Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Managing Crisis: When Insiders Go Public

by

Recently someone ask me if I thought car service Uber could improve consumer perceptions by engaging with social influencers. I replied with a very tentative maybe.

The damage to the firm’s brand goes well beyond one or two faux pas. Sexual assault of female passengers  and sexual harassment of female employees being a particular problem. Before it should engage with consumers directly through social influencers, Uber needs to actually fix that which is broken. Time for talk has passed. Time to walk.

The following day, I read an opinion piece by Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor that called on the company to do that very thing. Really fix its problems, not just promise to fix and do nothing substantive or sustaining.

Think about that for a minute. Investors so concerned about the situation, and so stymied by the regular channels of communication that they felt their only recourse was a public, open letter.

Something similar happened in the “momosphere” this past weekend. While I am not privy to all the details, the general gist is that two employees of a non-profit quit very publicly, detailing systemic racism and microaggressions in their posts, and others were quick to corroborate their stories, also very publicly.

How bad is the crisis, when insiders feel there is no possibility of change from within, and they literally take to the streets? Publicly and with attribution, as distinct from an anonymous source like Watergate’s Deep Throat or any number of rogue Twitter accounts sharing salacious details from the Trump White House.

And what does that mean for the organization under siege?

Fundamentally, when things get to this point, Public Relations As Usual is too little, too late. When the folks are figuratively marching in the streets, you need to respond in kind — with passion and commitment to change. Keeping in mind that you may NEVER do enough to satisfy the critics, but you have to try. Seriously try to fix your broken product.

You can’t expect things to turnaround overnight either. The things you do and say right away are just the start. You have to stay the course. Your public has to see that the changes you promise are real and sustainable. Especially if they have heard it before, but the followthrough was lacking.

Anything less than real commitment to change will not be enough.

2014 in Review: Some of my favorite sponsored content programs (part 1)

by

Disclosure: I am Senior Vice President, Integrated Marketing at SheKnows Media. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

In my job at BlogHer, and now at SheKnows Media following its acquisition of BlogHer, I am privileged to work with our client brands and our community experts, bloggers and social influencers on some truly excellent sponsored content programs. To start off this year, in my next few posts I will share a few of my favorites from 2014, along with why I think the content created in these programs was so compelling and successful. Actual results are confidential, but I can share that the programs delivered strong brand engagement.

Here are the first two: JCPenney and Chevrolet Traverse.

JCPenney BlogHer programJCPenney – Five bloggers were selected to participate in an 8 month brand ambassador program, creating content for their own blogs, sharing with their followers on their social graph and contributing to JCPenney’s Pinterest boards.

Why I love this program: The extended timeframe allowed the bloggers to really get to know the brand, and vice versa!! During a two-day immersion event at JCPenney headquarters in Plano, Texas, the bloggers were treated to presentations from JCPenney fashion, hair and home style experts as well as a private tour of the store, and were able to use the great information shared during those sessions throughout the year. We also created custom videos for each blogger during the Plano trip to share with her readers why she was excited to be working with JCPenney:

Chevrolet Traverse –  Ten bloggers were selected to drive a Chevrolet Traverse for a week, documenting their experience using dashboard-mounted video cameras. We then edited their videos into short documentary videos to accompany their sponsored blog posts. Start with their posts and videos looking forward to the experience before you dig into the reviews.  An additional group of bloggers wrote aligned posts about family travel memories to support the theme of family togetherness and provide context for Traverse messaging.

Why I love this program: Bloggers in cars! Dashboard cams! But none of the shaky-cam that often makes experiential video painful to watch. Our professional editors provided upfront guidance to the bloggers, and then edited the raw footage into tight stories to accompany the bloggers’ posts.  This “premium UGC” approach delivers a production quality that lets the story shine through and brings all the videos together into a cohesive series. I also love the juxtaposition of the experiential program with the more reflective aligned posts, allowing us to reach the audience through two very distinct types of content.

FTC Update: Operation Full Disclosure; Disclosing a compensated trip

by

Last Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission issued a press release about its Operation “Full Disclosure.”
The most important thing for bloggers to know about Operation “Full Disclosure” is that it has NOTHING to do with sponsored posts on blogs.  It was aimed squarely at national television and print advertisers that failed to make adequate disclosures in their ads. More than 60 companies received FTC warning letters, largely focusing on disclosures that were in fine print, easy to miss or hard to read.

