So monitoring the web for mentions and reacting to them appropriately is marketing that I with many, many other new marketers think is essential. But. But, but but – you need to fix the call centre, the wait times, the front line as well and not just pick up people who have a voice on the web and know how to use. it, just in case they say bad things about you and pollute your search experience. I wonder what Comcast are doing about that?

Post from: EveryJoe

Comcast Listening

com.motion is a specialty practice within Veritas Communications that helps brands and organizations to break through online. With tactics including blogger relations, online reputation management, social media marketing campaigns and the proprietary Grassroots Multiplier™, com.motion is at the leading edge of Direct Audience Activation: the next evolution in marketing communications.

That’s a perfect piece of PR speak, but the team lead Keith McArthur as been putting his money where his mouth is and reaching out to bloggers to promote a new survey they have put together to take a look at social media use in Canada and Canadian business. A surprising number of surveys are put together by PR agencies to promote clients – remember the one about women’s walking wiggle. Some are poor I agree, but many actually do add value and valid data to discussions and this survey looks like it’s got some great stuff for those following the development of social media usage. I got an early look at some of the results, asking about changes in spend on social media and also about attitudes to social media tools and their importance to promote products and services.

Out of 444 self-qualified respondents who work in marketing or senior management you got the following results:

Q: Looking forward to 2008, do you plan to spend more money on social media marketing, less money on social media marketing or about the same amount as you spent in 2007?

The follow-up questions looked at where the money is coming from:

Which, if any, of the following will you cut back on in order to increase your social media budget?

The favourite place to cut is in Direct Mail, a channel that can connect directly with users in the same way social media can, but the latter can be more efficient in resource use. Looking at the attitude to the the tools, there a many who believe in their strength and potential and interestingly the numbers are pretty similar across age groups (assuming that poisition has some correlation with age). Only about 1 in 8 people believe that it is all a fad which is lower than I expected, so that has to be good news.

There’s more information in the survey and you can get further information from Keith’s blog or from a special poll site (which is not live until later Monday)

Post from: EveryJoe

Spending continues to increase on social media for marketing

First up, via David Meerman Scott, are tips on how to pitch a blogger from Mark Hinkel. Paraphrased, they are:

• Format the news in a way that is easy for the blogger to use – include links
• Make the story relevant
• Make the information friendly and informative
• Be wary of using embargoes
• Develop the relationship. There’s a lot of stuff here that needs to be read well and paid attentions to!
• Be effective and be genuine

All great tips for you to think about.

Meanwhile, Ogilvy PR has been busy listening to the growing list of complaints from bloggers (partly triggered but the mommyblogger debate at Blogher) and has codified what is best practice for them. They are currently taking feedback – so please comment here or on their blog. Here’s the full list:

Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

There’s an interesting debate in the comments on that post, as a blogger replies with her own code of ethics and mentions about paying for the mention by buying media. Others chime in about compensation for reviewing or being involved in research This is an area that I’m extremely uncomfortable with as I believe that advertising and editorial needs to be separate. This is why paid reviews, on PayPerPost and other sites get such bad press, because the paid commentary gets mixed in with other stuff. But, having being exposed to PR, I’m fully aware that many, many journalists get things from agencies and companies for spending time being pitched to, even if it as simple as a cookie. There’s an interesting balance here – you can;t review a product without a sample, which may come in a ’special’ pack, but how far beyond that do you go into paid media?

The combined statements about only approaching a blogger is there is something that they think is good and being upfront in disclosing if they have not read the blog are contradictory. As bloggers, maybe we should be a bit more upfront with what we want to be pitched, the types of subjects, but if that is not there they have to have read the blog and got an understanding of what I like – and if they have not read the blog, how can they know what is interesting.

I love this list, it’s a great start – a pretty good codification of how to go about developing a relationship with a blogger OR just contacting them for short-term PR. Taken together, the information here should be enough for anyone to go about this in the right way ;)

Post from: EveryJoe

Guidelines for Pitching for Bloggers

Media Fragmentation has put the user in the driver’s seat. Now the user has taken on a new role, that of creative director/producer of advertising. Numerous advertisers have turned to consumers to develop ads for specific campaigns and the surge of mash-ups and viral distribution has exploded. But does this mean user-generated advertising has arrived? Are the risks of conceding partial control of the brand offset by the rewards of awareness and engagement? Our panel will discuss these and other key questions surrounding UGA.

