Getting Ink

Show me the money, Mummy

I've been tracking the UK parent blogging scene for a few months now, and one thing that really strikes me is how quickly the sector is commercialising – paid advertising, sponsorship deals, giveaways and competitions are now par for the course on many of the parenting blogs I’ve been tracking in the Tots100 index.

I’m starting to wonder whether the speed of this change means there hasn’t been time to agree on what is and isn’t acceptable when accepting goods, services or payment from third parties.

Following recent debate on whether Mummy bloggers should accept advertising, or receive payment for running competitions, I noticed this page on Violet Posy, one of my personal favourite Mummy blogs in the UK. What I found particularly interesting is the part where the blogger says:

“… compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content…. This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.”

I find this a bit alarming, really. Which is no reflection on Violet Posy - I applaud her for thinking about a disclosure policy, and I think more bloggers could follow her lead. 

The problem is that, for journalists, our professional code of conduct (and many contracts of employment) states that any commercial relationship that might influence content should be declared, and journalists shouldn’t endorse any commercial product or service, except their own work. Many media organisations explicitly forbid reporters from accepting any freebies over a nominal value. 

Now I accept that blogging and journalism aren’t the same thing – bloggers couldn’t cover many of the products and services they do without the benefit of freebies. What’s more, most bloggers aren’t journalists – UK parent bloggers have a wide variety of backgrounds and professions, and I wouldn’t expect them to come to blogging with an understanding of the ethics of balancing editorial and commercial content.

But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of a blogger accepting payment for posts without declaring that commercial relationship. Aren’t you risking your credibility? If you’re openly admitting that you might write about something because you’re being paid to do so, but you won’t necessarily tell me, how do I trust your content?

But the risks, surely, are even greater for PR agencies and their clients. Imagine being exposed as having paid for a series of “independent” positive posts on a major blog. Or if a competing PR agency discovered your agency had provided freebies to certain bloggers in return for coverage of your client. Can’t be good, can it? Perhaps it’s naïve, but I wonder if it’s not time for PR agencies themselves to start considering the issue of ethics and blogger outreach.

Props to the PR: all pitches should be *this* good

Further to yesterday's rant about PRs who send generic email pitches to hundreds of journalists, I got an email from Phil Corfan at Octopus that made me laugh a lot, especially the postscript. Genius. 

Hi Sally,

So you know this is an individually tailored pitch, not just some spam we send to everyone, your name is spelt down the side.

An announcement today by Cisco revealed Smart Connected Buildings, the company’s latest emerging technology. Smart+Connected Communities addresses the growing need for sustainable energy to meet the demand of increasingly urbanised populations by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future that run on networked information. 

Like other components of the Smart+Connected Communities vision, Cisco’s Smart Connected Buildings solution provides the intelligence to interconnect and enable building systems such as heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC), lighting, electrical, security, and renewables over the IP network to build smart and energy-efficient buildings of the future.

Linked to this sentence is the full release, complete with images, video and supporting quotes. <http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_070109b.html>

You may be interested in discussing this news with a Cisco spokesperson. If so, please do get in touch on the details below.

Kind regards,
Phil

(Apologies for the slightly wooden prose. This was harder than I expected it to be.)

Oi, enough with the spam, already!

I posted on Twitter this morning, one of my semi-regular rants about the ills that the world of public relations inflicts on us poor, innocent journalists.

My Tweet (I know, get me with my 2.0 lingo!) said that sending identical emails to 150 hacks isn't pitching - it's spam.

Of course, most people immediately agreed with me, but some inconvenient types thought I was insisting on personalised press releases, and said it wasn’t practical to tailor pitches to journalists if you’ve got limited time and resources.

Hmm. Not so, friends, not so. Next, time, try the Sally Whittle recipe for pitching (tequila chaser optional):

As a PR, you’ve got limited time to invest in getting a client's story out to the press. 9 times out of 10, you're not working with the market leader and the news isn’t exactly “Hold the front page” stuff.

In this scenario, a blanket press release broadcast to everyone in your Cision database is never going to be the most effective tool at your disposal. What is? Your knowledge of a) the client and b) the media.

Using this knowledge, you can identify perhaps 10 media outlets that you know SHOULD cover your client because their audience will want to know this information.

Again, using your skills and knowledge, you identify the relevant contacts at those outlets and the best way to contact them - perhaps email, phone or even Twitter DM.

Next, think for each outlet: what’s the story? (clue: your client is almost never the story). Consumer publications will be interested in how the news affects real people in the street, while trade publications might be more interested in how it drives business improvement or changes a competitive landscape.

On that basis, you can create 10 pitches that are personalised to different media. You’re not writing a novel for each person – just a brief intro and a few bullet points outlining the assets you’ve got that will help them put together that story – perhaps pictures, case studies, review kit, interview opps etc.

