Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Blogger relations is customer relations

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Recently, I was explaining to someone why I wanted to shift the mix of my consulting business to include more blogger relations projects, both hands-on projects and strategic consulting to companies executing their projects themselves.

It’s simple. Nearly every organization, regardless of size, is going to have to engage in blogger relations. Because blogger relations is the evolution of customer relations.

I hear the objection … "But isn’t blogger relations just PR campaigns aimed at bloggers to get them to write about products and services? How can that be customer relations?"

Outbound blogger relations, or blogger outreach, is only one part of blogger relations. It’s also more, or at least should be more, than "just PR." Remember: the blogger is the customer. When companies engage with bloggers, they are strengthening, or weakening, their relationships with their customers.

For the moment, though, let’s step away from the outreach discussion and remember that an interaction can be initiated by either party in a relationship. 

It is equally likely that a blogger — the customer  — will effectively reach out to a company by offering an unsolicited opinion about the firm or its products on her blog. How a company handles this blogger-initiated interaction, whether it be kudos or complaint, is equally blogger relations.

In my personal experience, companies rarely engage with bloggers under these circumstances. I’ve mentioned a number of different companies here, both positively and negatively, over the past three years. So far, only one company has left a comment on the relevant post. Other bloggers report similar results. The question is, why? 

Are the companies not paying attention, or do they just not know what to say?

It’s probably a bit of both. That’s the opportunity for companies willing to step up and really start talking with their customers. Wherever the conversation may be.

It starts with monitoring what people are saying about the company — on blogs, microblogs like Twitter, social networks like Facebook, Forums, your customer service or support lines — wherever customers talk about you, whatever else comes along. But it can’t end there, or even with solid outreach programs that offer relevant information to the appropriate people.

You have got to be willing to respond. To answer the question, acknowledge the comment, accept the compliment and address the concerns. Publicly.

That’s the challenge for blogger relations. Engaging with your customers on their terms as well as yours, on their turf as well as yours. Consistently and for mutual benefit.

Ready, set, go.

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I’m off to BlogHer Business tomorrow morning, so blogging will be light for the rest of the week, although I will be on Twitter. I will try to get my posts up about the sessions on the train ride home Saturday. While you are waiting, check out:

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An excellent read adventure

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Average Jane was kind enough to include Marketing Roadmaps on her list of most excellent reads in the meme started by Kayla at Project Mommy. The terms and conditions of the award, as with most memes, are pretty simple: pass it on and link back to the originator. You can repeat blogs that have already been awarded, but I think it is a cop-out to include ones that are on the same list as you, which is why you won’t see my list below repeating a good chunk of Average Jane’s even though I regularly read many of these same blogs and consider them most excellent.

Rules say award at least 10 Excellent Blog Awards, so here are 10 (out of the 500+ feeds in my feed reader) that will give you an excellent reading adventure. In alphabetical order by blog name:

  1. Communication Overtones
  2. Galactica Sitrep
  3. It’s Not A Lecture
  4. Mary Schmidt
  5. Mom-101
  6. mothergoosemouse
  7. Motherhood Uncensored
  8. Murphy’s Law
  9. Occam’s Razr
  10. PR-Squared

And if you’ve got a few extra minutes, please check out three blogs that I recently brought online for clients:

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Can this pitch be saved?

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Next week, Liz Gumbinner (Mom-101 and CoolMomPicks), Mir Kamin (Woulda Coulda Shoulda and WantNot.net), Maria Niles (ConsumerPop and BlogHer Contributing Editor) and I will be presenting a session called Improve This Pitch, first as a teleseminar for the Women Who Tech telesummit on Monday afternoon at 4 pm EDT and then as a panel at BlogHer Business in NYC on Friday afternoon at 1:15 pm.

As the title implies, we will be talking blogger relations, and specifically what marketers should do to improve their pitches. I’ll do a more comprehensive write-up of the session after we’ve given it at BlogHer — after all, the attendees should get first look at our collective brilliance — but I decided to share a few thoughts as a sort of sneak preview.

Some pitches cannot be saved. There is so much wrong with them that the only kind thing to do is put them out of their misery. There’s no good reason to send a 900-word email pitch about breakfast cereal. Or a pitch that talks down to the blogger.We’ll share a few specific examples and tell you what we would have advised the company.

Some products just shouldn’t be pitched to bloggers. That doesn’t mean the company can’t reach out to bloggers. Or that the blogger might not buy the product.  It does mean that the company has to find some other connection point with the blogger. We’ll share some ideas on what marketing people can do if they are tasked with reaching out to bloggers about products like bleach and bathroom cleanser.

Read the blog and address the blogger by name. You’ve read that here before, and you will again. This does not mean  "personalize" the email by mail-merging  the names of a mom blogger and her children into a generic pitch. Added demerits if the pitch is bad as well.

