Blogger relations

What is all the fuss about? Really.

A month or so ago, Nikon launched a blogger relations campaign aimed at PR and marketing bloggers. Gave ’em use of a digital SLR camera. Seemed to have covered all the bases for doing blogger relations —  transparency, clarity, targeted pitch, etc. 

And then whoops, the accusations of blogola started. Eric Eggertson summarizes some of them here. Mack Collier of the Viral Garden also had a problem with it, as well as with a CBS outreach around the TV program The New Adventures of Old Christine (more on that in another post later this week).

I’m confused.

Just exactly what is the problem with asking influential customers and potential customers to try out products? It’s part of Western culture. And has been as far back as we have had commerce.

By appointment to the Queen was all about patronage; merchants supplied goods to the sovereign and other nobles as a way of advertising their wares. And it still happens — the couture houses and high end jewelers like Harry Winston bend over backwards to get the chance to dress and bejewel the big name celebrities and top actresses. Not because us regular folk can afford the stuff we see them wear. But because we just might buy something from company’s "off the rack" product line.

Advertising, for good or for ill, is based on the idea that we, the customers, will buy things used by people like us or people we want to be like. Because guess what? We will.

If a blogger has influence with other people like him, it’s a smart business move to reach out to him. If you sell a tangible product that you can let her try, why wouldn’t you let a blogger try it out? Marketing 101: get someone to TRY something, you are nearly there. 

As long as everything is done in the light of day, as long as you don’t tell her what to say, what’s the problem? Calling it blogola, as in payola, implies some sort of secret dealings. Umm, maybe I’m missing something, but Nikon’s campaign seems pretty above board.

Unless of course you didn’t get a camera….

Seriously, if a company has confidence in its products and is willing to put them out on trial, we should applaud, not deride, their efforts. Sure, they are trying to sell something. So what. I’m just glad to see them extending their outreach beyond the glitterati and beyond traditional media.

Even if I didn’t get a camera 🙂

Tags: blogola, blogger relations, Nikon

"He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (John 8:7)

Yesterday, pr management software firm Vocus apparently spammed  bloggers with an announcement of a (insert ironic drum roll here) a white paper and webinar about blogger relations, The Five Golden Rules of Blogger Relations.

I learned about the email blast from a fellow blogger, who emailed me about it because I was one of the bloggers interviewed by Vocus for the paper and mentioned in the email.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased that the firm appeared to have broken just about every guideline I and the other bloggers had suggested. Impersonal pitch, mass email, untargeted, no relationship with the recipient. You name it, all the rules broken. I immediately emailed  the person at Vocus who had interviewed me for the paper. To their credit, she responded immediately that this behavior was not their intention nor their usual practice, she would look into it and get back to me ASAP.

About an hour later, Bill Wagner, Vocus CMO called. Here’s the explanation, in his own words, which he sent at my request following our conversation because I didn’t want to get any of his important points wrong. 

I wanted to follow-up on our discussion about the Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations whitepaper with some additional thoughts…

First, a little background….As you know, many of our customers use our media database to identify journalists and bloggers.  The vast majority of these customers research the journalists and bloggers who cover their space, make a personal connection, share relevant news and track their ongoing conversations.  In short, they build relationships.  On the other hand, we all know some PR people who build large lists and send mass distributions of press releases indiscriminately–something you and others have blogged about extensively.  While I believe these people represent a minority of PR practitioners, their actions give the entire PR community a black eye. 

As a leader in the industry, I believe Vocus should play an important role in educating our customers on best practices for media and blogger relations.  To that end, in writing our whitepaper we sought out advice and opinions from experts such as yourself, Shel Holtz, David Scott and Rachel Weiss, on what to do and not to do when approaching the blogsphere.

Now, with regard to how the Whitepaper was distributed…It was sent to our internal list of marketers and PR professionals as well as directly to our customers, including those from both Vocus and PRWeb.  While most of these recipients are familiar with Vocus and welcome our content, some are not.  For instance, many users of PRWeb (a company Vocus acquired last year) may not recognize the Vocus brand and don’t understand why they’re receiving communications from Vocus.  Understandably, some of them viewed our whitepaper offer as spam. 

Of course, anyone who receives communications from us can opt out, but the lesson is clear:  Whether sending news to journalists, reaching out to bloggers or sharing information with customers, we all have to strive to ensure that our communications are welcome and the information relevant.  I also recognize the need to clarify the relationship between Vocus and PRWeb for the thousands of individuals, marketers and PR professionals that have used the PRWeb service. 

