• Talking to Bloggers
• A swing and a miss.
• Hitting send.
• What about Dad?
• An "Ah ha!" moment
• Astroturf - Slash It, Burn It
• In the end, it is about people.
• Leave Seth Alone
• Digital Breadcrumbs
• Word-of-mouth at its most elementary

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Blogs

This afternoon I made my way over to Suburban Turmoil to read Mommy Blogger Marketing 101. I found my way there after a colleague (and fellow blogger) sent me the link to Mom 101 and there was a comment about Mother Goose Mouse's recent post.

I love to read stories from bloggers of great interactions with PR folks. And I try to share these stories as best I can. When I train people on blogger engagement these days, my presentation is made of quotes of blogs.

I wanted to tell bloggers how we try to train account staff to do blogger engagement at Edelman.

1. I often get asked for my list of top mommy bloggers, top travel bloggers, top _____ bloggers and I always respond, "I don't have a list." Why not? We believe that we need to talk to the right bloggers and the right bloggers change for every account. It is time intensive to build new lists, but I think that the act of building a list helps the account staff learn about the bloggers and that the bloggers on the list are more likely to be really interested.

2. "What do you have that offers value to their lives?" In addition to product, can we also offer a chance to talk to a spokesperson? A way to do have prizes for their readers? An example is a blog tour we are doing right now with Wrigley Gum. In addition to 10 Step It Up with Extra kits for their readers, bloggers can interview a Wrigley nutritionist or Marty from the Biggest Loser.

3. Sometimes we say no. We have had products where the conversation just wasn't there or we didn't have anything tangible to offer bloggers. Sometimes the topic is just too private and bloggers wouldn't be interested, no matter how big the freebie or how big the news is to the company. Sometimes, blogger engagement isn't the way to go.

4. Pitch is a four letter word. We try really hard to stop people from saying "pitching bloggers" and talk about "engaging bloggers." It might sound silly, but by changing the word, we can change the mind-set a little.

5. Read the blog. Read the blog. Read the blog. Read the blog. And did I mention, you should read the blog. And then read more of it. It is so much easier to write a blogger if you have read their blog. You'll have confidence that this blogger might want to hear from you.

6. Let it go. The blogger didn't write you back? Take the silence as your answer, let it go and move on. It isn't easy to do, especially not when PR folks are used to pitching. Again, this is why we don't say "pitching bloggers."

That's not my whole training, but those are some of things I try to get across to account staff here at Edelman. Just wanted to let bloggers know that we're listening, adjusting and training all the time.

Oh dear sweet Chicago Transit Authority... You tried. I give you that, you tried, but it was a swing and a miss. In Chicago, the CTA is the group that runs public transportation. And a couple years ago they took a big step into the community when the chairwoman Carole Brown started blogging.

That isn't the swing and a miss, that has actually been quite successful. People are reading and commenting--each post has 90-200 comments. CTA riders finally feel like they have a way to interact with the PERSON in charge. Not a phone tree, not an email that disappears, but a public forum to ask questions.

What I'm referring to is a comment I got on my blog last night. Each year the CTA brings us the Santa Express. A train decked out with Christmas lights, silly North Pole advertising, CTA employees dressed like elves and one flatbed car with Santa riding in it. Make no mistake, this isn't a Holiday Train, this is a Christmas train.

I get stuck on it every year and find it very awkward. I don't really do Christmas and I tend to pan the experience on my blog. Yesterday someone from the CTA got to the place on the to do list that said, "Find blogs about Santa Train and leave the following comment: Thank you for enjoying our train. Please check for next years Holiday Train schedules at www.transitchicago.com. They will start showing sometime by the middle of November./ Thank You & HO-HO-HO. PS. Check youtube.com for cta holiday train videos. "

Apparently nobody told this person to read the posts first. Before copy/paste/repeat, READ THE BLOG and see if they enjoyed the experience of being on the train. I know it is tempting to copy/paste, copy/paste, copy/paste and sometimes for proper messaging certain parts of an email need to be the same across the board.

