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File it under crazy S*&^: Fan Pages for PR Firms! Mom Blogs’ PR Boycott?

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Should public relations firms have Facebook Fan Pages? What’s the point really?  Do PR firms really have fans, and if they do, should they? Isn’t PR about promoting the client’s interests?

That’s the gist of a conversation thread on Twitter over the past few days. Good friend Geoff Livingston (@GeoffLiving) thinks it is silly for PR firms to have Facebook Fan Pages, in part I imagine (and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, this is my impression of his comments) because it smacks too much of “personal branding,” a concept we both loathe.

I agree, and yet I don’t. Or more accurately, I don’t mind that PR firms are setting up Facebook Fan Pages, as long as they don’t go overboard and start spamming my Facebook Wall with self-serving promotional bullshit.

Facebook Fan Pages are becoming a useful element for a company’s marketing plan, and agencies/consultants need to gain experience with the form. Even if they have clients with Pages, they still need a place to experiment. Client sites are generally not good places for messing around with beta stuff.

So, I’m okay with PR agency fan pages. Happy to “fan” you if asked. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously and think I want your autograph or something. Because, seriously, I don’t even ask real famous people for autographs.

Fame. Fans. One more brief point about the term fan before I move on to the ridiculous idea of mom blogs “boycotting PR.”

I like the term Fan Page. Not simply because the number of fans shows how popular a brand or company is. I like it because it highlights how the brand should be thinking of its customers. Not simply as consumers. Fans are engaged consumers. They don’t just buy a product, they love the product.

And the brand should love them back. Not take them for granted. Add value beyond the simple transaction. That’s what a Fan Page should be about.

Most are not, or at least I hope, not yet.

Facebook has more than 200 million users.

The brands that get it? That understand that the Fan Page isn’t just a billboard for product announcements? That truly make the effort to engage with the customers?

They are going to have lots and lots of fans.

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“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.

– Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes

Today, mom blog site Mom Dot proposed that mom blogs should boycott PR and marketing offers for a week in August. The rationale has something to do with marketing firms taking advantage of mom bloggers by sending them free products. I think. Or maybe it was that mom bloggers are burnt out from the burden of doing product reviews. Something like that. I think.

Seriously, I am not trying to be mean. I really cannot figure out the reason for the boycott.  If product reviews are too much work, don’t do them. Or do fewer. If you aren’t getting joy from something, stop. If the value isn’t there, don’t do it.

But a PR boycott? As CNET pointed out, this misses the point by more than a country mile.

The FTC is reviewing its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials. Without a doubt, blogs (and other new media) will be included.

This has caused a great deal of buzz around the issue of free products and other blogger compensation, particularly in the parent blogosphere. Latest media outlets, and by no means the last, to cover the story: ABC and the New York Times.

The issue isn’t the reviews. Or the free products. The issue is disclosure.

It’s about ethics. And integrity.

If you are a blogger, it’s about disclosing your relationships with companies that have provided you with free products or compensation so your readers can properly evaluate your recommendations.

If you are a company representative, it’s about reaching out to bloggers with respect. If you are hiring someone to write a document for you, you can read it before publication. Sending a product for review? Absolutely not. Don’t even ask. If you do, you are either scum or a nØØb.

So, I have another suggestion. Instead of polarizing boycotts, teeth gnashing and wailing, let’s all pledge to Blog with Integrity.

All this really requires is that you publish a clear review and ethics policy on your blog. It doesn’t matter what the policy is — your readers will decide that issue. What matters is that you clearly disclose.

This will help you, marketers who want to reach out appropriately and your readers. And, I’m guessing, the FTC will like it too.

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In other news, Michael Jackson is still dead.

Blogger Relations: A Refresher Course

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This past week has been an interesting one for students of public and blogger relations. We had the fallout from Robert Scoble’s latest temper tantrum about public relations. I do have an opinion, which you can find at the end of this post. Skip ahead if that’s all you are interested in.

This post is about blogger relations. And by that I mean the relationships companies form with regular bloggers. Their customers. Not journalists or celebrities.

