Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Is this blog haunted?

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Lately, the topic of ghostwriting has been the subject of a few posts in the little corner of the blogosphere where I hang out.

It all started due to a client blog written by staffers at Boston-area PR firm Topaz Partners and escalated from there. Investor’s Business Daily also had a story.  I followed the conversation on blogs and Twitter, but just haven’t had a minute to write about it until today. You can go back and read all the relevant posts, and I urge you to — some very smart folks had some very smart comments.

Here’s my take. Ghostwriting, bad. Hiring people to write a blog or sponsoring a blog, ok.

As long as the person whose name is on the post is the person who wrote it, does it matter whether they were hired to write it? I don’t think so.

Which is why I am the editor of a client blog and post there regularly under my own name. My client wants a blog, knows I understand the market and the products, and trusts me to build a good experience for the customers and readers. A good friend writes a blog that is sponsored by a major company, but the blog content is driven by her, not the sponsor.

I do not believe there is anything wrong with either approach. The key is of course that the person writing has, or has developed, expertise that makes him qualified to write the blog.

What isn’t right is hiring professional writers to write for employees, whether the CEO or a product manager, without attribution. If your CEO doesn’t want to write, find another way to connect her with your customers. For example, Bill Marriott records a podcast, which is then transcribed for the blog. Nothing wrong with that.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Blogs are a communications tool, not a religion. As long as you are honest about what you are doing and why, please, please push the envelope. Try new things. Just be relevant, be honest and don’t try to fool anybody. Do no harm and don’t hurt the humans 🙂  And don’t be afraid to f*** up. Tom Peters said it years ago, and it is still true – aim for fast failures. Rethink, retool and do it again.

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Playboy gets a Second Life and Delta Tweets

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About 2 months ago I posted about how I had been having some difficulty putting my head around whether or how virtual worlds like Second Life would develop commercial value, but then I noticed two things.

First, my  7-year old son’s complete engagement in the virtual world of Nicktropolis. In other words, digital natives aren’t going to have nearly the trouble navigating and using the new worlds as the digital immigrants do.

And second, the porn industry was in Second Life. On every street corner, you might say. The porn industry is really good at spotting new distribution opportunities, so I saw this as a sign that real business models might eventually emerge in virtual worlds.  🙂  In the comments to the original post, Adam Zand mentioned that he hadn’t seen any of the big porn players in Second Life.

Well, not anymore. Playboy has announced that it is opening up shop in Second Life (AdRants via Spin Thicket).

Guaranteed: Playboy will figure out how to make real dollars from Second Life. Folks who are interested in the potential value of virtual worlds as marketing spaces should pay attention to what they do. We may lag by a number of years in terms of our audiences being in Second Life and other worlds, but by the time my son is a potential (legal) visitor to Playboy’s virtual mansion, I’m pretty certain just about everybody will be. Start paying attention now.

And in other social media news, Delta is apparently twittering. And with a human, not robotic corporate-speak, voice. Joe Jaffe has a great recap of the conversation so far. He closes his post with a series of questions, the most important of which is:

Is this (or should this be considered as) the voice of "the brand"? Does it speak as an "official agent" of the company? And if not, does it matter?

If not, does it matter? That’s the most interesting bit of all. I don’t think it matters at all.

Marketers the world over may wish that the brand equaled the construct we create with official communications, but we do know that isn’t the case.

A brand is the sum of our experiences with a product, with a company. The official communications, like advertising, product manuals, packaging and customer service,  and the quasi- or unofficial ones, like interactions with company employees, on and off the clock. If you personally know or have a positive exchange with someone, you are going to add that interaction into your measurement of that brand. The same is true if you have a bad experience. Even if the negative interaction is not in the work context. It is one of the reasons that people who wear recognizable work uniforms are expected to adhere to  codes of conduct while in uniform, even when not on duty.

So it doesn’t matter whether "deltaairlines" on Twitter is official or not. What matters is that the persona is engaging with other Twits in a meaningful, positive way. More than likely, those folks will add these good twitting experiences into their calculation of the Delta brand. The product delivery — air travel — still has to live up to the promise, but if it does, this tweeting might accelerate a shift in overall brand perceptions among a key audience for the airline (Twits tend to be travelers).

This is actually a useful way for companies to use Twitter. Beyond seeing who is around for lunch or tapping into the collective expertise on an issue.

