Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Lessons to be learned from ConAgra/Ketchum’s Sotto Terra blogger event

by

I’m back! You had to know I would not be able to resist commenting on the ConAgra/Ketchum “Sotto Terra” blogger events in New York last month that went so horribly, tragically wrong. So wrong that the fallout made it to the pages of the New York Times. Ouch.

I’m not going to rehash the details here, because this post is not about piling it on. The company, brand and agency have been thoroughly schooled in the blogosphere already. Instead, I am going to focus on a few lessons that have nothing to do with the specific brand, that anyone involved in blogger outreach can learn from.

However, this post will make more sense if you know the basics about the ConAgra program. Short version: blogger event in New York. Promoted as an exclusive opportunity to experience a chef-prepared meal. On the day, entree and dessert revealed to be frozen meals. Ooops.

For more details,  please take a moment to read the NYT article and the links below to read the blog fallout after the event.

Lesson Number 1: Don’t fall so in love with your great, clever idea that you can’t see its flaws. Every idea has flaws; every message, detractors. You have got to be willing to be your own devil’s advocate. Ask yourself — what can go wrong? Where can this idea fail? Who might not like our idea and why?  I’m not saying be Debbie Downer on your own creativity. I am however advising you to think it through. Understand that there will ALWAYS be someone who doesn’t like your concept. The question is, are they outliers or your target? If your target audience ain’t gonna like it, don’t do it. That’s what happened with MotrinMoms a few years ago, and it’s clearly part of what happened here.

Poke holes in your own idea. Better you than a bunch of bloggers and the New York Times.

Lesson Number 2: People don’t like surprises. Especially when they make them feel foolish. Think about it. If you are old enough to remember Candid Camera, you’ll know what I mean. The audience of the stunts enjoyed them. The victim, not so much.

More proof? Ever read the back page of a book before deciding whether to invest the time? Ever visit a spoiler site for your favorite TV show for a sneak peek at what’s coming? Ever shake your holiday or birthday presents? Or try to sneak a corner of the tape off and then rewrap it? Yes, brother dear, I am talking to you. Or ransack your mom’s gift closet to see if there’s anything new there? My son did this.

People want to know what to expect. We like to be prepared. In fact, recent research from UC  San Diego suggests that knowing the ending of a book increases our enjoyment.

And we don’t like to be embarrassed.  It is really bad form to embarrass your customers.

Remember this when planning your blogger programs. Building around a big “reveal” is a dicey proposition, and if the reveal might disappoint instead of enchant? Seriously. Go back to the drawing board. Create something that will appeal to your target audience without deception. It may not be as alluring or sexy, but it’s far less likely to backfire. The Sotto Terra backlash was not “bloggers gone wild” by any means. It was people feeling betrayed and deceived. Not a good way to build a relationship.

Lesson Number 3: Disclosure. Do not do programs without disclosing your brand’s participation. EVER! Strictly speaking, I don’t think the Sotto Terra event violates the FTC disclosure guidelines, as full disclosure of the brand’s involvement was provided when the exchange of value (the meal) happened. However, I am not crazy about the ethics here. Bloggers were encouraged to promote an event as a prize, apparently without full information about the sponsor of the event. Could the bloggers have done a little research and learned that the two hosts were ConAgra consultants? Sure. But they shouldn’t have to. That’s your job as the sponsor.

What did you take away from the Sotto Terra story? Please stay away from brand-bashing. I want to focus on what brands, and bloggers, can do better to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes, not on pointing fingers or trashing the participants in this tale.

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

Pitching on the grave

by

Normally, I’m proud to tell people that I’m a marketer. I love connecting consumers with the brands they love and companies with the products that fuel their business.

Every so often though, someone calling themselves a marketing professional does something that makes me embarrassed for my profession.

More than a few of these instances have occurred in the past few years, quite specifically related to the practice of blogger outreach. You’ve read about them here and elsewhere too — bad pitches, rude PR people, “spray and pray” mass mailings. And so on.

