Social media

Auld lang syne

January 1, 2009 by Susan Getgood

Over the past month, there were three interesting brouhahas in the social media blogosphere. While I didn’t write about them at the time, I did tweet and comment here and there. I decided to bring them back for today’s post, for old times sake, because each one has implications for topics that I plan to cover in the coming year.

First, in early December there was a massive twitter-storm about a sponsored post social media consultant Chris Brogan wrote on his Dad-o-matic blog. Long story short, his post was part of an Izea campaign for Kmart, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posed some legitimate questions about sponsored posts , and a Twitter storm erupted.

I was mostly offline that weekend, but the general gist was that many questioned Chris’s integrity for writing a sponsored post, arguing that it compromised his objectivity and ethics.

When I came back online at the end of the weekend and saw the fallout, including more than a few posts discussing Chris’s actions, including his, all I could say was “huh?” I had seen the post some time earlier on Dad-o-matic and really didn’t think much of it.

While I have my concerns about the paid post model, particularly in its earliest forms which did not require disclosure, Chris was very clear that this was a sponsored post, the content was appropriate for Dad-o-matic, and there was a charity angle. No biggie, and I had a hard time imagining how participating in this Izea campaign could compromise Chris’s ethics or expertise. As I tweeted, folks should be less judgmental, and perhaps look to their own glass house.

Twits indeed.

There’s no question that the Izea model is an improvement over predecessor Pay Per Post. But… I still have a few concerns. Here are some topics that I plan to explore in the coming year.

The model seems much closer to mass market advertising than it does to blogger relations. Will big companies take this expedient route, thinking it a shortcut to robust relationships with their customers online?
Some sponsored campaigns are starting to have a cookie-cutter feel. Variations on theme of the blogger shopping spree or giveaway product, and contests for the blog’s readers. There’s nothing wrong with any of these approaches. I recommend them to clients. But, without a specific creative angle that reinforces branding, when do they all start to blur?
Is the sponsored post model really just for big companies with big budgets? And big bloggers with big audiences? What happened to the long tail and niche markets? Something for everyone? How do smaller companies compete? Ditto, niche bloggers with smaller but loyal audiences.

Topic Two: Embargoes.

The most recent salvo comes from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch who announced mid-month with his usual fanfare that TechCrunch would no longer honor embargoes.

“PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.”

I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised; Arrington’s anti-PR polemic has grown increasingly strident over the years, sometimes for good cause, sometimes not so much. This post was just the latest in a long line.

It is also more than a warning shot that he’ll break the embargo. Read between the lines – Arrington wants to break the tech news, and unless you give him an exclusive, he’s increasingly likely to NOT cover your news.

What does this have to do with blogs? You can’t really generalize the typical blogger’s reaction to an embargo request from Arrington. TechCrunch isn’t a blog; it’s a tech publication that uses the blog form. It’s competing with c|net, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and so on. Companies have to decide if TechCrunch is the most important outlet for their news. If so, giving Arrington the exclusive — a real exclusive — may make sense. If not, TechCrunch gets the news when it hits the wire, and you may not get any coverage there at all. That’s your call.

Will bloggers honor embargoes? I believe they will, if approached with respect. Will they honor an embargo that is noted on the top of a mass emailed press release? Unlikely. A journalist wouldn’t either.

In the coming year, we’ll talk about some of the positive ways companies can include bloggers in their confidential plans. In some ways it is far easier than with journalists. Remember, bloggers are your customers too. They like to be involved with your products at an early stage, and will keep your confidence.

Topic Three. Regular readers know how much I love lists and rankings. Not.

On more than one occasion, I’ve discussed the flaws in these rankings on Marketing Roadmaps, and I follow my friend Ike Pigott’s periodic exposes on how to game the systems with delight.

Erin Kotecki Vest, known to many as the Queen of Spain, raised the topic again last month. Her complaint started with the recent rise of Twitter ranking mechanisms, but the comments quickly expanded to embrace the issue in total. And particularly how these faulty constructs often are used to imply legitimacy, expertise and influence.

That’s what we’ll look at in the coming year. How do you determine a blog’s influence? Or a blogger’s expertise? The ranking systems, flawed as they are, impart some information, but we need to look much much farther than that. Most Internet ranking systems can be gamed and use flawed inputs. Business decisions should not be made on the basis of a popularity contest.