Moderator: Rich LeFurgy, General Partner, Archer Advisors
Cheryl Guerin, VP Promotions & Interactives, MasterCard, International
Tom Lynch, VP Marketing Strategy & Planning – Central Region, Avenue A | Razorfish
Tom Troja, VP Marketing, Pajamas Media

Q: How do you see ‘open-source marketing’ changing the role of marketing and agencies
CG: we no longer do one-off ads; it’s all part of an interactive programme. UGC has changed what we think as advertisers. But we won’t necessarily hand over the reins to consumers. Even with ‘priceless‘ (users added copy to pre-filmed ads) there were very few good ads. There needs to be good reasons why [we would hand over things] . We did the UGC contest, primarily to get people to know about the site. There have been no further competitions yet, but we still have UGC on the site, letting consumers know what is priceless to them. It’s challenging internally. A lot of fears at the beginning. But we have examples, it needs to start with an objective. We had plans, we had a .fill in the blanks. model. We monitored and moderated, our lawyers had to work hard to understand the law on this. You have to have a contingency plan.

Q: Conversational Marketing?
TT: look at the larger trend. People control what they consume, we try and create an infrastructure for brand to then talk to the market place. Objectives are crucial. Think about this in the long term – this is not a campaign. Let people provide the emotion; we can create process to set up a long term way – an effective channel. Build the layers, build belief and trust, set it up to build this right. This is way to get feedback and stay on target; get more people involved in the value. The brand can be the enabler.

Q: How can a brand leverage and keep control – or is losing control inevitable?
TL: you need to accept that we have less control than before. The power of the network is bigger and faster than any PR department. It is a fantastic thing – if we are keepers of the brand we have to listen more than ever before. It is not a relationship if people only want control. In many places there has not been a good relationship…you had to become iconic. These were the exception and not the rule. So how relevant was what we were doing before? If we listen more and become the voice of the customer than we will be in a lot better position than we ever were before. Need to become relevant.

Q: What is the role of the agency?
TL: You’ll see things like account planning become more digital; the traditional way will not work as well. Online you need to connect with niche. You have to break down mass concepts and do it on a micro level. The value is in connecting with customers, Big ideas are still big ideas – need to be customer centric. using focus groups to justify the big creative ideas instead of going with with customer focus.
CG: You start with the objective and measure against it. We use metrics a lot – how much awareness through buzz. It’s not a one-off, we launch and spend a lot on media to drive to it. We look at tracking. Agencies are coming up with ideas, nothign comes in without interactive components, it’s not just an ad.

Q: How do you encourage users to get involved?
TT: we’ve been working with blog and SM networks for 2 years. Initially a lot of what we were doing was not working. [advertising]. What did work was the conversations – looking for something different – we created a unit as a miniblog, showing the conversation taking place on client site. [an add unit that updated from RSS from main blog, showing different things at different times]. We have just added a video component, running 50M impressions. We have advanced thinking people who look for new/unique/different stuff – take a risk. eg mycadillacstory.com [a combination of 'professional' and UGC content about people's Cadillac].

Q: What do you do when the genie is out the bottle [referred in particular to KFC and rats]
TL: The dynamic has shifted from where we could talk over the bad stuff; you can’t do that any more [RC: there are firms that try to clean up your search results though!]. You have to do things to maintain the brand. You have to engage in a dialogue, that’s the only thing you do. If you don’t have an official voice then you have no voice. You can’t shutdown, talkover, make them go away – you have to embrace and not deny. Stand up and talk about it. A keeper of the brand has a nurturing aspect – be responsible for all the dynamics. You can;t back away, just be reactive. If you have the perspective that you can;t stop it, you deal with it. You need to be responsible with it.
TT: We think of this as an opportunity to look at trust and credibility. It’s solving problems – and creating opportunities
TL: Starwood started putting up reviews. There was anxiety, we put some check sin place; there are negative comments, as a brand you want to know this. And then address it.

Audience Q&A

Q: The ‘festering sore’ in the agency business is production cost. Does an increase in UGC content herald a push back on production costs?
TL: Yes – that is one of the last barriers to being able to communicate regularly and there is no reason for it. There is not ‘one big idea’ and there is not the justification for doing it at that scale. We need to do more smaller stuff; we’re building digital studios in every single office. Quality in idea and execution – execution is easy in the digital space and therefore we have to take advantage of this.

Q: Does success lead to pressure to lower production costs?
CG: Pressure is on the ability to execute fully integrated programmes, the budgets are not getting any bigger and we need to do more with it. It can’t be taken from media buys.

Post from: EveryJoe

IAB and Tapping Users to Create Advertising

Of course, to do that we advertisers and marketers need to stop loving the sound of our own voice. We need to stop finding gaps in the conversation where we can butt in with our two bits. We need to stop fooling ourselves to believe that the selective listening we practice called research is not enough. We need to realize that if we keep going on like we do, we’ll cement our place as the self-centered bores in the party.

Why is it so important to listen now more than ever? One, because our empowered consumers have discovered their voice and are talking between themselves and back at us. And they are talking a real lot – Technorati, a blog tracking firm, tracks over 50,000 new posts every single hour!

He identifies this as a new business opportunity for brands and rightly so; I’ve said this before that to do this properly you have to put the resources behind it. You can start off with dipping your toe in the water with the free tools but to really act on this, you need to have the processes and staff behind the effort, to listen and to act.

Post from: EveryJoe

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