The FTC Guidelines apply to ALL advertising claims and endorsements – traditional media, social media, even direct word-of-mouth. While its publications and hearings over the past few years have focused on defining and clarifying the guidelines’ impact on social and online media, the FTC clearly hasn’t lost sight of its mandate to protect the consumer from ALL misleading advertising.As the press release clearly summarizes:

“The FTC’s longstanding guidance to companies is that disclosures in their ads should be close to the claims to which they relate – not hidden or buried in unrelated details – and they should appear in a font that is easy to read and in a shade that stands out against the background. Disclosures for television ads should be on the screen long enough to be noticed, read, and understood, and other elements in the ads should not obscure or distract from the disclosures.

The staff letters advised advertisers that to meet the “clear and conspicuous” standard, their disclosures should use clear and unambiguous language and should stand out in the advertising – consumers should be able to notice disclosures easily; they should not have to look for them.”

The purpose of the FTC guidelines is to avoid consumer confusion about advertising messages. By making sure that advertising does not contain misleading statements or hide important facts or conditions, and that any interest, such as compensation or affiliation with a company, an endorser might have in a product she recommends be clearly disclosed.

Store these 3 principal FTC requirements permanently in a room in your mind palace:

  1. Disclosure is required when you are compensated, and you endorse (write or speak about) the entity that compensated you. If you are not compensated, either in cash or goods, there is nothing to disclose.
  2. Claims must be true and the source disclosed (my opinion, scientific research showed…, the company said….)
  3. Disclosures should use clear unambiguous language that stands out and is positioned close to the claim or endorsement.

Speaking of confusion….

There seems to be some confusion in the blogosphere of late as to how the guidelines apply to compensated trips. Here’s my take.

  • If you are PAID to go on a trip, you must disclose whenever you endorse/write/speak about the entity that compensated you. Compensation can be cash, product or service. In your blog posts. In your tweets and Facebook posts. You write about the sponsor, you disclose you were sponsored.
  • If part of a compensated assignment includes a certain number of social shares about the experience but not necessarily about the sponsor, and you are asked to use a specific hashtag and/or link to a website for the sponsor, you must disclose. Including the hashtag or link is a promotional activity for which you were compensated.
  • If you want to tweet about the sunset, or say how tasty the orange juice was at venue that is NOT the sponsor, or whatever,  you don’t need to disclose. You are not endorsing the sponsor, so you don’t need a hashtag or a disclosure. Where there is no compensation, no disclosure is required.
  • That said, if you write an unrelated blog post about elements of the trip that does not include the sponsor, you should still disclose that you were sponsored. Not because the FTC requires it, but because you should give your sponsor the love.
  • When in doubt err on the side of disclosure.

Here is an example, completely made up.

SuperChic Hotel sponsors you on a trip to the Mexican Riviera. They pay your airfare, comp your hotel, restaurant meals and rental car, and give you an allowance for sightseeing and incidentals. How should you disclose:

  • Any time you mention SuperChic Hotel, your readers should know you were sponsored. Blog posts, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, videos. Whatever.  Even if you were not specifically compensated for an activity, such as a pinning. Disclose.
  • Mention the airline, the car rental company, restaurants and boutiques not affiliated with SuperChic Hotel, sightseeing attractions? Unless SuperChic Hotel provided specific instructions on where to go/vendor to use, you do NOT need to disclose a compensated relationship with the vendors. Your relationship is with SuperChic, not with them. That said, as a best practice,  I recommend you disclose that your overall trip was sponsored.
  • Want to tweet about the sand on the beach or the gorgeous sunset. Unless your sponsor is the beach, which is possible, or the sun, which is not, no disclosure required.

This scenario gets a little more complicated if the sponsor is the regional tourist authority, especially if it plans the details of your trip. In that case, I would make the call that anything in the region is supported by the tourist authority, and the relationship should be disclosed with every endorsement. Even the beauty of the beach.

What about a compensated speaking engagement that also pays your way — any or all of fee, comped registration, airfare, hotel? Your presence on the roster of the event is a clear notice of your affiliation with the event. Any reasonable consumer of the conference content understands that you have a relationship with the conference.

