Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Navel Gazing in the Blogosphere

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Warning: slightly rantish post ahead. If you’re not in the mood, suggest you go here or maybe here.

On to the rant.

Over the past week or so, it seems like a new cycle of "deep blog introspection" has started. What’s that,  you say?  It’s when  bloggers start engaging in that time-honored activity,  "blog navel gazing." The principal symptoms? Posts about ME with the occasional dash of poor poor pitiful. Thoughtful pronouncements on the future of blogging.

Huh?

Here’s the thing. Blog if you enjoy it. If you stop enjoying it, stop. Don’t worry about your fans — they’ll survive. Another blog will step in and fill the void. Really.

How often you post? Whatever you want. It is YOUR blog. Even if only you and your Mum are reading it (and trust me, I’ve been there. Thanks, Mum!), it will never be too much. We should welcome new voices all the time. Big boys and girls, we are capable of filtering and choosing material based on what interests us today.  And picking different stuff tomorrow. Read this post by Stowe Boyd. He says it far better than me (thanks to Kent Newsome for the link).

Don’t have time to read all your email. Fine. Don’t. The world will keep on turning. Make sure you read the stuff for your job, but all that email from blog buddies and fans. Skip it if it is too much. Of course, don’t expect them to read YOURS either. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.

The conversation will go on.

Now, before everyone jumps all over me, I am NOT picking on anyone specific. Deliberately. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion and can blog about whatever they damn well please. Or not.

Just don’t ask your readers to care when you stop blogging about the interesting things they started reading your blog for. Your friends DO care if you are upset or hurt or pissed off or whatever. But most of the people reading your blog don’t. At most, they are online acquaintances. They may become friends, but it takes more than a conference meet up and a few blog comments to make a real friend. Really.

Your readers started reading your blog because there was something in it for THEM. When it becomes all about YOU, hhmm……

It’s all about choice. We choose when we enter the conversation, and we get to choose when we leave.

And that’s cool.  

Just like this post. If you didn’t feel like reading my rant, I gave you some fun alternatives. Worth checking out even if you did (thanks!) read to the end.

Rant off. Back to our regular program.

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The Week in Review: March 6-10

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A new (and very interesting) client has just come on board,  I had deadlines for some other projects, and I had to take a quick trip mid-week. Time has been tight, so blogging has been light.

So this post is going to be the week in review —  comments on the things I probably would have blogged in more depth had I more time.

Of course, the top PR blogging news of the week was the Edelman-Wal-Mart blogger relations story, starting with the New York Times article on March 7th, and continuing on with commentary from just about every PR/Marketing blogger on the planet. Except me of course. I was at a client 🙂 Check out the great round-ups of the commentary written by  Constantin Basturea and Tom Murphy. And don’t miss Richard Edelman’s post. For more coverage, here are the google and technorati searches on "Edelman Wal-Mart"

My .02 — this really does look like a simple effort at blogger relations, perhaps not the best execution, but not intentionally sinister.  In fact, I think Wal-Mart would be foolish to not engage in grassroots blogger relations, given how well organized its critics in the blogosphere are.

Here’s my take-away from this tempest in a teapot:

First, we have to be fair in our criticisms. Part (but not all) of the outrage about the Wal-Mart outreach was outrage about Wal-Mart in general. You have to put both your friends and your enemies to the same test. If something would be okay if your buddy did it, but it is bad if the evil empire does it,  you are not being fair. This is not dis-similar from what happened in the initial outrage more than a year ago about character blogs. GourmetStation and others were being lambasted for having characters as the blog authors. I pointed out a certain inconsistency using the example of Spencer F. Katt, the PC Week/eWeek mascot for 20-plus years who has both a column and yes, a blog. Somehow, a character everybody knew and liked was okay. It was only the new ones that were bad blogging practice 🙂  Wrong. Be consistent in BOTH your flames and your kudos.

Second, as PR practitioners start reaching out to blogs… as they should, and as most of us have preached, dare I say ad nauseaum, we have to expect mistakes. Given the ongoing commentary on PR blogs about the general quality of much PR practice, we shouldn’t be surprised if some PR agency efforts at blogger relations are better than others. I have no particular opinion about Edelman’s blogger outreach program. Time will tell whether it was good, bad or something in between. I am certain however, that no blogger outreach program will be (or should be) successful without complete transparency. You MUST be completely honest about your role and your vested interests. And not surprised if your entire campaign is published on a blog somewhere.

