Blogging

Blogging & social media: What customer service professionals should know, and do, about it (Part 1)

June 26, 2008 by Susan Getgood

This article is based on a workshop I delivered at the SOCAP International Symposium in April.

Part 1- Defining Social Media: Blogs & Microblogs

Customer service. It’s the new marketing.

Huh? Anyone who has been in business for more than five minutes knows that customer service has always been part of marketing. The scale of the modern enterprise and the realities of distribution may have separated them functionally, but practically, a customer’s experience with our product is just as, if not more, important than any ad, promotion or package.

Ah, but it’s different now. Customer satisfaction is more important than ever. Research conducted by global think tank Society for New Communications Research in Spring 2008 reported that 72 percent of respondents researched products and services online, and 84 percent considered the customer care reputation of the company when making a purchase decision.

Where are consumers finding this information? Not on your corporate website. Increasingly, they are turning to social media like blogs to both share their opinions and find out what others think. In the SNCR study, search engines, online rating systems, discussion forums and blogs were all considered more valuable sources of information than the company website.

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

Social media is a collective term used to refer to a variety of online tools including blogs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online consumer forums. This article will give you a brief overview of the ones most important for customer service and satisfaction. The key thing about all of them is that they give consumers a way to communicate with each other, fast. Faster than sometimes the company can respond. As customer service and consumer affairs professionals, you need to understand which ones your customers are using, and develop strategies to use those same tools to improve your service and satisfaction.

We’re going to focus on the tools most relevant to customer service: blogs, microblogs and social networks.

Technically, blogs are simply websites developed using a lightweight content management system (CMS). They use HTML, just like your company website, but the CMS tools are designed to be simple to use for people without technical knowledge. Well known CMS include Typepad, Blogger, Movable Type and Word Press.

The things that most clearly identify a site as a blog are:

Content, or posts, presented in an article-like form, in reverse chronological order.
Ability for readers to leave public comments
Ability to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed or by email

In practice, however, blogs are much more than that. Unlike your company website, which is probably a fairly static presentation of company capabilities not that different from a brochure, blogs are a conversation. Bloggers write about and link to other bloggers’ ideas. They create space on their blog for readers to comment, and they reply back. This dynamic is why news can spread so very fast from blog to blog.

Blogs typically have a point of view and they are not overtly commercial or promotional, even if they are a company or product blog. It’s all about engaging in a conversation in an authentic, honest way.

The easiest way to understand microblogs – services like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce – is to think of them as group instant messaging. It’s real-time one-to-many; unlike instant messaging, when you post a public message, everyone in your network can see and respond to it. The most popular service is Twitter, and companies like JetBlue, Comcast, Dell and online shoe store Zappos are already using it to communicate with customers.

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In part two, we’ll look at social networks and communities.

Tags: customer service, customer satisfaction, blogs

My Social Media and Marketing Mathom Room

June 19, 2008 by Susan Getgood

In the universe of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and LOTR: “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort." (Tolkien, cited on World Wide Words)

Going forward, when I have a small collection of various bits that don’t quite merit a full post of their own, but which I am not quite willing to throw away, I will be posting them to my social media and marketing mathom room.

Associated Press takes on the fair use standard – The blogosphere was abuzz earlier this week with the news of takedown notices sent by AP to parody web site The Drudge Retort citing copyright infringement. While it seemed to back down (and yet not) from the hard line stance, the AP party line seems to be that verbatim quotations from AP stories on blogs is not fair use, whereas paraphrasing and linking is. This is a complex issue, and won’t be resolved in the court of blogger opinion. It will take the inevitable lawsuit. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about fair use and implications for bloggers, check out EFF’s legal guide for bloggers (hat tip Kami Huyse for the reminder).

In my opinion, AP is paying attention to the wrong problem. Instead of worrying about the potential lost licensing revenue from bloggers using AP content under fair use, it should be thinking about how to reinvent itself in a new media landscape. In the simplest terms, AP is a news aggregator. It has a lot more competition now than it did a few years ago, and establishing a perimeter defense just doesn’t seem like the smart move.

Some will advance the quality argument — a professional organization like AP adds value to the story that cannot be duplicated by Internet sources or citizen journalists. Buffalo chips. Sure, AP has some stellar reporters who write great stories. But the agency is less and less needed to serve this intermediary role when the media, whether social or mainstream, can more easily go to the source.

Which is why I agree with Michael Arrington, Jeff Jarvis and others who suggest bloggers stop using AP stories as source material. Go to the original source. If you must use the AP information, and really, you shouldn’t need to, paraphrase and link, don’t quote. Unless you want to be the test case in a lawsuit, this is the safer course. And perhaps AP will realize that it should have been more careful in what it wished for.

Link exchange requests: PR’s Amateur Hour – Last week, I advised to never ever ask for a link exchange from a blogger. If you didn’t believe me then, believe my friend and mom blogger Julie Marsh. She writes this week that link exchange requests are worse than PR spam.

Ranking systems– As regular readers know, I think ranking systems are inherently flawed in that they are created by human beings with biases. As long as we know and acknowledge the limitations, they are not that harmful. If we forget that these structures were created by people with a point of view and are generally anything BUT objective, we end up attaching far more importance to them than they deserve. Robert French has a nice analysis of the Ad Age Power 150 that touches on some of these points.

That’s it for this edition of my mathom room.

Tags: link requests, ranking systems, fair use, AP

From the category Clueless: Pitches that make you go Hunh?

June 14, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Some blog pitches are so bad you wonder, really wonder, about the person who pressed <send> Others are just a bit off. A rare few are excellent – you can’t wait to write or participate in the program. Later in this series, I’ll talk a bit about the secret sauce that makes some pitches really stand out.

Today though, I am going to share a few that just make you go Hunh?

First, this pitch from a PR agency that appears to have forgotten… the pitch.

Clearly, it is meant to be a soft-sell teaser to get the mom blogger to opt-in to learning more cleaning tips. But, leaving out the information about WHO the pitch is for doesn’t make a blogger want to know more. It just makes her laugh. Typos and the poor salutation don’t improve the situation.The email also wasn’t signed; after the "Thanks" there was some space and the email footer.

Finally, as we’ve discussed here many times, most mom bloggers don’t write about cleaning tips. Here’s my favorite cleaning tip: set aside the money to hire a cleaning service or marry someone obsessed with cleanliness and willing to do the work. Camouflauging your cleaning product pitch as a fun activity for kids won’t change that. Grade: Fail.

Next, we have a pitch for a "Life changing contest on Facebook." Yawn.

When I dragged this out of my spam folder Thursday morning, my first reaction to this teaser campaign was that it was mostly boring, bad grammar and lame blogger exclusive notwithstanding. I did however note that it was from a firm that has something of a reputation in blogger circles for — let’s be polite and call it "excessive emailing." I wondered what the follow-up might be.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Notice the similar language to a pitch included in a previous bad pitch post. I won’t leave you in suspense; yes, it is the same agency, and no, I won’t name it. Here’s the thing — one day doesn’t even give the blogger a chance to read her email, let alone decide whether she has any questions. This isn’t following up; it is stalking.

The follow-up email also wasn’t from the same person who sent the initial email. Of course, both emails were sent by a bulk email program that must have had a glitch and attached the wrong sender name to the follow-up. Grade: Fail.

Lessons learned:

Teasers and exclusives. They have to be good, really good. Connected tightly to something the blogger cares about and will write about. Otherwise, you’re just looking for free advertising. Which you won’t get.
Follow-up. No sooner than a couple days after you send the pitch. And make it a follow-up: short and sweet. Don’t resend the whole pitch as they did in the example above. If the blogger didn’t get it for some reason, and it sounds intriguing, he’ll ask for more info.
If you use mail-merge, make sure your technology works properly.
Exclamation points do not make otherwise uninteresting copy interesting. Use them sparingly if at all.
Don’t try to fool the blogger; she knows there’s a client and a product. Stealth pitches just set off alarm bells about your agency.

Tags: blogger relations, bad pitch

Fixing blog pitches that just miss

June 13, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Almost. As the saying goes, almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear war. If your blog pitch is *almost* good enough, it’s not good enough. So what does almost look like in blogger relations?

Here are some examples, direct from my inbox.

Here’s what’s wrong, in order of appearance, not importance:

Sent from a gmail address versus a company, by one person on behalf of the signatory. Who do I contact with questions? How? We are pretty conditioned to reply to an email with our question. Who gets the question?
"Hey" is not an acceptable form of address, as far as I am concerned, for people you don’t know. If the sender had been reading my blog, she would have known that I wrote about this VERY recently. She’d also know that I am writing this series about good and bad pitches, and perhaps taken a bit more care with this one.
The worst problem with this pitch is that it doesn’t tell me why *I* should care. I’ve been included in a wide net, a general outreach to marketing and advertising bloggers; the assumption is that we’ll figure out why we are interested in this widget.

Why didn’t this get consigned to the round file? Why do I consider it a near miss versus a total fail? A few reasons. First, it is short, simple and clear about intent. That does get points with me. It doesn’t give me enough information to know whether I am interested, but at least it isn’t full of BS and fluff. More importantly, though, I recognized the name of the agency as one led by a fellow social media consultant who I know personally and respect. Relationship matters. I’m willing to give this pitch a little consideration because I know someone associated with it. [BTW I provided this feedback directly to my aquaintance, and he knows it will be on the blog.]

How would I fix this pitch? First, the simple mechanical things. Send it from a business account and include the reply-to email in the text. "Hi" or "Hello" instead of "Hey." As far as content, it should be more tailored to the recipients. I like to do each email by hand so I can include some personal details, but if you don’t want to go that far, you still can tailor the pitch more closely to segments in your target audience. In this case, I would have done two simple things.

First, cross reference the pitch list against the principals and employees in the agency/company/on the PR team. Find out who are in the same social networks, and reference them in the pitch. Don’t hope that the recipient will make the connection, as I did. Make it for them: Joe Smith in our firm thought you might be interested in this because…This works in any industry where you can reference someone known and respected by the recipient as the source. Just be sure your source is in the loop 🙂

Second, you have to fill in the "because" with something a bit more substantial than "you have a blog in a certain content area." This should be as personal as possible, but you *can* group bloggers with like interests and send them all similar emails. As long as the pitch is relevant. In this case, it would have been relatively easy; though I do not often write about products on this blog, I have mentioned the social media endeavors of the client company in the past. Tell me: "we thought you might be interested because you have written about company x’s social media projects in the past." I’ve masked it, but this is a big company that many social media marketing bloggers have written about.

With the simple additions of the reference name and a connection to what a blogger has actually written, not simply what kind of blog it is, this pitch could be a hit instead of a near miss.

One fiinal comment: the little PS about transparency does seem like overkill, at least as far as this pitch is concerned. There really isn’t a lot of substance to the pitch; no one is offering free product or exclusive access or anything that might be assumed to impact objective opinion. I’m also a little offended by the "please feel free" language. You betcha. If I were going to write about this product for real, I’d have no problem identifying the players. No need to offer dispensation 🙂

Here’s another one that misses because it is a generic pitch aimed at marketing bloggers. It has a bit more fluff than the previous example and makes the error of asking the blogger to write, but the main problem is that it doesn’t connect with the blogger’s interests; it just delivers the pitch.

I emailed the rep back and asked what led her to send the pitch to me. My exact words: Just wondering, what led you to send this pitch to me? Didn’t say whether I was interested or not. Here’s the answer:

That would be my confirmation that I’m on some list of marketing bloggers given to this junior staffer and she has NO IDEA why I might actually be interested. Because, again, there is a better answer. I have covered viral marketing programs pretty extensively in the past and moderated a panel about viral marketing at New Comm Forum 2007. All I was looking for was for this agency to connect what I write about to their pitch. They didn’t.

This program might be a good one, might be incredibly feeble. I have no idea, and no one has given me a good reason for rushing to find out. That’s a near miss, and we ain’t playing horseshoes.

All the PR person had to do was make a connection to the marketing topics I’d covered in the past. In both cases, it wasn’t that hard and there was no need to individualize; more than a few of my peers could have been in the same general buckets, allowing the firms to use mail merge software if they wished.

The common reply to this criticism is that the agencies don’t have the time to make this effort. Instead, they rely on the law of percentages and hope that something will hit. That works sometimes – generally when the product is just so awesome it makes up for the crappy pitch — but it doesn’t work all the time. Or even most of the time.

Make the effort.

Tags: blogger relations