Another tip I’ve mentioned here before is to give bloggers exclusive access to information. But it has to be exclusive access to something that the blogger will find interesting. Odds are, that’s not going to be a scripted conference call with a company exec. There are a few general exceptions to this rule, including highly anticipated product launches and extending access to financial results calls to the public, not just the financial media and analysts, but not many. We’ll talk about what sort of exclusives do appeal to bloggers, and how you should go about inviting participants. Generic email blasts addressed to BLOGGERS are not it. 

If you will be attending Women Who Tech or BlogHer Business and have an example you’d like us to discuss, either yours or one you received, we encourage you to share it. You can send it in advance to me at sgetgood@getgood.com and I’ll forward to my co-panelists, or just bring it with you for the Q&A.

UPDATED, 3/31/08: PDF version of my Custom Scoop article: Some Advice for Reaching out to Mommybloggers.

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Insanity

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Insanity is often defined as "doing the same things over again but expecting a different outcome."

Using that definition, we, marketing and PR professionals, are most definitely insane. F*****g nuts.

While I’ve written about a few blogger relations SNAFUs in the past week,  this rant is not about them. In fact, having spoken or emailed with many of the players on both sides of those blogstorms, I have no doubt that everyone in those specific examples was sincerely trying to make a contribution, do a good thing, build relationships, offer constructive criticism, etc. No bad guys. Not the companies. Not the bloggers.

No. We — the collective we — are nuts because we keep trying to impose mass media models on online social networks. In some cases,  like the media outreach numbers game —  throw as much at the wall as you can and see what  sticks — the models are badly broken and dysfunctional in their natural environment. They just suck more when applied to bloggers.

Advertising messages that are just a little "off," or even mildly offensive, are at best amusing in their badness, but easily ignored regardless. We stop watching, We don’t buy. We make fun of them on our blogs.

Other mass market tools, like demographics and pychographics and "targeting" and models of consumer behavior are useful but not sufficient in themselves. Think about it. Engaging in online social networks is more like making friends than anything else. Do we make friends based on their demographic profile? I sure as hell hope not. If you are, please return to a previous century immediately.  Don’t get me wrong — there is nothing wrong with using these tools in your marketing efforts. But they are simply a place to start. If you go no further, please, go no further in social media because we don’t need any more insanity. Just keep using direct mail and infomercials or whatever else puts your controlled message in front of your target audience.

Because we don’t need blogstorms. They are scary. Think about it. You are a marketer who developed a blogger outreach program with the very best  intentions, but made some errors along the way — perhaps a few design flaws in the program or a junior staffer doing outreach who didn’t handle an objection properly or maybe just bad assumptions. All of a sudden, your program blows up. And not just one or two unhappy customers. All over the blogs, all over the ‘Net. And more often than not, it’s a case of simple mistakes. I can only imagine how it feels (and intend to keep it that way) but it must be an awful feeling. It must be so hard to understand why people are so upset when it is often an easily fixed issue or simple misunderstanding.

Here’s why. It’s a cumulative effect. Yours isn’t the only pitch a blogger receives or hears about in a given day. A mommyblogger might get 10 or 20 in a single day. If every single one of those is just a bit off — poor targeting, poorly written pitch, addressed to the wrong person or the name of the blog instead of a person — it’s like an escalating bad day.

You know, the kind of day when you oversleep and the kids miss the bus and you forgot to give them lunch money and then you are late for work. And once you get there, the day just spirals downward. Or if you work out of the house, the dog pukes on the carpet and email doesn’t work and Twitter is flaky. Then the kids come home and everybody is in and out of the family room, which just happens to be your office. Some telemarketer from a political campaign calls, but it’s for your spouse’s insanely conservative party not yours. And then in all of this, your partner or one of your kids says something perhaps a little clueless. Maybe not the worst thing ever, but just enough. You go ballistic. Nuclear even.

That’s why blogstorms happen. It’s not just your pitch. It’s your pitch in context of everything else, of an ongoing problem of marketers applying mass models to social networks.

Remember, a blog is not a media vehicle. Even if it looks like one, with advertising and everything. A blog is a personal publishing platform, and is driven by the passions of the blogger(s), not products and promotions. This is true even in the case of group or company blogs; without people and passion, they never get off the ground.

When you reach out to a blogger, he or she is also part of a social network, of which the blog is one piece. Everybody emails everyone else. They are also on microblogging platforms like Twitter and social nets like Facebook and Utterz and ooVoo and God knows what else. People are talking,  the shot really is heard ’round the world in a matter of minutes and nothing snowballs faster than bad news. Trust me. It’s what I do for a living.  It takes twice as much effort to spread good news as bad.

