Marketing Roadmaps

Blogger relations

Best practices for influencer engagement

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Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a bit about blogger relations, largely in the context of brands reaching out to bloggers. As I mentioned in my last post, lately I’ve started to think about it more in terms of influencer engagement.

The key to success in social media engagement is to forge strong relationships, deliver relevant content and most importantly, respect the writer and her readers. As a starting point for developing long term sustainable relationships between brands and social media influencers, here are some best practices for your consideration.

Focus on the people, not on your product. Pay it forward — give first, get second.

Effective influencer engagement starts with reaching out to people who will have a genuine and authentic interest in a company or product. That interest is what inspires them to create a story that connects with their (and their readers’) passions. That it also mentions a product or service in some context is only a part of the story; Not all the story nor simply a tack-on mention at the end. For a conversation to be effective for both the brand and the bloggers, the inclusion of the brand has to fit (much like Cinderella’s slipper), not be forced.

Social media leaders should be compensated for their efforts on behalf of brands, and the value should be balanced, with each party obtaining sufficient benefit. In other words, if the product the brand is offering the blogger is a car for a significant period of time, the blogger might consider that  sufficient compensation — depending on what the brand is asking in exchange. A few boxes of cereal or tubes of hand cream? Not so much.

Brands are best served by a “clean, well-lighted” space, in which editorial is clearly distinguished from advertorial content, and brand-influencer relationships disclosed.  There is no such thing as too much information, too much disclosure in the blogosphere. The FTC imposes requirements on brands and bloggers for both disclosure and accuracy, but those are simply the price of admission. Long-lasting trust demands even more than a simple disclosure statement. To gain, and retain, trust, brands, influencers and communities need to be upfront about their point of view as well as their relationships with other parties. It’s the only way the consumer has all the information she needs to evaluate whether the opinion in a blog post is from a peer, and thus relevant to her life. Or simply an endorsement from an interested party or an advertisement. Both have value in the awareness/adoption process just a different one.

Every conversation has multiple stakeholders – the influencers, the brands and the readers, and you have to keep all three in mind when creating a campaign. Is the content relevant to the readers’ interests? Is it interesting? How authentically does it integrate the messaging into the  story without appearing forced or fake? What will the reader experience be? Develop programs that will be interesting for the social media influencers and their audiences – wherever they engage with her — not just an opportunity to get paid for a post, and that support the brand messaging, without being a product pitch.

A sponsored conversation can be just as engaging as a straight-up editorial post, update or Tweet, provided that the topic taps into the woman’s passions, not the product press release.

Less is often more. Reaching out to fewer influencers, but ones that have a genuine interest and desire to support the brand is usually more effective than a larger number of mildly interested folks. A few really good posts by influential women who are leaders in a community can have a stronger, more positive impact than a slew of perfunctory posts. It’s also important to consider how many influencers should be included in a program; a fatigue often sets in when multiple posts about the same thing all appear on the same day. Intended to have a positive impact, such volume actually can have negative impact on a community.

“Keep your friends close. And your enemies closer.” Embrace your critics instead of trying to silence them. This is a tough strategy to follow; it’s hard to invite your critics to take a seat at the table, especially when you know there are hundreds of fans who would be happy to have that seat.

Own your words. When you make a mistake, ‘fess up and apologize. A little humility goes a long way. Bottom line: nothing spreads faster than bad news. If you don’t do social media engagement right, you will face criticism. Better to do it right the first time!

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Cleaning out the inbox:

  • Check out  Blog Marketing to Moms Is About More Than Parenting, an eMarketer study about the momosphere. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the piece.
  • On December 9th, I’ll be speaking at the Massachusetts Conference for Women at the Boston Convention Center. I’ll be doing a session on using social media to build your brand and professional reputation.  The session was originally framed as an intro-level session, but feedback from the previous two conferences — in Pittsburgh and Houston — has confirmed that the audience wants more advanced content, so in Boston, I’ll be adding content on building a blog strategy. I’ll also be signing Professional Blogging For Dummies in the bookstore.

