Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Presentation matters

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In artistic sports like ice skating and gymnastics, there’s a score for skill and a score for presentation.

Marketing is pretty much the same. It’s the idea AND how you express it.

Now, without the skill, or good idea, the presentation is irrelevant. But, make no mistake, presentation matters.

It’s often the difference between gold, silver and bronze. Or a pitch that hits its target or misses. Not by a mile, maybe only an inch. But misses all the same.

Here’s an example. KB Toys recently announced that it would no longer accept its gift cards. Competitor Toys-R-Us saw an opportunity and today announced it would give KB gift card holders a coupon for 15% off at Toys-R-Us. Nice idea, nice gesture.

Except that’s not quite what it said in its pitch to bloggers and its press release.

Instead it announced the “great news” of its “gift card exchange program.”

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Except “great news” is a bit of an exaggeration.  It’s not an exchange — it’s a 15% off coupon. With a fair number of restrictions.

Why wasn’t the company more honest? I realize the corporate wordsmiths are probably cringing, but the truth is that Toys-R-Us is capitalizing on the misfortune of its competitor as well as helping the potential customer. Everybody gets that.

So why not just tell the truth? In a perfect world, Toys-R-Us might accept the KB gift cards in a true exchange. But the world isn’t perfect, and that would be a bad business decision. But it can give the KB gift card holder some value in exchange for trying out Toys-R-Us, and that’s better than nothing, which is what the card is worth at KB Toys.

Say so. “We wish we could simply accept the KB gift cards at our stores, but we just can’t afford to do that,”  said Toys mucky muck. “But we can offer this discount to encourage KB shoppers to try our stores and experience all that Toys has to offer.”

I also wish the coupon didn’t have all the restrictions. A gift card wouldn’t. How cool would it be if you could use the discount for any single item you wanted.

It’s not just what you offer. It’s how you say it.

Sometimes that makes all the difference.

The importance of value and values in social media

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A few months ago, I wrote a post called the Secret Sauce for the Perfect Pitch. In that post, I outlined a recipe for a good pitch to bloggers.

Central to the recipe was “adding value:”

What does adding value mean? A personal blogger writes about things he is interested in, generally from the perspective of how they impact him. He’s telling his story, and you need to give him a good reason to include your story in his. That means putting your product or service into his context, not talking at him from yours with a press release, list of features or carefully crafted message point.

I also listed some ways to add value:

  • Provide access to exclusive information.
  • Offer evaluation products or samples.
  • Offer products to the blogger that she can give away to her readers.
  • Events and junkets.
  • Support the charities and causes the community cares about.
  • Put the blogger at the center, not your product.

Now, this is just a list of tactics. Some may work for you, others may not. We need to develop a program that balances the value to the company and the blogger.

Just as in the commercial equation, where we make a purchase decision based on whether the value of the product merits the exchange of our currency — is it worth it? — we need a balanced value exchange when we reach out to bloggers. This is true for any social media program aimed at a community, including both blogger relations and programs for a defined online community or social network, whether run by a company or independent.

If the value tips too far to the company, it will seem like it is just asking for free publicity without compensation or consideration. The blogger says no. Run an ad. If the value tips too far to the blogger, it’s probably not cost effective for the company. A non-starter.

So we need to add value and balance value.

The key is in our mutual values. What is important to the company, to the blogger, and where do they intersect? That’s where we find the “thing” around which we can build a blogger relations program. I suggest using mind-mapping to find the intersect.

I’ve been working on a model (illustration below) that focuses on finding the shared emotions. What do both the blogger and the company care about? It’s not simply the features of the product, as much as the company might wish it so.  Those may be enough to trigger a purchase decision, but not a decision to cover the product or service on the blog.

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So here are some key ingredients for your perfect pitch:

  • What are our shared values? What do we both care about?
  • How can I use this knowledge to create a program that adds value for the blogger or community? Which of the secret sauce ingredients make the most sense for us?
  • Is the value balanced? Are we both getting enough from the deal? If not, how do I fix it?

In an upcoming post, I’ll show you how to apply this model. And to make the point, I’ll use some pretty generic products. Maybe cotton swabs….

Auld lang syne

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Over the past month, there were three interesting brouhahas in the social media blogosphere. While I didn’t write about them at the time, I did tweet and comment here and there. I decided to bring them back for today’s post, for old times sake, because each one has implications for topics that I plan to cover in the coming year.

