Blogger relations tips from Womma’s Andy Sernovitz

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Andy Sernovitz has an interesting post on ‘How to get a blogger to write about you’. As well his advice on the correct and incorrect approach he also has some comments on hiring a PR company to manage blogger relations. I’ve commented on Andy’s blog, but thought it was worth expanding on them here:

1. Hire a firm with proven, long-term, personal relationships with the bloggers

This sounds good until you start to analyse it and realise that it would be almost impossible for a client to actually find a public relations firm that had relationships with the specific bloggers it needs to have a relationship with. Most clients that we work with what us to advise them on what the relevant blogs for their industry, sector or products are. Sometimes the answer will be blogs that at least one person in our team knows well. In other cases we’ll be operating in a new space and the challenge and enjoyment is exploring it and really getting to understand it, before ever engaging in blogger outreach. To expect a client to find a public relations company that already has relationships with “the” client’s specific bloggers is asking the impossible.

What is right is that if you’re hiring a PR firm to do blogger relations then you must make sure it has done it before and that it’s team totally embraces, lives and breathes social media. Check out the team’s social media profiles and ‘rankings’ before you appoint them. Don’t fall for appointing a PR company that only superficially uses social media and has set-up blog and Twitter accounts etc just to show that they are ‘doing it’.

2. Supervise them very, very closely

I understand why Andy is saying this – there are so many examples of PR firms doing social media and blogs really badly. However, just supervising them closely isn’t going to make much difference as it assumes the client knows what to do. Most don’t, that’s why whey hire PR consultants as advisors, because the consultants have more experience and expertise. That’s the main point about hiring a consultancy is that they know more about it than you do.

3. Insist on complete disclosure of the relationship

On this one I totally agree with Andy. But it is no less than is required by trade and professional associations such as the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), Womma and WOM UK.

4. Do NOT let them delegate the job to a junior account exec

This is a very nice idea, but totally unrealistic as many clients might not have the budget to just have senior folk do the work. What you do need to do is assess the calibre of the whole team that will work on your account and look at what training and other quality control processes are in place.

5. Review every email that is being sent on your behalf

In my view this is just the same as point 2 and just doesn’t make sense. Indeed it could back fire very badly with the client trying to put some of the marketing hype back in, that the PR consultancy has taken out!

A good rule of thumb: Do not trust someone to pitch a blogger for you who has never eaten food with the blogger.

A good sound bite, but not such a good rule of thumb.

If your PR firm embarrasses your company, you take the reputation hit forever. They move on to the next client.

Too true, that’s why you need to have the right public relations company to advise you on social media and blogger relations.

How will the new Consumer Protection Regulations work in practice?

At the end of May I attended one of the WOM UK Espresso Briefings on the new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. There was an excellent presentation from Stephen Clarke, head of marketing and privacy law at law firm Osborne Clarke, who went through the details of the new law. There was also a rather less illuminating presentation from Marina Palumbo, legal director of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, who simply went through some of the best known case studies that most word of mouth practitioners would already know very well. Both presentations are available on the WOM UK website.

But the big questions about the CPRs remain as to how they will be interpreted by case law and how they will be enforced?

Ian Delaney, editor of New Media Knowledge (NMK), has an interesting post on his personal blog. Reading the post it looks very much like Carphone Warehouse, or one of its agencies, is engaging in unlawful activity by blogging without revealing their identity.

It looks like some Carphone Warehouse ‘fans’ have been commenting about how wonderful it is on Ian’s post about his negative customer service experience. All of the comments have Hotmail addresses, but come from the same IP address.

But here’s the rub, Just because it appears that Carphone Warehouse is guilty doesn’t mean it is. It genuinely could be some quite nutty Carphone Warehouse fan posting all three comments. But now Ian has blogged about it then the damage to the brand is done.

This raises interesting questions for online reputation managers such as the need to monitor for situations such as this and respond to them as appropriate.

It also illustrates the need for guidelines for employees (it is directors and senior managers who will go to prison) – guidelines will help prove a due diligence defence. You do want employees to engage in conversations, but in way that benefits them and you, not one that potentially damages you both.

Ad Age 150 – is it any good?

As someone who is relatively new to the world of blogging, and who is keen to learn as much as possible about social media, I’ve been wondering how to discover the blogs that make the grade. What makes a blog worthy of attention when there are so many to choose from?

