Thursday, July 30th, 2009
My blog has been quiet for the last week or so thanks to a trip to Hong Kong (which I enjoyed immensely), and imagine my reaction when I got home and found mutiple emails that just offended my senses. The gist usually is something like this:
Hello,
Our awesome event [insert name of event] has secured awesome speaker [insert name of speaker] to be at said event on this awesome date [insert date] together with other awesome speaker such as [name drop #1], [name drop #2] and [name drop #3]
Attached is the press release and a photograph of the awesome speaker. Please tell the world about it on your blog
Really? Dear PR person on the other end of the email, if you had such a request, would you do anything to act on it?
Borrowing a little from Jeremy Woolf’s blogpost, Dear spammers, can we have our social media back?, I’ve decided to come up with a few “rules” for my blog:
1) The pitch had better be relevant to me, my blog, and my readers. I’ll leave you to decipher what that means.
2) The pitch should not include a press release. A social media release or a link to graphs/videos is fine.
3) Provide a beneficial call to action. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not your news channel. If you think said awesome person is so interesting, offer me a chance to meet him or her over lunch or an invitation to the event so I can blog about how awesome I thought the person was after that.
I’m going to put it as plainly as I can: such emails are spam. And following this blog post, I will mark all emails as such and forward the email to whoever the contact person is on the company webpage (hopefully the CEO) and explain why it offends me. I’m also giving serious thought to starting a PR blacklist wiki. Sure I might miss out on some really relevant piece of news months down the line, but that is a price I’m gladly willing to pay.
Tags: bad pr, bad pr pitches, blacklist pr, call to action, final straw, hong kong, mutually beneficial relationship, news channel, press release, social media release, spam
Posted in Poor Practices, blogger outreach, education, social media | 5 Comments »
Monday, July 14th, 2008
This is part four (of four) of an analysis of a blogger survey conducted by Text 100. You can find out more from the previous parts:
Fig 1: 67% of bloggers spend less than 4hrs a week on blogging
Okay personally I’m not sure what this particular piece of data is supposed to show, but I think it says this: what other medium do you know that engages people for four hours a week? Television? Print? Radio? I don’t think so. Also note that this figure is purely spent on blogging. In other words there are many other hours spent chatting, on Lively, reading blogs, on YouTube, on Facebook. Are you still spending 90% of your adspend on mainstream media when we’re spending 10% of our time on mainstream media? (if even that).
Finally, I wanted to post some quotes from the survey in the form of advice from bloggers to companies. Maybe a traditional company will read this and find the quotes bordering on arrogant, but the truth is, these are your new consumers. They want personalisation, proper treatment, good service, and their loyalty only lasts as long as the next better deal comes along. So what’re you doing to continually be that better deal?
Fig 2: Blogger advice to companies
I think it’s easy for many of us in the “fishbowl” to look at this and say “so what’s new?”. But we have to keep in mind that companies by and large do not know this, or are skeptical. Solid, empirical research by a firm like Text 100 definitely helps bring some credibility to the discussion (especially in Asia), and I personally applaud the time, effort and I’m sure money put in to make this happen.
Tags: advice to companies, blogger advice, blogger survey analysis, company contact, social media release, text 100 blogger survey, time spent blogging
Posted in Research | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Bloggers seem to know what the social media release is about. Or at least 60% of them do (Fig 1), and 72% of those who do, find it an effective communications tool.
Fig 1 – The social media release
The social media release results I take with a little pinch of salt purely because of the small sample size. It’s easy to look at it and say “Wow Singapore understands the social media release!” but remember we’re talking only 14 bloggers in Singapore.
Let’s add on a second bit of information, that 88% of bloggers aware of the social media release would use the related material in blog posts (Fig 2).
Fig 2 – Using social media release material in blog posts
This makes the picture a little bit clearer. Bloggers don’t have a lot of time to write lots of original stuff about you. Providing them with the right quotes, videos, pictures, etc can make their life easier. Think of it as how you submit a ready-to-print press release to a journalist, compared to the bare minimum and expecting the journalist to write the rest himself. Not gonna work right?
Here’s where it’s easy to put two and two together. Bloggers are receptive to using your material, and bloggers like using video.
Need I connect the dots for you to say what you should include in your social media release? One thing though, if you’re not confident of your video standing up to scrutiny, you should just skip on it, because the focus can very quickly turn to “look what a joke this video is” instead of focusing on your message.
Fig 3 – Sources of information about companies
Finally Fig 3 tells us that more than one in two bloggers talk about companies. Also, the accompanying caption in this slide points out that social bookmarking sites are the lowest ranked for bloggers to find out more information about a company. I’d like to point out that “other bloggers” is ranked first. So bloggers turn to other bloggers for information about your company, and generally speaking, one in two bloggers talk about companies (maybe yours). Does that scare you?
Before I end, I’d just like to drop off a couple of quotes that I saw in the survey about what bloggers feel the contact person should be saying/doing.
“Keep it short and to the point – lay off the extreme glorification of companies”
“Information in advance is crucial so the blogger has time to consider, research and develop the content into meaningful posts”
“Few corporates and almost no PR companies have websites that provide regularly updated, easily searchable press release archives”
How’s that for some Sunday afternoon reading? Tomorrow I’ll close up this topic with a few more quotes and a ball park figure for how much time bloggers spend blogging.
This is part three of an analysis of a blogger survey conducted by Text 100. Here are links to part one and part two, as well as the social media release template.
Tags: bloggers and the social media release, blogging about companies, is social media release relevant, social media release, social media release template, sources of information about companies, text 100 blogger survey, where bloggers find information about companies
Posted in Research | 4 Comments »