As Groucho Marx once said:

“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”

Finally, please check out Toby Bloomberg’s 2006/2009 retrospective post. Going into 2006, she asked a number of social media bloggers about their wishes for the coming year. She reached out to us all again this year, and it is very interesting to see how things have changed. And yet not.

I’ll leave you with a bagpipe group’s rendition of Auld Lang Syne and Amazing Grace.

Happy New Year!

Change?

November 20, 2008 by Susan Getgood

What changes do I think the Obama administration will bring? That’s the meme with which I was recently tagged by David Wescott.

Hopefully, there will be a slew of political and policy changes that will make this country a better place to live and less of a joke overseas. Hopefully, we will edge closer to universal health care. Hopefully, the badly-listing ship that is our economy will right itself, the slip-slide of the Supreme Court to the far-right will be reversed and we’ll find a way out of the Iraqi conflict sooner rather than later. But those are all simply hopes for change. There are many more factors at play than one man, one administration and a stirring call to change, “Yes we can.”

What interests me from a marketing and social media perspective is a fundamental change that has already happened that makes these hopes realistic. As David says in his post, Obama understood that the instant communication and connectivity made possible by mobile and social media technologies fundamentally changed the nature of the game:

President-elect Obama didn’t create this change. He’s said so himself. He simply understood its existence. He used the tools people use today to communicate with each other, and by doing so he convinced us he knows politics is not a lecture.

Now he has to prove he gets it, and I’m not just talking about social media. We’re long past the point where you convince people you get it by publishing a blog or putting together a spiffy YouTube channel. They’re just tools. He’ll have to listen and respond. (emphasis mine, not David’s)

Ah, that’s the key. Use the tools to listen. And respond. Not simply to broadcast your point of view.

That’s the real interactive change I see in an incoming Obama administration. The key players — all the way up to the man himself — actively use the tools themselves. One of the top transition stories this week has been whether Obama will be able to keep his beloved Blackberry. An NPR segment yesterday described Attorney General designate Eric Holder as a “technology junkie.” It’s been widely reported that Obama intends to have a laptop in the Oval Office, another first.

Contrast that to an increasingly disconnected, soon-to-be-former President GW Bush who admitted in 2003 that he doesn’t read newspapers and the stunningly uninformed Sarah Palin who couldn’t recall the name of a single newspaper she reads.

This means that there’s a better than average chance that the incoming administration “gets it,” that they understand that our democracy requires a conversation with the American public, not a benevolent (?) dictator deciding what is best for the American public.

It isn’t that they used Twitter in the campaign or that the weekly address to the nation will be archived on YouTube. Both of those things are cool, but politicians have been embracing online tools, with varying degrees of success, for some time now. That’s not the change.

The change is that these communication tools, which are so much a part of our lives, are also part of theirs. These tools that we use to stay informed, to collaborate, to converse, to respectfully disagree, to battle it out, to reach consensus, to connect are their tools too. They don’t cut themselves off from the rapid flow of information. Like us, they revel in the hum of the Blackberry that says new email has arrived.

For all these reasons, I want to believe, I really do, that the first and most important change of an Obama administration is that the President-elect understands that the President is the representative by, for, and of the people. Our proxy, not our replacement.

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Final snarky aside: Of course, it helps that Obama was actually elected president, versus being named president. I can see how the Bush administration got confused there.

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Oops. Forgot to tag some others. I’d like to read what KD Paine, Elisa Camahort Page and Doug Haslam think. What changes will an Obama administration bring?

One week outside the echo chamber

October 17, 2008 by Susan Getgood

I’ve been on the road since Tuesday morning, travelling first to a Chicago suburb to give my social media 101 presentation to the consumer relations group of an international consumer products company and then to Cincinnati to give a similar talk to the Ohio Conference of AAA Clubs Annual Meeting.

Presenting to mostly newbie audiences stands in stark contrast to my recent panels at Blogworld Expo and BlogHer, where the folks in the audience were active social media users looking to expand their knowledge about specific things, whether it be monetization of the blog, how to balance personal privacy with public blogging or the best way to integrate Twitter and blogger relations into a social media strategy.