The irony of course is that by trying to educate PR professionals about best practices in media and blogger relations, Vocus is addressing the "spam" issue head-on on behalf of journalists and bloggers alike.  As I mentioned in our conversation, Vocus is the first in the industry to allow journalists and bloggers to "opt-out" from receiving press releases from a particular company.  We’ll also continue to be aggressive in educating our customers in order to help them be more effective in establishing and maintaining relationships with journalists, bloggers and other important constituents.  We hope others will follow our lead. 

Please feel free to give me a call to discuss.  I look forward to working with you to continue to educate both our customers and the industry at large about this and other related issues.

Now some people, the only slack they are going to be willing to give Vocus is that on the end of a rope. I have a slightly different perspective. I absolutely think this could and should have been handled differently and discussed this at some length with Wagner. But, we all have a little dirty laundry in our glass houses. Mistakes are good; I think of them as learning moments 🙂  A mistake is only truly bad when we don’t learn from it.

I doubt that Vocus wanted to be its own poster child for bad blogger relations and do think they’ve learned from this experience. And call me optimistic, but  it really does seem as though the company is making a sincere effort to get it right. Clearly, part of their motivation is to establish a competitive difference from the other vendors, but I’m willing to give them credit for doing some interesting things. Sure, having an opt-out link on press releases doesn’t make up for the poor PR practice of not building contact lists appropriately and carefully, but it is a start. It gives us back some control over our inboxes, and as I understand it, it is not optional. 

So here’s what I hope Vocus has learned from this moment. 

To start with, they should have thought more carefully about the PR Web user base. And I’m not  talking about doing a better job of communicating that Vocus acquired PR Web. That’s basic marketing table stakes, and they know it.

I’m talking about WHO these people are and what sort of communication would be appropriate for them. Think about it. People at PR agencies and in-house PR departments probably have PR Newswire or Business Wire accounts, if only as a matter of habit. Who was PR Web’s initial user base? Bloggers, small  to medium business owners, individuals, non-profits etc. etc. who wanted to issue a press release, often for the Google juice as much as anything else, and didn’t have accounts with the major wires. A communication written for Vocus customers, PR professionals, is not appropriate. No wonder bloggers took exception.

And of course, the irony was so delicious. How could they not blog about it?

Now I abhor mass emails for blogger relations, but I do not object to them for customer marketing communications, if the customer has opted-in and the material is targeted, relevant and preferably short. In this case, I told Bill that perhaps a better path would have been to have different communications, better targeted to the population receiving them.You tell me, PR Web users, but if you had gotten a short 2-3 line email that told you:

•  why you were getting this —  PR Web customer, PR Web now owned by Vocus;
• gave you a short, simple reason to be interested — "as someone who has issued a news release over the Web, we thought you might be interested in this white paper about blogger relations that we’ve produced with the help of Holtz, Scott, Weiss and Getgood"  — and
• gave you the download link without all the marketing-speak,

would you have had a negative reaction? Some certainly still would have, but I am willing to bet that some of you would have been interested, and if not, you would have just hit "delete" and moved on. 

That said, in my opinion, the best approach still would have been to lead by example. Practice what is preached in the paper.  Take the time to read the blogs, get to know the bloggers, mention relevant posts from their blogs, write individualized emails. Perhaps to fewer bloggers, but this is a pretty frequent topic in the PR/marketing blogosphere. There would have been PLENTY of bloggers to reach out to 🙂

I’m guessing that Vocus will do things differently next time. I’m sure plenty of people will be watching. Me included.

And here’s what I’ve learned:

I agreed to be interviewed for the white paper and to participate in the upcoming webinar because I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help Vocus’ customers understand how to do blogger relations right. I still feel that way. However, in future, with any projects like this, with anyone, I will ask to see all promotional materials that mention my name. It may be their white paper, but it is my reputation.

Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, because we care about stuff like that here in the blogosphere, I have not nor do I expect to receive any compensation from Vocus for my participation in the white paper and proposed webinar or this post.

But hey, I’m a consultant. In the future, if they or anyone else wants to retain my counsel on this subject, I’m game.

Tags: Vocus, blogger relations, ethics, pr, public relations, pr spam

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