Marketing Roadmaps

Spam, the law of averages & June Cleaver – more blogger relations

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Even a spammer will get lucky and hit it right often enough to make it worthwhile. That’s why we all win so many lotteries and have so many obscure and recently deceased relations.

It’s also why we are able to fool ourselves that mass tactics work in public relations and blogger outreach. The law of averages (really the mathmetical law of large numbers) suggests that if we just contact enough people, someone will be interested.

We’ll get lucky.

Unfortunately, we then use that lucky hit to justify the future use of the tactic…

That’s exactly what happened last week with Log Cabin’s announcement that it was replacing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with sugar in its syrup line. The outreach was a fairly generic one-line email with an attached press release. Pretty unremarkable, and most bloggers who got it probably read and deleted the email pretty quickly.

But they got lucky.

Against all odds, the release caught Mom-101’s attention. Did they know she’d written about HFCS in January? Possibly, but it wasn’t mentioned in the pitch. Was the list targeted? Possibly, but other high-profile moms who had also written about HFCS didn’t get the pitch.

With this result — a great post in a top parent blog — the folks over at Log Cabin may not realize that they just got lucky. The release was relevant and Mom-101 was paying attention. As she noted in her post, she had just warned a group of marketers that HFCS was going to be the next big issue for the consumer product companies.

I don’t want to pick on Log Cabin. I think that removing HFCS from their products is a very good thing, although I have to admit a preference for actual maple syrup as opposed to maple tasting syrup. I just wish they had done a better job in positioning the issue for parents in their pitch, rather than relying on the bloggers to make the connection. To find the relevance.

A great hit obscures the core problem with mass, generic outreach. It doesn’t foster long-term relationships. It’s like the guy lookin’ for love at the local pick-up bar. Eventually someone will say yes.

He’ll get lucky.

Doesn’t mean a thing.

As I’ve said before, one person’s spam is another’s breakfast. But… it’s still spam.

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Now I promised you some good pitches. I’ve got two for you today.

First a pitch for Netflix from Edelman Digital. This pitch works because:

  • it’s short and to the point. The blogger who forwarded it to me said she got it at first glance;
  • it refers to appropriate past content on the blog;
  • it links to the press release (versus including as an attachment).

Second, this St. Patrick’s Day pitch from Coinstar. I usually don’t like holiday pitches. They generally don’t work. This is the rare exception. Why?

  • Short. Short is always good;
  • Clever Twitter name (@chching);
  • Small contest with lots of winners. Often more effective than one BIG contest;
  • The Twitter account was active all day March 17th.

The only thing I would have done differently? The Twitter account has gone a bit silent, and I would have liked to see it continue to follow, and respond, to people that followed it on Saint Paddy’s Day. It now seems to be doing some sort of promo with the HARO Report, a good thing, but still, more engagement with the community would be good.

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A final word. This lady?

She doesn’t exist. She never did. She was a 50’s-sitcom writer’s vision of the ideal mom.

So, isn’t it time we retired her as the model of the modern mom? Please?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. In fairness, the PR folks on Log Cabin assured me that it was a paired down list, presumably to folks they thought would be receptive to a food safety message. It wasn’t personal in how it addressed me, per se… but I’ll take their word for it.

    In any case I had to weed through 4999 other totally irrelevant press releases to get to that one. I hope that most PR folks aren’t billing their clients to work those odds.

    Mom101´s last blog post..When preschoolers attack. Or at least attack their closets.

  4. Mom-101: I’ll take their word for it too.

    But they were exceedingly lucky that you caught it given the volume of pitches you receive & the sparseness of the pitch.

    The problem is, it would be easy to then use this success as proof that a somewhat targeted list and a generic pitch can work.

    But wow, 1 in 5000. Not good odds. PR peeps, think about that for a minute.

    In the interest of transparency, Mom-101 is not the only blogger I know who got the pitch. The other one had to fish it out of her trash at my request.

  6. I got the Log Cabin pitch too and it was a perfect fit at This Mama Cooks! since I have written that many moms want HFCA removed from products. I posted the news, used a pancake recipe that I thought was healthier than the one they provided (but that did use lite pancake syrup). And then I wrote the PR person thanking her for the news. Ends up she represents other food companies I am interested in featuring for another project. So even if the pitch wasn’t personalized, it was dead on and the relationship I now have with the publicist is very beneficial for my work. A win win situation for both of us.

    Anne-Marie at This Mama Cooks!´s last blog post..Friday’s Weight Watchers frittata roundup

  7. *Relevance* is the most important element in any outreach, as the Log Cabin pitch proves. What I hope companies will avoid is leaving it to the *bloggers* to find the relevance. Sometimes they will, but more often they will not.

    It would be very easy to make the leap that a generic pitch works from this example, when the success is more likely due to some basic targeting on the outreach list combined with the high degree of relevance of the HFCS issue for many parent bloggers.