Recently I lost a piece of business that I really wanted. In part because I didn’t do enough self-promotion, which I am working to correct. And in part because I didn’t give easy answers. In the interviewing process, one of the questions asked was what small business bloggers would I reach out to on behalf of this potential client. I told the truth, which was that I didn’t know yet, because we needed to match the client’s messages with the bloggers who covered small business. The competition provided a list of bloggers and forums.

Now I suppose I could have sent them a list of SMB sites and bloggers. I have one, and it wouldn’t have taken long to "puff" it up. But I am absolutely convinced that the mass media numbers game is not the right approach for the long haul. The social media payoff for anyone, for any company,  is in doing the upfront research to figure out who you want to know, who wants to know you. It’s about building relationships with your customers over time, not overnight.

Repeat after me. Mass consumer models do not work in the blogosphere. We aren’t going to get a different outcome the next time. Thinking we will is insane.

Stop the insanity.

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Some additional resources:

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PR people: do your homework BEFORE you reach out to bloggers

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As we’ve seen this week alone, from the Camp Baby blogstorm and other incidents (like inviting Jewish moms to Disney over Passover), it is painfully apparent that many PR firms and reps reaching out to bloggers don’t do their homework. This is probably the root cause of the most egregious blogger relations SNAFUs. A poorly written pitch makes you chuckle. A poorly targeted one pisses you off.

Some of you may recall my 4Ps of social media:   

  • Prepare   
  • Participate   
  • Then and only then Pitch or Publish.

Companies and agencies spend far more time analyzing every word to create the perfect pitch and putting together spectacular events designed to wow bloggers and customers, than they do on the research — on getting to know bloggers, reading the blogs, figuring out who would be most interested in a particular product or program.

They still play the numbers game — build as big a list as possible, focus on the "top" blogs and bloggers, blast the pitch and see what falls out.  I, on the other hand, am convinced that if you spend the time to narrow your list and reach out to a smaller number of bloggers who will be very interested, you’ll get better results. 

I’ll give you an example. I created a small program for HP last year for the launch of the HP Photo Books. I’ve written about it here before, and we’ll be presenting a case study that includes it at BlogHer Business in April. I’ll publish the full case study here after the presentation, but for now, I want to focus on how we decided who to reach out to with the Photographic Memories component of the program.

You could make an assumption that most moms take pictures of their kids. Pretty safe bet. But the Photographic Memories project involved a time intensive component of writing interviews with the moms for HP.com. We also had a limited supply of the compact photo printers we were offering to make it easier for the moms to try out the books.

Twenty interviews. Something in that vicinity felt right.  With 20, we felt we’d have a nice cross section of women from all over the US with different personal and professional backgrounds. We also wanted moms who were really into their photos, but that didn’t just mean women who were actively engaged with it as a hobby. We wanted a mix of moms that simply liked to take and share snapshots, dedicated hobbyists and professional photographers. Why? Because when other women came to read the interviews, we wanted everyone to be able to find someone they could identify with.

Homework time. I combed through my blogroll of mommy blogs. And trust me, that is a lot of mommy blogs. Looking for moms who wrote about their pictures, often included pictures in posts, and had a Flickr badge on their home page or a special photo album for family pics. I also contacted a friend who is a professional photographer and blogger for her recommendations.

In the end, I had a balanced list of 40 mommy bloggers. Some of them have lots of readers, but most are in what has been termed the "magic middle" – blogs with 20-1000 other people linking to them.

Only 40? I can hear you all now. That’s not a lot. Well no, it isn’t. And that’s the point. If you do your preparation properly, you don’t have to cast a wide wide net. Twenty-two –22 — from that initial list of 40 participated in the project. Even math-challenged me can do that math — more than 50 percent.

Do your homework. Build relationships. Develop programs that offer strong value to both sides. Narrow cast. As narrow as possible. Your program will benefit, and by the way, your selection criteria are much more defensible. One of the things J&J got tagged with this week was reaction from the many mommy bloggers who weren’t invited. The more focus you have, the better off you will be.

Friend and colleague David Wescott of APCO Worldwide has been working on a project for the past year or so with the Council of PR Firms to understand the perspectives of both PR agencies and bloggers. There’s a lot of good information in the study, as well as an opportunity to contribute to future research, so I urge you to check it out. What I found the most interesting was that it clearly proves the biggest disconnect between agencies and bloggers. Agencies think they are doing a good job identifying the interests of bloggers and sending them relevant information. Bloggers resoundingly disagree.

(source: The State of Blog Relations)

Uhmm. Yeah. That would be my experience. And that of many bloggers I know.

We have got to get this right, folks. Bloggers are your customers. How do you want to talk with your customers? Think about it, and think hard.

I’ve said it before, and I guess I’ll say it until we get it right. Bloggers are your customers. It’s about the relationship over time, not overnight. Do you want a one night stand or a commitment?

If you want a commitment, figure out what matters to your customers.

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