As promised, I’ve finally uploaded the slides from the Media Kit workshop at BlogHer Pro last month: BHPRO MEDIA KIT Workshop (pdf). You may also be interested in the slides from last summer’s Pathfinder Day, Pathfinder Day 2012 FINAL (pdf).
Blogging
What I learned at (Harley-Davidson) Summer Camp
Note to readers: I have been working on this post for forever. I had it finished one day and the changes didn’t save. Go figure. And then I got busy with work and it just sat in my drafts folder. But here, finally, are my thoughts on Harley-Davidson Summer Camp from a marketing perspective.
I don’t have a life list. Mostly because I never think about it until I am doing something fun or interesting for the first time, and it pops into my head —wow if I had a life list, this would be on it, for sure. But of course by then it is too late — I’ve already done whatever it is. So the life list remains unwritten.
However, learning to ride a motorcycle has been on my unwritten life list for more than a year, so I was beyond delighted to attend the Harley-Davidson Summer Camp as BlogHer’s representative. At some point, I will get around to writing about the experience, probably next spring when I will actually learn to ride at a Harley Rider’s Edge class. In the interim, I urge you to read the sponsored posts written by my 11 fellow Harley campers.
In this post though I want to focus on three marketing lessons we can learn from this event.
1. Choose your attendees wisely. It goes without saying that you want to be sure the bloggers you invite are interested in the topic, but you also want to have a simpatico group, especially with a smaller event. And you don’t necessarily want everyone to already know each other. After all, it isn’t a reunion, it is a sponsored event.
In the case of the Harley event, some of the bloggers knew each other, but everyone also met a few people for the very first time. It was a well-matched group; with interests and life experiences in common, but diverse as well. It mixed well, and that contributed to the overall success of the event.
Bottom line, you have to know your bloggers. Obviously, I think we do it very well at BlogHer, and if your blogger outreach or event involves reaching digitally savvy women, I hope you consider working with us. But with time, effort and patience, you can do it too. No shortcuts though. You have to get to know people.
2. Vary the agenda. It is perfectly okay to have brand presentations; your attendees expect to hear from you about your product, are hungry to learn more and take pride in covering the event thoroughly. If they weren’t interested, they wouldn’t have come. But also give them time to experience your product. Granted it is a little easier to come up with experiential ideas when your product is a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and you can put the bloggers on the bikes as both passengers and nascent riders. And a museum full of memorabilia is pretty compelling too.
But I think it is possible no matter what your product is. You just have to think a little differently about your assets. The goal is to give your attendees a picture of your brand beyond product attributes and marketing messaging. Here are just some of the things you can do:
- Demonstrations and trial use (as Harley did) work for nearly every product under the sun, and the more freedom you give the attendees to use the product, the more compelling it will be. In other words, demonstrations good, letting them use it, better and giving them a challenge or task where they can be creative with it, best.
- Let them meet your employees and other stakeholders, in both formal and informal settings. In my experience, women bloggers are particularly interested in meeting women who work for your company, at all levels. What’s it like to work for you? What was their career path? If you have a good story here, tell it!
- Your company is part of a physical community and probably active in civic organizations and local charities. Get out of your building and let your attendees meet the organizers and leaders of those groups. Even better, people who have benefited. And best, put them to work somehow. Planting a garden in the local park. Working at a soup kitchen.
3. Mix it up — Part of the incentive for attending sponsored events is the opportunity to meet and hang out with other bloggers. Harley-Davidson did a great job leaving time for socializing in the agenda, among the group and with Harley employees at informal unstructured events like a Milwaukee Brewers game and an evening cruise along the river into Lake Michigan. The group hit it off so well in fact that we started a Facebook Group so we could still “hang out,” albeit virtually. Some truly free time is also a good idea. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but make sure there is some downtime in the schedule for your attendees to call home and write their blog posts!
What things do you think make a great sponsored event?
Disclosure: As noted in my post, I was hosted by Harley-Davidson during Summer Camp, which I attended in my role as VP Influencer Marketing at BlogHer.
Pinterest changes TOS, allows commercial use: What does this mean for you?
Last Wednesday, Pinterest changed its Terms of Service (TOS) to allow commercial use.
Wait. What?
You mean commercial boards and sponsored pinning may have been in technical violation of Pinterest’s TOS all these months?