Six years of blogging – perspectives on social media

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Since I joined BlogHer earlier this Fall, I have had a lot going on — traveling, speaking, digging into the new job, moving my family to the NY area — and this poor blog has been sorely neglected. So neglected in fact that my 6th blog anniversary passed earlier this month and I didn’t even notice.

Thinking about that milestone over this holiday weekend led me to think about some of the changes I’ve observed in the blogosphere.

In 2005,  early adopters were dipping their toes into the blogging waters. The hot topic was the corporate blog, and the term “social media”  wasn’t even being used yet — Facebook was in its infancy and Twitter wouldn’t even be invented for another year. Public relations agencies were just beginning to reach out to bloggers on behalf of brands, mostly high tech and consumer electronics. Online conversation often swirled around the mistakes agencies and companies made with poorly targeted “spray and pray” outreach.

Now, according to research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth,  23 percent of the Fortune 500 have public blogs, including four of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron and General Electric), 60 percent have corporate Twitter accounts and 56 percent have Facebook pages (The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies).

The study, which was announced at the Annual Research Symposium and Awards  Gala of the Society for New Communications Research, concludes:

“This [adoption of social media] clearly demonstrates the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is [a] clear. It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways.”

Furthermore, according to research conducted by FedEx and Ketchum, and reported in eMarketer, 75 percent of companies worldwide participate in social media in some aspects of their communications and marketing strategy, with 10% actively leading in the space and 15% still mostly on the sidelines observing (Leveraging Best Practices for Social Media).

Another hot topic in the early days of this blog was whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would accept blogs as an outlet for material disclosure by public companies.  The SEC began studying the issue in late 2006 and in 2008, announced that it would accept websites and blogs as outlets for material disclosure under certain circumstances.

The topic that has engaged me the most since I dove into the social media pool, however, is the relationship between brands and consumers. Initially, this activity was called blogger relations, a name that reflected its roots in public relations and a focus on blogs. Over the past year or two, the term blogger outreach became more prominent — in part I think in an effort to distance the work from public relations. At least that was my reason for the vocabulary shift.

The sphere of activity also has extended beyond blogs to embrace social networks like Facebook and microblogs like Twitter and Tumblr, and influence is just as important as blog real estate, prompting a shift to talk about  “social media influencers” rather than just bloggers.

Going into the new year, I will be shifting my analysis of this topic to focus on influencer engagement. How well do we engage influencers across the range of social media channels? What can brands do to better engage the customer with the brand premise while retaining authenticity? What is the role of the influencer herself? What can she do to engage proactively with the brands she loves without “selling out?”

Bottom line, I am more interested in the two-way sustainable engagement, brand to influencer and influencer to brand, than I am in a one-way outreach or a single campaign.

Next week, I’ll kick this off with a brief summary of  some best practices for influencer engagement.

Two levels of getting it right with blogger relations

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Mom out on the town
Image by marymactavish via Flickr

Recently I was interviewed by Chief Marketer about how brands are reaching out to women through social media. The reporter was interested in how brands were and were not “getting it right.”

As I wrote here last month (OMG, that long), it’s become increasingly clear to me that the brands that are doing excellent work using social media tools to reach their customers generally have done and do a good job in traditional media. Sure, even the best companies make the occasional mistake with a campaign, product or program but for the most part, their marketing communications are sharp (often clever) and do not patronize the consumer.

These companies already understand that it’s important to respect your customer. In all that you do. They just have to figure out how to translate that imperative using the social media toolset in a way that is authentic to the brand and relevant to the customer.

It’s more than just getting the mechanics right. That’s the price of entry into social media engagement with your customer. I’ve been saying it for years, and I’ll keep on saying it: there is NO excuse for misaddressed e-mail – for example, the “Dear XXX” pitch about toys (children’s toys) that many parent bloggers got last week – or grammar errors – like “conscious” for “conscience,” also from last week’s in-box.

As Marketing Mommy said on Twitter:

@sgetgood My reply to him: “Despite my efforts to break into the porn star business, I’ve yet to use the moniker XXX.”

The poor interns come in for a lot of flack when we talk about these often humorous mechanical mistakes, but really, it is management’s job to create a system with the proper checks and balances.

If you MUST mass e-mail bloggers (and I wish you wouldn’t), invest in a decent CRM system and assign your interns to getting the data entered properly. Not on cutting and pasting pitches. Buy everyone who drafts, edits or sends customer facing emails a dictionary and make it a requirement that it be displayed on their desks. Why? Because it will be a constant visual reminder to check not just the spelling of words, but their meaning. Spell check and online dictionaries can’t do that.

The mechanics are the first, most basic level of getting blogger outreach right. We can do it. I know we can.

Your message is the second, more important level of “getting it right.” My favorite fantasy is that next year, even more companies and their agencies will see the light and understand that what they should be doing is sharing compelling ideas and stories with their customers. Exciting things that will make them want to write about the brand.

Instead of trotting out formulaic pitches and recycling the same product launch templates from project to project, client to client, brand to brand.

Be careful though.This requires more than just identifying the blogger’s passion that drives interest in your product and inserting the message point in an otherwise bland pitch. That’s a start (I guess), but it’s not enough. There is honestly still far too much of this sort of pitch circulating in the ether.

Really getting it right requires that you connect with that passion. To do that, you need to know the bloggers you are reaching out to. It still comes back to the 3 R’s as coined by good friend and colleague David Wescott in 2007 – respect your customer, be relevant and build a relationship over time.

Good blogger relations is  still (and always will be) a commitment, not a one night stand.

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Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women ticket giveaway – Stay tuned: I will pick a winner this weekend from the comments on this post. I also have one ticket each for the Texas Conference for Women in November and the Massachusetts Conference for Women in December. Watch for a post next week about the conferences and details on how I plan to give away those passes. More than likely it will be on Twitter, not here on the blog as finding time to write is a bit problematic for the next two weeks due to my schedule.

Next week, I will be in NYC most of the week, digging in to my second week on the job as VP Sales Marketing for BlogHer and speaking at a PRSA event on Friday. The following week, I travel to Orlando to present a social media workshop at AARP’s Orlando@50+ conference.

In between all of that we are trying to find a place to live for 3 people, 3 dogs and 2 cats. Fun times!  We need a rental within about an hour’s commute to Manhattan by train until we sell our house in Massachusetts. If you’ve got leads, let me know. We’re leaning toward western Connecticut but open to all suggestions.

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BlogHer Marketing Lessons, Part 2: Influencer relations and #gapmagic

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Regardless of the industry segment or specific details of the campaign, the best influencer relations programs have one thing in common: the value exchange between brand and influencer is balanced. Each gives something of value to the other, both are satisfied with the exchange and nobody feels taken advantage of.

In paid media like advertising, this exchange is easy to understand. Publisher — whether online or off, broadcast or print — develops an advertising package based on audience demographics and content. Company pays an agreed-upon rate for its ad to appear within the media vehicle. Publisher gets money; advertiser gets eyeballs.

In influencer relations, the equation is a little more complex, but it’s not rocket science.

For the influencer, balanced value means that the program offers something interesting and relevant to his or her interests or activities, and the “ask” — what the brand hopes the influencer will do as a result of the offer —  is proportionate to what the influencer has or will receive from the brand. And let’s be clear — there’s always an ask, even if it’s only implied and the pitch includes the oft-repeated words, “if you choose to write about this on your blog…”

If the company asks too much of the influencers — for example, multiple posts and status updates in exchange for a few tubes of toothpaste — the value equation is unbalanced.

From the company side of the equation, the cost of the program has to be justified by the results. That means setting, and measuring, realistic objectives, and culling out programs that don’t deliver. The best way to do this is to build long term relationships with the online influencers that truly matter for your brand.

I tend to prefer simple programs aimed at small numbers of influencers so the brands can really focus on the “fit” with the influencer and add sufficient value to the pitch. Plus, we all like to feel special, and nothing says “not special” like a promotion aimed at hundreds.

One of the best influencer relations programs I’ve seen recently (and full disclosure, I was a beneficiary of it) was the Gap’s outreach prior to the 2010 BlogHer conference. The company reached out to the conference speakers, offering us a styling appointment at our local Gap where we’d get to try on the new Fall clothes.

The initial email was fairly vague; while I’m sure most of the women assumed we’d get a gift card of some sort, there was no specific dollar amount mentioned. The fun and convenience of a styling appointment at a local store, combined with the fact that many women in the BlogHer community were already acquainted with the WOM agency doing the outreach was enough. It was easy to say yes because we didn’t have to do much.

The genius of the program was its generosity. Instead of the token gift card I’m sure many (including me) expected, every speaker got a $400 clothing allowance. That’s two or three outfits, depending on what you picked.

There was no requirement to wear the clothes at the BlogHer conference, although it was clear that the brand hoped the participants would. In the document circulated to the stores (yes, I peeked — it was attached to the rack of clothes I was picking from), we were described as influential women, and the reason for the promotion our participation as speakers at the conference where our clothes would be seen by hundreds of other women.

As for results, many speakers tweeted and blogged about their experience and most wore their new Gap clothes during the conference. Quite simply, we were grateful for the generosity and it was fun sharing the experience with friends and fellow speakers. And that’s where the company gets its value in the exchange.

Smart marketing all around. Had the gift been less generous, I’m certain the activity at and around BlogHer would have been far more muted. Had the outreach numbers been smaller — only a select few top blogs versus all the speakers, regardless of size of blog or niche — the impact would have been far less. Had the outreach been focused on the top mom or style blogs that normally get such offers, it would have been just another influencer relations program. Instead, by reaching out to the small group of speakers, the Gap recognized the women for their achievements. That’s special.

No influencer relations program escapes without a few criticisms, and the Gap Magic promotion is no exception. I think there would have been less criticism if folks were more aware that BlogHer strives to have 80% new speakers every year. The speaker roster doesn’t equate to an A-list of any kind, unless smart accomplished women willing to share their knowledge and experiences with each other has become one.

If that’s the case, I call that an Amen-List, not an A-list. This year, I think there were more small, niche bloggers than ever before speaking on topics like loving your small blog and work-life balance. For some, it was their first time ever speaking at an industry conference.

The Gap Magic program was not an official BlogHer sponsor program. Had it been, perhaps there would have been more emphasis on the merit basis for the selection of participants. Attention clothing brands: something to think about for next year.

As for ROI, it’s too soon to tell, but the program must have been pretty inexpensive, given the total costs of retail marketing. According to agency Brand About Town, about 100 women participated. That’s $40,000 in clothes at retail price. Even if you add in a generous amount for overhead and agency costs beyond the wholesale cost of the clothes, it’s still far less expensive than an ad in a fashion magazine.

On principle, with BlogHer, I tend to prefer the programs of official conference sponsors because the sponsor fees offset registration costs for the attendees. In my next post, I’ll talk about the sightseeing trip to Ellis Island that sponsor Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project did the day before the conference started. Preview: it rocked!

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Marketing Lessons from BlogHer, Part One

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IMG_9067
Image by sgetgood via Flickr

I will have more personal commentary about BlogHer — including how I see the community evolving —  on Snapshot Chronicles sometime over the weekend. Here on Marketing Roadmaps,  I am going to explore what brands can learn from BlogHer 2010.