The events this week were also convened for entirely different purposes than to talk social media. The first was an offsite for the consumer relations team and the second an annual meeting of AAA affiliate clubs in Ohio. My social media presentations were one very small part of a packed agenda focused on business issues, not blogging.

It was an incredibly refreshing week outside of the social media echo chamber. While both organizations were very interested in learning about blogs and social networks, social media wasn’t the only topic of discussion. As a result, I had an opportunity to hear about the pressing issues driving their businesses.

This perspective is invaluable. We get so caught up in the echo chamber, we sometimes forget that for social media to be relevant, it has to be solving real world business problems.

Which it does. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that social media participation is a critical component for 21st century customer engagement. It just needs to be grounded in the needs of the business. And its customers.

Not the needs of the companies flogging the latest widget or tool set.

Some thoughts that were validated this week in my time outside the echo chamber.

Large multinationals face a crossroads that smaller companies may never see. Who “owns” the relationship with the customer? Both marketing and customer service/consumer relations have a legitimate “claim” to this relationship, and due to organizational size, they tend to operate in silos of responsibility.

Marketing and consumer relations also have very different reasons for listening to and engaging with customers. Marketing listens to understand what messages motivate purchase. Customer service and consumer relations are charged with resolving customer problems or complaints, and sending the customer feedback up the chain to product marketing.

But the consumer doesn’t see or care about these silos. She does NOT divide the experience with a product into before sale and after sale. She just buys a product. It is going to require executive commitment at the highest levels, cross-functional teams and deep, deep cooperation to get this right in these large multi-nationals.

AAA faces a similar challenge. While the brand is national, the clubs are locally owned, independently operated businesses. It’s a mega-franchise.

It also has more than 50 million users nationwide, which is a helluva base for an online community. The trick will be for the national organization and its clubs to figure out how to divide the responsibility for online customer engagement. Some of it needs to be done nationally. Other elements will be much more successful at the local level. Again, deep cooperation will be required.

The good news is that the organization understands that its members, current and future, are online and has started to ask the right questions.

A brief aside about AAA, since I told my flat tire horror story during the session and I expect that some of my listeners will be reading this post. I forgot to tell this story during the speech and it is one of the times I have been most glad to be an AAA member.

I’ve been a member all my driving life. When I got my license at 19, my mom gave me her used car (so she wouldn’t have to schlep me to college) and an AAA membership.

In the mid-80s, my apartment in Lawrence Mass was robbed. Stereo, tv, jewelry but most sadly, my porcelain doll collection. The responding police officers told me it was a long shot I would ever see my stolen goods again, but if I did happen to see them in a pawn shop, to call the police first and wait for them to go in and claim the goods.

I didn’t have much hope.

A few weeks later, imagine my surprise when, driving back to my office in Methuen after picking up some airline tickets for my brother at AAA in Lawrence, I happened to glance over at a pawn shop window, and saw some of my very unique porcelain dolls in the window. This was before cell phones so I pulled into a parking space, and used a pay phone to call the detectives. They came and we got my stolen property back. All my dolls.

Nothing else was recovered, but we did learn who pawned the goods (and probably stole them in the first place) and they were prosecuted for receiving stolen goods.

All because I was driving back from AAA in Lawrence on my lunch hour.

Back to my week outside the echo chamber.

I’ve decided that I definitely need a better way of introducing Twitter. It needs a demo. A screen shot and description don’t cut it with a truly neophyte audience. They don’t always ask for more explanation. Luckily, in one session where I did have some pretty confused folks, I got an opportunity at the break to show it to them on my BlackBerry and explain things a little better. Enough that I’m expecting some new followers in the near future.

It was a great week, but I am glad to be home. My deepest thanks to both organizations for inviting me into their programs. I hope they got something out of the experience. I certainly did.

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Next on Marketing Roadmaps: I taped both of my panels at BlogHer Boston, and hope to post some decent sound files over the weekend. Stay tuned! Fair warning, though: this post will only go up on the new site, so change your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions now 🙂

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Some Blogger Relations Mathoms

September 7, 2008 by Susan Getgood

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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Tags: blogger relations