This is where the Power 150 comes in – a global ranking system of the top English language media and marketing blogs. Developed by Todd Andrlik, and now housed by Ad Age,  the Power 150 (which confusingly ranks 707 blogs) uses a multimetric algorithm to determine the best PR, advertising and marketing blogs. Sounds complex and too mathematical for my liking, but basically it considers eight sources, seven of which tally results from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati with the eighth derived from Todd’s personal input – Todd Points. These value “frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content” and the “use of audio, video and graphics.”

Todd Points is the only subjective metric. On one hand this is brilliant to have an actual human’s insight into the blogs, yet I can’t help but feel skeptical that 707 blogs can’t personally be checked regularly by one individual for their updated content. And what if a bias against the blog topics skewers the score – how impartial is the Todd Points scoring system? At least the input from the traffic rating sites has no human agenda but this does not make it completely reflective of blog popularity. Understandably, metric ranking is not perfect yet - this post by Rohit Bhargava highlights some of the issues surrounding this method – but for now, it’s all bloggers have got if they want an indication of their blog reach. 

Putting those technical complexities aside, I think the Power 150 is an excellent starting place to delve into the world of global media and marketing blogging. Alternatively, if you’re looking for UK blogs, Seventy Seven has helpfully compiled the Top UK blogs based on the Power 150. I’m pleased to see I’m in the right place at Wolfstar for my social media experience – Stuart Bruce’s A PR Guy’s Musings currently ranks 12^th and Sam Oakley’s All Things PR 49^th.

What other tools or measurements do you think should be considered when ranking a PR blog?

More Introductions… (Sam Oakley this time.)

I must have started blogging about three years ago, I think mainly as a way of passing the time during a particularly slow period at North Yorkshire County Council. The first person to comment on my blog was a guy called Stuart Bruce, and since then we’ve disagreed on almost everything – He thought Yorkshire should have a regional assembly, I thought it shouldn’t (1 -0 to me.) He thought Tom Murray should win in the local elections, I thought it should be Alan Lamb (1 – 1 dammit!) He thought Alan Johnson would make a great Labour deputy leader, I thought my dog would do better (it’s a long story but, bizarrely, 2 -1 to me.)

In fact it’s taken a while for us to find something we agree on, but the fact that I should come and work for him seems to have provided us with the common ground we were looking for, and since then we’ve actually found that we agree on a lot more than we originally thought. Namely, that good PR comes from a genuine desire to converse, that David Cameron would be a better PM than Gordon is (publicly, he still denies this but deep down… well maybe I’ll convince him one day,) and perhaps most importantly, that the web’s second coming will irrevocably shift the goal posts for traditional PR.

In all seriousness, I’m delighted to have joined Wolfstar, they’re a great group of people to be around and the business has genuinely exciting prospects. Right – I’ve got 2000 blog posts read so best get on.  You’ll be hearing more from me soon, so I hope you’ll allow me to get away with this being short.

Don’t blame the PR intern - ever

So many things I could say about this story on Gawker about a US PR firm impersonating a rabbi to post fake blog comments. But let’s keep it quick with three simple rules.

1. Don’t ever blame the intern. They are working on your time, on your clients. It’s up to you to supervise them and make sure it’s done right. If they screw up, then it is really your firm that has screwed up. Someone should have been mentoring them properly. They are there to learn and gain experience, not just do work for you.
2. Don’’t fake it on the internet – ever. Firstly, because it’s wrong. Secondly, because you’re likely to get caught. Thirdly, in the UK at least it is illegal thanks to the new Consumer Protection Regulations – you can go to jail.
3. If you do get it wrong then admit it, apologise, learn and don’t do it again.

Thanks to Stephen Davies for the link.

Twitter Tool - Updating Twitter from Microsoft Outlook

If you are a regular Twitter user, you may well be interested to hear that there is a new tool available which means you can check and update your Twitter status directly from Microsoft Outlook - so no more switching from one site to another.

I have just tested it and it appears to work just fine and it’s actually really useful. Interestingly, it singles out messages to just you too, which is a really useful function - I had spotted most of my personal messages but there were a few in there that I didn’t know about.

Thanks, to Tom Murphy for flagging this one up to me - very useful. To download this tool click here - it takes about 30 secs.

Below is a screen grab of my outlook page and how it now looks.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

UK blog visitors reach an all time high

The latest research from Hitwise Intelligence reveals that UK Internet visits to blogs reached an all time high last week.

In fact if you look at the monthly data you can see that the market share of blogs has increased steadily over the last three years and has increased by 208% compared to ‘traditional’ news and media sites which have also increased significantly by 70%.