Sending these pitches will almost always generate better results than a generic press release sent to all and sundry, and has the added advantage of helping you to build real working relationships with key media contacts – at the very least, you’ll be showing that you’re someone who takes the time to understand who their audience is, and what they’re interested in.

Besides, you can always spam out the release the next week, if you really feel the urge, can’t you? 

Was this the stupidest Tweet EVER? (probably)

The last week or so, I've been meaning to post something about those people who keep doing the Twitter equivalent of pushing a flyer in my face by incessantly promoting their books/seminars etc. You know the ones where you want to reply: "yes, I saw that message the first 20 times you posted it, thanks". But you don't, because, well, you're a coward and you want an easy life.

But sometimes you see something SO bad, SO poorly executed, you can't help yourself. Friends, this is that moment:

Around lunchtime today, I received an @ message on Twitter from someone called Ellen Brandt, saying "I Don't Like What You Wrote. You Should be Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Have Vultures Eat Your Liver".

Not so unusual for a journo to get that sort of thing - but the comment was followed by a tiny.cc link. Checking it out, it was a link to a blog post, which turns out to be a sort of long and kinda dull ‘humorous’ article about people attacking other people online. It's also the only post on the blog, which is sort of weird.

The article seems to be the work of Dr Ellen Brandt, an entrepreneur and Ivy League educated historian who has written 3,000 magazine articles. Cripes. Turns out she’d posted the same @ Tweet to hundreds of people today, most of whom didn’t really get the joke and thought they were being insulted – cue lots of conversations where Ellen accuses them of having no sense of humour, of not being sophisticated enough to understand her humour, and – best of all – not understanding how the Internet works.

Sending an insulting Tweet with a blind link to your own blog is a GREAT idea, Ellen says, because:

Creative marketing is not "spam." We in Little Media must be creative to compete with Big Media. Interactivity is what makes Internet media different from print media.

Now I’m willing to bet that Ellen’s Twitter feed, blog post and business website (she writes up the life stories of 'ordinary' Americans) got thousands of hits out of that stunt today. Yay, right?

Except it’s still the most stupid Tweet I’ve ever seen. By a long way.

Because at least 50% of people will instantly dismiss Ellen as a spammer and block her from their accounts. All those connections, all those relationships, are now dead. Another significant proportion will have followed through the link, realised it was a bit of shameless self-promotion, and blocked Ellen from their accounts. Or will just ignore her the next time she gets in touch.

And an unfortunate few, who asked Ellen not to send them that sort of thing - well, they got insulted for their trouble. I particularly liked the woman who said she'd reported Ellen as a spammer and was told: "Sweetums. It is OVER. Do not talk to me again."

Way. To. Go. 

I think the lesson we can learn from this is:

• If it looks like a plug, sounds like a plug and clicks like a plug, it's a plug. Don't try and dress it up.
• Don't post links without telling people what they are.
• Don't assume people will get your sense of humour, especially when wishing them physical injury

And most important of all:

• If someone objects to your plug, don't call them stupid, unsophisticated or "sweetums" and ESPECIALLY don't do it online where it's indexed by Google and available for anyone to see for all time.

Pitching Parent Blogs - Top Tips

British parenting blogs are getting rather a lot of attention these days. Various papers are reporting that the "mommy blogging" phenomenon has officially landed in the UK, and the Tots100 index of parent blogs shows at least 500 UK blogs in this sector that are updated more than once a week.

As the blogging community has grown, of course, the blogs and bloggers are becoming increasingly attractive to the PR community. After all, why spend a fortune trying to get editorial in Practical Parenting magazine, when you can get almost the same exposure through one of the top UK parenting blogs – for free?

However, PRs should take note that parent bloggers are getting savvy to your ways. Susanna over at the Modern Mother blog is sick of being asked to do things without being paid, and her views are shared by many of the commenters on this post. Other bloggers resent being asked to promote your client’s brand out of the goodness of their hearts, or in return for a £20 freebie you’ve got lying around the office.