First, in early December there was a massive twitter-storm about a sponsored post social media consultant Chris Brogan wrote on his Dad-o-matic blog. Long story short, his post was part of an Izea campaign for Kmart, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posed some legitimate questions about sponsored posts , and a Twitter storm erupted.

I was mostly offline that weekend, but the general gist was that many questioned Chris’s integrity for writing a sponsored post, arguing that it compromised his objectivity and ethics.

When I came back online at the end of the weekend and saw the fallout, including more than a few posts discussing Chris’s actions, including his, all I could say was “huh?” I had seen the post some time earlier on Dad-o-matic and really didn’t think much of it.

While I have my concerns about the paid post model, particularly in its earliest forms which did not require disclosure, Chris was very clear that this was a sponsored post, the content was appropriate for Dad-o-matic, and there was a charity angle. No biggie, and I had a hard time imagining how participating in this Izea campaign could compromise Chris’s ethics or expertise. As I tweeted, folks should be less judgmental, and perhaps look to their own glass house.

Twits indeed.

There’s no question that the Izea model is an improvement over predecessor Pay Per Post. But… I still have a few concerns. Here are some topics that I plan to explore in the coming year.

  • The model seems much closer to mass market advertising than it does to blogger relations. Will big companies take this expedient route, thinking it a shortcut to robust relationships with their customers online?
  • Some sponsored campaigns are starting to have a cookie-cutter feel. Variations on theme of the blogger shopping spree or giveaway product, and contests for the blog’s readers. There’s nothing wrong with any of these approaches. I recommend them to clients. But, without a specific creative angle that reinforces branding, when do they all start to blur?
  • Is the sponsored post model really just for big companies with big budgets? And big bloggers with big audiences? What happened to the long tail and niche markets? Something for everyone? How do smaller companies compete? Ditto, niche bloggers with smaller but loyal audiences.

Topic Two: Embargoes.

The most recent salvo comes from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch who announced mid-month with his usual fanfare that TechCrunch would no longer honor embargoes.

“PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.”

I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised; Arrington’s anti-PR polemic has grown increasingly strident over the years, sometimes for good cause, sometimes not so much. This post was just the latest in a long line.

It is also more than a warning shot that he’ll break the embargo. Read between the lines – Arrington wants to break the tech news, and unless you give him an exclusive, he’s increasingly likely to NOT cover your news.

What does this have to do with blogs? You can’t really generalize the typical blogger’s reaction to an embargo request from Arrington. TechCrunch isn’t a blog; it’s a tech publication that uses the blog form. It’s competing with c|net, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and so on. Companies have to decide if TechCrunch is the most important outlet for their news. If so, giving Arrington the exclusive — a real exclusive — may make sense. If not, TechCrunch gets the news when it hits the wire, and you may not get any coverage there at all. That’s your call.

Will bloggers honor embargoes? I believe they will, if approached with respect. Will they honor an embargo that is noted on the top of a mass emailed press release? Unlikely. A journalist wouldn’t either.

In the coming year, we’ll talk about some of the positive ways companies can include bloggers in their confidential plans. In some ways it is far easier than with journalists. Remember, bloggers are your customers too. They like to be involved with your products at an early stage, and will keep your confidence.

Topic Three. Regular readers know how much I love lists and rankings. Not.

On more than one occasion, I’ve discussed the flaws in these rankings on Marketing Roadmaps, and I follow my friend Ike Pigott’s periodic exposes on how to game the systems with delight.

Erin Kotecki Vest, known to many as the Queen of Spain, raised the topic again last month. Her complaint started with the recent rise of Twitter ranking mechanisms, but the comments quickly expanded to embrace the issue in total. And particularly how these faulty constructs often are used to imply legitimacy, expertise and influence.

That’s what we’ll look at in the coming year. How do you determine a blog’s influence? Or a blogger’s expertise? The ranking systems, flawed as they are, impart some information, but we need to look much much farther than that. Most Internet ranking systems can be gamed and use flawed inputs. Business decisions should not be made on the basis of a popularity contest.

As Groucho Marx once said:

“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”

Finally, please check out Toby Bloomberg’s 2006/2009 retrospective post. Going into 2006, she asked a number of social media bloggers about their wishes for the coming year. She reached out to us all again this year, and it is very interesting to see how things have changed. And yet not.