But please, please, please if you have been authorized to make comments for your company or for your client, READ THE BLOG FIRST. Please.

And not related to the comment on a post that wasn't pro-Santa, if you are going to make a MySpace page for your brand, make sure it is consistent with your message. The CTA Santa has a page that doesn't exactly scream Christmas.

UPDATE: The CTA has redone the CTA Santa MySpace page and it is much more on target. Well done!

Just a friendly reminder to everyone: the conversation doesn't start until you hit send or publish. Before you hit send or publish you haven't participated in the conversation. You have listened, but you haven't actually entered the conversation.

Huh? Why am I saying this?

Once upon a time, I got flamed in a forum after expressing an opinion that was the opposite of the majority of the community. One of the members that flamed me, then wrote me a private apology email asking that I not to take offense. In the email the writer insulted me a couple more times, but each time said, "Oh, that's sounds bad, it isn't quite what I mean."

I just want to remind everyone that the conversation doesn't start until you hit send or publish. Do you have any idea how many times I rewrote the previous paragraph? No, you don't. You aren't sitting at my desk watching me type, delete, edit, and publish. You are reading the finished product.

If you find yourself typing, "That isn't what I mean, that's not the right word, I don't mean to offend you." then delete it and try again. That is the beauty of the send key. You hit send after picking all of the right words.

The conversation starts after you publish the response, not while you are writing it. Remember that and take advantage of the delay that the publish or send button builds in. Your reader doesn't need to know all the words you threw away while you were crafting your response.

Consider this a public service announcement. No, wait, consider it unsolicited advice. Oh, that isn't quite right. How about Friday Free Flowin' Opinion? Hmmm, I'll get back to you on that.

As an aunt, I glimpsed the community that my sister gets from fellow mommy bloggers. As a PR professional, I understand the magnetic pull of this online community for brands and companies. But I wanted to take a minute and ask, "What about Dad?"

I sat behind Laid Off Dad at BlogHer last summer and had the family from DadTalk over for dinner. Dad bloggers are out there and so is a growing online community focusing on fatherhood.

The Father Life was launched today and is available for download. The online zine includes recipes, interviews, fashion, arts, sports, and personal essays about being a father.

Over at Rebel Dad, inspired by GapingVoid, stay-at-home Dads have been submitting parenting manifestos. Why Rebel Dads? According to the author, "I wanted a name for us that captured something positive, something edgy. I occurred to me that I'm at the leading edge of a social revolution (gender equity in the home!), and that Rebel Dads would be good name for us guys."

Who are the online fathers that you read?

After almost two months in the me2revolution and maybe a dozen research projects, I've started to feel like a broken record. How many different ways can I say the same thing to my team? Every time they send me out to research a product or brand, I come back with the same answer.

People are talking about the brand and are doing these five things:

1. Asking for advice.
2. Reviewing products.
3. Showing off a new set-up.
4. Talking about an upgrade.
5. Building community.

I suppose 30 years ago, the researcher walked down a suburban cul-de-sac and came to the same conclusions. And a three hundred years ago, someone walked to the community well and came to the same conclusions.

People want to get advice, give advice, show off, talk and build community. The forum might change and the product might change, but moving forward this list of five things will serve as the backbone to my research.

On this backbone, I will try to fill in new blanks. What advice are they seeking? What reviews are they giving? Where are the communities forming? Who are the movers and shakers?

It is a simple list, a basic list, but a major "Ah ha" for me. By recognizing it and calling it out, I hope to take a leap in my own research.

So tell me...

What is your research backbone? What was your last "ah ha" moment?

I know I'm a bit late in acknowledging this, but I was thinking a lot about the topic of online identity this weekend and was moved to point out the Cook/Young Anti-Astroturfing campaign.

Folks around here seem to view me as our internal Emily Post of online behavior. In fact, few things irritate me more than astroturf, professionally speaking. So, with that said, I hope you don't think I'm overstating the matter when I say that PR's relevance (and lifespan) is only as solid as the attention paid to the astroturfing problem.