This week, I noticed a marked increase in pitches, reflected by (unusually) my own inbox, items forwarded from friends and chatter on Twitter about (mostly) poor practice.

So, I thought it was a good time for a little refresher course in good blogger relations practice.

When I give my blogger relations workshops, I start with the following chart from Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report. While my issues with ranking systems in general and Technorati’s algorithms in particular are well documented here in Marketing Roadmaps, I thought the research about the bloggers in the 2008 report was quite valuable.

This particular chart answers the question, Why do you blog?

technorati11

In class, I read a few of the most cited reasons before I deliver the punchline.

Nowhere on this list do we find:

Help companies promote their products and services.

Bloggers don’t mind helping you promote your products. Many of them welcome the opportunity to get closer to the companies whose products they use and love. Some monetize their blogs through advertising and would love to have yours. But that’s not WHY they blog. They blog to share their passions. They write about the things they care about.

Sadly, quite a lot of companies and agencies still miss this critical point. Let’s turn to the inbox for some examples.

  • A bed manufacturer sent a pitch to parent bloggers essentially asking for free advertising for its contest on their blogs. Mechanically, this pitch is acceptable, if a bit dull; there were no mistakes in addressing in the multiple examples shared with me. But, why would a parent blogger write about this?
  • A pitch from a fitness expert that exploits the television show Dancing with the Stars. The agency is one whose pitches regularly appear here as bad pitches. Among other things, full of typos. More importantly, who cares?
  • Seen on Twitter: a discussion about a liquid soap product pitched as a Mother’s Day gift. Hey Mom, you stink.
  • Child Safety Mistakes. I’ll let the badmommy blogger tell you about this one.
  • From my own inbox, the exciting (sic) news: godaddyfollowed by a second email, same day, offering the photos. Hullo, have you ever read what I’ve said about Go Daddy on this blog? Apparently not.

And I have more in my “bad pitch” folder. So many more, it’s sad. That said, I also have a few good pitches from the past week. I’ll tell you about those tomorrow.

Coming attractions:

Next month,  I’ll have a  report on what AAA is doing in social media and a case study about the Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit blogger outreach.

Now to Scoble. I don’t have PR clients any more because I am focusing on blogger relations and social media engagement. If I were still actively practicing PR in the the tech space, I’m not sure if  I would even pitch Scoble at this point. A PR person has to evaluate all the potential outlets for client news. Unless Scoble is the top number one outlet for the news, why even bother? Like Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch, he’s really looking for the exclusive, even if he hasn’t articulated it as clearly as Arrington has.

If Scoble is your A-number-one media target, by all means jump through the hoops. But if not? Focus on more productive targets. Heck, talk to some of your customers instead.

That, I can help you with.

Too little, too late, too lame? Initial thoughts on #fishfulthinking

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Yesterday morning my friend Julie Marsh sent me an example for the bad pitch file, an email pitch for a campaign called Fishful Thinking from Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. As she notes on her blog this morning, the offer was somewhat interesting, so she had followed up, twice, with the agency to no response.

She thought that a bit odd, that they didn’t bother to respond. I did too, given the tone of the email, but didn’t have any time to do much with it then as we were off to Boston for brunch and the musical Dirty Dancing.[Brief aside, if you have the chance to see it, go. Makes you feel just as good as the movie, the dancing is excellent, and male vocalist Ben Mingay has a voice to die for.]

Checked back in after dinner to see there had been quite a discussion over Twitter during the day #fishfulthinking. Turns out about 200 mom bloggers had received this “special invitation” to participate in the Pepperidge Farm program, many responded positively and most NEVER heard back. That is, until the discussion started on Twitter yesterday.

Representatives from the agency, including the boss,  then contacted mom tweeters and bloggers to explain the situation, but as Julie notes in her post, and others have tweeted, the explanation isn’t terribly satisfactory. Kristen Chase, who also received the invitation and replied to thunderous silence,  has a summary of the sequence of events and some good advice for the agency on what they should have done.

I’m going to break this down even more, using the information I have at hand. I’d love to hear from the agency or company and will be sending an email with a link to this post later today.

