Social media

Bloggers liable for statements about products? Maybe, says FTC.

April 6, 2009 by Susan Getgood

According to several news reports, the Federal Trade Commission is currently reviewing its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials.

The expected revisions would hold companies responsible for the statements made by bloggers who received products or samples, and also make the bloggers themselves liable for their statements about the products.

Whoa Nelly! What happened to opinion? Freedom of speech?

As Linsey Krolik writes on Silicon Valley Moms Blog, will this have a chilling effect on bloggers’ ability to give honest reviews? Will it check the growing influence of bloggers on consumer opinion?

I am not a lawyer, but I have testified at the FTC and before a House sub-committee in a past life, so I have some inkling of how this all works 🙂

Here’s my take.

First and foremost, the expected revisions are just that — expected. Nevertheless, bloggers should still protect themselves NOW. Have a good disclaimer, especially if you review products. Linsey covers that nicely in her post. You should also be very clear about contests and giveaways. David Wescott (It’s Not a Lecture) and I (Marketing Roadmaps) did a pair of posts about that a couple years ago.

Second, we need to stay on top of the discussion of the new guidelines. Bloggers are consumers, albeit with voices, and we must make sure that our opinions are heard. We are WHO the FTC is supposed to protect, and we should remind them of that fact.

Two key issues in FTC regulation of Word-Of-Mouth

I think there will be two key issues:

The extent to which the blogger is acting as an agent for the company. Is there compensation, especially beyond the value of the product reviewed? Is there direction on what or when to write?
Whether the content is identified as opinion or stated as fact.

The sponsored post companies (like Izea), blog networks that offer sponsored posts, and the client companies are potentially the most affected by the FTC moves. Possible changes to their business model give them sufficient incentive to weigh in on the arguments. I would expect them to move vigorously to limit both the company’s and the blogger’s liability. BUT, bloggers should be aware that in a commercial transaction, the company is first and foremost going to protect itself. Not you. Act accordingly.

Break it down

The most defensible position, clearly, is when you offer an opinion about a product that you purchased. That is the opinion of a customer, and not subject to advertising guidelines. It starts to blur when we factor in blogger outreach. Companies provide bloggers with product information, including products for review, which they generally don’t expect back. In this case, I expect the FTC will look at how much direction the company gives the blogger and the total value received by the blogger.

Our job is to remind the FTC, and the companies, that firms have been providing product and product samples to customers for years. As long as the blogger is free to share his or her opinion, no restrictions, it is just that, consumer opinion. And last I looked, opinion was free speech.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (First Amendment to the Constitution)

Blogger Relations: A Refresher Course

March 28, 2009 by Susan Getgood

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?

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: followed 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.

Blogger outreach, shared values, and cotton swabs?

March 18, 2009 by Susan Getgood

There are two key elements to successful blogger relations: the execution and the pitch. A successful campaign needs BOTH to be good. Today we are going to talk about the pitch.

I’ve written before about the secret sauce for the perfect pitch and earlier this year, I introduced a model I’ve been working with to find what I call the shared values between companies and bloggers/customers.

The key to using this model is stepping away from the features and functionality of your product. Look for issues that both the company and the customer care about, and build your program around these mutual or shared values. As the model shows, you start with how the customer uses the product, but you don’t stop there. You’ve got to move onto the emotional. What do they care about when they use your product? What other things do they care about?

You then link these things to your product. Starting with features, but also including attributes — the intangibles you want people to associate with your products — and corporate values.

Now, while this is never an easy process, it is a bit easier with new and entertainment products. But how does it work with a product that’s been on the market for a while. Or one that is almost a commodity.

For example, cotton swabs.

Is it possible to develop a pitch related to cotton swabs that would resonate with bloggers? I say yes.

In fact, I’ve got two, both aimed at parent bloggers.

These examples use information from Unilever’s Q-tips brand, but I imagine the programs would work equally well for Johnson & Johnson’s Cotton Swabs brand. The first example skews toward families with younger children; the second is applicable to a broader age range.

This screen shot identifies the key market USE segments for cotton swabs: family care, home care, and arts & crafts.

Putting aside beauty uses, let’s focus on two areas that relate specifically to families.

First, family care. Cotton swabs are permanently linked to ear care. The brands don’t even need to remind us of this. In fact, the main concern is to make sure we don’t poke the swab too far into our ear. Now, step into the shoes of a parent of a younger child. Say ages one to three or four years of age.

An issue that tends to be top of mind is ear infections. How to protect their toddlers. If their child is prone to ear infections, should they get the ear tubes or not?

To reach these bloggers – a very active parent blogging segment – why not develop a website and program devoted to education and information about this critical parenting issue? This is valuable information that bloggers will want to share with their friends and readers. While not about the product specifically, it is in that shared value segment of ear care and family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

As I noted above, my second example skews a bit older, and relates directly to the use of cotton swabs in arts & crafts projects. Any parent of an elementary school age child knows what a big deal arts & crafts can be. I often wonder whether they are evaluating the child or the parents, but that’s a topic for another day (and my other blog).

