a broader population. It’s also a good idea to have some time between the two programs. Compounding the fishy confusion is that the agency was apparently doing two simultaneous programs, the exclusive one and a promo for a public seminar in White Plains this weekend.
  • Don’t mislead in an attempt to entice. Make sure the offer and any requirements or qualifications necessary to participate are clearly stated. Err on the side of OVER not under-communication.
  • On the other hand, the promotional-speak, the self congratulations. Keep those to a minimum. Elementary school children can tell when they are being spoken to in message points.  So can their parents.
  • Make sure you have sufficient resources to execute. Enough people to respond to the bloggers. Enough products or whatever your offer is to meet the demand. If you target your good pitch appropriately, you should have a fair idea of the response. Staff accordingly. If you misjudge, staff up. Get a temp. But don’t let weeks go by without responding to an email from someone YOU approached in the first place.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the Fishful campaign over the course of the week. I’ll be sure to report anything interesting.