Again, a comparison. When I started to get a great deal of media exposure as spokesperson for Cyber Patrol in the late 90s, I was very careful to make sure that my public statements passed the ultimate test: would I be embarassed if this were on the front page of the NY Times? Different times, same general principal. Ain’t no such thing as "off the record."

Moving on, conferences. Without a doubt, the model of conferences where the panel is presumed to be the "experts" and the audience the "students" is outmoded. In tech and in marketing, the two arenas where I have spent most of my professional career, the audience often knows as much, or more, than the panelists. I’ve written about this here a bit, and it was one of the inspirations for the Room of Your Own proposal for Business Blogging currently under consideration for BlogHer 06. Our idea is that the panelists are there to kick off the discussion, but in fact the entire audience is the panel, and an active part in building our takeaway "best practices" for business bloggers.

This week,  some smart bloggers asked some great questions about the "conference issue:"

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, Elisa Camahort brings it home: BlogHer is the conference that takes a truly different approach. See you there in July.

In the category of smart business advice:

  • PR Squared has a series of three posts of "bad advice" about customer references which of course are excellent advice for PR and MarCom pros. Here they are:  one, two, three
  • Converstations gives some great advice on how to best write your posts in A Blog Posting Mantra.
  • And Jill Konrath has some great advice on thinking like your customer.

In the news:

And finally, if you stuck this post out this long, you deserve some fun. Don’t miss this clip on trendspotting from the Daily Show. Thanks to Small Business Trends for the link.

Tags: , , , , , ,

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It’s all in the name…GetGood…Goodlink

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POST UPDATED APRIL 6, 2006

It’s all in the name.

About six-eight months ago, I started getting support calls for something called  GoodLink. Apparently a mobile phone software product of some sort.

We were stymied. We had no idea why people all over the country were calling GetGood Strategic Marketing for support for some product called GoodLink.  It wasn’t tons of calls, maybe one a month, but it was a mystery.

I even asked one caller how he got my number. "From your website," he replied. I was confused but I just couldn’t put it together.

Until last week when I received an email from a college professor, which said:

"I have no idea how a program “GetGood” with an automatic link to your site got installed on my Treo and I cannot find a way to delete it since it doesn’t seem to show up in the applications list.  Can you help me?"

All of a sudden, things started to make some sense. I’m still not sure, but what I think has happened is:

A company called Good Technology has a product called GoodLink that runs on mobile phones, specifically the Treo.

I’m betting that the file (either the program or an .exe) is called GetGood. Don’t know for sure because I don’t have a Treo, but that’s my guess.  Because I can’t believe that the file actually LINKS to my site…

Some people must see the filename, wonder what it is and do a ‘net search’ on "getgood".

Hhmm. I wonder if there is any documentation..

Anyway, the top results on that search deliver my Web site or my blog. They get to my site, find a phone number, or in this last case, my email, and they look no further.

And it wouldn’t matter because the search on "getgood" does show the sites of other Getgoods lower down, but last I looked, it doesn’t deliver GoodLink or Good Technology.

I’ve sent an email to Good Technology asking that they consider changing the filename from someone’s surname, but I don’t hold out much hope for a response. Or any change.

So I am writing this post, hoping that this post will rise high enough in the search engine results so that future searchers will find it, and get the answers they need.

So here’s the scoop. If you are looking for strategic marketing consulting, you’ve found the right place. Send me an email at sgetgood@getgood.com or call me at 978-562-5979. I’d love to chat with you.

If you have a Treo mobile phone and are looking for information about your GetGood file or GoodLink, you probably want Good Technology.

Their address and phone:

4250 Burton Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054
United States

Phone: +1.408.327.6000
Fax: +1. 408.327.6001

A rose by any other name….

UPDATE 4/6/06: Mystery solved by yet another customer call (never heard from the company): the Web site for "over-the-air provisioning of Good Technology’s software" is at http://get.good.com (no "www") but people are so trained to type the www that they end up at my Web site http://www.getgood.com.

Tags: getgood, goodlink, treo

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Monitoring the Blogosphere

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Last week, smart PR blogger John Wagner (On Message) had a great post about monitoring blogs  Use PR Sense when monitoring blogs. He pointed out, rightly, that not every comment merits a response. Sometimes, many times, what a company can learn by monitoring can be just as valuable.

Today, Washington Post has a front page article that provides two examples of companies (ConAgra and HP) that have done just that: paid attention to customers’ online comments and made smart business decisions as a result. First seen on The Bivings Report.