I’ll leave you with a bagpipe group’s rendition of Auld Lang Syne and Amazing Grace.


Happy New Year!

Not a bad pitch. Just misunderstood.

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Today, we’re going to look at two pitches that aren’t really bad. Just misunderstood. The pr reps who sent them just didn’t understand the basic principles of blogger relations: know your audience, be relevant, add value.

Because I also liked both products, I am going to make some suggestions on what they could have done instead.

The first was sent to me from the pr agency for New York Women in Communications. I apparently am on their emailing list as I get these announcements on a regular basis.

Not a total miss. I am in communications and write about gender issues from time to time, so I actually might be interested. If I lived in New York or wrote a calendar section for a blog or website. Which I do not.

It’s also just a press release with no cover note, which regular readers know is a practice I deplore.

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However, the content is interesting. I wish I could go. How could they make this pitch relevant for me and more successful for them?

First, add a cover note that acknowledges that they know I am a Boston-area marketing blogger interested in gender issues and women in the workforce, so they thought I might be interested in the event should I be in NYC that week. Sending a cold pitch about an event that is not in the blogger’s region is a non-starter unless you plan to pay some or all of the expenses for the blogger to attend.

It’s different if you have a relationship with the blogger. You issue the invite, and the blogger makes his decision about whether it is worth it to him to foot the bill to attend. If New York Women in Communications isn’t planning on purchasing my train ticket and paying for my hotel room, it has to give me another good reason for caring about the event.

For example, ask me straight out if I know any women in the New York area who would be interested. This lets them grow their list by referral, if I reply, and even if I don’t, it may make me think to forward the news to friends and colleagues. The news about their event then becomes a value-added service I offer to my network. And, who knows I might even write about it on the blog.

Finally, give me an explicit option to opt-out of these notices. Sure I can figure out how to send email to the flack, but it is much classier for the organization to offer to remove me from its list.

Our second example was forwarded by a mom blogger friend.

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Cute. Very cute shirts. My friend even said if she had little boys instead of little girls, she might be interested.

Once again, a promising product but the pitch is not relevant to the blogger. She writes a personal blog about her life, her family and her daughters.

Relevance. It truly is the secret sauce of blogger relations.

For a kids fashion or shopping blog, the pr person’s very minimalist approach would be appreciated. It’s already relevant. But it’s not enough for a personal blogger.

If agencies are going to continue purchasing broad parent blogger lists, which is clearly the case here, they must craft a pitch that adds value for the blogger even if the age range or genders of her children don’t match the product.

While my personal preference is  that flacks would do a better job targeting and not send pitches for boys’ products to parents of girls or products for teen girls to parents of toddler boys, I realize that this is a longshot. Way too much work for the typical agency faced with deadlines and bottom line pressures.

So if you can’t be spot-on with relevance all the time, you’ve got to make sure you’ve added value. Here, there’s a simple solution  — offer product to the blogger to giveaway on the blog. Even if a parent blogger doesn’t have a little boy, some of her readers will. This wouldn’t work for every product, but in this case, the shirts are organic and cute, two compelling attributes when combined with free product.

What else might these two groups do to improve their pitches? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Cuddly as a cactus, charming as an eel

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This bad pitch gets the Grinch Award for crass commercialism and totally missing the point of Christmas.

More than 100 years ago, Francis Church reassured a young girl about Santa Claus with words that created a picture that still resonates today. This service, on the other hand, suggests lying to your kids with faked photographs. Bad enough, but that’s  not what they are pitching.

It’s really a thinly disguised affiliate marketing pitch.

However, the blogger to whom this was sent does not run advertising or review products. She’s also Jewish. If you are counting, that’s three strikes, and makes it crystal clear that the flack has never read the blog.

If you are going to pitch Christmas, at least get one thing right: Christmas is about GIVING, not about how much money we can make off our friends and readers. Donate to charity. Give toys for tots. Something to show that you are not the Burgermeister.

Not to mention, the product is just yucky. If you choose to share Santa with your children, there are so many ways to make him real that reinforce the spirit of the holiday and the imagination of the child. You don’t need some faked photo.

If you are going to call on Santa to help with your product or your pitch, make sure what you’re offering has the right holiday spirit. Lying to your kids does not qualify.

Today’s clip is, of course, You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch: