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Playboy gets a Second Life and Delta Tweets

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About 2 months ago I posted about how I had been having some difficulty putting my head around whether or how virtual worlds like Second Life would develop commercial value, but then I noticed two things.

First, my  7-year old son’s complete engagement in the virtual world of Nicktropolis. In other words, digital natives aren’t going to have nearly the trouble navigating and using the new worlds as the digital immigrants do.

And second, the porn industry was in Second Life. On every street corner, you might say. The porn industry is really good at spotting new distribution opportunities, so I saw this as a sign that real business models might eventually emerge in virtual worlds.  🙂  In the comments to the original post, Adam Zand mentioned that he hadn’t seen any of the big porn players in Second Life.

Well, not anymore. Playboy has announced that it is opening up shop in Second Life (AdRants via Spin Thicket).

Guaranteed: Playboy will figure out how to make real dollars from Second Life. Folks who are interested in the potential value of virtual worlds as marketing spaces should pay attention to what they do. We may lag by a number of years in terms of our audiences being in Second Life and other worlds, but by the time my son is a potential (legal) visitor to Playboy’s virtual mansion, I’m pretty certain just about everybody will be. Start paying attention now.

And in other social media news, Delta is apparently twittering. And with a human, not robotic corporate-speak, voice. Joe Jaffe has a great recap of the conversation so far. He closes his post with a series of questions, the most important of which is:

Is this (or should this be considered as) the voice of "the brand"? Does it speak as an "official agent" of the company? And if not, does it matter?

If not, does it matter? That’s the most interesting bit of all. I don’t think it matters at all.

Marketers the world over may wish that the brand equaled the construct we create with official communications, but we do know that isn’t the case.

A brand is the sum of our experiences with a product, with a company. The official communications, like advertising, product manuals, packaging and customer service,  and the quasi- or unofficial ones, like interactions with company employees, on and off the clock. If you personally know or have a positive exchange with someone, you are going to add that interaction into your measurement of that brand. The same is true if you have a bad experience. Even if the negative interaction is not in the work context. It is one of the reasons that people who wear recognizable work uniforms are expected to adhere to  codes of conduct while in uniform, even when not on duty.

So it doesn’t matter whether "deltaairlines" on Twitter is official or not. What matters is that the persona is engaging with other Twits in a meaningful, positive way. More than likely, those folks will add these good twitting experiences into their calculation of the Delta brand. The product delivery — air travel — still has to live up to the promise, but if it does, this tweeting might accelerate a shift in overall brand perceptions among a key audience for the airline (Twits tend to be travelers).

This is actually a useful way for companies to use Twitter. Beyond seeing who is around for lunch or tapping into the collective expertise on an issue.

Twitter is a more informal channel of communication. If we accept that it doesn’t have to be an "official spokesperson" speaking from on high (in fact, it is much better if it isn’t), then companies can use this conversation to have that quasi-official interaction with their customers. Find out what they care about. Make them feel good about the company. Put a more human "face" on the company.

But it only works this way if we are willing to let it be an informal conversation. You can’t switch back and forth from informal voice to official statement. It would be too confusing. 

Personally, I’d prefer that companies not use Twitter and other short form spaces for official announcements. Let Twitter et al be informal, public backchannels where we can chat with brand ambassadors without expectation. Let the long form spaces like blogs and Web sites and news releases do the heavy lifting on official statements.

Then we can be pleased surprised and flattered when our informal conversation changes or improves something in a product or company we love.

Wow. If this works, Twitter might be useful after all.

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Blogger Relations Step by Step

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The goal of blogger relations is to build long lasting relationships, not just get a few hits for one program.  Even when you have a great story to tell, doing blogger relations right is a careful, time-consuming process.

It starts with reading the blogs. Regularly. There is no substitute.

Directories?  I don’t use them for blog research. I prefer to do the digging myself.  It is okay to start with a list from another source, but I think you miss out if you don’t do original research. Follow some links. Inhale a few blogrolls. Make some decisions about the bloggers that you want to reach based on what you’ve read, not on how they are categorized on some list.

You should develop a pretty tight “definition” of the blogger you are trying to reach. A good story will only be a good story for a limited number of bloggers. When you try to tell it to someone who isn’t that interested, it becomes a bad story. It’s not about what you say. It’s about how they receive and perceive it.

