GETTING PERSONAL ALERT!

Back in your box Darika

The Background

I don’t normally blog and talk about “feelings”, this has always been a blog that’s professional and not personal in nature, but damn it, this week it got personal.

As you know I was involved with the Social Collective Conference. First off, I want to say that I don’t generally support paid-for Social Media conferences, but having already agreed to join Shannon at the event I threw my heart and soul into trying to give value at the event.

I’m not just saying that. I really did. I felt a huge personal responsibility to show value to each and every attendee. I turned up at 9am and stayed until the very end to ensure the event and speakers got my full support. I didn’t just swan in, grand stand, then swan out.

The Investment

We keep saying this has been 6 months in the making and that’s the god’s honest truth

• We did not come up with our concept the week before (note how different the brochure blurb was from the final online blurb, this is how much we kept at changing/improving the presentation). In fact this is combination of our collective thinking from years working in the industry
• We did not pull out an old powerpoint the night before and shuffle some slides
• We were willing to invest time & money into giving everyone something they could take away and actually use after the conference (so did Hold)

To be dismissed as “braindead gurus” and for persons not even present in the room to whine “social doesn’t fit into 6 boxes, there’s loads of crossover etc” (forehead slap no sh*t sherlock, that’s exactly our point) has got me rattled.

The Beef

Don’t get me wrong, the feedback about our idea and infographic from the event was mostly pretty positive and many people got what we were trying to do …however, some people totally missed the point.

The point was

• We don’t know everything
• We don’t present ourselves as self-styled gurus
• Here’s a V1.0 we are throwing open for debate before trying to lock this down into something even MORE useful & workable.

It’s OK to miss the point, that’s fine, but to then come after us aggressively, whine, or even take the p*ss out of our presentation style (yeah, you did) is disappointing.

Did anyone notice that we got straight to the point and then handed over the control to the audience in about 20 minutes? People sit there b*tching & complaining at conferences – we know we do – but why is the default to criticise or sulk silently when the floor is opened?

That’s right. We ASKED for feedback. Why can’t you give feedback? Why do some people fall in to petty griping with no solution offered.

I went and saw a production of Educating Rita last night. In the play the tutor explains to Rita that “to critique” something is different than “to critcise“. To critique is objective, references other valued opinions, and weighs up the relative values of the peice. That’s what I signed up for.

Why bother?

I work freelance, meaning that when I’m not working on a paid project, I’m not earning anything. Most of this past week and a good chunk of the last couple of months has been dedicated into trying to create something useful for the industry, instead of looking out for Numero Uno and making a pretty [so-called] racket helping clients get to grips with Social Media/Social Technologies [or selling snake oil as we're so frequently accused of].

I value this industry (social/media that is) and my peers. Well, I thought I did. But as of today I’m not sure I want to be a part of something which trashes new ideas, open conversation, and each other so readily. This isn’t just SoTech, this KEEPS ON HAPPENING.

The feeling

You know, there’s a possibility we were just rubbish, our presentation sucked, our infographic was pathetic, we don’t understand what we’re talking about.

Hmm, maybe, but I don’t think so.

Maybe, just maybe, some of you need to take a good hard look  in the mirror and ask yourselves:

• When was the last time you invited your peers to contribute/give feedback instead of hogging the mic?
• When was the last time you put hours of time into something people could pro-actively use in their business to problem solve Social Media. For free
• Why are you making comments behind your hands instead of the platform offered to collate feedback

I may also be guilty of doing exactly that which I’m frustrated about – focusing on the negative and not the positive. But in my defence, I’m tired. I’m very tired.

SoTech Now

Well it’s been a whirlwind journey since I got to know Paul Armstrong (@munkyfonkey) and Shannon Boudjema (@shannonboudjema) at the start of the year.

Shannon, bless her, signed up Paul and I to present at Social Collective 2010 and we thought we were going to get up there and talk about social media marketing. So far, so like every other conference.

But the more we spoke, the more we realised we were narked about the same things in the industry:

• We were tired of talking about Social Media just in marketing circles
• We didn’t care about the latest new tech brand, we were more interested in what it could do
• We thought business was still business, if social technologies aren’t MAKING or SAVING money then why are you using them? (Exc third sector from biz objectives here)

The last point we knew social media could deliver on – if the right stakeholders, with the right objectives, used the right tools. Our solution? An infographic You can find the SoTech Infographic over on a dedicated home we’ve set up called SoTechNow.com

This is the change in conversation we want to make. We’re hoping to keep updating the site and the infographic is only V1.0 right now so yes please, we’re very much looking for feedback on how to make this even more useful for business.

