Marketing Roadmaps

Archives for 2009

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.

In Vino, Veritas

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting an introduction to social media at the Massachusetts Farm Wineries & Growers Association Annual Conference. They were a delightful audience, and I promised I would post a few links to wine blogs.

I was able to taste a few Massachusetts wines during the break, and  was quite impressed. We’ve been to our local winery quite a few times, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try any other local wines.

I also learned that the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources publishes an agriculture tourism map that covers farms and wineries across the state that have a variety of activities open to the public. Check out Savor Massachusetts on the MDAR site for more information.

Engaging with your community, your customer

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Engaging the customer. It goes well beyond those stalwarts of mass marketing, the original 4Ps: product price place and promotion.

Certainly we start there, because our product is the first place we’ll find a shared interest with our  customer. The customer needs or wants it and the company wishes to sell it.

In a mass market, we could stop at this and use our traditional tool chest of advertising and public relations to communicate at our prospective buyer.

But strictly speaking, the mass markets of Darren Stephens and Don Draper don’t exist anymore.

Long tail products find their buyers online and mass market products find value in niche marketing.

Nearly every mass consumer product is sliced diced and tailored to ever smaller  focused needs. Just look at laundry detergent. At my last count, one side of an entire aisle at Target was devoted to Tide. Multiple varieties, each available in multiple packaging options to meet a perceived multiplicity of laundry requirements. Overkill? Almost certainly.  Nevertheless it is the market reality.

Amidst this continued clutter, brands needed new ways to attract the customer.

They found it online. Through online advertising and websites. And the motherlode. The ever expanding communities of their customers engaging with social media – blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,  online portals.

Companies and their PR agencies began pitching bloggers about their products. Some well. Most not so much. But pitching isn’t engaging the customer.

To engage implies a closer relationship than the simple exchange of gelt for goods. To engage implies a conversation, not an advertising campaign or product pitch. To engage expects mutual respect and a balanced exchange – everybody gets value out of the deal. As I said at the Mom 2.0 Summit Friday, nobody gets screwed… unless of course they want to.

In my opinion,  engagement demands that the company bring more to the table than just its product. In the offline world, we generally don’t have conversations about products, unless we are highly invested in them. Entertainment products, video games, cars. Perhaps. Cereal, laundry soap and soup? Not so much. Why should companies expect it to be ANY different in the blogosphere?

If you want to have a conversation with someone, you need to engage over something that both parties care about. Otherwise it is a very short conversation.technorati1

When I do workshops I often show this  Technorati data. Technorati’s rankings may be rank, but the 2008 research offers some good data about bloggers. Scan down this list of reasons why bloggers blog. I’m sure you’ll notice that “help companies promote their products” isn’t on this list.

Likewise, people generally don’t form communities around product features. Around products, yes, but not as a channel for promotional messages from the vendor. Around the passion for what the product lets them do, make, achieve.

This is where the concept of relevance comes in. You have to make your product relevant to the needs of the community, the needs of the blogger. Put the product in the blogger’s context; get beyond how someone uses your product to the why of it. Why does the customer want to use your product? How does it fit into her life?

This puts you down the path to discover the values you, the brand/company, share with your customers,. These values form the basis for better pitches and a long term sustainable relationship with your customer.

How to find the shared values

For some products – for example entertainment and technology where trial might be a draw or folks do get caught up in exciting new features – you may be able to build an outreach campaign on features. Some of the most successful campaigns I’ve seen recently are indeed for entertainment franchises like Wii and amusement parks, and trial or trip forms a big part of the program.

But consumer product goods are a bit harder. Many product marketing folks get caught up in features, but to be really effective you’ve got to go beyond that and relate to something the blogger is doing. How the product fits their life, not how they can make their life fit your pitch. Relevance. Context.

Here’s an example recently sent to me by a mom blogger, a pitch for mouthwash.

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(click on image for larger size)

I can’t be any clearer than this: the bullying example in the pitch is totally lame. It is a made-up problem.

And it’s a shame because they could have done a much more relevant pitch related to a parent’s desire to establish good oral hygiene habits with the kids. Sure, it’s been done before – most good ideas are not new, just new or better executions – but so what….  It is relevant, and that’s what really matters when reaching out to an online community. It doesn’t have to be new, just “new to you.”

In this economy, budgets are going to be a lot tighter. Relevance isn’t as critical when  you can offer an all expenses spa weekend in exchange for sitting through  a few product pitches. Still important , but we can easily imagine someone who doesn’t care that much about the product going if the event is slick enough. That won’t fly anymore.

Events of that scale have always been out of reach of small to mid size companies, and increasingly won’t be in the budget for big ones either.

We have to be more clever.

We have to meet the customer, the blogger in her context. Not expect her to blithely sign up for ours.

I  have been working on a model that explains HOW to do this. How to find the context or shared values. It’s hard to explain it in a blog post, but here’s the mind map.

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I’ve promised to share an example of how to apply this to consumer products. My next post will apply it to cotton swabs, as close to a commodity as I think you can find in the consumer markets.

This post is based in part on material prepared for the Mom 2.0 Summit panel on Communities.

