Marketing Roadmaps

PR

Grab bag: Good Marketing Stuff

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And for the final grab bag entry this week, a few posts that caught my eye:

Toby Bloomberg on 5 ways to combat negative blog comments. I particularly liked this reminder:

"One of the benefits of a marketing blog is the opportunity to dialogue with customers, prospects and stakeholders.  Sorry y’all, no comments does not make a conversation. It’s called a monologue. […] One person takes center stage with no opportunity for direct feedback. For my money, a blog without comments and trackbacks is an on-line newsletter.  And that’s not a negative comment."

She’s absolutely right (that’s why she’s the diva) — there are places for both sorts of things, blogs and blog-like newsletters without comments.

The way I see it, companies just have to decide which thing they want to have and make sure it fits their culture and yes,their marketing plan. If you REALLY can’t handle the comments, don’t put up a blog with comments and then selectively delete the ones you don’t like. You WILL get caught out, and you would have been better off doing a monologue.

I have commented in the past that I (like Toby) do not recommend turning off comments. Rather, use the comments on a blog to have a conversation with the reader. Even negative comments. As we all well know, your BEST customer often is the formerly unhappy customer who you turned around. Of course… you DO have to be willing to do what it takes to turn the customer around….

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If you use TypePad, archive this post from Neville Hobson on how to republish and back-up your blog.

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Two thought provoking posts from John Wagner: Open your eyes to the next wave of PR bloggers and Can the big agencies be thought leaders in a changing marketplace?  John has links to commentary by Shel Israel and Trevor Cook among others. Start from his post and follow the trail. I think John is on to something. It is very hard for the big guns, in any industry, to open the country club doors and let the "rest of us" in. The minute they do, they have lost the cachet of their leadership position. They aren’t "special" any more. However, more disturbing to me than the old school leaders having this "club" attitude is when I see similar behavior cropping up in the blogosphere…. Isn’t it a bit soon (and contrary to the spirit of the blogosphere) for there to be authoritative voices on anything?  To identify anyone as "So and So, the voice of X in the blogosphere" strikes me as odd.

Just my .02.

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A great post by Jill Konrath on the Selling to Big Companies Blog: Why this voicemail failed. Follow her advice and I’ll bet you’ll have more of your calls returned.

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And finally, from Elisa Camahort at Worker Bees (one of my must-read blogs by the way), some additional commentary on conferences. We’ve both noted a trend where conferences are becoming less about the content and more about the contacts. Which may be okay for dot-com millionaires and folks who don’t pay their own way to these things, but as a small business owner who funds myself (whether I am a speaker or an attendee), I need to find value in the program as well as the people. I can’t afford to attend a conference where I already know most of the content and my only takeaway is to have a few meals with people I already know. And much as I’d love to submit my name as a speaker for some of these things, well,  I’m not as well known as others in my field, and can’t afford to pay my own way (or take the time out from billable work) to the extent that others can, so I guess I’ll remain not as well known.  So it goes.

And, yeah, I guess I’ll be staying home a lot too!

That’s it for the grab bag. Next up for the marketing plan series of posts are some words about channel marketing.

Grab bag: PR Measurement

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It’s been a little hectic here, with Christmas, client work, catching up from vacation and 2-week old puppies, so the blog has suffered a bit. I’m not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions (talk about setting oneself up for failure) but I expect to be back to my regular blogging schedule of at least 3 times per week, starting this week.

To catch up I am starting with the grab bag of stuff in my RSS reader that I’ve just now had a chance to catch up with. I’m sure many of you have already seen these posts, but humour me 🙂

First, Shel Holtz and Andy Lark on PR Measurement. I think Andy has it right when he says the barrier to PR measurement isn’t the availability of tools:

"The barrier however remains a lack  of commitment at the top. Too many organizations I talk to are only looking to measure where Executives demand it. "

Shel’s post talks about some of the folks who are measuring PR… successfully. Problem is, these are the already converted…

The first step in solving a problem is realizing you have one, and I believe that many PR agencies don’t want to acknowledge that there IS a problem. The fallacy is that PR is about some intangible called "brand awareness" which cannot be measured. And on the client side, often the marketing teams either can’t (because they don’t get the support from sales teams) or won’t (because they are afraid) tie their PR efforts to sales results. 

