I’ll be in New York for the next few days for The Next Big Idea conference. If any bloggers want to get together for a drink, send me an email to my first name at ryananderson.ca.
How NOT to pitch bloggers
Following my post on How to Pitch Bloggers, I want to post a link to Darren Barefoot’s (another fellow Canuck) post which details exactly how NOT to pitch bloggers.
Lessons here:
- Don’t begin with "Dear Webmaster"
- Don’t talk to bloggers like they’re idiots
- Don’t pitch to blogs that obviously are not related to your content
- Referring to people by their general title rather than their name is a big time-saver
All of these seem pretty obvious, but I’m sure that most of the blog pitches that will occur over the next year or so will be low-level workers instructed that they need "online buzz" by some VP who doesn’t really know what that means.
What is the future of the PR Pro?
In an interview between Dan Greenfield of Bernaisesource, and Brad Berens who is the executive editor of iMediaConnection, Berens touches on an excellent point about where the job of PR is going.
The job of the PR person just got a LOT harder. There is so much more to keep track of now. Technology can help — free Google alerts, Technorati, etc. — but it’s a tooth-and-nail fight to keep from being merely reactive.
Very true. The sad thing is that I don’t see a lot of PR pros outside the blogosphere understanding this. Many are still happy to continue on the status quo and relegate blogs to "just another website."
I think the most important takeaway of the interview for PR people is our changing role within an organization:
The best thing that people in your role can do is to manage UP, to educate CEOs, CMOs and COOs about how much chatter is going on. The PR folks need to integrate closely with marketing, as closely as they currently do with legal. That’s on the internal side.
Sure, as a PR person, YOU understand social media, blogs, the changing blah blah blah of PR, but if your CEO is still stuck in the old way of thinking, you’re much more likely to deal with crises – and with much higher stakes.
Maybe it’s because I started my career as a marketing guy, but I’ve always been of the mind that marketing and PR have to be on the same team – especially now that the line between the two is getting so blurry. We still each have our own tasks, but the overlap is getting bigger and bigger.
As much as it is our job to educate the public about the issues we are working with, it is our job to educate executives within the company about how PR looks now, and how it’s changing their jobs.
You don’t know what you’re doing
In reading this post from the Fast Company blog, I immediately thought of almost every project I’ve ever worked on in my professional career. PR is the art of making it seem like you know what you’re doing, and then being really good at figuring it out before anyone realizes you’re a fraud.
"You need to reach doctors with your message? CEOs of law firms? Illiterate librarians with diaper fetishes? That’s what we do best!"
I usually tell younger people who ask me about a career in PR that the only two things you need to make it are spectacular writing skills and to be insanely intelligent. Not only to have a breadth of knowledge, but to know what you don’t know, and more importantly where to find it. In order to make it in this business, you need to love knowledge. When I think of all the useless crap I know about airborne allergens and carpet care, about the legalities of service marks, obesity trends and import tarrifs on chicken in Canada, I always wonder about what kind of useful thing could have occupied those byte sectors. Maybe it could have been how to properly boost a car, or how to spell the word "deperate" right the first time.
You can stop pretending you know what you’re doing. I know you’re making everything up as you go (hoping nobody notices). It’s OK though – that’s not where your problems are coming from. Rather, your problems are coming from the fact that you think other people know what they’re doing. It’s an illusion that’s wreaking havoc in your life.
Imagine how much different the PR business would be if we all admitted that we didn’t always know what we were doing. I can’t imagine it would be good for monthly billings, but it certainly would be freeing.
What getting my bike stolen taught me about PR
I’ll be honest: I was less than zen when I walked out of my house to find my bike had been liberated from its lock during the night. There was a lot of swearing and impotent rage, but I’ve since calmed down a little, and tried to make the best of a bad situation by taking a lesson from the whole experience.
As they say – when life hands you lemons, shut up and eat your goddamn lemons.
The first thing I learned is that while social media can have an immediate effect on a company’s bottom line, it cannot shatter a reputation earned from having a good product. My first thought as I held the cut lock in my hand: "God damn, I wish I had bought a Kryptonite lock."
