Susan Getgood

Personal brand?

March 31, 2009 by Susan Getgood

There’s been a great deal of conversation online in recent months about the importance — or not — of the “personal brand.” While I admit to finding the concept of a personal brand, and all the posturing, positioning and posing that seems to go along with it, a bit noxious, I hadn’t found the exact words to express my opinion.

Until yesterday when I was asked to share my thoughts on the subject during an interview with the website Radical Parenting.

Rather than think of it as building a personal brand, I suggested that what we should really focus on is our personal reputation.

Brands are created. Reputations are earned.

Reputation embraces your ethics. Proponents of the personal brand will argue that it does as well. Maybe so, but the link is far less clear. Brand is a construct. There’s something inherently artificial in a brand. The notion of an artificial construct having ethics is a great plotline for a science fiction novel, but it just doesn’t work for me out here in the real world.

Moreover, the company doesn’t own the brand. It may think it does, but the brand is a shared construct. It is the combination of the image or story the company sets out to convey and how it is actually perceived by the customer. It shares its brand with its customer. On some level, then, the notion of a personal brand is an oxymoron.

My reputation, on the other hand? I earned it. I own it.

Bottom line, it’s not what you say. It’s what you do that matters.

Words to live by. I do.

Blogger Relations: A Refresher Course

March 28, 2009 by Susan Getgood

This past week has been an interesting one for students of public and blogger relations. We had the fallout from Robert Scoble’s latest temper tantrum about public relations. I do have an opinion, which you can find at the end of this post. Skip ahead if that’s all you are interested in.

This post is about blogger relations. And by that I mean the relationships companies form with regular bloggers. Their customers. Not journalists or celebrities.

This week, I noticed a marked increase in pitches, reflected by (unusually) my own inbox, items forwarded from friends and chatter on Twitter about (mostly) poor practice.

So, I thought it was a good time for a little refresher course in good blogger relations practice.

When I give my blogger relations workshops, I start with the following chart from Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report. While my issues with ranking systems in general and Technorati’s algorithms in particular are well documented here in Marketing Roadmaps, I thought the research about the bloggers in the 2008 report was quite valuable.

This particular chart answers the question, Why do you blog?

In class, I read a few of the most cited reasons before I deliver the punchline.

Nowhere on this list do we find:

Help companies promote their products and services.

Bloggers don’t mind helping you promote your products. Many of them welcome the opportunity to get closer to the companies whose products they use and love. Some monetize their blogs through advertising and would love to have yours. But that’s not WHY they blog. They blog to share their passions. They write about the things they care about.

Sadly, quite a lot of companies and agencies still miss this critical point. Let’s turn to the inbox for some examples.

A bed manufacturer sent a pitch to parent bloggers essentially asking for free advertising for its contest on their blogs. Mechanically, this pitch is acceptable, if a bit dull; there were no mistakes in addressing in the multiple examples shared with me. But, why would a parent blogger write about this?
A pitch from a fitness expert that exploits the television show Dancing with the Stars. The agency is one whose pitches regularly appear here as bad pitches. Among other things, full of typos. More importantly, who cares?
Seen on Twitter: a discussion about a liquid soap product pitched as a Mother’s Day gift. Hey Mom, you stink.
Child Safety Mistakes. I’ll let the badmommy blogger tell you about this one.
From my own inbox, the exciting (sic) news: followed by a second email, same day, offering the photos. Hullo, have you ever read what I’ve said about Go Daddy on this blog? Apparently not.

And I have more in my “bad pitch” folder. So many more, it’s sad. That said, I also have a few good pitches from the past week. I’ll tell you about those tomorrow.

Coming attractions:

Next month, I’ll have a report on what AAA is doing in social media and a case study about the Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit blogger outreach.

Now to Scoble. I don’t have PR clients any more because I am focusing on blogger relations and social media engagement. If I were still actively practicing PR in the the tech space, I’m not sure if I would even pitch Scoble at this point. A PR person has to evaluate all the potential outlets for client news. Unless Scoble is the top number one outlet for the news, why even bother? Like Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch, he’s really looking for the exclusive, even if he hasn’t articulated it as clearly as Arrington has.

If Scoble is your A-number-one media target, by all means jump through the hoops. But if not? Focus on more productive targets. Heck, talk to some of your customers instead.

That, I can help you with.

Blogger outreach, shared values, and cotton swabs?

March 18, 2009 by Susan Getgood

There are two key elements to successful blogger relations: the execution and the pitch. A successful campaign needs BOTH to be good. Today we are going to talk about the pitch.

I’ve written before about the secret sauce for the perfect pitch and earlier this year, I introduced a model I’ve been working with to find what I call the shared values between companies and bloggers/customers.

The key to using this model is stepping away from the features and functionality of your product. Look for issues that both the company and the customer care about, and build your program around these mutual or shared values. As the model shows, you start with how the customer uses the product, but you don’t stop there. You’ve got to move onto the emotional. What do they care about when they use your product? What other things do they care about?

