Marketing Roadmaps

Mathom Room

Hiatus

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Marketing Roadmaps is going on a little break. Just a little one – I expect to be back with you on or before October 1st.

Here’s the scoop.

First, we are shifting over to self-hosted WordPress sometime in the next week or so. I’d rather save the really great stuff I’ve got in the pending file for the new URL, not this hosted TypePad one.

Second, I’m pretty busy at the moment with client work and new business development, plus trying to find time to work on my blogger relations book and a new business I am putting together. I don’t have the time to devote to the posts here that I require to keep the quality high.

Finally, I’m feeling just a bit burnt out on social media "stuff," in part due to last weekend’s BlogWorld Expo. My post about that is on my personal blog, Snapshot Chronicles.

It’s time to step back, just a bit.

I’m going to spend some time catching up with the bloggers I love to read and pursuing my other interests, on and offline. Friday the 26th I’ll be going out to Denver for Sci Fi Channel’s digital press tour, and the following weekend I’ll be at the big terrier dog shows in Montgomery County Pennsylvania. Reports from both of those will also be on Snapshot.

But I’ll be back in October, with a shiny easier to manage WordPress blog. Perhaps not tanned or rested, but certainly ready to talk about blogger relations, marketing and social media again. In fact, if you are in the Boston area, consider coming to BlogHer Boston on October 11th at the Burlington Marriott. It’s shaping up to be an excellent conference.

Some Blogger Relations Mathoms

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As part of a fresh start to Fall, I’m cleaning out my email box today. In the process, I’ve run across a few blogger relations issues that really can’t support a full post but deserve mention.

Email addresses

Don’t use gmail, yahoo or other free service email addresses to send pitches. People like to know that they are dealing with a reputable person, a reputable organization. Your email address, traceable to a firm or organization through its website, helps convey that information. Related: don’t send the email from someone else’s account, ie the email FROM: field is one name and the signatory on the email is someone else.  Nothing says “processed using an email database” better than an email sent by one person on behalf of another.

Media databases

Media databases like Cision and Vocus that include bloggers are an okay place to start building a list for blogger outreach in certain high-profile blog categories like tech, parents and marketing, but don’t just spam releases without a cover note. Vocus offers an opt-out button, and I find I am using it when it is simply a release with no note. While I am sure there is a work-around if someone affirmatively requests materials, once someone has opted out from an entity, the system isn’t supposed to let it send anything else. In other words, no second chances. Now, this might force agencies to actually begin contacting bloggers before emailing them, but I am not terribly hopeful.

Why did you send me this pitch?

If you get an email like this from me or any other blogger, don’t take offense. When I do it, it means that the item might be of interest, but  you didn’t tell me why you thought I’d be interested. Now, if I’m just a name in a database, and you have no clue why you sent me the item, this does have the effect of calling you out, so to speak. The best course is to apologize. But don’t simply offer to take me off the list — ask me what I would be interested in.

Often as recently happened with a junior staffer at an agency I respect, the rep just gets so wrapped up in the pitch that she forgets to identify the WIIFM. That’s why I always advise starting there — tell the blogger, or journalist, why you thought he’d be interested before you get into the pitch for your thing, whatever it may be.

And finally, a pet peeve.

The true meaning of Unsubscribe. It’s the action we take when we have subscribed to something, by choice, and then decide that we don’t want to receive it anymore. It is NOT a synonym for opting-out of a mailing list to which you have been added without your permission. Increasingly, however, I’ve noticed that organizations are using unsubscribe in that context. Even the opt-out mechanism on Vocus has an <Unsubscribe> button instead of <Remove> or some other verb that would be more accurate, and I have seen it used on other PR pitches sent to bloggers.

This really bugs me. Since I did not subscribe to your list in the first place, how can I possibly unsubscribe? I suspect the use of the language is motivated by the CAN-SPAM Act. The thinking probably goes something like this:

Adding these people to our mailing list without their permission is probably in violation of CAN-SPAM, but people get so much email these days, if we imply they subscribed, maybe they’ll forget that they didn’t opt-in to ours and we won’t get in trouble.

Sleazy.

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Mathom Room: Compensation Architect, Media Bullseye, Intuit and relaunch of PBS Parents

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The mathom room is that place where I put all the interesting stuff that I want to tell you about but just don’t have time to devote a whole post. Here’s this month’s collection.

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Compensation Architect is a new blog that I developed for Santorini Consulting, an enterprise software implementation firm. The blog is a guide to designing, managing and implementing compensation systems; its principal author David Kelly is a recognized expert in the field. If you are, or someone you know is, involved in setting or managing sales compensation systems and policies, I urge you to check it out. Design by Leslie Doherty of Catapult Web Development.

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I keep forgetting to mention that I was a guest on the Media Bullseye Roundtable podcast on August 1st. Sarah Wurrey, Jen Zingsheim and I talked about BlogHer, whether the web is impacting reading standards and the impact of Randy Pausch’s life and death on the interwebs.

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I’m going to have more to say on the JingleGenerator from Intuit as a blogger relations campaign, but for now, just enjoy messing around and creating jingles using this tool. I’m not sure anyone would actually use one of these jingles in a promo campaign but it’s kinda fun to create one. And I absolutely love this footnote from the press release:

1Tommy Silk is a totally fictitious character, created solely for the promotion of theJingleGenerator.com because we didn’t have the budget to hire someone famous or use their name without getting our pants sued off. Any resemblance to real music moguls, living or dead, is purely coincidental. So there.

Silk? He’s sort of a cross between Austin Powers, Tommy Mottola and Tommy Lee.With maybe a dash of Van Halen. And funny, though not nearly as funny as the footnote.  Enjoy.

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PBS has relaunched pbsparents with the Supersisters blog written by sisters Jen Lemen, Kristen Hammond and Patience Salgado. I love the idea of hearing from siblings on a subject. One of the most compelling blogs I’ve ever “read” was 3191 a photo blog by two sisters who lived on opposite coasts, took a photo every morning and then posted the results. I think Supersisters has the potential to be just as compelling. Check it out.

That’s it for the mathom room. I’ll be back later in the week with more blogger relations, good and bad.

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My Social Media and Marketing Mathom Room

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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.

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Red Sox Nation

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Yes, I have interesting and relevant marketing stuff to talk about. And I will.

But tomorrow, I, like many of my colleagues, am simply a member of Red Sox Nation.

GO RED SOX!!!!