The second thing I learned when I called the place I bought the bike from three months ago (yeah) was that the people you have answering your phones can dramatically affect the perception of the company. The first girl I talked to was unsympathetic, unhelpful and generally unsmart. I’d always been happy with the service they provided, but I almost walked away completely and bought my new bike somewhere else. Instead, I emailed the owner of the company, from whom I had bought the bike originally.
Which leads me to the third thing I learned – a simple customer service gesture can make a lifelong customer. When I emailed the owner, he offered to loan me a bike until I bought a new one. They’ve got tonnes of used bikes in the shop, so the gesture was small, but at the same time, extremely meaningful to an existing customer.
Long story short, I’m buying my new bike from the same place, and I’m buying a Kryptonite lock. That is, unless I can find a lock with an insurance policy that will hunt down the person who stole the bike and give me five minutes alone in a locked room with them. I would pay any amount of money for that.
Who’s listening – and more importantly, who’s talking?
There has been a lot of talk recently about the impact of the blogosphere on a product or a company. Some accuse bloggers of being rabble-rousing communists drunk on power, hell-bent on making companies run the way they deem fit. Others view it as the responsibility of companies to listen to their individual customers and respond to each of them in kind.
The answer, it seems, lies somewhere in between the two extremes.
The reality of online buzz is that the only way to ensure that nobody talks about your product is to make it completely unremarkable. There’s a reason that nobody talks about their showerhead or their favourite brand of toilet paper online – it’s because nobody talks about it in real life either. As I have said before, there are only two types of people who create buzz about a product online:
- Extremely happy people.
- Extremely pissed off people.
The only way to get your product talked about is to ensure that your product, your customer service, your advertising or your company in general positively delights or angers your customers. If you have miserable customer service and draconian policies, people are going to hear about it – and likely from Jeff Jarvis.
If, on the other hand, you go out of your way to give great customer service, people are going to hear about it too. They’re probably not going to announce it as often or with as much passion as when you screw up, but if you make enough individual customers happy, you’re going to develop a reputation for making people happy. The same is true for the opposite, though that reputation is not nearly as easy to shake.
So what does that mean for the influence of bloggers? The blogosphere is a brilliant barometer of your success, and one that people are going to check before investing in a relationship with your company. In that respect, the blog influence is huge – bloggers have become global opinion leaders in their respective knowledge circles. Companies need to listen to bloggers, not so bloggers can dictate how business is run, but because they represent a larger community, and will report back to that community how the company really conducts itself.
However, we must always keep in mind that bloggers are not representative samples of a given customer base. Sure, the percentage of bloggers will skew high with various products, but for the average everyday consumer stuff, we have to remember that we are a specific market. Sometimes a little more educated, usually a little more geeky, and seemingly more prone to outrage than the average consumer.
The effect that bloggers cause is for now, short term. Companies that are most affected by blogstorms can easily bounce back, but as more and more casual consumers start to develop their online voice, dusting oneself off after a blog knock-out is going to get more difficult.
At the same time, bloggers must be careful not to tarnish the reputation they have developed. Already, the image of torch-wielding extremists has been conjured by many critics, and if bloggers continue making demands of the corporate world, that image may sap the influence from the blogosphere one boycott at a time.
Just think of how much stock the average consumer puts in activist groups. That’s not what we want to become.
Companies have to remember this – blog buzz as a general indicator of where you stand in the mind of the consumer, but don’t forget about the majority of your consumers who don’t live online.
The blogosphere is a barometer. Ignoring it before you go out to sea could be disastrous. Viewing it as an infallible metric of your customer base, however, may be just as short-sighted.
Dell launches blog, suddenly everyone an expert
Only in blogland would a company launching a blog be considered news, but hey – I’ll admit to being social media nerd, so I’m going to write about it too.