The amount of your compensation is not relevant. When it comes to  FTC disclosure, it doesn’t matter if it is a liptstick or a Lamborghini;  a free lipstick is the same as a car, comped airline ticket or $1000 fee.  In my opinion, to double down on disclosure, if you decide to write a glowing post about the conference, or tweet props to the conference organizers, you should disclose your affiliation, but you don’t need to preface every tweet about the conference content with the hashtag #ad unless you were specifically compensated to promote the conference content.

A note about hashtags in social posts: Never use #spon. It is not at all clear. Use  #ad or #hosted or #sponsor or #sponsored, and don’t bury the hashtag at the end of your social post. I prefer to see them in context if possible or at the very front of the post if not.

Examples:

Having a great time on trip to Mexico #sponsored by #SuperChic.
Rooms at #sponsor #SuperChic are gorgeous. Now off to the spa.
#ad Don’t miss the regional tasting menu at #SuperChic restaurant

Lastly, a word of advice. The FTC guidelines are pretty simple.  Disclosure is required so the consumer of the advertising can put your endorsements in the proper context. It’s common sense — Wouldn’t you want to know if the writer of a glowing blog post about a product you intended to buy was compensated by the company? If it was someone you trusted, you’d still take the advice, but you would want the context of the compensation. The FTC provides guidelines and advice about proper disclosure, and will from time to time go on the record about what it considers inadequate disclosure (like #spon), but it doesn’t dictate a specific way to disclose. When you read articles or blog posts that report that there is a specific, correct way to disclose, take them with the grain of salt. What you are reading is someone’s interpretation of the guidelines cast as an absolute.

Related articles

Blogger Compensation: How Much is a Sponsored Post Worth?

by

Cross-posted on BlogHer

Disclosure: I am Vice President, Sales Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

BlogHer 2014. We just celebrated the 10th anniversary of a little conference held to tell the world: Here are the women who blog.

Many things have changed in the social media landscape since July 2005. But a constant, at least in my little corner, is that social media offers consumers an opportunity to have a voice about the products and services they buy. To share their customer experiences (good or ill). To actively participate  in the marketing cycle as endorsers of the brands they love. Preferably compensated.

Compensation. That’s our topic today. What should a blogger be paid for a sponsored post? How much is that tweet worth?

In my job at BlogHer, I lead the teams that create and execute our custom sponsored programs. Blogger payment is a topic that we address on a daily basis, and I shared some of our practices in a Business Fundamentals session about monetization in a session during the conference.

Here’s the gist.

Task + Reach + Performance = Fee

The baseline for payment for a sponsored blog post is the task.

  • What are we asking the blogger to do?
    • Simple post? Cover an event? Develop a recipe? Create a Craft or DIY How-To? Produce a UGC video? Participate in a custom video program? Is travel involved?
  • Does the blogger have special or unique expertise?
  • How many hours will this take? At a reasonable hourly rate?

Then we factor in reach, both monthly blog pageviews and overall social reach on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. If you’ve ever wondered why some bloggers get paid more than others for similar work (whether from BlogHer or another network or social media/pr agency), your answer starts with reach. Absent other data (and more about that in a moment), potential reach is the most common proxy for influence.

Influencers with more scale can get higher fees. Usually. But sometimes the program just doesn’t have the budget. We don’t mind if bloggers ask for more if a program appeals to them but the fee seems low. Just as long as they aren’t offended if the answer is no.

But task and potential reach are not end game. They are a good start, but end game is results. The more a blogger is able to link back to actual results achieved for brands, the better fees she can command for future work.

Bottom line: Size matters. Influence matters more. Results matter most. 

We’ve been doing sponsor programs since 2008, and have accumulated quite a bit of data on typical results. We use this data to predict program performance when calculating our guaranteed results for sponsored programs. Key measurements include number of post page views, both absolute and as a percentage of monthly traffic, total comments, earned social shares/pins, and clicks to sponsor site.

Starting later this summer, we will be sharing this proprietary data with the bloggers in our sponsored programs. Via their private BlogHer profiles,  they will be able to see how their own posts are performing and better understand how their posts and social sharing contribute to a program’s success. We will also share historical benchmark data so they can measure their performance. Eventually, and we will give our bloggers plenty of notice, we will be using this results data in our fee calculations. Task and reach will always matter, but historical results will be a factor. This should be particularly welcome news to mid-size bloggers with loyal audiences that read and engage with multiple posts every month; these “magic middle” blogs should compare quite favorably to much larger blogs that get a big chunk of their traffic from one-time search engine visitors.