Yes indeedy. Given the importance of widespread commercial adoption of the service to its ultimate ability to monetize, it is highly unlikely that it would have cracked down on the commercial activity, but until last week, the TOS prohibited both commercial use and encouraging commercial use by others unless the activity was pre-approved by Pinterest.
So, what do you need to do if you are planning to use Pinterest for commercial purposes?
You must comply with the Pinterest Terms of Service and the FTC’s Guideline for Commercial Endorsements. Here’s how:
- You need to have a business account and agree to the Business Terms of Service. If you already have an account, it is easy to convert it to a business account, and if you do not, you simply open it as a business account. Both can be done at business.pinterest.com. HubSpot did a nice tutorial with screen shots if you need a little guidance. Important: ANYONE using Pinterest for commercial purposes, even an individual, needs to have a business account to be in compliance with the Pinterest TOS. The pages don’t look any different but Pinterest has released some tools for the business accounts and has promised more, which is an incentive above and beyond the simple ethical consideration of complying with the TOS!
- You need to develop your policy for proper disclosure of commercial activity on your Pinterest account to comply with FTC requirements for commercial endorsements. If you are a commercial brand and your account has a company name, your boards likely will be presumed to be commercial content, so you should be fine from a disclosure standpoint. However, if you are an individual, you must make sure that your affiliations are clear. I recommend:
- As a best practice — put a clear statement in your bio about your affiliations.
- To comply with the FTC, label any boards and pins related to commercial activity in the description. For example, “My Golfer’s Paradise board is brought to you by GOLF BRAND” on the pinboard description, and on the pins themselves, a sponsor statement such as “Sponsored by GOLF BRAND” or “Love this putter from GOLF BRAND. #sponsored.”
Next — and this part is optional, not a Pinterest or FTC requirement, but I personally recommend developing your own guidelines for your use of Pinterest to best leverage the platform and ensure consistency of your approach over time. Plan the work and work the plan!
If you represent a brand, you want the boards to fit the ethos of Pinterest, and help build awareness, interest, consideration and purchase. Don’t just slap up boards with pictures from your catalogs or details of the latest promotion. Think about how you can make your content valuable to the community so they will repin it and help you spread the word.
If you are an individual, you want your sponsored Pinterest content to be consistent with your non-sponsored personal pins. Your taste and interests are why people have followed your boards, and you don’t want to disappoint. Bottom line, if you have any sort of following, brands will be approaching you. Best to have your own strategy lined up so you know which opportunities are worthwhile, and which ones are not.
Lookin’ for Adventure
I was lucky enough to be hosted, along with 11 BlogHer Network bloggers, at a 2 day event at Harley-Davidson headquarters in Milwaukee earlier this week.
Here on Marketing Roadmaps, I will be sharing some observations about the event and the impeccable execution of the Harley-Davidson team. And over on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles, I will share my personal experiences over the 2 days as well as some amazing tidbits from Harley history. Watch for these posts over the next week or so.
Disclosure: I am a BlogHer employee and attended this event as a representative of BlogHer.
The blog contest you are so glad wasn’t yours…
Last week, a blogging hot mess developed around a contest being run for Chrysler by Ignite Social Media. You can get the deets at this post by Avitable. Fair warning: Avitable has a definite point of view on the events in question. I don’t. Or more accurately, I’m not picking a side because I think both “sides” could have done things differently and achieved a far different outcome.
As many on the comment thread on Avitable pointed out, this sort of contest, in which consumers are encouraged to vote for their favorite bloggers so one of the bloggers can win a tremendous prize, nearly always turns into a popularity contest, rife with accusations of gaming the system and so on. Quite simply, they bring out the worst in human nature. Even when there isn’t a “confusion” about the rules.
My advice: stay away from this sort of event. No matter how good it sounds in the brainstorming session. There is a reason why we have election law and elaborate protections to prevent voter fraud, hanging chads notwithstanding. Unless you can prevent fraud, or even the hint of it, do something else with your marketing dollars.
And the truly sad thing? For those guarding the castle gates from the social media juggernaut, the whole mess is evidence that the blogosphere is a dangerous place for brands. No matter who was or was not at fault, the Chrysler brand has been tarnished by association with the whole thing. Even if they don’t pull back from social media now, others will, and that’s a missed opportunity all around.