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Emptying the bit bucket: books, pitches and too fat to fly?

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Heard on Twitter about a big brand: Apparently the brand is using multiple word of mouth agencies on blogger outreach programs for the same company initiative. Some of the agencies are offering compensation for posts, others not. Here’s the kicker though: some bloggers are getting both sorts of pitches. For the same program. Ouch!

And before you ask: yes I know who it is, no I am not telling, and I’d appreciate it if my readers do not “out” the brand in the comments either. I’m telling this story to make a point, not to embarrass anyone.

Here’s the lesson. It’s okay to have different programs for the same initiative. Just make sure the programs are highly differentiated, especially if some include compensation and others do not. And for heaven’s sake, de-dupe the lists, and do your best to make sure that bloggers only get ONE of the pitches.

Too fat to fly? The ‘net was all a-twitter over the weekend and yesterday about the @ThatKevinSmith and Southwest Air incident Saturday. It was all over the mainstream media as well, but just in case you missed it (on vacation at the South Pole, crossing Alaska with a dog team, climbing Mt. Everest, etc.), here’s the short story.

Director Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) was asked to get off a full Southwest flight from Oakland to Burbank last Saturday for “safety reasons.”  He twittered about it as it was happening, and later released a special, very long, very ranty episode of his podcast with the blow by blow.

Smith has 1.6 million Twitter followers, so the whole thing blew up hard and fast. And of course, the whole situation was further fueled by the fat/thin debate.

Eventually,  Southwest apologized, sort of but not really, which further inflamed Smith. They then apologized again, as detailed in both this Nuts about Southwest post and Smith’s final word on the subject in his blog.

I’m not going to do a blow by blow analysis. The pundits have analyzed this thing to death, and it’s pretty clear that this was a customer service snafu that evolved into a full-blown communications crisis due to bad decisions and the power of social networks.

Southwest has learned a hard lesson. What can we learn from it?

First, exercise a little common sense. The entire situation could have been avoided in multiple ways. First, the obvious — just let the man fly. Southwest also could have chosen to NOT clear Smith from the standby list if they were truly already hyper-aware of fliers with “safety issues.” Is that right? No, of course not. It’s awful and stupid and ugly. But, it would have avoided the problem. Putting the man on the flight and then taking him off is the problem, because, truly, he didn’t get any fatter while waiting to board the flight.

Second, and I know others have said this as well: When you apologize to someone, you really should apologize for the thing that actually upset the other party. Otherwise, it isn’t an apology. It’s a justification. The lawyers may not like it, but good  customer relations demands it. When you screw up, own it. All of it.

Enough of this. I may write about this on my travel blog this weekend — after I fly Southwest to Houston for Mom 2.0. The airlines  — all of them — do have a problem. As they try to pack more seats into each plane and then pack each plane to capacity to improve the bottom line, the US population is getting larger. It’s not good. It just is.

Finally, I meant to post this weeks ago, but forgot. The second edition of David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (Amazon affiliate link), has just been released. While I don’t agree with all of David’s tactics, it’s a good introductory text on how to use social media in your marketing plan.

What don’t I agree with? I am a profound opponent of using press releases to reach customers. News, yes. The press release form, no. Otherwise, our approaches to integrating marketing and social media are pretty similar.

A refreshing change from Super Bowl ads – the Pepsi Refresh Project

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cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

The Super Bowl is pretty much the only athletic contest in the world where the television advertisements during the event get nearly as much media coverage as the event itself. Likewise the run-up and hype of the commercials. Will the network will sell all the space? Who will run ads, how much will they pay and what will they promote?

Before the ads even run, the pundits are postulating and after, they dissect them.

It’s a bit obscene really — and full disclosure, I’ve played the game on my blog in past years.

This year, though, the real news is who is NOT advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead of spending a hefty chunk of change on a few spots during the football game, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project. For the next year,  the company is giving away $1.3 million dollars per month to community development projects submitted and selected online by the public.

Anyone can submit a grant. Pepsi will accept 1000 every month, and the public can vote for up to 10 projects every day.

Of course, the company is getting a lot of media, and social media, coverage for the campaign, and I imagine they are also spending a pretty penny on the infrastructure to support the project with their ad, PR and interactive agencies. I’m sure they have high expectations for positive revenue as well as brand awareness results from the project.

What makes this campaign so exciting is the scale of the grants. Other companies have done similar projects to fund charities through community submission and vote. For example American Express. But I can’t think of anything from corporate America that matches the scale of Pepsi Refresh.

It is truly refreshing to see a company do so much potential good. I’ve got no problem if they “do good” as a result.

In fact, I’d love to see more copycats.

Who’s next?

Facebook ads, getting too spammy?

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This post started out with the intent to be about online privacy and advertising.  I was going to talk about the issues raised at last month’s FTC roundtable on online privacy including behaviorally targeted advertising. Maybe even float around in cloud computing, the topic of next week’s session at the FTC. Talk a little about Facebook’s privacy woes in the aftermath of changing its privacy settings.

But I have bronchitis and a terrible sinus headache, so that post is on hold.

Instead, I am going to have a very  little rant about the demographically targeted ads on Facebook.

Ads like these that pull age related data from my Facebook profile and “fill in the blank” in an otherwise generic ad.

This isn’t targeted advertising.

It’s spam. And it’s lazy.