Many of these are mistakes made out of simple ignorance, lack of experience and miscommunication. Some are simply rude; for example, when a blogger says she isn’t interested in the pitch, replying back implying that she’s stupid is the social media equivalent of the classic Saturday Night Live line, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

Most faux pas can be forgiven. There is however one for which there is no excuse. Pay close attention, aspiring and practicing PR pros and marketers.

Don’t pitch on the grave.

It is NEVER okay to pitch someone who has recently had a death in the family or her circle of friends. And particularly on the back of a blog post about the death. NEVER, NOT EVER.

If you know the blogger well, a message of condolence or a donation to the charity in memory of the deceased is perfectly fine.

But if you don’t know the blogger, don’t use the death in an attempt to bond with her, on any basis, about anything. It’s crass, and the social media equivalent of ambulance chasing.

In fact, when I was consulting, I advised clients to do a read-through of the blogs in their outreach list the day they planned to send their pitch just to be sure there hadn’t been a tragedy or death in the family. In which case, they should remove the blogger from the pitch list regardless of how perfect the pitch was.

Obviously, if the blogger hasn’t posted or publicly mentioned the death in Facebook or Twitter, you aren’t pitching on the grave, you’re just the victim of poor timing. If the blogger replies, apologize and move on.

Don’t believe this happens? A good friend has had it happen twice. She posted about a death, someone pitched her on the back of the post, and when she pushed back, the sender was not only NOT apologetic, but also rude.

That’s just terminally clueless.

Is “earned media” an anachronism?

by

anachronism — A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, esp. a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned (Source: Google Search)

Perhaps anachronism is a little harsh, but not by much. The whole concept pf earned media, as part of the triumvirate of Earned, Paid and Owned, has always been a little squishy. There’s just something a little bogus in the idea that the story being told was so tremendously good that the brand earned its non-paid media mention in a story, when of course brands, entertainment properties and celebrities spend millions of dollars every month to PR agencies and publicists to obtain these placements. There’s nothing unpaid about earned media.

Nevertheless, earned media  is where “we” have been accounting for the results of blogger outreach and other word of mouth engagement programs. In part because many early social media engagement programs originated in PR agencies for whom the earned media model made sense (or at least as much sense as it ever will.)

Certainly more so than paid media, which was clearly understood to be paid advertising media, and owned media, which is a bit more complex but boils down to the assets that the company controls – its packaging, trucks, website and so on.

The problem is that nothing is that simple. It never was, but social media and the rise of the engaged consumer has changed the dynamic to the point that classifying things into three buckets just doesn’t work any more.

Blogger outreach programs often include freelance fees paid to the bloggers for their work. So that’s paid media, I guess. When readers of those posts leave comments or post to Facebook or tweet about the posts? Earned. What about if the blogger who was paid to write a post, either a sponsored post on her own blog or as a freelance assignment, tweets it out on her own initiative?

Digital ads almost always include Share icons for Twitter and Facebook. So the media is paid, but the sharing is what? Pearned, for paid + earned?

And then there’s Facebook. How do we classify the activity on Facebook? A brand page is owned, I suppose. But are the comments earned? And what about custom promotional tabs? Are those owned or paid? And when someone shares it, is it now earned?

Clearly, we’ve outgrown these simple models of Paid, Earned and Owned.

What matters is whether consumers want to share. It doesn’t really matter whether the story you are telling starts in paid, earned or owned media.

Will consumers share it?

This concept of shared, or shareable, media is easy to understand. Much harder to execute, because it crosses so many functional lines – media, PR, marketing, advertising, creative. Much harder to measure, because it is more than pageviews or Twitter followers.

Up for the challenge? I am, and would love to hear how you are navigating this world.

The Mommy Card

by

Last week while listening to Pandora, I heard a commercial for VistaPrint promoting “mommy cards” (along with networking cards and dating cards.)

What exactly is a “mommy card,” I wondered (and tweeted.)

Now before, you jump in and think, “how stupid are you, Susan, to not know what a “mommy card” is,” rest assured, I had a pretty good idea of what was intended.  I just thought it was a bit silly and more than a bit sexist.