Before each project, I always take the time to update my list:

  • look for new blogs and bloggers that might be interested;
  • update my email addresses;
  • make sure that a blogger isn’t facing anything (crisis, poor health, death in the family etc.) that would make outreach inappropriate.

When you are contacting a reporter with some bit of news, you generally do not have a window into her personal life. Not true with people who are writing about their lives. You do have a way of knowing. The blog. There is no excuse for not checking. Is it time-consuming? Sure, but if you don’t do it, you aren’t doing blogger relations. You are emailing spam.

Even good news may mean that it’s not the right time to contact someone.

This holds true for business bloggers too. Even if the focus of the blog is a business topic, not the person’s life, major events tend to get noted. For example, business blogger Debbie Weil’s daughter is getting married this weekend (congratulations!) Probably not the best time to reach out to Debbie. She’s too busy. 

Now, I know we all read lots of feeds, and we can’t read everything by everybody every day. And still get our work done. I very regularly mark ALL READ when I get way behind. But, even if you can’t do tight monitoring all the time, you must do it for a period before your outreach. It is well worth the time; if you aren’t willing to put the time in, don’t do it at all.

How many bloggers? In a recent project which had pretty broad appeal, I built an outreach list of about 40 bloggers. Some of you are probably thinking, why so few? In fact, this is a pretty large list for a blogger outreach. Typically, I recommend about 20 well targeted blogs. If you have more than that for your "thing," whatever it may be, you may not be targeting tightly enough. Not all mom bloggers write about the same things. Not all food bloggers have the same interests. And so on.

As my friend Elise Bauer says, don’t send a cake mix to a scratch baker.

There’s also a practical reason for keeping the list small.  Every email is done individually. Sure, I build a doc with the basic information, but every email is addressed to the blogger by name unless the blog is anonymous.

This is important, marketing and PR bloggers, so pay attention: NO MASS EMAILING. You’ve done all this work researching and reading. You comment on the blogs when you have something appropriate to say.  Don’t screw it up by using a mass email program. I do each and every email by hand, adding personal information and referring to recent or regular topics on the blog. For every blogger relations program I do.

Finally, it is critical that your story actually be interesting to the blogger. No one wants to get regurgitated press releases. Just about everybody likes contests. Especially when they have great prizes. But they also like information about things they are interested in. They like being asked to evaluate products. They like being asked to participate. Be creative. If you don’t know what they’d like, ask them!!!

The first few campaigns in any given space are the tough ones. But if you do it right, you’ll build authentic relationships with a core group of influencers that will pay off, for you and for them, over the long run.

Tags: blogger relations

Thinking Bloggers

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Kent Newsome tagged me in the Thinking Blogger Awards meme.

First off, the only reason Kent himself isn’t on my list is that I suspect some sort of double jeopardy rule applies to internet memes.  In other words, ye may not tag the one that tagged ye.

That said, here are five bloggers that make me think:

Robert French, PR Professor at Auburn University. He writes infOpinions for his students, and has a number of other blogs, including Marcom Blog, written by practitioners for the students. Robert understands that you actually have to prove your point. Saying it three times, and louder each time, doesn’t cut it. You need proof. One of my favorite posts this year: Blogs, Press Releases and Farmers in Appalachian Valleys.

Elisa Camahort, one of the co-founders of BlogHer. Read Elisa for some of the best, well-rounded thinking on gender issues in the blogosphere.

Mary Schmidt gets customer service issues like no other marketer I read. Currently, I have 15 of her posts saved in Bloglines because I want to do something with them. She’s also a fellow SciFi fan with whom I can dish Battlestar Galactica spoilers.

For some international flavor, PR blogger Tom Murphy. Tom was one of the first PR bloggers, and his no-nonsense approach to the practice of the profession is refreshing. Perhaps because he’s all the way over there in Ireland, he’s not as deafened by the echo chamber (echo chamber).

And since my life isn’t just about my professional persona, my final blogger is Mom-101.  Liz is frank, honest and smart. Her writing is exquisite and her ability to balance blogging about her personal life on Mom-101 with her professional life has inspired me to start a new blog (coming soon) in which I am going to explore digital photography with my 7 year old son.