Another interesting statistic  is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad cites yesterday’s launch of Apple’s 3G iPhone as an example of the influence of blogs. Gadget and Apple-related blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media.

Another fascinating fact about blog traffic is the diversity of search terms that people use to find them. The highest ranked term was ‘club penguin cheats’ yet it accounted for just 0.39% of the 518,000 search terms.

The final interesting piece of data for me was the importance of Google image search, which was the second largest individual source of traffic after Google UK and even more tellingly 7.85% of all traffic from Google UK Image Search went to blogs, second only to social networks and forums.

The significance of image search for public relations people is that it highlights just one of the many business benefits of a social media news room and social media news releases. Content is no longer being created just for the privileged ranks of journalists, but for thousands of ‘citizen journalists’ who simply want to talk about what they like on whatever user-generated content site they happen to use. But this means we must be much more focused on customer engagement and what the people want rather than what the client or business wants to tell them.

Live blogging the Guide to Social Media Conference

If you visit A PR Guy’s Musings then I’m live blogging the Don’t Panic Guide to Social Media Conference using CoverItLive.

Measurement Camp - How to measure social media. My take on the event…

I was in the big smoke yesterday at the second instalment of the social media measurement camp organised by Will McInnes. Both Seb and Stuart attended the Chinwag event on measuring social media that inspired Will to set up the camp and have posted about it previously but I thought I would give you my thoughts on this one, especially as it’s one of the first events I’ve been to whilst working in the PR industry.

I really enjoyed the set up of the meeting. It was really informal so and we were split up into groups to discuss issues therefore allowing everyone to make contributions to the discussion.

The key thing I came away thinking was that nobody really had any definitive answers about the best way to measure social media. Nielsen had some good examples of the tools that they use to analyse social media campaigns, however it was clear that these are not necessarily always effective for all the types of social media. Some useful insights into benchmarking by creating snapshots were also shared.

The questions were plentiful and really got me thinking about social media and the practicalities of measuring it. Here are some of the questions that we came up with to get your brains around:

· Should the different types of social media platform be considered as separate media forms? For example should a Twitter campaign be measured in a completely different way to a blogger outreach campaign? My initial thoughts were of course, but then this led to me questioning how you measure a campaign that translates across the different platforms, for example if a YouTube video is uploaded and is then posted on a blog, then added to a group on Facebook?

· From this we started to consider whether the true value of social media is in the story/content rather than where it appears?

· What is the definition of a successful Facebook/MySpace/Twitter campaign?

· How do you identify appropriate mavens and how do you value them (e.g is more people talking more important than influential people talking?)

· How do you measure the effects of your online campaign offline?

One of the key conclusions that I came to after the event is that one of the biggest challenges in measuring social media is defining what makes a campaign successful, especially as this can be specific to each client and to each individual campaign that is created.

I think I definitely have to agree with Stuart and Will again that “understanding is more important than measuring” and that to measure we must understand.

I love Ajax

Since December 2006, I have been enjoying the tech world a lot more than I thought I ever would. What’s not to love? Social networking, speedy instant messaging, Vista, the Wii, RSS feeds, building blogs….

I’m now at a stage where my nearest and dearest believe I’m some sort of a new age geek. A cross breed of a digital marketer and blogger, meets wannabe chef and sports fan. I hold my hands up and whole heartedly agree. Why not embrace these new treats and enjoy the tools that are now available to us?

The thing that has continued to impress me over the past six months is Ajax.

Wikipedia: "Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications."

Ultimately most people are impressed by functionality, but as my team mates remind me every day, I like things to look ‘pretty’. Until recently, I was an advertiser’s dream. The packaging was key, with usability coming close behind. For me, Ajax achieves both of these key elements to a very impressive degree.

I’m pretty sure that most people who use popular sites like Facebook aren’t aware they’re using an Ajax system, or for that matter, really care… and then there’s the new BBC site; allowing you to customise your own homepage with whatever BBC content you’re most interested in.

Basically, the way the world is moving, and the pace at which consumers are now living their lives means information must be informative, relevant and accessible. If it isn’t, then the information supplier looses credibility and inevitability users. And just to quickly revert back to my earlier point about how I like things to look good, or rather, slick… I really like the fact Ajax allows you to move content, style the design and customize a site to make it feel like your own. Personalisation is the key.

Here’s my top five sites that I would highly recommend having a proper look at:

1) BBC

2) Facebook

3) Netvibes

4) Google

5)  YouTube

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