What do you reckon? Do you think we need to move on from talking about social media and start foccussing on analysing/benchmarking/creating case studies around social technologies instead?

Blogger Outreach: Stuart Waterman

The problem with being a blog “influential”

Writer, editor, and one-time Social Media Manager, Stuart Waterman runs music blog My Chemical Toilet. The blog frequently makes it on to “top music influencer” lists in PR circles, yet unfortunately that means many PRs don’t bother to read the site at all. Just 5 mins quality time spent reading My Chemical Toilet would show that the blog has a very clear style and you can’t just pitch in any old music related stuff.  Here he takes time out from writing about Naughty Rappers to tell us about PR/Blogger Outreach.

Stuart Waterman

1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?

Yes.

2.  Should they?

Well I do say how they can contact me in my “About” section, so I can’t complain really.

3.  How do you prefer to be contacted?

Email. I have a filter which archives emails sent to the email address on the site, so I can look at them all at once rather than have them bombarding my inbox.

Having said that, I admit I probably reply to/act on about 1% of the PR emails I receive.

4. What’s the worst “outreach” you’ve ever received?

As a music blogger I get invited to (or manage to wangle an invite to) the odd thing. It’s always a “name on the list” kind of affair, and of course there have been times when I’ve turned up and not been on the list at all. That combines timewasting with public humiliation, and each time it’s happened it’s taken me one step closer to never responding to any PR email ever again.

Other than that, I’ve been addressed by names that aren’t mine; I’ve been addressed as “Dear Blogger”; I’ve been called about things that have nothing to do with my site. I’ve been hassled to ask some questions to an “artist” via email… and when the answers come back they’re barely-usable, monosyllabic crap

5. 3 things you HATE about being contacted by PRs

• Receiving an email – obviously as part of a bulk mail – which says “Contact me for guestlist!” and then responding with just such a request, only to be greeted with a reply of the “Uh, who are you?”/”I’ll see what I can do!” variety. Don’t mention guestlist to people who have no hope of getting on it
• I suppose it was always likely to happen, but when a PR decides to bother me on Twitter because I haven’t replied to their email it does annoy me. But then again I can understand them using all the “tools” at their disposal to get what they want
• Being called in the daytime, while I’m at my day job, and being pitched without being asked whether it’s a convenient time to talk. I hardly ever give my number out for this reason.

6. 3 bits of advice if a PR is going to contact a blogger generally

• Flattery doesn’t hurt, but if possible try and go beyond “Hey! Great site!” and say something specific to the person in question. If there’s nothing in the email to indicate that it hasn’t also been sent to 10,000 other people, it’s easy to ignore
• Are you funny? Be funny in your emails then. People like funny emails
• Don’t dangle some kind of carrot and *then* ask for a blogger’s traffic figures. If traffic figures for the sites you’re contacting are important to the campaign you’re working on make this clear from the outset

7. Complete this sentence: PR/Blogger relations could be improved by…

PRs understanding that most bloggers don’t do it as their main job.

When you approach a blogger, more often that not it’s not like pitching Cosmo and going “BUT MY CLIENT’S NEW SKIN CREAM HAS HYPOALLERGENIC LIPIDS, WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT SUITABLE FOR A FEATURE???”

If a blogger owns a site and spends their own precious time on it they don’t have to justify anything that does/doesn’t go on there to anyone. Even hinting that they may need to means they’ll probably take a personal dislike to you.

8. Anything else you’re dying to get off your chest about PR? Good or Bad [We like good things too!]

I’d just like PR people to know that I do feel guilty looking at all the emails I don’t answer. Also, as I’ve experienced being “on the other side” I do understand the pressures of getting coverage/pick-up. I think there are a fair amount of bloggers who don’t, and I generally disagree with the practice of blithely bashing PR folk on Twitter because an image file didn’t arrive on time (even if names aren’t mentioned). Some of them do kind of ask for it, though…

Crib notes:

• Don’t contact a blogger and then ask them prove why they’re worth being in contact with
• Don’t promise and not deliver
• You’d never dictate editorial to a journalist, same goes for bloggers (I can’t believe this even needs to be spelled out)

Can’t get enough? Read the full set of Blogger Outreach interviews.