"People are making this too hard," WOMMA president Andy Sernovitz said in an early episode of earSHOT. I tend to agree. The WOMMA code of ethics lays it out country-simple.

Someone ought to tell Samuel L. Jackson, though. From ContactMusic:

The screen star often goes incognito in the online community to find out what fans really think about him. He says, "I remember one day I was having a conversation with this guy and he was saying, well (Jackson's) not that great, he's done a couple of films that were okay. "And I was like, 'what would those be'? He named a few films and I started naming some more films I thought I was good in. And he was going, 'Maybe you're right, maybe you're right'."

In 30 minutes or so, I'm getting on a plane and headed to San Jose, California for BlogHer! In case you've been hiding under a very heavy rock (or a dial-up connection) you've probably heard about this women's blogging conference.

I'm very excited to go, because it is the essence of why I blog. People. Connecting to people. Not growing stats or inbound links or my Technorati ranking, but the people behind those links.

With a couple years of blogging under my belt, I've been on dates with readers, made good friends out of mutual blog admiration, and gone to blogger meet-ups in other states. While plenty is being written about how lonely America is, the connections are just in different places. Instead of the cul-de-sac, it is through blogs, online social networks, even tagging sites.

So... with my laptop and carry-on bag, I'm off to meet the women of the blogosphere in person. I get to take my online connections offline, because in the end it is about the people.

(Full Disclosure: it is a work trip, Edelman has a sponsoring client. But that doesn't mean I'm any less excited to go, just that I have to also take business cards.)

My daily need for a hughtoon fix pointed me to the incredible reaction that Seth Godin received for explaining why he doesn't allow comments on his blog.

Oh, the weeping. The wailing. The gnashing of trackbacks.

I'm driven to sympathize with the man, since I was once roundly criticized for my own position on the matter years ago. I'm not an obstinate man, though, and (eventually) folks like Mike Manuel and other reasonable voices brought me around. Mid-summer 2005, I activated comments and trackbacks on my blog and I've recommended that clients do the same.

So... These days, I prefer blogs that have comments. It's a preference of mine and one I've seen, from personal experience, that has great value compared to the alternative. Some choose to moderate their comments. Others don't. I choose not to judge them on that basis. I ultimately must consider that the decision to open up one's blog to user comments is a position upon which reasonable people can disagree.

Unfortunately, those kinds of topics are precisely the ones upon which some people become most unreasonable. Some folks might as well host comments on their blogs for that reason alone — call it "ridicule mitigation."

Trackbacks and Technorati searches offer suitable alternatives — and I guarantee Seth Godin is not ignoring them.

So... Please... Leave poor Seth alone.

Technorati Tags:
seth godin, blogs, blogging, pr, public relations

Microsoft's Tom Murphy, one of the first PR bloggers, has found yet another example of folks thinking that they can hide their identities online.

The problem is this: These are examples of marketers who don't think in terms of "right" and "wrong," but rather "What can I get away with?"

And it's not just marketers, either. I've seen people engaged in grassroots movements who beat their chests about a given topic on one blog, and then create a bunch of sockpuppet blogs to cheer themselves on.

It's the digital breadcrumbs you leave everywhere you go online. They will always lead back to you.

Ethical marketers and consumers alike, I leave you with this: In the otherwise forgettable Fred Ward movie Remo Williams, the J.A. Preston character had simple instructions for Remo.

"You're going to be the Eleventh Commandment: 'Thou shalt not get away with it.'"

Technorati Tags:
public relations, pr, marketing, astroturf

When we all came into work this morning, my colleague had a story to tell. Her friend Harry had gone to his favorite hangout, a wine cafe in the trendy Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park, as he does a few nights a week. That evening the restaurant was particularly full and he was denied a table. Harry asked to speak to the manager, who knew him well because of his repeated patronage. Surprisingly, the manager did not pull a few strings to find Harry a seat. Instead, he got into an argument with Harry - and told him to get out and never come back!

