Next week, I’m planning a special holiday edition of Good Pitch/Bad Pitch. There will be awards, fun, frolic, merriment and possibly munchkins and flying monkeys. We’ll see…
But I need more good and bad holiday themed pitches. Especially good ones. If you got something kicking around in your inbox, I would be so grateful if you’d send it along.
PS — any holiday, not just the imminent ones!
Relevance.
It’s probably the most important element in blogger relations. Respect, which we revisited a few weeks ago, is important. Relationships, which we’ll talk about again in a future post, are certainly the grease to the wheels.
But your pitch won’t bear fruit unless it is relevant to the blogger. It may be a great offer or a wonderful program or a great product. But if it doesn’t match up to the blogger — her interests, her family, her location, it’s a bad pitch.
Let’s have some examples, shall we. These are all pitches sent to my friend Karen who:
She also has a dog and has attended more than one BlogHer conference. Her most recent project is the Craftastrophe blog. All of this is publicly available information.
Here are just a few of the pitches she has received since October.
Verbatim subject lines with company and product names redacted:
And here are are few that you have to see to believe.
I’m all for brevity but you really need to give a reason. One is enough!! (emphasis intentional)
This one just cracks me up. Everything the PR rep has to flog, except possibly the kitchen sink.
No subject. No salutation. Canadian citizen ineligible for contest. Fail.
Some of these were decent offers, for the right audience. Some are dumb, full stop. But none were relevant to the blogger who received them. That makes them bad pitches.
Take the time to research the blogs. You do stand a better chance of cutting through the clutter if you have made the effort to develop a relationship, but it’s okay if you haven’t had time to get to know the blogger personally if the pitch is relevant. Even better if you add value.
What’s value? To quote a previous post:
“A personal blogger writes about things he is interested in, generally from the perspective of how they impact him. He’s telling his story, and you need to give him a good reason to include your story in his. That means putting your product or service into his context, not talking at him from yours with a press release, list of features or carefully crafted message point.”
The post where that paragraph first appeared has some specific suggestions on how you can add value.
I know we can’t always do as much with a program as we’d like; sometimes the client or the boss just can’t be moved from the idea that the product is intrinsically wonderful.
But really, we ought to be able to do better than the examples I’ve brought you today.
Be relevant.
Or be one of my next examples.
The team behind the upcoming film Coraline (based on the novel by Neil Gaiman) does blogger relations right.
Read about it here: A little nail polish, a bit of Coraline and an email from Neil Gaiman and here: My funny Coraline.
Hat tip Sandy.
AdAge has a case study on the Motrin ad flap today (hat tip Queen of Spain) that characterizes Motrin’s decision to pull the babywearing ad as caving to “a vocal flash mob.”
It has lots and lots of great numbers to show that not that many people saw the ad. True enough, and I urge everyone to bookmark the article for the Twitter stats alone. Twitter isn’t mainstream, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it is. Useful? Promising? Trendy? Yes. But mainstream? Not yet. Maybe not ever.
However, from an advertising perspective, the Motrin team did the absolutely right and responsible thing. The ad offended, no matter how small the number. It pulled it. Last week, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Healthcare Kathy Widmer wrote on JNJ BTW, the company’s corp comm blog and motrin.com:
So…it’s been almost 4 days since I apologized here for our Motrin advertising. What an unbelievable 4 days it’s been. Believe me when I say we’ve been taking our own headache medicine here lately!
Btw – if you’re confused by this – we removed our Motrin ad campaign from the marketplace on Sunday because we realized through your feedback that we had missed the mark and insulted many moms. We didn’t mean to…but we did. We’ve been able to get most of the ads out of circulation, but those in magazines will, unfortunately, be out there for a while.
We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.
In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:
- When you make a mistake – own up to it, and say you’re sorry.
- Learn from that mistake.
That’s all… for now.
I wish more marketers would be as responsible and responsive to their customers as McNeil has been here.
Just because people subscribe to a feed, doesn’t mean they read it. So I’ve been conducting an experiment of sorts. Not particularly scientific and absolutely no baseline measure, so consider it more anecdotal than anything else.
As regular readers know, about a month ago, I moved Marketing Roadmaps to the WordPress platform from TypePad but I did not redirect my Feedburner feed. This was a deliberate choice, as I am convinced that feeds — especially feeds that have been active for four years as the original Roadmaps one was — accumulate waste circulation. This is people who have subscribed to the blog in multiple feed readers, probably serially, as they bounce from reader to reader. I wanted to stop carrying these dupes.
I’ll use myself as an example. When I started reading blogs, I used the Bloglines feedreader. When Google introduced its feedreader, I switched over to it, and then about a year or so ago, I switched to Newsgator. When I switched however I did not unsubscribe the abandoned readers from the feeds. So there are a significant number of feeds to which I am subscribed at least twice, possibly three times.
While I generally refrain from assuming that my behavior is reflective of the rest of the population, in this case, I think my pattern is pretty typical for the small 11% of the online population that uses feedreaders (Forrester data.)
How much waste is there in my old feed? A month into the cut-over, subscribers to the new Marketing Roadmaps feed are about 6% of the total number of subscribers to the old feed. Since this is totally unscientific research, we can’t make the correlation that only 6% have re-subscribed, but I will bet that it isn’t far from the truth.
What does that tell us? I make no claim that my results are indicative of anything other than my blog and its audience. However, my data hints that feedreader subscriber numbers are very inflated, especially for long running blogs, and may not be the best basis for evaluating a blog’s readership or creating ranking systems. If used at all, feed reader subscribers should not be weighted heavily.
Further substantiation. The number of visitors and unique visitors per month to the old TypePad site in August and September, the last two full months of its life as the active blog, and to the new site in its first full month are about the same. Traffic to the TypePad site is also falling off. While this is all extremely unscientific and has absolutely no statistical validity, it does support my belief that the readers who read my blog on the blog is a fairly stable number, and most have followed over to read at the new site.
How useful is my data? What can other people extrapolate? A lot or a little I suppose, depending on how honest you want to be about how many readers are actually, regularly reading your blogs. It’s up to you.
For myself, I have a great deal of confidence that I truly know how many regular readers Marketing Roadmaps has. Thanks for sticking with me. You know who you are 🙂