How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing

While everyone’s running around trying to work out how to join up their online with their offline marketing I just want to see marketing which works.

Marketers have lost their way. If you really want to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing it’s probably not what you think.

[Special mention has to go to my compadres Paul Armstrong & Shannon Boudjema who help me in joined-up thinking and will be debating these ideas later in the month at Social Collective 2010.]

Don’t join online with offline marketing

The secret to joined-up marketing isn’t to connect online and offline marketing, but to join marketing with the business’ objectives as a whole.

Somewhere along the line, and despite the constant navel-gazing about online marketing, we’ve forgotten that the whole point of marketing is to make the business money [or, in the case of not-for-profits, ensure uptake of info or services].

Excellence in marketing isn’t about a joined-up strategy, it’s about marketing which works. Marketing ROI is not a metric, it’s a business result.

Joining online with offline marketing: back to basics

The key to joining the channels is to first go back to Marketing 101 basics: who is your customer?

And I don’t mean the lazy “our product could sell to everyone! Teens! Grandparents! Men! Women! All over the globe!“. That’s all well and good but the secret to success of brands like Apple is you know EXACTLY who the iPad is aimed for, right? When Starbucks first opened you know EXACTLY the sort of clientele they wanted to attract (and it wasn’t the mothers with buggies and/or crazy people wanting to use the toilet types you see today).

The biggest brands narrow focus and go after a certain customer. This doesn’t prevent other people from buying their products or services, it just helps them market to a core consumer. Offline marketing isn’t dead, ‘spray and pray’ is.

When you know who your customer is, it’s easy to create a marketing strategy. Online and offline become irrelevant, you’ve just got to market to them in places they hang out.

Joining online with offline marketing: changing channels

Now I’m just guessing but for the majority of businesses out there, they will have customers who spend time online. Fact. It’s up to YOU to profile your audience and then market to them where they will be most likely to see it.

Does offline marketing work? Sure, it’s a no brainer that if your customer listens to the radio, then radio is a valid marketing channel for your business. Likewise TV, giant billboards, painting the sides of buses, and hiring out-of-work actors to give away chocolate bars outside tube stations, works.

Unfortunately, the reality is that marketers are forgetting how much media consumption has shifted to online channels. Desperate to integrate a little online into their marketing strategy, businesses allocate the bulk of their marketing budget to [often more expensive] offline marketing channels and then dump a small proportion of their budget on online marketing – to “test if it works”.

This seems to ignore the facts, for example social networking alone now accounts for nearly a quarter of all time spent on the Internet, and these figures can only grow. If your customer is aged 15 – 24 then for the love of god, throw the traditional marketing plan out the window, they’re not reading newspapers!

Joined-up marketing should take the budget as a whole and allocate spend to the channels most likely to target your customer, irrelevant of whether they’re online or offline.

As for testing if it works, I find it a hell of a lot easier to track if someone clicked through from a Facebook page to buy something on my website than follow someone home after handing them a free chocolate bar. [Disclaimer: I have never knowingly followed someone home after giving them a free chocolate bar.]

Measuring the excellence of your joined-up marketing

So you’ve profiled your customer, you’ve picked your marketing channels, you’ve allocated your budget cleverly across online and offline, what do you tell the boss?

Well, what is the boss telling YOU – is the business making money? It astounds me the lack of business critical data marketers use to inform their marketing decisions.

Is the product selling? If so, to whom (and was it who you thought your customer was)? Where are people buying from? Is anyone tracking any of this stuff in the business?

Many bosses will be happy with what I call ‘Ego Marketing’ i.e. “Check out this super awesome full page wrap around which will be in the hands of every commuter for the whole of today.” But most will settle for making money.

If your marketing strategy is doing that, then you’ve achieved excellence in joined-up marketing. Relax, put your feet up, enjoy that free chocolate bar the attractive young actress outside the tube gave you this morning.

This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.

[Images: apdk, Nina Matthews Photography, striatic, Horia Varlan]

Blogger Outreach: Gemma Cartwright

Don’t be afraid…

Gemma Cartwright started blogging when she was in 16. She joined Shiny Media [R.I.P.] in 2004 to launch their first fashion site Shoewawa.com, going on to become Group Editor of the Shiny fashion network. She’s written about celebrities for The Nod, happy homelife at Domestic Sluttery, geek chic for Dork Adore, and a host of on- and off-line media.

