Marketing Roadmaps

Blogger relations

Bloggers liable for statements about products? Maybe, says FTC.

by

According to several news reports, the Federal Trade Commission is currently reviewing its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials.

The expected revisions would hold companies responsible for the statements made by bloggers who received products or samples, and also make the bloggers themselves liable for their statements about the products.

Whoa Nelly! What happened to opinion? Freedom of speech?

As Linsey Krolik writes on Silicon Valley Moms Blog, will this have a chilling effect on bloggers’ ability to give honest reviews? Will it check the growing influence of bloggers on consumer opinion?

I am not a lawyer, but I have testified at the FTC and before a House sub-committee in a past life, so I have some inkling of how this all works 🙂

Here’s my take.

First and foremost, the expected revisions are just that — expected. Nevertheless, bloggers should still protect themselves NOW. Have  a good disclaimer, especially if you review products. Linsey covers that nicely in her post. You should also be very clear about contests and giveaways. David Wescott (It’s Not a Lecture) and I (Marketing Roadmaps) did a pair of posts about that a couple years ago.

Second, we need to stay on top of the discussion of the new guidelines. Bloggers are consumers, albeit with voices, and we must make sure that our opinions are heard. We are WHO the FTC is supposed to protect, and we should remind them of that fact.

Two key issues in FTC regulation of Word-Of-Mouth

I think there will be two key issues:

  • The extent to which the blogger is acting as an agent for the company. Is there compensation, especially beyond the value of the product reviewed? Is there direction on what or when to write?
  • Whether the content is identified as opinion or stated as fact.

The sponsored post companies (like Izea), blog networks that offer sponsored posts, and the client companies are potentially the most affected by the FTC moves. Possible changes to their business model give them sufficient incentive to weigh in on the arguments. I would expect them to move vigorously to limit both the company’s and the blogger’s liability. BUT, bloggers should be aware that in a commercial transaction, the company is first and foremost going to protect itself. Not you. Act accordingly.

Break it down

The most defensible position, clearly, is when you offer an opinion about a product that you purchased. That is the opinion of a customer, and not subject to advertising guidelines. It starts to blur when we factor in blogger outreach. Companies provide bloggers with product information, including products for review, which they generally don’t expect back. In this case, I expect the FTC will look at how much direction the company gives the blogger and the total value received by the blogger.

Our job is to remind the FTC, and the companies, that firms have been providing product and product samples to customers for years. As long as the blogger is free to share his or her opinion, no restrictions, it is just that,  consumer opinion. And last I looked, opinion was free speech.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (First Amendment to the Constitution)

Sponsored posts ?

Sponsored posts, on the other hand, are going to look an awful lot like advertising to the FTC. Its  job is to protect the consumer from potential abuses. I think they will consider:

  • Is the blogger being directly compensated?
  • If not direct, is there an indirect element as often seen with blog networks where the blogger gets the product, but the network gets the fee?
  • How much direction is given to the blogger about when and what to post?
  • Is the blogger stating an opinion or presenting a fact?

I’m going to dig some more into this issue. Any readers who have additional information on the FTC plans, please leave them in the comments or email me at sgetgood@getgood.com.

This is not the end of the world for blogger relations, social media outreach or viral marketing. It is however an important issue, and we shouldn’t ignore it, thinking someone else will handle it.

They will, and you might not like the outcome.

Spam, the law of averages & June Cleaver – more blogger relations

by

Even a spammer will get lucky and hit it right often enough to make it worthwhile. That’s why we all win so many lotteries and have so many obscure and recently deceased relations.

It’s also why we are able to fool ourselves that mass tactics work in public relations and blogger outreach. The law of averages (really the mathmetical law of large numbers) suggests that if we just contact enough people, someone will be interested.

We’ll get lucky.

Unfortunately, we then use that lucky hit to justify the future use of the tactic…

That’s exactly what happened last week with Log Cabin’s announcement that it was replacing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with sugar in its syrup line. The outreach was a fairly generic one-line email with an attached press release. Pretty unremarkable, and most bloggers who got it probably read and deleted the email pretty quickly.

But they got lucky.

Against all odds, the release caught Mom-101’s attention. Did they know she’d written about HFCS in January? Possibly, but it wasn’t mentioned in the pitch. Was the list targeted? Possibly, but other high-profile moms who had also written about HFCS didn’t get the pitch.

With this result — a great post in a top parent blog — the folks over at Log Cabin may not realize that they just got lucky. The release was relevant and Mom-101 was paying attention. As she noted in her post, she had just warned a group of marketers that HFCS was going to be the next big issue for the consumer product companies.

I don’t want to pick on Log Cabin. I think that removing HFCS from their products is a very good thing, although I have to admit a preference for actual maple syrup as opposed to maple tasting syrup. I just wish they had done a better job in positioning the issue for parents in their pitch, rather than relying on the bloggers to make the connection. To find the relevance.

A great hit obscures the core problem with mass, generic outreach. It doesn’t foster long-term relationships. It’s like the guy lookin’ for love at the local pick-up bar. Eventually someone will say yes.

He’ll get lucky.

Doesn’t mean a thing.

As I’ve said before, one person’s spam is another’s breakfast. But… it’s still spam.

—

Now I promised you some good pitches. I’ve got two for you today.

First a pitch for Netflix from Edelman Digital. This pitch works because:

  • it’s short and to the point. The blogger who forwarded it to me said she got it at first glance;
  • it refers to appropriate past content on the blog;
  • it links to the press release (versus including as an attachment).

Second, this St. Patrick’s Day pitch from Coinstar. I usually don’t like holiday pitches. They generally don’t work. This is the rare exception. Why?

  • Short. Short is always good;
  • Clever Twitter name (@chching);
  • Small contest with lots of winners. Often more effective than one BIG contest;
  • The Twitter account was active all day March 17th.

The only thing I would have done differently? The Twitter account has gone a bit silent, and I would have liked to see it continue to follow, and respond, to people that followed it on Saint Paddy’s Day. It now seems to be doing some sort of promo with the HARO Report, a good thing, but still, more engagement with the community would be good.

—

200px-b_barb02

A final word. This lady?

She doesn’t exist. She never did. She was a 50’s-sitcom writer’s vision of the ideal mom.

So, isn’t it time we retired her as the model of the modern mom? Please?

Blogger Relations: A Refresher Course

by

This past week has been an interesting one for students of public and blogger relations. We had the fallout from Robert Scoble’s latest temper tantrum about public relations. I do have an opinion, which you can find at the end of this post. Skip ahead if that’s all you are interested in.

This post is about blogger relations. And by that I mean the relationships companies form with regular bloggers. Their customers. Not journalists or celebrities.

This week, I noticed a marked increase in pitches, reflected by (unusually) my own inbox, items forwarded from friends and chatter on Twitter about (mostly) poor practice.

So, I thought it was a good time for a little refresher course in good blogger relations practice.

When I give my blogger relations workshops, I start with the following chart from Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report. While my issues with ranking systems in general and Technorati’s algorithms in particular are well documented here in Marketing Roadmaps, I thought the research about the bloggers in the 2008 report was quite valuable.

This particular chart answers the question, Why do you blog?

technorati11

In class, I read a few of the most cited reasons before I deliver the punchline.

Nowhere on this list do we find:

Help companies promote their products and services.

Bloggers don’t mind helping you promote your products. Many of them welcome the opportunity to get closer to the companies whose products they use and love. Some monetize their blogs through advertising and would love to have yours. But that’s not WHY they blog. They blog to share their passions. They write about the things they care about.

Sadly, quite a lot of companies and agencies still miss this critical point. Let’s turn to the inbox for some examples.

  • A bed manufacturer sent a pitch to parent bloggers essentially asking for free advertising for its contest on their blogs. Mechanically, this pitch is acceptable, if a bit dull; there were no mistakes in addressing in the multiple examples shared with me. But, why would a parent blogger write about this?
  • A pitch from a fitness expert that exploits the television show Dancing with the Stars. The agency is one whose pitches regularly appear here as bad pitches. Among other things, full of typos. More importantly, who cares?
  • Seen on Twitter: a discussion about a liquid soap product pitched as a Mother’s Day gift. Hey Mom, you stink.
  • Child Safety Mistakes. I’ll let the badmommy blogger tell you about this one.
  • From my own inbox, the exciting (sic) news: godaddyfollowed by a second email, same day, offering the photos. Hullo, have you ever read what I’ve said about Go Daddy on this blog? Apparently not.

And I have more in my “bad pitch” folder. So many more, it’s sad. That said, I also have a few good pitches from the past week. I’ll tell you about those tomorrow.

Coming attractions:

Next month,  I’ll have a  report on what AAA is doing in social media and a case study about the Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit blogger outreach.

Now to Scoble. I don’t have PR clients any more because I am focusing on blogger relations and social media engagement. If I were still actively practicing PR in the the tech space, I’m not sure if  I would even pitch Scoble at this point. A PR person has to evaluate all the potential outlets for client news. Unless Scoble is the top number one outlet for the news, why even bother? Like Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch, he’s really looking for the exclusive, even if he hasn’t articulated it as clearly as Arrington has.

If Scoble is your A-number-one media target, by all means jump through the hoops. But if not? Focus on more productive targets. Heck, talk to some of your customers instead.

That, I can help you with.

Blogger outreach, shared values, and cotton swabs?

by

There are two key elements to successful blogger relations: the execution and the pitch. A successful campaign needs BOTH to be good. Today we are going to talk about the pitch.

I’ve written before about the secret sauce for the perfect pitch and earlier this year, I introduced a model I’ve been working with to find what I call the shared values between companies and bloggers/customers.

value-mind-map1

The key to using this model is stepping away from the features and functionality of your product. Look for issues that both the company and the customer care about, and build your program around these mutual or shared values.  As the model shows, you  start with how the customer uses the product, but you don’t stop there. You’ve got to move onto the emotional. What do they care about when they use your product? What other things do they care about?

You then link these things to your product. Starting with features, but also including attributes — the intangibles you want people to associate with your products — and corporate values.

Now, while this is never an easy process, it is a bit easier with new and entertainment products. But how does it work with a product that’s been on the market for a while. Or one that is almost a commodity.

For example, cotton swabs.

Is it possible to develop a pitch related to cotton swabs that would resonate with bloggers? I say yes.

In fact, I’ve got two, both aimed at parent bloggers.

These examples use information from Unilever’s Q-tips brand, but I imagine the programs would work equally well for Johnson & Johnson’s Cotton Swabs brand. The first example skews toward families with younger children; the second is applicable to a broader age range.

qtips2

This screen shot identifies the key market USE segments for cotton swabs: family care, home care, and arts & crafts.

Putting aside beauty uses, let’s focus on two areas that relate specifically to families.

First, family care. Cotton swabs are permanently linked to ear care. The brands don’t even need to remind us of this. In fact, the main concern is to make sure we don’t poke the swab too far into our ear. Now, step into the shoes of a parent of a younger child. Say ages one to three or four years of age.

An issue that tends to be top of mind is ear infections. How to protect their toddlers. If their child is prone to ear infections, should they get the ear tubes or not?

To reach these bloggers – a very active parent blogging segment  – why not develop a website and program devoted to education and information about this critical parenting issue? This is valuable information that bloggers will want to share with their friends and readers. While not about the product specifically, it is in that shared value segment of ear care and family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

As I noted above, my second example skews a bit older, and relates directly to the use of cotton swabs in arts & crafts projects. Any parent of an elementary school age child knows what a big deal arts & crafts can be.  I often wonder whether they are evaluating the child or the parents, but that’s a topic for another day (and my other blog).

Parents love to see their children recognized. Kids love recognition. Hold a crafts contest for kids, promoted either exclusively or extensively through blogs, with both blogger outreach and online advertising. Obviously cotton swabs need to be involved, either as tools or materials, but the less rigid the criteria, the better. The prizes don’t have to be that big. In fact, offering more prizes to more children is preferable to a few BIG prizes. What makes it work isn’t the value of the prize. It’s that the child stands a really decent chance of being recognized.

The shared value space? Recognizing the achievement of children. Family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

Forget about your features. Look for the shared values with your customers. That’s where you’ll find a pitch that resonates for them and delivers results for your brand.

Blogger Relations: Connect with passions & values, not products

by

graphic2

My posts earlier this week about Pepperidge Farm’s Fishful Thinking initiative focused on the errors in execution of the blogger outreach. I’m done with analyzing these errors.

Pepperidge Farm has personally apologized in email to at least some of the affected bloggers, the marketing agency spoke to a number on the phone and via email, and at least one attended today’s symposium in White Plains as an observer. Let’s let things play out.

Nevertheless, there is one more important lesson for us, so bide with me a while.

One of the reasons the situation erupted was because the pitch was perceived as valuable by the mom bloggers. On its face, the Fishful Thinking initiative accomplishes one of the things I regularly preach in blogger relations; it connects with parents over a shared value – the desire to raise optimistic kids. Especially in this economy, when we are all faced with the necessity of telling our children they can’t have something that in better times we might have been able to give. Throw in the stipend, and it’s no wonder the response was so high.

But, by their own admission, they didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what sort of mom they were looking for when they started the outreach.

Here’s what I would have done differently. Yes, I know I am in the comfy chair of an armchair quarterback, but if you know me, you’ll recognize the general approach.

As I’ve noted above, I believe the Fishful Thinking program would be attractive to quite a few parents simply for its content — without the enticement of the trip to White Plains and the stipend.  Since the company is also planning on building a wider network of parents (1000 according to Mr. Youth CEO Matt Britton), my question is: why didn’t they start there?

With a broad outreach to parent bloggers about the program on its merits. Perhaps with an offer to send one of the expert’s books. Or offering a conference call with the expert on a specific topic.

The Fishful Thinking program might not be everyone’s cuppa, but it definitely connects with parents around passions and values, not simply Goldfish. That’s such a good start; it makes all the execution errors even more of a shame.

I am certain — dead certain — that potential candidates for the “faculty”, really good candidates (and that’s not to say that the 10 they’ve picked are not good) would have self-identified by taking the company up on its simple offer. The women would have written because the information offered intrinsic value to them, their blog, their readership.

That would have been a far better and more defensible pool of candidates for the influencer program. Execution would still be critical –it always is — but there wouldn’t be so many questions about the criteria.

That’s what I would have done. Start simple and progress to the complex. YMMV.

—

Stepping into the circle of shameless self promotion,  if you like the general approach and you’re planning a blogger outreach campaign, call or email me.  I’d love to help you develop a program that connects with the passions and values of your customers.