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated said the Press Release

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The actual Mark Twain quote is "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

When it comes to the much maligned press release, no matter how much some might wish the death notice to be true, the press release as a form is actually doing its job just fine. It tells you who, what, where, when, why and usually how.

Well written press releases do so with an economy of language that gives the reporter the facts and encourages him to search out more information to make the story "his." And, as I and so many others have said (many of whom will be linked to below) the press release is only one tool in the practitioner’s kit. The communicator who relies solely on her release to tell the story deserves to be in the Bad Pitch Blog.

So what’s the problem? Why do so many want to read the last rites over the press release?

Here’s my .02 —

There is an awful lot of shoddy PR practice. Full stop. Fluffy, content-free press releases masquerading as news. How can they pitch some of this stuff?

I lay much, but not all, of the blame for this on the press release being used as sales collateral. And I don’t mean the incidental use of a press release in the sales process. I mean the deliberate writing of press releases to be used by sales people with prospects. I think that’s why so much fluffy stupid language crept into the press release, and folks started to forget to make each announcement pass the "newsworthy" test.

The press stopped being the principal audience for many. The form of the release and the practice of PR suffered as a result.

It is okay that press releases are picked up on search engines and used by sales people in the sales process. It is NOT okay to forget that a press release should first and foremost be a NEWS release.

There are other ways to communicate sales messages. Specifically, advertising and direct mail.

There are other ways to pitch more complex stories to a reporter. Pick up the phone and call. If you haven’t been trying to pass off crappy sales collateral as news, the reporter might just take your call.

The practice of public relations is not defined by the press release. Yes, it has its problems, but these will not be solved by getting distracted by the press release red herring. We have to stay focused on the larger issues — how to improve the practice of PR, how to integrate the new media (without throwing out the baby), and ultimately, how to best serve the communication needs of our clients and companies, irrespective of the tool. Need a chisel, use a chisel. Need a mallet, use a mallet. And so on.

There are a lot of bright folks blogging about PR. Below are some of the recent posts I’ve run across.

Tom Foremski is wrong (Kevin Dugan, Bad Pitch Blog and Strategic Public Relations)
Start Spreading the (Fake) News: A Ratings System for Today’s Modern Press Releases, from a new blog I just discovered today, Below the Fold by Gary Goldhammer
Kicking the dead dog — new meme, Tom Murphy, PR Opinions
Is This About PR’s future? – Or Journalism’s??  and Is this the press release of tomorrow?, Todd Defren, PR Squared. Note: in the second post, Todd and team address the critcisms of Tom Foremski’s Die Die Die post

I’ve also written about this more than once. Here’s the link to all my posts in the PR category. Many of them touch this topic.

Foremski seems to really like what the Shift folks did, and while I think it is a great exectution of Foremski’s wish list, I’m hard pressed to see how it is any different than what many PR folks already provide to the media — fact sheets, background materials and so on.

Or that it solves the practice problems we’ve identified, ’cause let’t face it, a crappy pitch will still be crappy, regardless of format.

After I finished writing the first draft of this post and was creating my links list,  I ran across Steve Rubel’s post Everything is a press release. While I appreciate the sentiment, I respectfully disagree. In fact, I believe that the use of blogs and other social media in the dissemination of news is an important adjunct to the press release, but it does not replace the press release. Outside of the pr/marcom industry, we cannot and should not expect bloggers to do the same job as a good PR person in covering all the bases in an announcement.

Blogs can absolutely disseminate news, but we still need the form of a press release in many instances. It is as good a form as any, and if you want to call me a dinosaur for defending it, just pick a cute one. I don’t mind the one in the PR Squared announcement.

Tom Murphy (above) refers to kicking the dead dog. Well, there’s also another phrase that fits this situation:

When it comes to "the press release is dead" meme, that dog don’t hunt.

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Update March 2: Andy Lark weighs in as well, expressing the same frustration many of us feel at the "press release is dead" meme. He wishes we could just stop talking about it. I suspect we will, for a while. Then, someone will start a new blog or something will happen or maybe a new Web 2.0 "thing" will be announced that promises to "revolutionize" PR. It almost doesn’t matter what, but someone, somewhere will type the fateful words, "the press release is dead" or something similar. And even though we are tired beyond measure of this discussion, we’ll all jump in again, to varying degrees. Because if we don’t join the conversation, it will go on without us. And then we really will be dinosaurs.

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