Last year she founded Big Girls Browse, a site aimed at anyone who finds it hard to shop to suite their shape, and has already attracted interest from most of the High St brands including a guest spot editing the Evans blog.

Gemma Cartwright

1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?

Yes.

2. Should they?

Absolutely. I really don’t mind receiving press releases, email pitches, celeb style IDs, event invitations…anything really. I’m not bothered by a bulging inbox, I can easily delete the stuff I don’t need. That said, I do get a lot of badly-targeted stuff from PRs in the US and my requests to be removed from their lists go unnoticed. If I went to all the events in NY that I’m invited to, I’d have an astounding amount of airmiles!

3. How do you prefer to be contacted?

I like friendly, to-the-point emails that have both my name and the name of the site they’re targeting on it. I write for a few sites and some people still think I write for Catwalk Queen (I actually left 18 months ago) so knowing their expectations means I don’t mislead anyone in terms of where I can give coverage.

I like all the info in the body of the email. Word and .pdf attachments are unnecessary, as are dozens of images (one or two is fine – if I want more I’ll ask).

Don’t follow up with a call unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’m incredibly antisocial and I hate talking on the phone

4. What’s the worst “outreach” you’ve ever received?

An email with the subject ‘Press release’. The body was completely empty, and there was an attachment called ‘PressRelease.doc’. Needless to say, I didn’t read it.

There have also been plenty of the usual ‘Hi blogger’ type template emails. I’ve been called Sarah, Laura, Genna, Jemma…I even got ‘Hey there, G‘  once (I’m not even joking). I’ve also had lots of emails that don’t even ask for coverage, they simply tell me to write about their client. Finally, emails asking me to write about a competition that’s running on another site. No, no, no!

5. 3 things you HATE about being contacted by PRs

• Lack of research – one 5 second look at my site and you’ll see I’m not interested in brands that stop at a size 12
• People trying to write my copy for me – unless you are paying me to write sponsored content, I will write whatever I want (within reason)
• Getting invited to things, emailing an RSVP and being asked to give my traffic figures before I’m told if I can attend or not. Don’t send the invitation if you’re not *really* inviting me

6. 3 bits of advice if a PR is going to contact a blogger generally

• Read the blogs you’re pitching to. REALLY read them. Don’t pretend you’ve read them by sending an email saying “I loved your post about…” with the title of the most recent post. We’re not stupid, don’t patronise us. You wouldn’t pitch to a magazine without at least flicking through it first. Do us the same courtesy
• Research! I’m convinced the same people go to events time and time again because PR’s google ‘[fashion/beauty] bloggers event’ and just invite the first 20 blogs that come up. You’ll get much more interesting coverage if you find bloggers that really have a strong opinion of your client, rather than just going for the usual suspects (who’re all probably bored of cupcakes, cheap fizz and manicures by now anyway
• Be nice. If a blogger has written something erroneous / libelous / problematic or broken an embargo, approach them tactfully. Don’t go in all guns blazing threatening legal action – you’ll end up with that email posted all over the internet with hundreds of bloggers ranting about you

7. Complete this sentence: PR/Blogger relations could be improved by…

…both sides getting off their high horse and realising that people are Just Doing Their Job.

8. Anything else you’re dying to get off your chest about PR? Good or Bad [We like good things too!]

I poke fun when someone emails me with the wrong name, sends me a wildly irrelevant press release littered with typos or invites me to something 2 hours before it’s happening because someone more important clearly pulled out last minute…but most of my dealings with PRs in the last couple of years have been great. I think it’s all too easy to jump on the big #PRFail bandwagon and forget that bloggers make just as many mistakes.

So to any PRs reading this, please don’t be scared off by the minority of bloggers who jump on their soapbox about every tiny little issue. Most of us just want to be treated as human beings and given access to information and resources so we can write about interesting things!

Crib notes:

• It’s only an email, but there are so many ways you can get it wrong
• Be respectful, just because you’re not approaching a “journo”, doesn’t mean you can approach online writers like second-class citizens
• Don’t become paralysed with fear. Be informed, pleasant, helpful. In other words… just do your job

Can’t get enough? Read the full set of Blogger Outreach interviews.