Marketing Roadmaps

Blogging

Blogger Relations Tip: Sleep Is for the Weak

by

Next week, I will be back with new installments of good pitch/bad pitch as well as the promised post about the "secret sauce" of blogger relations. In the interim, if you are interested in a crash course on parent blogging,  get your hands on Sleep Is for the Weak, an anthology of posts from some of the best known mommybloggers edited by Rita Arens (Surrender, Dorothy).

Sleep Is for the Weak is a perfect introduction to parent blogging and should be required reading for any marketer planning a program or campaign in this space. It doesn’t replace the research and reading that I recommend as part of the Preparation phase of blogger relations, but it’s a great place to start.

Do me a favor though. Please don’t stop there by simply sending your pitches to the writers in the book. I do not want to be the indirect cause of more spam in their inboxes. Thanks!

Tags: , ,

Batter up… Bad pitch is back

by

I hope everyone enjoyed the customer service series, and if in North America, had a great holiday week.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen at least one example of every poor blogger relations practice, so I thought I’d resume our discussion with a refresher on the mechanics of blogger outreach.That’s everything related to form and focus.

Later this month, we’ll get into making the secret sauce. Pitch content. How to develop a blog pitch that resonates with the intended audience like this one for Lucky Charms did for Mom-101.

1. Don’t spam. Try to determine if the blogger would be interested in your product or service. That still doesn’t mean he’ll respond, but it improves your chances from zero.

2. Follow up in reasonable timeframes. Not twice in the same day. And if the blogger doesn’t demonstrate any interest (or worse, makes fun of your pitch on her blog), don’t send a follow-up a week later. And another two weeks after that.  Just shows you aren’t reading the blogs you are pitching.

3.  Address the blogger by name. Not by her blog name, someone else’s name or as a database field, as in these two examples:

4. When a blogger responds to your pitch, even if it just to ask why you sent her the pitch, be courteous. Reply. And not just with a slapdash apology for the intrusion. Answer the question. If you don’t know why, why did you send the pitch in the first place?

5. Make sure the blogger could realistically attend the event to which you are inviting her. Don’t invite someone who lives in New York to an event in California unless you are planning to pay travel expenses, and please please don’t send a glowing update about an event to which the blogger was not invited. That’s just mean. Related: don’t barrage people with press releases about political campaigns that aren’t relevant. I may be a loyal Democrat and I might even be interested in a small tidbit about your race in Texas but neither of my blogs are political columns. I don’t want every damn release.

6. Include the relevant information. Nothing sillier than pitches with blanks or notes to <insert info here> If you offer samples, send them when promised, and don’t ask for them back. If your budget can’t afford samples, don’t offer them, or target even more narrowly so you can afford to give them to the bloggers that respond.

7. If you are offering products for contests, make it as easy as possible for the blogger and don’t offer stuff that has a limited audience. Gift certificates for a national restaurant chain, good. Gift certificates for a local restaurant, not so good for a blog with national (or international) reach, with certain exceptions. What’s an exception? A gift certificate awarded prior to a convention that the people entering the contest are attending.

8. Don’t include paragraph upon paragraph of product info. Keep it brief, and respond promptly to questions. Don’t answer a question with a canned response unless it is actually the answer to the question. Hint: it probably isn’t.

9. If the language your pitch is written in is NOT your native language, please have a native speaker read it before you send it. Really. This point enough I cannot be stressing. Okay, I made that up, but the following two screen captures are selections from a very long pitch for something called a balance bike, a toy that teaches young children how to balance before they face the problem of wheels. It sounds like an interesting product for young children but the pitch is nearly incomprehensible.

 Let’s just say, hoping I am that this person a native speaker of English not is.

10. Review the email to make sure it is all in the same typeface, size and color. Nothing says crappy pitch like a document that is clearly "cut and paste" from other docs. Especially since they usually also have poor grammar, missing information and database errors.

11. Press releases are links, not attachments. My personal pet peeve is press releases sent in the body of the email with no cover note. Extra demerits if it is included as an attachment as well.

—

Some notes on my good pitch/bad pitch policies:

I intend to continue using screen grabs and blocking out product, company and agency names from the bad pitches.

If you are considering a PR agency, and would like to know if they have been included here as a bad pitch, call or email me. I will answer your yes/no question: Has agency X been included in a bad pitch post?  However, I will not provide a list of agencies that have been included in bad pitch. Don’t ask.

I do identify companies, products and PR reps on the good pitches. It is important to give credit where credit is due.

If you forward me a pitch you received, good or bad, I will not identify you by name without your permission.

Tags: ,

Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 5)

by

Part 5: Comments. They’re what keep you up at night.

Without a doubt, the issue at the forefront of most customer care professionals is how to respond to comments, whether on your own company’s blog or elsewhere. You are really worried about the negative ones. This is not only a real concern but also a realistic one.

Some folks out there are crazy and there’s nothing to be gained by engaging with them. The good news is, the Internet is a fairly self-correcting environment. If someone is talking trash about your products without cause, the community tends to self-police.

Some, hopefully many, comments will be positive. More importantly, the conversation will happen with or without you. The only thing I can guarantee is that if you make no effort, nothing will change. But if you do, your customers will notice.

When people say positive things online about your company and products, thank them. When they criticize or have a problem, respond. Solve the problem if you can. If you can’t, develop the mechanisms in your firm so you can escalate the issue. If there is no solution, explain, clearly and honestly. The customer may not be happy, but the rational ones will appreciate the response.