You then link these things to your product. Starting with features, but also including attributes — the intangibles you want people to associate with your products — and corporate values.

Now, while this is never an easy process, it is a bit easier with new and entertainment products. But how does it work with a product that’s been on the market for a while. Or one that is almost a commodity.

For example, cotton swabs.

Is it possible to develop a pitch related to cotton swabs that would resonate with bloggers? I say yes.

In fact, I’ve got two, both aimed at parent bloggers.

These examples use information from Unilever’s Q-tips brand, but I imagine the programs would work equally well for Johnson & Johnson’s Cotton Swabs brand. The first example skews toward families with younger children; the second is applicable to a broader age range.

This screen shot identifies the key market USE segments for cotton swabs: family care, home care, and arts & crafts.

Putting aside beauty uses, let’s focus on two areas that relate specifically to families.

First, family care. Cotton swabs are permanently linked to ear care. The brands don’t even need to remind us of this. In fact, the main concern is to make sure we don’t poke the swab too far into our ear. Now, step into the shoes of a parent of a younger child. Say ages one to three or four years of age.

An issue that tends to be top of mind is ear infections. How to protect their toddlers. If their child is prone to ear infections, should they get the ear tubes or not?

To reach these bloggers – a very active parent blogging segment – why not develop a website and program devoted to education and information about this critical parenting issue? This is valuable information that bloggers will want to share with their friends and readers. While not about the product specifically, it is in that shared value segment of ear care and family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

As I noted above, my second example skews a bit older, and relates directly to the use of cotton swabs in arts & crafts projects. Any parent of an elementary school age child knows what a big deal arts & crafts can be. I often wonder whether they are evaluating the child or the parents, but that’s a topic for another day (and my other blog).

Parents love to see their children recognized. Kids love recognition. Hold a crafts contest for kids, promoted either exclusively or extensively through blogs, with both blogger outreach and online advertising. Obviously cotton swabs need to be involved, either as tools or materials, but the less rigid the criteria, the better. The prizes don’t have to be that big. In fact, offering more prizes to more children is preferable to a few BIG prizes. What makes it work isn’t the value of the prize. It’s that the child stands a really decent chance of being recognized.

The shared value space? Recognizing the achievement of children. Family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

Forget about your features. Look for the shared values with your customers. That’s where you’ll find a pitch that resonates for them and delivers results for your brand.

Blogger Relations: Connect with passions & values, not products

March 7, 2009 by Susan Getgood

My posts earlier this week about Pepperidge Farm’s Fishful Thinking initiative focused on the errors in execution of the blogger outreach. I’m done with analyzing these errors.

Pepperidge Farm has personally apologized in email to at least some of the affected bloggers, the marketing agency spoke to a number on the phone and via email, and at least one attended today’s symposium in White Plains as an observer. Let’s let things play out.

Nevertheless, there is one more important lesson for us, so bide with me a while.

One of the reasons the situation erupted was because the pitch was perceived as valuable by the mom bloggers. On its face, the Fishful Thinking initiative accomplishes one of the things I regularly preach in blogger relations; it connects with parents over a shared value – the desire to raise optimistic kids. Especially in this economy, when we are all faced with the necessity of telling our children they can’t have something that in better times we might have been able to give. Throw in the stipend, and it’s no wonder the response was so high.

But, by their own admission, they didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what sort of mom they were looking for when they started the outreach.

Here’s what I would have done differently. Yes, I know I am in the comfy chair of an armchair quarterback, but if you know me, you’ll recognize the general approach.

As I’ve noted above, I believe the Fishful Thinking program would be attractive to quite a few parents simply for its content — without the enticement of the trip to White Plains and the stipend. Since the company is also planning on building a wider network of parents (1000 according to Mr. Youth CEO Matt Britton), my question is: why didn’t they start there?

With a broad outreach to parent bloggers about the program on its merits. Perhaps with an offer to send one of the expert’s books. Or offering a conference call with the expert on a specific topic.

The Fishful Thinking program might not be everyone’s cuppa, but it definitely connects with parents around passions and values, not simply Goldfish. That’s such a good start; it makes all the execution errors even more of a shame.

I am certain — dead certain — that potential candidates for the “faculty”, really good candidates (and that’s not to say that the 10 they’ve picked are not good) would have self-identified by taking the company up on its simple offer. The women would have written because the information offered intrinsic value to them, their blog, their readership.

That would have been a far better and more defensible pool of candidates for the influencer program. Execution would still be critical –it always is — but there wouldn’t be so many questions about the criteria.

That’s what I would have done. Start simple and progress to the complex. YMMV.

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Stepping into the circle of shameless self promotion, if you like the general approach and you’re planning a blogger outreach campaign, call or email me. I’d love to help you develop a program that connects with the passions and values of your customers.