For my part, I think we absolutely have to look at PR as part of our revenue generation toolkit, and expect as good, or better, results from it as we get from other marketing activities. If your PR agency won’t support the measurements you, the client, want, then get another agency. And agencies, if your client won’t support your desire to measure your results, understand that this is an account in jeopardy. Anyone can come in and attack you on qualitative terms, and you don’t have the ammo to fight back.

Measurement is in all our interests. I’ve written about this in the past here and here. It’s also not that hard. You just have to make the commitment.

Big damn auction, big damn movie

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I realized yesterday that if you weren’t interested in charity auctions or Joss Whedon’s Serenity, there wasn’t much on the Roadmap for you this week.

And there still isn’t… although I promise to move onto other topics soon. Maybe next week.

The HP Charity Auction ended last night, and by all accounts a success. The auction itself raised a little less than $10,000, and with HP’s matching funds, each charity (DATA and the American Red Cross) got more than $9,000. HP will be publishing a webpage with all the details, and when I get the link, I’ll post it.

Everyone involved learned a lot in the process, from both our mistakes and the things that went well. One thing that is absolutely critical is to allow enough time for viral marketing to work. It takes time for messages to spread into an audience of any size, even if you do billboards and primetime TV ads. You need even more time for a grassroots message. The good news, though, is once it takes hold, it *does* snowball. Our example without a doubt is how fast the word spread in Elijah Wood’s fanbase about the auction.

And speaking of grassroots marketing …. the Big Damn Movie is in general release today. I’m going tonight, more on it tomorrow, but I promise, no spoilers.

And then maybe I’ll write about something else 🙂

Serenity and grassroots marketing

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About a week or so ago, I posted about the Joss Whedon movie Serenity as an example of how customers can effect change, when they care enough AND somebody is actually listening. The post also was my submission to this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists.

As a fan of Firefly, I have been impatiently waiting for the film that continues the story just like any other fan. And as a marketer, I have been observing the grassroots and viral marketing efforts with great interest over the past year. I’ve even done my share of fan conversions. For the uninitiated, that’s when you loan your Firefly DVDs to a “virgin.”

Shortly after I wrote my post, as we got ever closer to this Friday’s general US release, the media – both mainstream and blogosphere – effectively exploded. The LA premiere generated a great deal of press, as did the rounds of interviews director Whedon and the cast are doing to promote the movie. I won’t list it all here, but you can find most of the coverage on the site Whedonesque.

Not surprisingly, given the grassroots and viral campaigns already in play, the studio (Universal) decided to approach bloggers directly. Among the bloggers they contacted with their offer for a free advance screening provided they agreed to blog about the movie, good or bad, was the Instapundit . Definitely the way to spread the word fast..   

In fact, three marketing blogs that I read on a fairly regular basis wrote about the offer, each with a slightly different take and what it means longer term. I’ve commented at all three, and won’t rehash all the discussion here, other than to recommend you read the posts, and all the comments.

As one of the commenters on the gapingvoid post pointed out, planned or merely unintended consequence, the free advanced screenings reached well beyond the fanbase.

The best post about the whole thing however was from a blog I hadn’t read before, New Persuasion   (again I tip my hat to Whedonesque for the link). The author of the post Nellie Lide actually was “confirmed” for one of the blogger screenings but chose not to go because she didn’t like the way the publicity firm handled the whole thing. Reading some of the language they used in their emails, I can definitely see why bloggers might be put off by it (notably too much use of the word MUST). And perhaps the PR firm didn’t handle it as well as they could have.

But I still stand by my opinion that no one was forced to do anything. It was a choice whether to accept the terms of the offer: get into a free advance screening of a much-anticipated movie in exchange for blogging about it. Or not.

Yes, the language the PR firm used was a bit strong and controlling. But, if you didn’t like the terms, don’t accept. Nellie Lide didn’t accept. Others did. (Although I do imagine it was easier to resist if you’d already seen the film than if you hadn’t.)

We will make mistakes … all of us … as we try to integrate new media into existing models. It is inevitable. But I’d rather try something new and perhaps make a mistake than never be willing to try. For that alone, I commend the team behind the blogger screenings –they tried something new. And hopefully, they learned from whatever mistakes they made. As I hope to when I make mine.

By Friday, this will all be moot anyway, as Serenity will be in general release. According to Whedonesque this morning, tickets are now available on movietickets.com.

See you at the movies. And "aim to misbehave."