<Rant off>

Latest Lands’ End Contest on Facebook DOES comply with new rules

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In my post earlier this week, I mentioned  Lands’ End’s after-Christmas contest, which let Facebook users enter simply by becoming a fan. I know, because I did it.

Unfortunately, it’s a violation of Facebook’s new promotion guidelines to use “become a fan” as a way for people to  enter a contest. You can require that someone be a fan to enter, but they have to explicitly enter.

I was pleased to see that Lands’ End’s newest contest complies.

Facebook’s new contest rules and FTC guidelines – has social media marketing adapted?

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Warning – long post

Are social media marketers implementing the new Facebook contest rules and meeting their obligations under FTC guidelines? Survey sez: maybe not, or at least, not yet.

Background

Social media marketing. A bit like the wild west of our imaginations — a little bit glamorous, a little bit dangerous, and as practiced by some, perhaps just a little bit dirty.

At the end of 2009,  however, the Sheriff came to town. Or at least a few parts of it. Facebook’s new rules for contests and sweepstakes were announced in November and updated in December. The revised FTC guidelines for endorsements and testimonials went into effect on December 1.

The landscape is bound to change. In fact, strictly speaking, it should have already. Marketers had plenty of warning about the proposed changes to the FTC guidelines, and their responsibilities under them.

The Facebook changes were more of a surprise but they seem fairly straightforward (and a revenue boon to third-party app developers) although there was a great deal of confusion about whether you could require someone to be a fan to enter a contest. The answer BTW is yes, although you cannot have the action of becoming a fan equal an automatic entry in the contest or sweepstakes. There must be an explicit entry form, and there are very specific rules governing how you can administer the contest on Facebook.

I wondered.

Were marketers informing bloggers of the obligation to disclose when they offered free stuff? The evidence, including that in my own inbox, indicated: not so much. Every so often, I would hear of efforts like Procter & Gamble’s for its Vocalpoint program. They sent an email informing community members of the FTC requirements and telling them how P&G would support them. Not surprising perhaps, given that P&G’s programs and products were cited in more than one news story about the guidelines, but still smart and commendable.

By and large though, it seemed the offers were still coming without any information about the FTC requirements.

On the Facebook front, on Christmas, an email from Lands’ End promoted a contest that one could enter simply by becoming a fan on Facebook. Oops.

Now, I adore Lands’ End, and think their marketing is top notch. If a big brand could make such an error, what about the smaller ones on Facebook? Not to mention all the bloggers who had been running contests to build their fan bases.

It seemed to me that perhaps marketers hadn’t got the message yet. So I decided to do a survey.

Disclaimer: In no way does this survey purport to be scientific or definitive. I just wanted to get a better idea of what was going on in these two areas, and figured a survey would give me access to far more data points that conversations and Twitter chat. It was promoted to my Twitter and Facebook friends and here on the blog, and to Blog with Integrity’s fans, followers and email subscribers. Friends and colleagues kindly retweeted and emailed the link as well. The survey was published on December 27th and closed this morning, January 4th.

Survey Says

Here are the raw results with a little bit of analysis.  Later, I am going to do some cross-tabs and other fancy stuff that SurveyMonkey lets you do when you have to buy a paid account because your responses exceed the 100 you can get with the free account. But not today.

  • Started the survey: 243
  • Completed the survey: 198 (81.5%)

One to 10 pitches per week was reported by more than half the respondents. The answers to the next two questions were equally compelling. Seventy-percent (70.2%) reported that the number of pitches they receive on average every week had stayed the same since December 1 when the FTC guidelines went into effect, and 63.7% reported that pitches since December 1 contained offers for free products, review products or other compensation.

Seems like business as usual. Time for the money question: Thinking about the pitches you’ve received since December 1 2009 that offered free products or other compensation, *generally speaking* how many have contained guidance or information about a blogger’s obligation to disclose his/her relationship with the company?

It’s cut off in the chart but that orange bar in position one represents nearly 50% reporting that NONE of the pitches contained any information about the obligation to disclose. One of the comments in “other” states that this information did come after the blogger had accepted the offer. Fair enough, but in my opinion, that isn’t soon enough. If we are offering free products or other compensation, we need to state the terms of the deal clearly and up front.

Moving on to Facebook. I asked how often the respondent used Facebook and if they had recently entered any contests.

There are a few interesting things here:

  • Most respondents would be classed as fairly or very active users of Facebook.
  • The majority of respondents hadn’t recently entered any contests. Is this because fewer contests are now held “on the wall,” they are being held somewhere else (Twitter?), the holidays or some other reason? Questions for a future survey.
  • 37.1 % entered by becoming a fan of the page, which is a violation of the new rules.
  • Clearly some companies are beginning to implement the new rules, or at least holding their contests appropriately by accident,  with 40 respondents indicating that they entered a contest in a way sanctioned by the new rules.

Demographics



Does this survey prove anything? Yes and no.

No, because it didn’t use a rigorous model. I’d like a more even representation of the blogosphere than “folks who know Susan, Blog with Integrity or Susan’s colleagues,” and I wish I had done a better job on the list of primary topics for the primary blog. If I do another survey, I’ll dig into what people replied for ‘Other’ to make sure I cover more categories.

On the other hand, nearly 200 responses isn’t too shabby. Bottom line, I think these results are a good place to start our exploration of how well — or not — companies are implementing these new rules.

Because like it or not, once the law shows up in town, you gotta live by the rules.