Depending on the situation this conversation could happen publicly on a blog or microblog like Twitter or privately in email. Choose the response that fits the situation and your company culture. What matters is that your customer spoke online and you heard him.

—

Update: Netflix recently demonstrated that it is paying attention to its customers when it rescinded a decision to remove a popular feature after customers protested online. Hat tip to Sandra. 

Next up: Part 6, Should you build a community?

Tags: , ,

Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 4)

by

Part 4: What should customer service and consumer affairs do?

You’ve decided that some involvement in social media makes sense. But what should you do? I recommend a phased approach that I call the Four Ps of Online Engagement:

  • Prepare
  • Participate
  • Pitch or Publish

Let’s take them in order. First, you need to prepare by listening to the online conversation. Monitor the blogosphere for mentions of your company name. Find out who is writing about your products and industry. It’s a virtual, informal focus group that lets you take the pulse of your key constituents. You can do this monitoring on your own, using Google, the Technorati blog search engine and a myriad of free tools that do everything from track Twitter  to measure the impact of a blogger’s posts.

 

Or you can get some help. There are many third party options available, at various price points, from the custom and often costly monitoring programs developed by companies like Cymfony to do-it-yourself dashboards that assemble the information for analysis such as those offered by KD Paine & Partners and Radian6.

If you do proceed with a social media effort, these same tools can also help with the measurement of results, but don’t confuse the two steps. Initially, monitoring is done to assess the commentary about your company and products so you solve the right problems. Ongoing measurement is about results. Have you achieved whatever objectives you set for your social media effort?

Once you know what’s being said about your company online, and by whom, you can start thinking about how to participate in the conversation. This can be anything from simply replying privately, to posting public responses when and where appropriate, to starting a blog, as Dell did, to make it easier for your customers to communicate with you. All of these are perfectly acceptable responses.

The most important thing to remember about engaging publicly is that you have to be able to take action. Sympathy and empathy are a good start, but they are not enough.

Also, keep in mind that not all commentary is negative. When you start listening to what your customers are saying online, you might find evangelists who love your company and products, and are already sharing the love with the people who read their blogs or listen to their podcasts. These folks are a great channel for sharing information with other customers, and nothing would please them more than a little recognition and communication from you.

The final phase of online engagement is actively telling the company’s story, versus simply responding to the ongoing conversation. This is what I call pitch or publish. The company may choose to publish a blog, launch a community or start a proactive program of outreach to bloggers. For most companies, these efforts will be part of the marketing or corporate communications functions, but if your firm is considering one or more of these strategies, I highly recommend that customer care professionals get involved or at least stay informed. Guaranteed, whatever the company does will impact customer satisfaction, one way or the other.

—

Next post, Part 5: Comments. They’re what keep you up at night.

Tags: , , , ,

Blogging, social media & customer service (Part 3)

by

Part 3: Impact of Social Media on Customer Care

Customers are engaging with social media. So are many companies. For example, nearly 12 percent of the US Fortune 500 companies have a blog of some kind. The benefits that accrue for both individuals and companies include deeper relationships with peers and customers, increased awareness of the brand, whether personal, professional or corporate, broader and deeper professional networks, improved search engine rankings and increased traffic to the website.

But what about the specific impact on customer care? How has the social media explosion changed the playing field for customer service and consumer affairs professionals?

As noted earlier, postings on customer care experiences influence purchase decisions. In the SNCR study, 74% reported that they choose companies and brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.

.

Source: Society for New Communications Research, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

The SNCR study also reveals an opportunity. While consumers feel that one person can influence many about a bad customer care experience, only 30% of the respondents thought that businesses take customer opinions seriously. And that’s the opportunity – to start listening and acting on what customers may be saying online.

Source: Society for New Communications Research, Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media

This is a scary idea for many — indeed most – companies, mostly because we tend to focus on the negative. And there is negative, no question. There aren’t many people in business who don’t know the story of Dell Hell, and how one prominent blogger’s negative postings about Dell customer service exploded into a serious PR problem for the computer maker in 2005.

However, it’s not all bad. Customers leave unsolicited positive comments about the products and services they love every day on blogs, review sites and discussion forums. And for the most part, companies are just as silent.

But not Dell. The company launched its Direct2Dell blog in July 2006 to engage directly and publicly with customers about problems. Though the blog had a rocky start, Dell succeeded in showing even its most severe critics that it was both paying attention and acting on customer feedback. The company monitors consumer sentiment in the blogosphere and has seen its negative rating decline from 49 percent negative in August 2006 to 21 percent negative in January 2008 (Source: Presentation at New Comm Forum 08 by Richard Binhammer, Dell)

There are two very important lessons from the Dell experience. First, top management support is absolutely essential. Customer feedback must be actionable. Dell had that support from Michael Dell. Second, your best customer is often the formerly unhappy customer. Jeff Jarvis, the blogger who launched Dell Hell in 2005, wrote a positive piece about the company’s efforts for BusinessWeek in October 2007 and commented on his own blog Buzz Machine:

“After giving Dell hell two years ago, I may well be accused of throwing them a wet kiss now. It’s a positive piece. But it’s hard not to praise them when they ended up doing everything I was pushing in my open letter to Michael Dell. I’m not saying that I caused that, just that we ended up agreeing and they ended up seeing the value in listening to and ceding control to customers. They reached out to bloggers; they blogged; they found ways to listen to and follow the advice of their customers. They joined the conversation. That’s all we asked.” (October 18, 2007)

—

In part 4, we’ll discuss what customer service should do about and with social media.

Tags: , ,