All marketing outreach, including blogger relations,  has three components: the target audience or list, the pitch/program and the execution. Success requires careful attention to all three. So where did Fishful Thinking fail?

First, it made what appeared to be an attractive exclusive offer:

“We are recruiting 10 insightful moms to become key influencers in this nationwide campaign.”

to 200 women. Mass outreach, micro tactic. Not a good match.

Reread the email — I have many times. It  reads like the recipient has already been selected. Not that she is one of 200 randomly selected mom bloggers and must pass an interview process to participate. Which was the information that surfaced yesterday.

That’s problem number two. The pitch misrepresents the program. It offers the mom an opportunity for a trip to New York for a training session and a stipend. Sounds good. Except the real offer is to INTERVIEW for the opportunity.

Finally, execution. Bad enough to send a misleading pitch to a large list of mom bloggers. But then, when the women are interested,  to not follow up? Until the mess made it to Twitter that is, when it HAD to follow up or look really stupid.

Unfortunately, the explanations that have surfaced to date don’t seem to be much more than attempts to smooth over the situation with offers of free goldfish.

If you are counting, that’s a failing grade on all three elements: audience, pitch and execution.

The whole mess reminded me quite a bit of Camp Baby, except Johnson & Johnson immediately apologized and made an honest effort to understand where it went wrong. Not saying we won’t see that from Fishful, but so far things seem more like boilerplate and justification.

More importantly, Fishful Thinking had the Camp Baby example to learn from. Same target audience, similar program, at least on its face. The definition of insanity is to repeat the same actions, expecting a different outcome. The Fishful campaign certainly seems to qualify.

Kristen and Julie have already done a fine job telling Fishful what it should have done differently. I’m going to frame my advice for a company considering a similar program.

  • Exclusive offers have to be a a micro tactic. You should never reach out to more than you can afford to fulfill. That means you have to qualify your list very carefully and narrowly. Consumers talk to each other. Bloggers talk to each other a lot and not just in the public channels.
  • You can mix exclusive offers and mass tactics but the mass offer, such as the free goldfish or public seminar, can’t be a consolation prize for a poorly executed exclusive offer. That just sends the wrong message to everyone. What you can do is make the exclusive offer to a highly targeted, narrow population with a very clear criteria and then have a mass offer to a broader population. It’s also a good idea to have some time between the two programs. Compounding the fishy confusion is that the agency was apparently doing two simultaneous programs, the exclusive one and a promo for a public seminar in White Plains this weekend.
  • Don’t mislead in an attempt to entice. Make sure the offer and any requirements or qualifications necessary to participate are clearly stated. Err on the side of OVER not under-communication.
  • On the other hand, the promotional-speak, the self congratulations. Keep those to a minimum. Elementary school children can tell when they are being spoken to in message points.  So can their parents.
  • Make sure you have sufficient resources to execute. Enough people to respond to the bloggers. Enough products or whatever your offer is to meet the demand. If you target your good pitch appropriately, you should have a fair idea of the response. Staff accordingly. If you misjudge, staff up. Get a temp. But don’t let weeks go by without responding to an email from someone YOU approached in the first place.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the Fishful campaign over the course of the week. I’ll be sure to report anything interesting.

What’s the buzz – more examples from the bad pitch file

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My goal here on Marketing Roadmaps is to provide guidance and examples that will help my readers do social media “right.” That’s why I usually mask company, product and agency names from the bad pitch examples, and focus on the pitch, not the products.

From time to time, something crosses the transom that demands a different approach. I’ve got a couple for you today.

The first is for a new social network for kids. In my opinion, this one fails all around — pitch, product and PR. Here’s the pitch:

buuz11

And here’s the product:

buuuz21

And here are the problems.

Let’s start with the pitch, which implies that this is a product for kids with references to Barney and the Wiggles. Yet, when  you go to the site, it seems far more like a dating site for teens. The wiggles here aren’t the ones singing “Fruit Salad” if you know what I mean. Was this pitch slanted young to appeal to mom bloggers, even though the product clearly isn’t? That sort of deception is bad practice at best. Possibly unethical.