Exciting times. And more to come.

 

A practical definition of content marketing

by

Disclosure: I am Vice President of Sales & Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

Content marketing. It is the hot topic of 2014. And like “native advertising,” there are as many definitions of and opinions about it as there are marketing pundits on the interwebs.

Far be it from me to back away from a challenge.

Linguistically, content marketing simply is using “content” to market products and services. But what exactly is this thing called “content.” Channeling Inigo Montoya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya), it is entirely possible that this word does not mean exactly what we think.

Let’s stay simple to start. Brands are using “content” as distinct from “advertising” to promote their products. This can take many forms:

  • sponsored posts — on blogs and mass media sites (advertorial)
  • sponsored editorial
  • in native ad units
  • editorial on brand sites

Sponsored posts often integrate the brand into a story, not dissimilar from old style advertorial, but quite a lot of this content is just, well, content brought to you by a sponsor, either intermediated by a publisher, like Forbes BrandVoice or Mashable or direct, like Coca-Cola’s new content site, Coca-Cola Journey.

Mashable Screen Shot for content post

Example of integration of sponsored editorial: Is Your Cash Working for You?, sponsored by American Express

On some level, this is the fulfillment of the promise of the World Wide Web — build a terrific website and your customers will come to you, with the twist that we finally get that reading about the products isn’t the attraction. It’s useful and when you are ready to buy, critical, but product websites are selling tools, not marketing tools. They matter once you are in the consideration phase.

What attracts the consumer is storytelling.

And now brands are joining their customers as the publishers of content. If 2004 was the beginning of the rise of the citizen journalist, 2014 may be the birth of the brand journalist. This has implications for the quality of the news we consume, and already has had an impact on mainstream media. Advertorial content is increasingly front and center on mainstream media sites, with varying degrees of disclosure. More on that another day.

The long term impact of this shift on the independent,  read objective, journalist remains to be seen but the shift to brands as the direct funder of our news feed is already exerting a tremendous pressure on prices.

The quality of online content is also at some risk… The costs of feeding a machine that relies on new stories every day is why newspapers began selling advertising in the first place. Unlike an advert,  which is “create once, play many,” and works because of its simple, entertaining, purchase-oriented message, content marketing requires new stuff every day. The temptation is strong to sacrifice quality for volume.

But simply shoving a lot of words into a funnel isn’t going to have the long term effect we want. We need deeply engaging content that will connect consumers with our value proposition in a meaningful way and encourage them to consider our product or service. Bottom line, much as I love the quizzes, and top 10 lists, their impact is fleeting when it comes to long term engagement.

Collectively, we –marketers, consumers and publishers — need to take a step back and commit to creating and supporting GOOD content.

What’s good content in this context? It’s well-written content that engages the audience with a story, and connects with the brand message in some fashion. It can be tightly integrated like a review, loosely integrated like many sponsored posts or simply aligned editorial brought to you by the brand, with a brand message at the end of the post or article.

While brand marketers can, and should, produce material to feed the content marketing machine, the best stories will come from the community. No matter how well we write, we shouldn’t try to copy community-created content. It is extremely difficult to excise our passion for our brand from the story, and, as has been proven time and again, with good stories and bad, there is nothing more powerful than an engaged consumer.

Use your marketing passion to create the brand material for your content funnel that consumers rely on for more information about a product – micro sites, Facebook pages, Pinterest “catalogs,” and help your customers channel their passion into storytelling. Find and nurture your evangelists. Let them create the content and stories that matter with your support, either directly sponsored by you, or syndicated for re-use. A story may not be new to you, but it will be new to someone.

Personally, I’m excited about the potential for content marketing, and true partnerships between companies and their customers, brands and bloggers, to tell the stories that connect us with each other and with the brands we love. It’s what I’ve been hoping this interweb would morph into since I started writing about the space in 2004.

Here are some oldies but goodies from my archives on the topic of the brand-blogger connection:

Other writers who touch on this topic that you might enjoy: Rebecca Lieb, Christopher S. Penn.

Enhanced by Zemanta