Harry was so stunned and upset that he went home and called several friends and family members. Those friends and family members told their friends and family members, and so on. Everyone who hears this story will likely think twice about going to that restaurant. This one serious lapse in customer service could result in not just one customer lost, but hundreds.

Today, we tend to think of word-of-mouth as some abstract marketing concept we hear about at seminars, but let's remember the basic principle that makes it relevant in the first place: people talk to each other...a lot. If you want to generate positive buzz about your brand or product, give people a legitimate reason to talk about it. Give them quality. Give them excellent service. Give them creativity and innovative ways of solving their problems. Give them something they can't get elsewhere. If you do, they will come back and bring their loved ones with them.

But if you don't, the BEST you can hope for is a resounding silence.

Technorati Tags:
wom, word of mouth

When I was a kid, a friend of mine was irritated that his dad would walk into his room first thing in the morning (without knocking) and bark chores at him — "Mow the lawn" or "Scrub the porch" and so on.

After plaintively asking his dad "What about 'good morning?", dad changed his tune. Thereafter, the dad would say "Goodmorningmowthelawn." (Still no knock.)

This is generally the tenor of the pitches I've been receiving lately.

Sure, there's still a lot of "spray-and-pray" mail merges and bcc'ed messages in my inbox. But, lately, it seems that someone has a gun to the PR person's head to demonstrate that he or she has read the blog before hawking that new fly-by-night webtool or all-in-one PDA carrying case.

The emails go something like: "I just saw your 'Heroes' page. Now that I've demonstrated that I've read your blog and have gotten that pesky business out of the way, have you heard about megablogbuzzmaximizer.com?"

It's a noble attempt and (in some ways) I appreciate that small effort, but you can't manufacture or operationalize passion, domain knowledge, or sincere interest.

Technorati Tags:
pr, public relations, blogs

I have the Craig's List "What We're About" page taped to the wall of my office.

The text is more more than five years old, according to it's revision history, and it still holds up:

craigslist is about:

• giving each other a break, getting the word out about everyday, real-world stuff.
  
• restoring the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment.
  
• keeping things simple, common-sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real.
  
• providing an alternative to impersonal, big-media sites.
  
• being inclusive, giving a voice to the disenfranchised, democratizing ...
  
• being a collection of communities with similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity.

A must-read for communicators.

Technorati Tags:
craigs list, womm, word of mouth

For those who don't know, "swag" is an acronym for "stuff we all get." It refers to the gimmicky trinkets that get passed out at tradeshows and conferences, mailed to journalists, and so on. Most of the time, it amounts to just so much clutter. I've heard that, in the SF Bay Area office of one venerable business publication, there's a community basket brimming with such things.

(Yes, I know the "S" in "swag" is usually a very different word, but I'm writing you from that odd part of LA where the PG rating still remains somewhat sacred.)

Most of the time, we're talking about knickknacks such as company-branded pens, pads, rubber balls, t-shirts, paperweights, screwdrivers, and the like.

And, sometimes, things just get out of hand.

Nikkei Electronics' US Correspondent Phil Keys received some rather ill-conceived swag today.

...I recently received some swag through the mail that did grab my attention, but in a negative way. It consisted of a plastic box containing a maze, a ball, a card, and a dollar bill. Basically, it looked like the whole premise of the thing was that by offering me the chance to release the trapped dollar bill into the warm embrace of my pocket, I would spend all sorts of time with this maze and thereby remember the release that they are trying to get me to cover. While I'm sure in their mind it seemed like a fun idea, in my mind it seems like the thought is that I have so much free time on my hands that I would be happy to try to solve this thing to get at the buck.

Technorati Tags:
pr, public relations, swag, nikkei

TalkShop is a blog about word-of-mouth and the Me2 Revolution, published by Edelman and hosted by Phil Gomes, the company's Senior Counsel, Online Communications. This blog pulls in thoughts and opinions from members of the worldwide Edelman network.

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