Everyone needs to demonstrate ROI. This is not unique to PR or marketing or any other business unit for that matter. However, in social media there is a disconnect in the understanding and interpretation of new age methods of tracking ROI that can in many cases cannibalize the actual ROI of a campaign. A high level, blinded example illustrates my point:
We have a client – one of the largest and most widely respected companies in America, that is using social media to promote an upcoming webcast. The webcast is meant to impact a very small, niche group of people, and ROI is extremely important. The challenge faced by our client is how to justify that the people who viewed the webcast were in fact members of this niche audience. The answer? Database registration!!! Long, detailed, form-loving database registration. Name, address, gender, location, etc. etc. etc. The result? Attrition. People don’t want to spend their time filling out registration forms, particularly if they are unsure what they are registering for. Register just to view a webcast? Why? Let me guess – you’re going to be spamming me, right? The actual ROI of the webcast is cannibalized by our need to justify it.
The net result is that often times the harder we try to justify ROI, the less ROI we actually get. The return on investment from our client’s webcast is to have people view it. Not just people, but the RIGHT people. And not just view it, but ACT because of having viewed it. However, there is no direct and trackable link to that action. It is therefore our responsibility to appropriately equate changes in our audience’s behavior to their causes – the webcast in this case. However, in a world where ROI metrics like engagement, sentiment, and syndication don’t translate to the top of organizations, the rest of us are left with a real value tradeoff that looks something like this:
Where the optimal “Value” is at the point at which real ROI intersects with our ability to justify or translate that ROI up the food chain. This intersection will not always be evenly split between the two, but the graph serves for illustrative purposes.
What is the answer to the cannibalization of justification? Trust. Proficiency. The more we demonstrate ROI to management in old school terms, the more open they will be to our interpretation of the new world of ROI down the road. It takes time and demonstrated value to build this sort of trust. The unfortunate casualty of that time is the missed real ROI in the meantime.
Few PR practitioners would argue that Bloggers will play an important if not central role in their job 3 years from today. Most would agree they play a pivotal role already. Let me preface this post by saying: I am not a PR veteran. And most of my clients will attest to that. I am a web guy who landed in the PR world. This is important because even the most web savvy PR veterans most started by viewing Bloggers as low hanging fruit for their less important clients (2005-2007)… Then, as Media opportunities shrank, turned to convincing their clients that blog hits are actually BETTER than Media coverage (2007-2008), and finally wound up realizing that Bloggers would be more important than Media in the very near future (2008-2009).
On the flip side, I started on the other side of the fence – as a blog guy who viewed traditional Media as arcane from the very beginning. Why? Because I was marketing my own web property in the early 2000’s and couldn’t afford PR. Plain and simple. The point is, the following viewpoint on the difference between Media Relations and Blogger Relations comes from a different angle than most. This comes from the view of a person who has worked with Bloggers for many years, while closely observing but never myself participating in Media Relations.
Without further adieu, to summarize the difference between Media Relations and Blogger Relations:
You PITCH Media.
You ALERT Bloggers.
WOW. How anti-climactic was that? But give it a minute to sink in. The point is that you have to CONVINCE Media. With Bloggers your goal is not to convince them. It’s merely to “draw their attention to” your client/product/brand. Simple, right? From a messaging standpoint it actually makes PR’s job much easier… From a list and relationship building standpoint, however, it becomes much more challenging. For most PR practitioners, this is a very difficult transition. As the head of Social Media for two different PR firms now, I have witnessed and managed this transition in many different ways. I have found that for most PR folks, the transition to Blogger relations looks something like this:
- Draft a pitch letter to Media
- Try to think what makes Bloggers different from Media
- Re-write the Media pitch letter for Bloggers. Usually:
- Shorten the pitch
- Insert one or two colloquialisms
- Make a half-baked reference to something the Blogger posted earlier this week (trying to show that you read his/her blog religiously)
- Blast your original pitch letter to a whole bunch of Media
- “Personalize” it for Bloggers by copy/pasting your pitch into individual emails addressed to either the Blogger or his/her Blog’s name
Does this sound familiar? This is not Blogger relations. This will not get you success. Think about your last Blogger outreach campaign. What percent of Bloggers… REAL Bloggers, not traditional Media who gave you a nod on their blog because they couldn’t fit you in their publication, posted about your story? 10%? 20%? 30%?