In this post and the one that follows, I’ll share my perspective based on what I experienced: the good, the bad and the ugly.  Over the weekend,  I am privileged to have guest posts from Meagan Francis from The Happiest Mom and Elizabeth, the one only and original Busy Mom, with some advice for marketers on how to reach them effectively.

If you have thoughts for marketers/about marketing to bloggers that don’t quite fit your blog, I am more than happy to host you here. Email me at sgetgood (at) getgood (dot) com. My only request is that you provide specifics so that marketers who are interested in getting it right when engaging with customers in social media  can learn from your thoughts and experiences. The marketers who aren’t interested in doing it right don’t read this blog so don’t worry about them. If you’d rather write it on your blog, send me the link and I’ll include it in a round-up.

First, some general observations about the good. As I noted in my pre-BlogHer post, only official BlogHer events and sponsors had space at the Hilton. This worked like a charm on the most important level — people who weren’t attending the  special, invite only events from non-sponsors didn’t have them thrust in their face at every turn. And the official sponsors got their due.

The downside, of course, was that numerous off-site events pulled people away from the Hilton and the conference sessions far more than I would like. I don’t have a problem with extra events scheduled the day before or after the conference, or the evenings. That is typical for any conference, and shows that BlogHer has truly grown up to be a major player in the blogging world.

However, I do not think it’s smart to hold your off-site events  during the conference sessions.  Especially the keynote sessions. In particular, an offsite Scholastic brand event held Saturday morning at the same time as the four international scholarship recipients, some of whom were at personal risk for speaking, shared their stories with the BlogHer audience, did not go over well with many in the community.

This is the ugly, and here are some of the comments from Twitter  about it:

@lauriewrites (Laurie White) tweets:  @Cecilyk @sgetgood I’ll never touch a Scholastic product again, as a teacher or an auntie. Schedule stuff during conference, offsite? Nope.

@zchamu (Shannon McCarney): @sgetgood scholastic woulda scored far more points by sponsoring the int’l scholarship session than by holding a rival party, no question

Shannon also wrote a beautiful post about all that BlogHer 10 meant to her, and while there was far more good than ugly, there were some strong words about holding events that conflict with the conference schedule:

“I’ve come away from BlogHer 2010 with a lot.  I’ve come away angry as hell at a corporation for having such disrespect as to hold gatherings to shill their wares to bloggers while women in another building were literally risking their lives to tell those bloggers how their words were changing the world. “

Go read her post. Read the comments too. I’ll wait.

The lesson for marketers – check the schedule before you schedule your event.

There really wasn’t a lot of bad in terms of marketing this year. The new personal sponsorship guidelines meant you weren’t accosted by someone thrusting a sample in your face at every turn.

However, watching the Twitter stream and reading the post-BlogHer reports I can’t help thinking , it’s too much. There’s just so much going on across a 3-4 day span that I’m afraid it starts to become a blur.

I understand the opportunistic strategy of scheduling events when  your target market is already gathered,  so you don’t have to pay for travel. But how much information can humans really absorb? How much marketing budget was squandered last week throwing big events that are a blur the week (if not the day) after?

I think  a lot. An awful lot.

My advice is to think carefully about what you want to achieve at a conference like BlogHer. Start with the official sponsorship opportunities. If one of those fits your objectives, you are supporting the organization as well as your own objectives, and that’s a dual win.

Then think about what your audience really needs. Is it one more party that they have to squeeze in or is a free limo service to the airport on arrival and departure day more meaningful? Or perhaps a smaller sightseeing event that really gives people an opportunity to speak with each other? How can you broaden your reach — beyond who you already know —  to new influencers that you’ll want to know.

In my next post, I’ll cover two influencer relations campaigns that I think hit the mark: Gap’s #gapmagic outreach to BlogHer speakers and the trip to Ellis Island sponsored by Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project. Full disclosure: I participated in both, and have known the PR people for both Gap and Liberty Mutual for more than a year.

That’s why I opened the emails. But not why I think the programs worked.

Stay tuned. More tomorrow.

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