Unless you also have a separate line of  “daddy cards,” promoting the “mommy card”  associates the act of parenting entirely with one gender. And that is sexist.  Undoubtedly inadvertent but still….

The term “calling card” seems perfectly suitable if you don’t want to call it a business card due to the more personal nature of the information.  Or if you need to be more descriptive, call it a Family Card or a Parent Card, since it lists important family information that a parent might want to share with a babysitter or the parents of their children’s friends.

But this isn’t a post about sexism or gender bias. If I was going to stop at my rant about “the mommy card,” this post would be over on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

Here, I write about marketing and social media. And I’d like you to take away two marketing lessons from my Twitter exchange about “mommy cards.”

First, if your brand is criticized online, you need to figure out if the critic is a rational individual or a wing-nut. Ignore the wing-nuts and engage with the rational ones. VistaPrint figured out I was a rational human being, and reached out to me on Friday.

The company Twitter persona told me  why they promoted them as “mommy cards” and promised to share my feedback with the product team.

 

As I said in my tweets, I like the company. I’m a customer. I just didn’t like the concept of the “mommy card.” Full props to them for monitoring the Twitter stream and actively engaging with a customer. Makes it that much more likely that they’ll get my Christmas calendar order again this year.

Lesson number 2: VistaPrint told me that they used the term “mommy card” because the research indicated they should. My reply was that research didn’t make the term any less sexist.I firmly believe you can market calling cards to mothers without calling them “mommy cards.”

Now, you may disagree with me on the “mommy card” point (and I fully expect someone to do so), so don ‘t get too hung up on whether you agree with me that it is sexist. What I really want you to remember is that sometimes the research is wrong. Or more accurately, it is right, but you still shouldn’t do it.

This is particularly true when marketing to moms. Just calling a product “for moms” doesn’t make it so.

Be very careful about playing the mommy card.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Smells like Social Media

by

I have some serious topics on deck to share with you, including my thoughts on the state of  “earned media,” but today we have to take a little detour.

Because the press release I received this morning for the “Made for Social Media” attraction fragrance  is just so good bad, in a good way, that I have to share it.

As a friend said in a private email, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

But I’m not going to tell a bunch of jokes about the product, which apparently contains “a combination of human pheromones that have been clinically proven to increase feelings of arousal, excitement, social warmth and friendliness in both men and women.”  You can do that all on your own with no help from me.

I’m not even going to wonder about why I received the release, having never written about fragrances or pheremones, on any of my blogs.

Those two topics are such low-hanging fruit they are reseeding themselves as  I type this post. And I do write about social media, so I guess I’m fair game on that score.

Nor am I going to name the company, an aggregator of online forums, or delve too deeply into the value proposition of the scent, the subtext of which seems to be that social media types are so desperate, we need special help to attract a mate (and yes, I know that sentence will probably resurface the troll that drops in to insult me about once or twice a year. So be it.)

In the release, the company claims this endeavor will launch an entirely new business model for productizing through its online channels. And here’s where I go “What?”

They are going to sell a fragrance — a product that generally buyers like to smell before they fork over their cash — through forums, user bases that are notoriously defensive about any form of commerce occurring “on the boards?” Really? It seems like a commercial mis-match in the making.

Maybe they are just hopping on the social media bandwagon, figuring that all you need to do is slap a little “social media” on the front of the product and the news will just go viral (option 2).

Not to get too meta on you, but maybe they DID read my blog and know that I tend to comment on absurd things. Maybe their goal is to make us laugh? And they just couldn’t get the release finished in time for April 1? Option 3.

Whether they are serious and just misguided (options 1 and 3) or opportunistic (option 2), it seems like a real long shot to me.

And that’s what I want YOU to think about when you are percolating your really awesome breakthrough social media idea that is so groundbreaking it just has to go viral RIGHT AWAY.

Just because you call it social, doesn’t mean the community will agree.

Use social media to engage your audience in an authentic conversation about mutually interesting topics. Not just as a label to capitalize on a popular trend. It’s a bit like greenwashing, and just as offensive.