Dell, if you’re unfamiliar, is one of those companies that we PR bloggers are talking about when we refer to clueless old-school companies who are too big and Hell-bent on control to ever enter into a conversation with their market. Apparently, however, there are still some free-thinking communicators with enough sway to convince the company with one of the worst reputations for customer service in the blogosphere to take that leap of faith and start a-bloggin’.
Steve Rubel, Jeff Jarvis and countless others have offered their (actual) expert opinion on how to make the Dell one2one blog work. Dell would do well to heed this advice. I’m not even going to bother putting in my two cents, since the big guys have said pretty well all there is to say.
I’ll tell you what, though – reading through the comments on this thing, I would HATE to be the guy who had to spend his time responding to them. It seems that every self-proclaimed blogging expert in the world has taken it upon themselves to tell Dell what they should do with the blog and how.
Ranging from “drivel” to “such a boring blog” from someone who calls themselves “Microsoft Employee,” to rants about customer service and complaints that Michael Dell himself isn’t writing daily (hint: CEOs are busy) Dell has opened Pandora’s box for customer conversation, and there’s no closing it now.
Here’s how I predict it will play out:
- “Everyone hates us! Let’s start a blog!”
- “Welcome to the blogosphere – here is everything that is wrong with you.”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we grow!”
- “Um… yeah… I was trying to download Comet Cursor on my computer, and everything froze. What should I do?”
- “In order to make sure that we can address comments in a timely fashion, we’ll have to moderate them.”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “We’re trying! Bear with us as we continue to grow!”
- Blogosphere: “Rabble, rabble, rabble!”
- “Everyone hates us even more now. Blogs are failures – let’s go back to shouting at our customers about how great we are.”
- Blogosphere: “RABBLE!!! RABBLE, RABBLE!”
*fin*
Blogging Emails
I’m of the mind that anything you have to say that can make you look bad probably shouldn’t be said in an email. That’s extra true when it comes to pitching what are essentially strangers.
I have had a number of emails blogged verbatim – most of them were pitches, so no big deal, but it nonetheless surprised me. When I came across an email from another PR person in a group I belonged to, I had one of those “this is so painfully obvious” moments that make you shake your head and wonder why the hell you never thought of this before.
His email was simply appended with:
this email is: [X] blogable [ ] ask first [ ] private
I think this is a great idea. Of course, if someone’s out to ruin you, a line like this isn’t going to help, but I think in most cases that bloggers have enough respect for one another to abide by the wishes of the sender. Moreover, if you’re writing something that you want blogged, this may help the thought occur to the person you’re emailing.
del.icio.us and PR
If you’re anything like I was a few months ago, you can tell that del.icio.us is a really powerful tool – you’re just not sure what to make of it, or really, what to do with it. As I explored it and adopted it more and more into my normal PR day, I discovered a lot of really intriguing uses for it.
Steve Rubel’s latest post, “Fifteen Things I Learned from del.icio.us” is a must-read for the novice, and even more advanced users will learn a few tricks from it.
Ham-handed PR approaches
I wrote a few days ago about how companies who are not ready to lose control should stay out of the whole realm of social media. I will add quickly to this that not only should they not try to add social media public relations to their marketing mix, but they should stay away from it altogether.
Chris Thilik and Mack Collier both post excellent analyses of Paramount’s latest bone-headed move to issue a cease-and-disist order to The Movie Blog’s ISP, resulting in his site going down without receiving so much as a two-line email in advance.
This is a blogger who said nothing but positive things about the project in question, and even complied with a request to remove other pictures from his site. And yet, this is how they chose to reward the free publicity simply because they didn’t control it.
I won’t bother expounding on this, since both Mack and Chris have said everything I could have said and more, but I urge you to read both of them and treat this case as a case study in how not to deal with bloggers.
Having worked with heavily litigious clients in the past, I can say with authority that lawyers can be both the best friend and the sworn enemy of communication. However, in most of the cases I’ve encountered, lawyers do not understand the communications process any more than we understand commercial litigation, and when legal outranks communications, they have a lot of potential to completely screw things up, and end up biting the hand that feeds them.
