In a recent post, I commented that blogger outreach from the big consumer companies seems to be trending toward big-budget brand events. There’s nothing wrong with this of course. The bloggers invited enjoy themselves tremendously and the companies get a chance to meet with some of their customers in person. Which in and of itself is revolutionary for the big brand companies.
The recent Johnson & Johnson Camp Baby event, for example, seems to have been a success. I’ll be doing a case study on it soon, with feedback from bloggers who attended and hopefully some comments from J&J as well.
I do wonder how much influence big events have on building long-term, sustainable relationships between companies and their customers. We can’t possibly know yet; it is still early days, and certainly the impact will be nil if the companies don’t continue to reach out.
What I do know is that in the focus on the BIG EVENT, sometimes the little things get lost. The little things that really matter to us as people.
For example, Disney. I have no doubt that the company wants to engage with its customers. But it’s a big company. With rules and red tape and all those other things that can get in the way of real relationships.
And this week, Disney could have missed an opportunity with many of the mom bloggers that it has reached out to recently.
Here’s the short story.
Susan/Whymommy from Toddler Planet had been invited to Disney’s mom blogger weekend later this month. She’s not going, but in the outreach, Disney had asked for feedback and ideas from the moms. Around the same time, another mom blogger learned that her cancer had returned quite aggressively, and a group of her mom blogger friends decided to see what they could do to make her dream of a family vacation to Disney come true. They are raising money and coming together as a community to make it happen. Susan thought: Disney just reached out to mom bloggers, they want to be part of our community, maybe they could help. So she reached out to her contact at Disney. Read her post for all the details, including the Disney reply in full, but long story short, her Disney contact referred her to a group called Compassion Partners.
It seemed like a missed opportunity.
I completely understand that Disney cannot respond personally to every request as well as the danger of setting a precedent. In that context, the information about Compassion Partners is useful and a reasonable standard response to queries like these.
However, the context of this specific request is different. Susan was well aware of Disney’s plan to host a bunch of mom bloggers for a 3-day weekend. Of its desire to build relationships with the moms. And of the concern on mom blogs about
the timing of the event during Passover. [Note: The previous line has been edited.
Someone graciously told me that my initial wording trivialized the timing
mistake and would be insulting to members of the Jewish community. I have
edited it out, rather than use strike-through, as strike-through perpetuates
the insult.] In that context, it isn’t an unreasonable request. As she put it in her email, Disney asked for ideas and she gave it one.
Blogger relations is more like making friends than anything else. Of course we all realize that bloggers and companies aren’t friends in the real-life sense; it’s business, and we expect both sides to benefit from the relationship. But when a company reaches out to an individual, as it does when it reaches out to personal bloggers, and particularly when it asks to participate in the community, it’s a different playing field. New rules.
My initial thought was, instead of the standard corporate response, I wished Disney had responded as a member of the community, and offered the family some passes to the parks.
But I strive to be fair. So, I contacted Disney.
It turns out to be a simple matter of miscommunication.
Craig Dezern, head of PR at Disney, told me that they get, and grant, thousands of requests per year. In order to manage it properly, they work through wish-granting organizations like Give Kids the World, of which Compassion Partners is part. What’s not clear in the reply e-mail is that while Compassion Partners is a third-party organization, Donna, the individual Susan was referred to, is dedicated to requests that come in through or for Disney parks. She sits in a Disney office and has a Disney email address. She is absolutely the right person to help in this situation, and trust me, at this point, she’s probably waiting for the call.
Craig also said that Disney feels very strongly about not publicizing its support for wish-granting groups. They never want it to look like they are taking advantage of someone’s misfortune. While this wasn’t the case here at all, and most likely never is, I do see the point. It’s a fine line, and even finer when we talk about blogs versus traditional media.
I pointed out that in blogger relations, when you are dealing with people as individuals, versus as "markets" in the mass media model, you have to expect that they are going to act like, well, people. They are going to have different expectations of your company. If you don’t meet them, or if there’s a miscommunication, it can be worse than if you’d never tried. If you reach out as a friend, the blogger is going to expect you to act like a friend.
Craig’s a good communicator — he didn’t miss a beat and replied that if a friend approached him with the same request, he would give the same answer. And cynical though I am, I believe him. Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and talk to people.
The devil is always in the details. It’s always a bunch of little things that make up the big picture. Like so many other blogger relations SNAFUs, the problem here was clarity and information. There just needed to be a little bit more of both.
I’ll be back with the Disney story again after their event later this month. Stay tuned.
Tags: Disney, blogger relations