1book3The product. BUUUZ. Sounds like “booze”  which makes “message in the bottle” a questionable tagline. What sort of message in the bottle and just how much should we drink before we get the message?

More like spin the bottle….Do kids really need their own version of match.com? Or is it just one more fertile hunting ground for predators?

Now I can see how they ended up with the name. The domain name was available and someone fell in love with the logo and the idea of “UUU” create the buzz. But domain name availability and a graphic presentation are two of the WORST reasons for choosing a product name. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Because no matter how you spin it, and more on that in a minute, there’s no way “BUUUZ” is pronounced anything other than booze. It’s simple English grammar.

And that just doesn’t cut it for a site for kids. No matter how you choose to rationalize it.

As the PR flack did when one of the parent bloggers who received this pitch asked why they gave the site the name and tagline they did. A one line response, it completely dismissed the concerns and insulted the blogger.  The email equivalent of Dan Aykroyd’s rejoinder in the early days of Saturday Night Live: “Jane you ignorant slut.”

Now, I can see why one might be defensive about BUUUZ. It can be tiring hopping around on one leg. But, responding to criticism in a hostile fashion is both rude and stupid. I hate to say it, given how strongly I believe in active engagement, but it would be better to just ignore the email and simply be considered rude.

This campaign is one that I definitely vote off the island. Bad pitch, questionable product and offensive PR. Three strikes. Out.

Our other example today is a an inauguration-related pitch. Sort of.

joesteeth1

This program for Trident gum fails in a number of ways. First, it trivializes the change we celebrated on January 20th with President Obama’s inauguration. “Chomping for change?” Please.

Next, as I’ve commented before, campaigns that co-opt celebrities without their permission are distasteful.  Don’t like ’em. Slimy.

Finally, think about what they’re asking people to do for a pack of gum. A 50 cent pack of gum. Seems like an awful lot of work for a single pack of gum.

It doesn’t say much for American culture that quite a few people did it, but that doesn’t make the campaign good. I didn’t see any coverage of this program on the 500+ blogs I read, including many parent blogs.

If you only remember a few things from what you read here, I hope you remember this:

  • Respect the bloggers. Even if they occasionally piss you off, they are your customers. Even if they are wrong, they are right.
  • Add value. Give bloggers a reason to write. A thin storyline and a pack of gum? Not so much.

I’ll have some more on how to add value in my next post.

“New to you” – the opportunity in blogger outreach

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In public relations, we are conditioned to think of everything in terms of the news. What’s new? Is it newsworthy? Introductions, launches, exclusives, breaking stories, reviews. These are the stuff from which PR success is traditionally made.

And that’s still true. Mainstream media, whether print or online, and social media that follows the journalistic model are still driven by the news. The news cycle is by no means dead. In fact, it is accelerated and expanded. If you have something new, revolutionary, even evolutionary, there’s plenty of opportunity.

What if you don’t? What if you are charged with spreading the word about a product that isn’t new?

In PR, we try to find story angles. We suggest story ideas to reporters and position our products for inclusion in features. These tactics can be successful when reaching out to journalists, but tend to fall flat with personal bloggers. Why?

Most bloggers do not view themselves as writing for an audience. They are writing about their lives for themselves and for their friends. Realistically, of course, they know they have an audience but that’s not the primary motivation as it is for a journalist.

What’s the solution? Reframe the task. You are not limited by the news cycle. Remember that bloggers are the customer. While they like to hear about new things, as long as a pitch is relevant, the product doesn’t have to be new.

“New to you” is enough.

Now, that doesn’t mean they want advertising hype. If they want to view your ads, they will. They might even purchase your products as a result. However, if you are pitching them something for their blog, it has to be relevant and timely to them. Product can be ten years old as long as it solves an immediate problem or answers a current question. As I’ve written here before, it has to add value.

That’s the opportunity in blogger relations. Think creatively about the product and services in your portfolio. Think about audiences for whom your product would be new. Or new uses for the product. Don’t be limited by launch mentality.

Where to start? I’ve developed a model for finding the shared value between customer and company that you can use to identify a departure point for your pitch. In my next post, I’ll apply it to develop two possible blog pitches for cotton swabs.