If less than 40% of the Bloggers you reach out to are writing about your story, you are doing something wrong.
There are a few important difference between Media and Bloggers that make this true. With Media:
- Media have limited and shrinking space
- The same Media are pitched by every PR person
- Media get paid regardless of Page Views
- Media reply, analyze, question, interview, and prioritize between your story and others
On the flip side, with Bloggers:
- Bloggers can post about whatever they want, whenever they want. There are no limitations on volume of coverage
- There are new Bloggers everyday and Bloggers change tone and direction regularly… Each company/product/campaign should have a unique list of Bloggers, no matter how similar the products or companies are
- Bloggers NEED good, fresh, hot content. It’s the primary way they get paid (Page Views with ad placements)
- Of the Bloggers who respond to your initial outreach, 98% or more of them should end up posting about you, regardless of whether they are covering something else in your industry this week or not
What these differences mean to PR professionals is that pitching Media is becoming increasingly difficult… You and every other PR person in your industry have suddenly become salesmen for your client and you are working on a commission-only basis. There are fewer Media to pitch and everyone of them is getting more burdened under the weight of your collective pitches. Your job is more and more to be the ultimate CONVINCER.
Bloggers don’t have time to be convinced. Either it’s relevant to their readers or it’s not. They don’t care if it’s more interesting than the relevant “pitch” they got earlier today or not. They’ll just post both. In fact, if you waste a Blogger’s time trying to CONVINCE them to write about your client, they are more likely to move on to the next email than to write about you. Your job is not to “pitch” Bloggers. Your job is to “alert” them to information that is relevant to their readers.
Does this mean your job just got easier? NO. As most PR people will attest to, it’s usually the opposite. What this actually means is that your old skill sets are passe… All but irrelevant in fact. Of course, strategy and messaging are still highly valued. But the art of the pitch letter is all but dead. It used to take a PR or journalism graduate to draft a strong pitch letter. Any monkey can “alert” someone to a hot news story. The only marginal value from being good at “pitching” comes from being able to condense all the niceties and message points into four sentences without sounding like an S.A.T. question.
Sound grim? Think positively for a minute, this does not mean that PR people themselves are obselete. It means that our job has changed more dramatically than most believe. In 2005 and before the PR industry viewed Media lists as a commodity and pitching as a skill.
In 2010 and beyond, building the perfect Blogger list will be the skill and “pitching” will be the commodity.
The best Blogger relations campaigns do not begin with a Media pitch letter and wind up chopped and “massaged” into a Blogger pitch. The best Blogger relations campaigns front load their time finding the Bloggers who are best for their topic and merely “alert” them to it. The very best Blogger relations campaigns actually structure the meat of the campaign – what it is they are trying to get covered, around something the Bloggers in that list are likely to respond to.
I mentioned the 40% number above. If less than 40% of the Bloggers on your list end up writing about your client, there is something wrong with your approach. In top tier Blogger campaigns, I would expect to begin with a list of 50 Bloggers and end with at least 30-35 of those Bloggers writing about my client. For every Blogger who replies to my initial outreach I would expect all but maybe one to write about my client. There is no convincing to be done. If the Blogger bothers to write you back, it’s all but guaranteed he/she will write about you, so long as you don’t screw it up. This is what an effective Blogger campaign should look like:
- Build a smart, targeted list of Bloggers
- Conceptualize your outreach in a way that will be meaningful to those Bloggers’ readers
- Send individual “alerts” to each Blogger that are no longer than 4-5 sentences. MAX.
- Exchange normally just 1 email with the Bloggers who respond to you – should be more than half of the Bloggers on your list in the first 4-5 days
- Rack up blog posts from nearly every one of them within two weeks
Nice. Clean. No convincing necessary. If you want them to post more quickly, have a product sample or other incentive ready or build a campaign that has some urgency – hot news, pending end date, etc.
In fact, half the strategy in a well executed Blogger Relations campaign isn’t how to get coverage, it’s timing. How do you maintain momentum over time? If you reach out to all your Bloggers NOW, you’ll just get a quick batch of posts and then what will you do next month? But if you stretch your outreach over time, how do you generate urgency with Bloggers when you want them to post? This concern alone highlights the stark difference between Media Relations and Blogger Relations. At the end of the day, however, the real determining factor is not in the timing or strategy. It’s in the list. Build your list well and THEN you will have to worry about how you spread blog hits out over the life of a campaign…
Having reached 1,400 words in this blog post, I am going to conclude and promise to follow this post with more on HOW to build your Blogger list and some (blinded) examples of actual messages that have successfully “alerted” Bloggers and resulted in 40+ Blog posts from a list of 50 Bloggers.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of PR pros who read this blog… What say you? I’ve been crucified before for coming out on the side of “web” in a crowd of “PR” – do you think I’ve missed the mark here? Or do you agree there is a legitimate paradigm shift between Media Relations and Blogger Relations? Let me know – I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject.
If you’d like some more fodder for the fire, here are what a few other people had to say on the subject:
PR-Squared / Todd Deffren:
(I find this point PARTICULARLY interesting… And slightly misguided: “If your pitch isn’t good enough to be published as is, don’t send it”)
Full pdf from Todd: Blogger Relations Tips
Media Relations Blog (In Summary):
“1. Be relevant 2. Personalize 3. Make it easy 4. Be persistent.”
Social Cocktails:
“Bloggers are media. Get it. Right now. Stop separating it. They are in some cases, more influential than traditional media that write only for print. You should treat them in the same way that you reach out. They reach an audience that is influential. They attract readers. They matter. They’re not “different” This has been written about and discussed time and again yet for some reason, agencies are still treating bloggers as an entirely new entity. An unknown space.”
NewMediaWise:
“I tend to agree with those (including Dan Gillmor) who say anyone who chooses to write in a public forum—keep a “journal,” if you will—is in fact a “journalist.” Sure, there’s a wide disparity in writing skills (and critical thinking skills) across the blogosphere. But, face it, the number of good, generally well-regarded, and reasonably well-read bloggers out there—the vast “long tail” of what I maintain is modern journalism—already far exceeds the number of people employed in traditional journalism. Their voices are being heard. The world is changing. And it’s good to see the PR profession recognizing that, and trying to help its people understand best practices—what works and what doesn’t in communicating with bloggers.”
PR 2.0 / Brian Solis:
“The differences, and the answers, are discoverable by reading the work of bloggers and reporters before you reach out instead of simply aligning them with particular topics or industries. This is about building relationships and rising above the fray. If you’re not interested in the industry, product, or service you represent, or what the most influential voices have to say about the subject, then do us all a favor and pursue your dreams elsewhere.”
Marketing Roadmaps:
“No matter how well you know the blogger or love the blog, it’s next to impossible to read every day, every post. No one expects that you will. But, if you are going to pitch, you absolutely must check the blog before you press <send>.”
Recently there has been an ad for a UGC (user generated content) contest in heavy rotation on YouTube. Normally when I come across cool UGC contests I share them with my readers here – a little pay-it-forward from someone who pitches a lot of UGC contests myself. For this one, however, I’m just reposting their ad. Why? Because this company seems to think that their ad is all that’s important. See below:
Why on earth is this company paying oodles of money to YouTube and then wasting that space with unbranded advertisements? Is this supposed to be edgy and underground? Something only the cool kids know about? If that’s the case then you lost your audience the minute you bought real estate on the homepage of the 3rd most trafficked website in the world. With click thru rates on the decline – and social media users even less inclined to click on ads than regular internet users, paid media placements like this cannot afford to go unbranded.
Take it from someone who’s run a dozen + UGC contests for very major brands… Your ads WILL NOT generate contest entries directly. Your Facebook efforts will, your blogger outreach will, your email database marketing will. Your ADS will not generate contest entries. HOWEVER…… You will have a large number of people who come “direct” to the site and submit entries. Why? Because they see your ads as they are browsing online and then an hour later, when they get bored of whatever they were doing, they type in the URL that’s been flashing in front of them for the last 60 minutes. If your ad does not include A) the contest URL and B) the name of the brand or contest, you are wasting your money. Oodles of it.
I just sat in on the BlogWell presentation on ethics and disclosure. For background, the presentation is referencing/summarizing the Blog Council’s Disclosure Toolkit which is actually a really great document. In fact, the document itself doesn’t probably go as far as the in-person presentation did with regard to Blogger Outreach. It is the extension presented today that I take issue with.
In the document such things as disclosing who you work for when pitching a Blogger and setting the rules up front if you are sending product for review, are highlighted. All good advice, and makes sense to most of us. However the presenter today went a step farther by saying that we as PR/social media professionals have an ethical obligation to instruct the bloggers to preface their post with an official disclaimer. This, I disagree with.
The blogosphere is a casual and personal space. If you are doing your job well, you have only selected Bloggers who are naturally and legitimately interested in the type of product you sell. In many cases they may even have tried your product before and may already like it. They may just not have thought to blog about it, or you may have a new product/promotion/reason they just weren’t aware of prior to your outreach. Why then is it necessary to require a legal disclaimer before they post?
PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT arguing that you should DISCOURAGE the Blogger from posting a disclaimer if he or she wants to… That is most certainly unethical and will get you burned in a heartbeat.
This is just one person’s opinion, but I am one person who has worked with hundreds of Bloggers and secured many millions of views for clients in a dozen verticals, without ever a sniff of ethical concern from any Blogger, client, or consumer. Here is what I believe to be your ethical requirements, when distilled to their most basic form:
1. Full disclosure about who you are.
“Hi Blogger, I noticed you are interested in this type of product (which is sold by Company XYZ). I work with Company XYZ…”
2. Full disclosure that you are open to compensating the Blogger. NOTE: Compensating does not equal PAYING. Compensating should be in the form of a perk – something an employee of the company might be privy to, nothing more. If you sell packaged food items for instance, you can send the Blogger a sample with a note that you know they like blueberry flavored foods.
“… I’d be happy to send you some of Product XYZ if you’d like to check it out?”
3. No limitations or persuasions on review. It is totally permissible to point elements of your product out to the Blogger. It is NOT permissible to ask them to refrain from commenting on something or insist they only post if their review will be positive.
“… You’ll probably notice the cooling sensation.” == NOT == “… Product XYZ isn’t for everyone, we’d appreciate if you only post if you enjoy it.”
That’s it… Everything else should be self evident. Things like Don’t send the Blogger a pre-written pitch to post for you OR Don’t pay Bloggers to review something they’ve never actually tried are self evident. If you don’t understand how these are unethical, let’s be honest… You’re probably going to get nailed for something sooner or later. Even if you get away today, you’re likely cutting corners elsewhere too and like I always say… The internet leaves a paperless trail.
Assuming that you are a savvy practitionery, however, these three rules should suffice for your Blogger outreach. It is not necessary to require a legal disclaimer. Remember, this should be fun AND ethical… Relax your shoulders a little and pitch your Blogger like you’re sending a note to a friend.
As more and more marketers are taking on social media I am noticing a decline in our ability to effectively speak the same language as our customers. Just last week I was invited to, “Join in our Word of Mouth Program!” and then this morning’s Social Ad from Absolut Vodka continues to drive the point home…
The ad copy reads “Be the first to receive exclusive Visionary art, content, event invitations, drink recipes, and prize giveaways.” ……..
Marketers: YOU ARE ALL PEOPLE WITH NORMAL LIVES TOO! Can you imagine going on a hiking trip with your friends and following it up by saying, “Hey buddy, I’ll get you all the content from this weekend as soon I get back to my computer”??
Is it being nit-picky? Sure. But it underscores the point that too many marketers are talking to themselves. “Word of Mouth Program” ? This is terminology used in the conference room, not the living room. “Be the first to receive content”? You would think someone was using a bad ESL dictionary if you heard them say that out loud.
Rule of thumb here: Follow the Conference Room vs. The Living Room rule
If it would sound natural in a conference room, but awkward in a living room, you are talking to yourself.
When Facebook first started letting users choose their own vanity URL (facebook.com/somethingyouchoose), there was originally a notification at the top of your page when you logged in. That notice is now gone, so how can you still pick your own URL?
Simple. Visit: http://www.facebook.com/username/
It will step you through the process. You can also visit this URL to set vanity URLs for pages that you own (as in a company or brand page). Facebook has limitations on which pages can be customized – Fan Pages must have at least 1,000 Fans and have been created before May, 2009, for instance.
If you own a page that has NOT been customized yet, I strongly recommend doing so. I managed to grab my name the minute Facebook opened up vanity URLs (visit me at http://www.facebook.com/pauldyer now), but not all were so lucky. I called my friend Kevin Mitchell to grab his 20 minutes after getting mine and facebook/kevinmitchell and /kmitchell had both been snagged up already.
Critical Mention is one of my favorite PR vendors. Their product is slick, smart, and applies social media technologies to traditional PR needs. However, Techcrunch reported this morning on a new site that threatens to upset their business model. SnapStream’s recently launched TV Trends product, which is amusingly similar to Google Trends, allows you to search for keyword mentions in broadcast reports.
There is no doubt that Critical Mention catalogues more reports and offers more robust tools for accessing, downloading, and analyzing keyword mentions, but nobody likes to see a competitor who offers their service for… Well… Free.
I was interested in recent broadcast mentions of “Breast Cancer”…
Richard Edelman had a great post this morning. It discussed how PR must evolve to embrace social media. More than anything else, the post made clear to me that traditional PR pros are (finally) starting to get this social media thing. Sure, Richard has written his blog for 5 years now and Edelman is clearly a company that takes the social media opportunity seriously (as witnessed by their social media practice’s many rebrands, reorgs, scattered bloggers, etc.). But being interested in the social media opportunity and actually getting what it means from a business perspective are two very different things.
Richard may have been blogging in 2005, but as this rather pointed criticism from Shel Holtz points out, he wasn’t exactly an ace at it:
“I find it appalling that he is ether too lazy or too self-centered to bother to link to other bloggers. Most recently, he reports on having lunch with the UK’s Suw Charman, one of England’s top-ranked bloggers. He doesn’t even bother to link to her.”
This morning’s post from Richard contained 21 links by my count… Borderline overkill by most standards (do we really need Wikipedia’s definition of YouTube?). For those who clicked on Shel’s post above, his criticism continued by saying, “Any blogger soon learns that links are the blogophere’s currency. Why is he so damned cheap?” I think it’s safe to say that Richard has learned to loosen his wallet (although he seems to be disproportionately infatuated with Wikipedia).
More important than Richard’s own journey toward blogging betterment are the messages he conveys in this morning’s post which are, dare I say… Shockingly good. Let’s look at his six key points on social media:
- Integrate search into PR
- Mobilize the influencers
- Inform the conversation
- Every company a media company
- Be present and consistent everywhere
- Democratic and decentralized
I’ll be damned… He’s right. And from a true to life, old school PR guy. This is a solid and thoughtful philosophy for your approach to social media. Notice the only major missing component is a shout out to transparency… Something he has missed opportunities on before (when blasted for paying bloggers to travel around the country and blog “organically” about how much they love Wal-Mart, Richard responded by basically saying it was the bloggers’ fault for not telling the world Edelman was paying them).
But other than a note about the transparency in PR/social media, I think it’s safe to say that Old World PR is Finally Starting to Get Social Media. Heck, a few years from now we may even find that Old World “Social Media Experts” will have actually DONE social media before… And what a world that would be.
As reported by TechCrunch, beginning this weekend, Facebook will (finally) begin allowing you to pick your own vanity URL. This is a great opportunity for personal branding, given the Google juice that Facebook profiles have. It’s also a great chance for your corporate clients to lock in pages for brand, corporate and product names. Facebook has taken steps to avoid squatters who would sit on your Facebook domain and extort money, but it’s still a lot less messy if you just lock them up yourself.
More details direct from Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130
The details are still a little “cloudy” but Virgin America has announced an upcoming contest with Google Apps. The winner will receive a free laptop and a year of free flying on VA. The contest sounds interesting – requiring people to be online simultaneously in order to solve problems. It’s unclear whether there will be lesser prizes for other winners, which is an important part of making this type of skill-based contest a success.
The one thing that IS clear is that Virgin America was smart to launch this contest in conjunction with Google Apps. While their previous social media contests have floundered somewhat, there is a surefire element of success when you launch with a partner who has the world’s largest online audience.
Not sure what the schedule looks like on June 24th, but I was intrigued enough to surrender my contest email address… Who knows, maybe I’ll be competing for that year of free flying.