The participation rules are simple:

  • If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
  • Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
  • Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

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Perspective: Social Media Matters

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Twitter. Jaiku. MySpace. Facebook. StumbleUpon.  Ning. LinkedIn. Rojo. Newsvine. Netvibes. Bloglines. Flickr. Second Life. YouTube. Vox. LiveJournal. Memeorandum. Digg. Confabb. del.icio.us

Blogs. Feeds. RSS. Podcast. Videocast. Lifecasting. On-line communities. Wikis.Wikipedia.

And the list goes on. Every day, there’s something new to capture the imagination of the easily distracted 21st century netizen. And the horde at the bleeding edge flitters — and twitters — off to the next new thing that is going to revolutionize… well, something.

This blog is about marketing and communications. I tend to look at new technologies, techniques and tools through the filter of how or whether they will be useful in a marketing program. Since the utility of some (many?) of these new tools  is still unclear/undiscovered, my posts about them might lead one to believe that I think social media doesn’t matter.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Social media matters, and not just because some social media tools offer companies better, more authentic ways of communicating with their customers. Or because the tools are neat and geeky cool. Both true.

And certainly not, as some would have us think, because "everybody is reading blogs, so blogs are now the best, most valid form of business communication." The reality is, while the "rest of the world" is catching on and up, right now, still only 22% of adults read blogs at least monthly (Forrester report on Social Technographics). Most people still don’t get RSS. 

And as the saying goes, "Second Life? I’m still trying to figure out the first one!"

Bottom line: some social media "stuff" is already proving valuable to companies and their customers. The jury is still out on others. And there will certainly be more to come. .

But, even if our vision is still a bit murky, social media matters.

It’s okay if some things don’t have business value. As Kent Newsome points out, we shouldn’t confuse social networking with business networking.  Sometimes, things are just fun and that’s quite alright. 

Social media matters because it reflects a fundamental shift in society. A shift in how we converse, relate, even fight. In how we make and keep our friends, and maybe enemies. Changes in how we learn, in how teachers will teach. Changes in where we meet these friends. And in who they are.

Sure, not everyone is going to start wearing a head-camera 24/7. Thank goodness.

But look at how Facebook, the web-delivered, on steroids, adult version of (yes) the college facebook, has had a fundamental impact on both a local and the global community.  Just a social tool, said naysayers. Used by college kids and fodder for stalkers. Yet during the VA Tech nightmare, it was a source of both consolation and information for the VA Tech community in Blacksburg and around the world, as well as all those who were Hokies in their hearts and shared the community’s sorrow. And this is just one example. Similar things have happened in other communities, on MySpace and elsewhere.

And not just after public tragedies. In online communities throughout the blogosphere, you will regularly find people virtually celebrating the happy moments and sympathizing in the sad. As someone said (and I can’t remember where I read it so apologies in advance): These are not my virtual friends. These are my real friends.

This is real change, not superficial, echo chamber, dot.com hype.

Marketers must understand these social changes. Or fail at the task. How people  interact with each other, how we relate, is crucial information. If we don’t understand what’s going on with our prospect, how can we hope to develop meaningful products, meaningful communications? So even if you can’t see any possible use for all this social media "stuff" in YOUR marketing, which is a mistake BTW, you had better understand the social changes happening as a result. Even if you don’t use any social media tools yourself, social media still matters.

Now, granted, currently these shifts are still limited to the digitally-literate, primarily in the developed nations, but with $100 laptops for students in developing nations, we can reasonably hope that the technology adoption gap is going to be smaller than it ever has been in the past. In the not too distant future, there will be more digital natives than digital immigrants. Everywhere.

I can hope that when my 7 year old son gets a pen pal at school, he actually will keep in touch with him or her. Because it will be that much easier, thanks to virtual worlds and email and IM and whatever else comes along.

I can hope that as technology makes the world smaller, we can all make our own worlds bigger. What we have in common with someone, of whatever race, gender, nationality, will be more important than our inevitable differences.

Social media matters because it can enable real social change. If we let it.

So, while I will continue to be somewhat skeptical of individual tools and the companies behind them, "tools from the leading innovator of this or that, that promise to revolutionize communication or whatever the latest hype,"  it’s the hype that I question.

Not the conversation that’s happening around us. That matters, and it is why social media matters.

At least to me.

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