If you’re interested in reaching the growing audience of the UK’s parent blogs, here’s some tips for PR pros:

1. Research the blog first. Don't pitch a baby product to someone who has school-aged kids. Don't ask about little Emily if the blogger's child is called Esme. Remember that bloggers generally write in a personal not professional capacity so when you get it wrong, they're that much more offended than a journalist is when you get the name of their publication wrong. 
2. Read blogs. You'll soon notice parenting blogs tend to read like diaries of family life with the focus on personal experience. So why would they (or their readers) be interested in a press release? They're not a journalist - they don't really want to spend an hour turning the news about your client's new lotion into an amusing 300 word anecdote. Instead, look for ways to provide the blogger with an experience that will result in good, entertaining copy - to test out the product, to attend a product launch with other bloggers, to visit the company HQ.
3. Make life easy. Most parenting blogs are written by people with other day jobs. Or if they're not in a paid job, they're looking after demanding small people. So don't saddle them with a competition that requires them to set questions, write rules, check entries and pick a winner, before lugging the prizes to the Post Office. Take as much of this load away from the blogger as you can, so the competition doesn't cost them any additional time or effort.
4. Mummy bloggers will tell you they're part of a supportive community. Take it from someone who's seen the underbelly of parent blogging first hand - they're not. There are rivalries, cliques and feuds to rival anything you'll find in a traditional newsroom so if you're doing anything that involves more than one blog or blogger, do a little research to make sure you don't start a war in the process.
5. If you offer a blogger a review product, and you need to have the item returned, don't ask them to arrange the shipping. Don't ask them to write something positive. Don't post fake gushing comments on their review saying how much YOU love the product even if they thought it was crap. Yes, all of these things have happened.

Manners, much?

I write a blog for one of my clients, and recently posted something on life lessons we’d like to teach our children – you know, the stuff they learn that isn’t in text books.

One of the lessons I try to teach Flea is ‘manners take you places’. She knows when to say please and thank you, to say ‘excuse me’ when she wants to talk to someone who’s otherwise occupied, and that sort of thing. When she gets a bit older, I’ve got a new one to add to the list: return a bloody phone call once in a while.

Seriously, the media business is all about relationships – and it’s impossible to have a fulfilling relationship with voicemail.

I must waste an hour a day trying to get people on the phone. I call editors about pitches, I call PR agencies to arrange interviews, I speak to my various corporate and PR clients … and I inevitably hit the voicemail roadblock.

I recently had a contact email me with a query. I phoned them directly because the information they wanted wasn’t straightforward – it depended whether they wanted solution A or B. The call went to voicemail. So did a second call. Neither call was returned.

Eventually, we got into an email conversation instead, which took four times as long and meant what should have been a five minute job at 10am turned into eight emails back and forth, two iterations of the project document, and the job wasn't finished until 7pm. It's annoying and inefficient - for both of us, surely?

What’s really infuriating is I knew the client was in the office the whole time, screening calls, and basically didn't pick up the phone. I do it myself and I know it's an easy trap to fall into - you're busy, there's so much information coming from all directions and voicemail seems to save you time, right? Except it doesn't - you end up wasting time with asynchronous conversations, and you lose the opportunity to build a relationship in the same way you can when you're talking to someone in real-time.

In my book, there’s an etiquette with phone calls. Just as you shouldn’t take calls at the table, and you should turn your phone off in the cinema (seriously, who are those morons whose lives are so important they can’t turn a mobile off for 90 minutes?) you should try and respond when someone wants to talk to you – even if it’s to say “Now isn’t a great time, can I call you back in 10?”

When did it become okay to adopt this notion of “I’m so busy that I simply don’t have time to deal with other people”? As I tell Flea all the time, manners are about not making life harder for other people. So why don't we try answering the phone and returning calls once in a while?

Me, my blogs and I.

As a freelance writer, I’m increasingly being asked to write blogs for companies that don’t have time to produce three or four topical posts each week for themselves. I’m now a blogger for three different clients, in three different industries.

I find writing corporate blogs pretty fun. It’s mostly short pieces, you can express an opinion, and blogging is a great way to bring stories and posts you’ve found interesting to a wider audience. I really love when you start to see a blog you’ve written gaining traction in an industry – when links start appearing to your posts, and you’re regularly getting comments from readers.

But sometimes it’s REALLY difficult to balance the ‘me’ writing the blog, and the ‘client’ that is ostensibly the author.

Here’s the dilemma: to get traction, I think a blog needs a coherent personality, and a consistent voice. The best blogs – the ones I read regularly – feel like they’re written by a real person. Over time, you get a sense of who the blogger is – the sorts of issues that rile them, what kind of sense of humour they have…

As a blogger for my clients, I want their blogs to have that kind of identity, but I also feel blogs should be authentic and transparent. The more personality I give the blog (which is necessarily a version of my own personality), the less authentic I feel it becomes. When people respond to a post I’ve written about my opinions, and they think they’re responding to my client, it feels a bit dishonest somehow.

I’m really interested to know how other bloggers approach this issue – can you put ‘you’ aside when you’re blogging for someone else? Or should you be open about the fact that the client (or at least the MD) isn’t really writing the blog? If you write a blog from a purely corporate perspective without any personal anecdotes or opinion, do you alienate the audience? Or am I just worrying too much and this is just like writing a bylined article for your clients?