Parents love to see their children recognized. Kids love recognition. Hold a crafts contest for kids, promoted either exclusively or extensively through blogs, with both blogger outreach and online advertising. Obviously cotton swabs need to be involved, either as tools or materials, but the less rigid the criteria, the better. The prizes don’t have to be that big. In fact, offering more prizes to more children is preferable to a few BIG prizes. What makes it work isn’t the value of the prize. It’s that the child stands a really decent chance of being recognized.

The shared value space? Recognizing the achievement of children. Family.

Relevant – check. Blogworthy – check. Consistent with brand – check.

Forget about your features. Look for the shared values with your customers. That’s where you’ll find a pitch that resonates for them and delivers results for your brand.

Engaging with your community, your customer

February 23, 2009 by Susan Getgood

Engaging the customer. It goes well beyond those stalwarts of mass marketing, the original 4Ps: product price place and promotion.

Certainly we start there, because our product is the first place we’ll find a shared interest with our customer. The customer needs or wants it and the company wishes to sell it.

In a mass market, we could stop at this and use our traditional tool chest of advertising and public relations to communicate at our prospective buyer.

But strictly speaking, the mass markets of Darren Stephens and Don Draper don’t exist anymore.

Long tail products find their buyers online and mass market products find value in niche marketing.

Nearly every mass consumer product is sliced diced and tailored to ever smaller focused needs. Just look at laundry detergent. At my last count, one side of an entire aisle at Target was devoted to Tide. Multiple varieties, each available in multiple packaging options to meet a perceived multiplicity of laundry requirements. Overkill? Almost certainly. Nevertheless it is the market reality.

Amidst this continued clutter, brands needed new ways to attract the customer.

They found it online. Through online advertising and websites. And the motherlode. The ever expanding communities of their customers engaging with social media – blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, online portals.

Companies and their PR agencies began pitching bloggers about their products. Some well. Most not so much. But pitching isn’t engaging the customer.

To engage implies a closer relationship than the simple exchange of gelt for goods. To engage implies a conversation, not an advertising campaign or product pitch. To engage expects mutual respect and a balanced exchange – everybody gets value out of the deal. As I said at the Mom 2.0 Summit Friday, nobody gets screwed… unless of course they want to.

In my opinion, engagement demands that the company bring more to the table than just its product. In the offline world, we generally don’t have conversations about products, unless we are highly invested in them. Entertainment products, video games, cars. Perhaps. Cereal, laundry soap and soup? Not so much. Why should companies expect it to be ANY different in the blogosphere?

If you want to have a conversation with someone, you need to engage over something that both parties care about. Otherwise it is a very short conversation.

When I do workshops I often show this Technorati data. Technorati’s rankings may be rank, but the 2008 research offers some good data about bloggers. Scan down this list of reasons why bloggers blog. I’m sure you’ll notice that “help companies promote their products” isn’t on this list.

Likewise, people generally don’t form communities around product features. Around products, yes, but not as a channel for promotional messages from the vendor. Around the passion for what the product lets them do, make, achieve.

This is where the concept of relevance comes in. You have to make your product relevant to the needs of the community, the needs of the blogger. Put the product in the blogger’s context; get beyond how someone uses your product to the why of it. Why does the customer want to use your product? How does it fit into her life?

This puts you down the path to discover the values you, the brand/company, share with your customers,. These values form the basis for better pitches and a long term sustainable relationship with your customer.

How to find the shared values

For some products – for example entertainment and technology where trial might be a draw or folks do get caught up in exciting new features – you may be able to build an outreach campaign on features. Some of the most successful campaigns I’ve seen recently are indeed for entertainment franchises like Wii and amusement parks, and trial or trip forms a big part of the program.

But consumer product goods are a bit harder. Many product marketing folks get caught up in features, but to be really effective you’ve got to go beyond that and relate to something the blogger is doing. How the product fits their life, not how they can make their life fit your pitch. Relevance. Context.

Here’s an example recently sent to me by a mom blogger, a pitch for mouthwash.

(click on image for larger size)

I can’t be any clearer than this: the bullying example in the pitch is totally lame. It is a made-up problem.

And it’s a shame because they could have done a much more relevant pitch related to a parent’s desire to establish good oral hygiene habits with the kids. Sure, it’s been done before – most good ideas are not new, just new or better executions – but so what…. It is relevant, and that’s what really matters when reaching out to an online community. It doesn’t have to be new, just “new to you.”

In this economy, budgets are going to be a lot tighter. Relevance isn’t as critical when you can offer an all expenses spa weekend in exchange for sitting through a few product pitches. Still important , but we can easily imagine someone who doesn’t care that much about the product going if the event is slick enough. That won’t fly anymore.

Events of that scale have always been out of reach of small to mid size companies, and increasingly won’t be in the budget for big ones either.

We have to be more clever.

We have to meet the customer, the blogger in her context. Not expect her to blithely sign up for ours.

I have been working on a model that explains HOW to do this. How to find the context or shared values. It’s hard to explain it in a blog post, but here’s the mind map.

I’ve promised to share an example of how to apply this to consumer products. My next post will apply it to cotton swabs, as close to a commodity as I think you can find in the consumer markets.

This post is based in part on material prepared for the Mom 2.0 Summit panel on Communities.

Social media

Whoa Nelly! What happened to opinion? Freedom of speech?

Two key issues in FTC regulation of Word-Of-Mouth

Break it down

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