Marketing using social bookmarking

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Earlier this week, I had an interesting phone call with the marketing person from a game portal. He had called to avail himself of my “one hour free” offer. He primarily wanted to talk about the potential of social bookmarking — such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Kirtsy, Mixx and Reddit  —  as a marketing tactic.

I suspect he was disappointed in the call. Unlike an analyst, I don’t have  great pronouncements about trends. What I do is discuss your business issues and make concrete suggestions for your marketing and social media plans. There is no single answer, just avenues for exploration.

Here’s what you should look at regarding social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking as a tactic is a bit like Google Ads. Easy to do but  hard to do well. To be successful with Google Ads, you need to look at your stats every day. Adjust keywords. Tweak content.

Social bookmarking is the same.You need to look at your web analytics, understand what the social bookmark sites deliver to your site and be willing to tweak your content to be appealing to the ones delivering real traffic, real prospects.

Black hat tactics like paying for submissions are a non-starter. They may deliver traffic — until  you are caught — but the traffic won’t convert. They won’t buy, they won’t come back.

And that’s what you are looking for. Buyers and loyal visitors.

Unlike Google Ads, though, you can get some benefit dabbling in social bookmarking. If you aren’t willing to invest the time to understand which of the social bookmarking sites are productive for you,  you can still get some incidental benefit by placing the links  or a widget like Share This on your site. Or by occasionally pinging your friends to Digg a post. No real investment, no expectation, no worries.

If you want to spend the time though, here’s my suggestion.

First, look at your referrers. Which social bookmarking sites are delivering the most traffic, and the most productive traffic, to your site? It is bound to be different depending on what you write,  what you  offer. Every social bookmarking site has a user base and possibly even a perspective. You need to understand which ones are important to you, to your customers.

Then look at the type of content that attracts these visitors. If it is consistent over time — the same type of content attracts the visitors from a desired social bookmarking site, you have guidance for what to write to attract them in future. It’s not that different from the process used in television ratings. The networks tailor their content to the most productive audience.

It’s simple marketing math.

What’s the buzz – more examples from the bad pitch file

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My goal here on Marketing Roadmaps is to provide guidance and examples that will help my readers do social media “right.” That’s why I usually mask company, product and agency names from the bad pitch examples, and focus on the pitch, not the products.

From time to time, something crosses the transom that demands a different approach. I’ve got a couple for you today.

The first is for a new social network for kids. In my opinion, this one fails all around — pitch, product and PR. Here’s the pitch:

buuz11

And here’s the product:

buuuz21

And here are the problems.

Let’s start with the pitch, which implies that this is a product for kids with references to Barney and the Wiggles. Yet, when  you go to the site, it seems far more like a dating site for teens. The wiggles here aren’t the ones singing “Fruit Salad” if you know what I mean. Was this pitch slanted young to appeal to mom bloggers, even though the product clearly isn’t? That sort of deception is bad practice at best. Possibly unethical.

1book3The product. BUUUZ. Sounds like “booze”  which makes “message in the bottle” a questionable tagline. What sort of message in the bottle and just how much should we drink before we get the message?

More like spin the bottle….Do kids really need their own version of match.com? Or is it just one more fertile hunting ground for predators?

Now I can see how they ended up with the name. The domain name was available and someone fell in love with the logo and the idea of “UUU” create the buzz. But domain name availability and a graphic presentation are two of the WORST reasons for choosing a product name. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Because no matter how you spin it, and more on that in a minute, there’s no way “BUUUZ” is pronounced anything other than booze. It’s simple English grammar.

And that just doesn’t cut it for a site for kids. No matter how you choose to rationalize it.

As the PR flack did when one of the parent bloggers who received this pitch asked why they gave the site the name and tagline they did. A one line response, it completely dismissed the concerns and insulted the blogger.  The email equivalent of Dan Aykroyd’s rejoinder in the early days of Saturday Night Live: “Jane you ignorant slut.”

Now, I can see why one might be defensive about BUUUZ. It can be tiring hopping around on one leg. But, responding to criticism in a hostile fashion is both rude and stupid. I hate to say it, given how strongly I believe in active engagement, but it would be better to just ignore the email and simply be considered rude.

This campaign is one that I definitely vote off the island. Bad pitch, questionable product and offensive PR. Three strikes. Out.

Our other example today is a an inauguration-related pitch. Sort of.

joesteeth1

This program for Trident gum fails in a number of ways. First, it trivializes the change we celebrated on January 20th with President Obama’s inauguration. “Chomping for change?” Please.

Next, as I’ve commented before, campaigns that co-opt celebrities without their permission are distasteful.  Don’t like ’em. Slimy.

Finally, think about what they’re asking people to do for a pack of gum. A 50 cent pack of gum. Seems like an awful lot of work for a single pack of gum.

It doesn’t say much for American culture that quite a few people did it, but that doesn’t make the campaign good. I didn’t see any coverage of this program on the 500+ blogs I read, including many parent blogs.

If you only remember a few things from what you read here, I hope you remember this:

  • Respect the bloggers. Even if they occasionally piss you off, they are your customers. Even if they are wrong, they are right.
  • Add value. Give bloggers a reason to write. A thin storyline and a pack of gum? Not so much.

I’ll have some more on how to add value in my next post.