Twitter is a more informal channel of communication. If we accept that it doesn’t have to be an "official spokesperson" speaking from on high (in fact, it is much better if it isn’t), then companies can use this conversation to have that quasi-official interaction with their customers. Find out what they care about. Make them feel good about the company. Put a more human "face" on the company.

But it only works this way if we are willing to let it be an informal conversation. You can’t switch back and forth from informal voice to official statement. It would be too confusing. 

Personally, I’d prefer that companies not use Twitter and other short form spaces for official announcements. Let Twitter et al be informal, public backchannels where we can chat with brand ambassadors without expectation. Let the long form spaces like blogs and Web sites and news releases do the heavy lifting on official statements.

Then we can be pleased surprised and flattered when our informal conversation changes or improves something in a product or company we love.

Wow. If this works, Twitter might be useful after all.

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Happy Mother’s Day

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You Are Totally Like Your Mom
You and your mom are practically clones.
You think alike, and you even seem to read each other’s minds.
You’re definitely your mother’s child… and that’s just fine with you.
Are You Like Your Mom? (Blogthings)

Blogger Relations Step by Step

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The goal of blogger relations is to build long lasting relationships, not just get a few hits for one program.  Even when you have a great story to tell, doing blogger relations right is a careful, time-consuming process.

It starts with reading the blogs. Regularly. There is no substitute.

Directories?  I don’t use them for blog research. I prefer to do the digging myself.  It is okay to start with a list from another source, but I think you miss out if you don’t do original research. Follow some links. Inhale a few blogrolls. Make some decisions about the bloggers that you want to reach based on what you’ve read, not on how they are categorized on some list.

You should develop a pretty tight “definition” of the blogger you are trying to reach. A good story will only be a good story for a limited number of bloggers. When you try to tell it to someone who isn’t that interested, it becomes a bad story. It’s not about what you say. It’s about how they receive and perceive it.

Before each project, I always take the time to update my list:

  • look for new blogs and bloggers that might be interested;
  • update my email addresses;
  • make sure that a blogger isn’t facing anything (crisis, poor health, death in the family etc.) that would make outreach inappropriate.

When you are contacting a reporter with some bit of news, you generally do not have a window into her personal life. Not true with people who are writing about their lives. You do have a way of knowing. The blog. There is no excuse for not checking. Is it time-consuming? Sure, but if you don’t do it, you aren’t doing blogger relations. You are emailing spam.

Even good news may mean that it’s not the right time to contact someone.

This holds true for business bloggers too. Even if the focus of the blog is a business topic, not the person’s life, major events tend to get noted. For example, business blogger Debbie Weil’s daughter is getting married this weekend (congratulations!) Probably not the best time to reach out to Debbie. She’s too busy. 

Now, I know we all read lots of feeds, and we can’t read everything by everybody every day. And still get our work done. I very regularly mark ALL READ when I get way behind. But, even if you can’t do tight monitoring all the time, you must do it for a period before your outreach. It is well worth the time; if you aren’t willing to put the time in, don’t do it at all.

How many bloggers? In a recent project which had pretty broad appeal, I built an outreach list of about 40 bloggers. Some of you are probably thinking, why so few? In fact, this is a pretty large list for a blogger outreach. Typically, I recommend about 20 well targeted blogs. If you have more than that for your "thing," whatever it may be, you may not be targeting tightly enough. Not all mom bloggers write about the same things. Not all food bloggers have the same interests. And so on.

As my friend Elise Bauer says, don’t send a cake mix to a scratch baker.

There’s also a practical reason for keeping the list small.  Every email is done individually. Sure, I build a doc with the basic information, but every email is addressed to the blogger by name unless the blog is anonymous.

This is important, marketing and PR bloggers, so pay attention: NO MASS EMAILING. You’ve done all this work researching and reading. You comment on the blogs when you have something appropriate to say.  Don’t screw it up by using a mass email program. I do each and every email by hand, adding personal information and referring to recent or regular topics on the blog. For every blogger relations program I do.

Finally, it is critical that your story actually be interesting to the blogger. No one wants to get regurgitated press releases. Just about everybody likes contests. Especially when they have great prizes. But they also like information about things they are interested in. They like being asked to evaluate products. They like being asked to participate. Be creative. If you don’t know what they’d like, ask them!!!

The first few campaigns in any given space are the tough ones. But if you do it right, you’ll build authentic relationships with a core group of influencers that will pay off, for you and for them, over the long run.

Tags: blogger relations