PepperDigital

To Blog is Human... To Successfully Pitch a Blogger is Divine

By Rob Longert, PepperDigital

A few weeks ago, I penned a post about how we can take the ideas of a “successful PR campaign and apply the things that made it great to the digital world.”

In the post, I mentioned six points that can be applied to traditional and digital PR and marketing, one of which focused on building solid media relationships online and off.

For now though, let’s keep things focused in terms of online channels.

Last week, Text 100, a “global boutique PR consultancy,” released survey results based on the responses of 449 bloggers from 21 countries based on “preferences of chiefly technology, business and lifestyle bloggers across the globe.”

Check out some of the takeaways mentioned in the press release, below.

1. Corporations are increasingly recognizing the influence of bloggers – The increased contact points to the “mainstreaming” of blogging as a communications channel, and the recognition by corporations that bloggers have increasing influence over their desired audiences.

2. Corporate News Releases are out - Bloggers say Social Media Releases will experience far greater usage in the coming months.

3. RSS feeds are a key source of information for bloggers, second only to other bloggers – If companies aren’t making their information available via RSS feeds, then they’re failing to use one of the bloggers’ most-trusted channels. Corporate bloggers and Web sites are also consistently deemed more credible sources than microblogging, newspapers, social bookmarking sites and television (and magazines in Europe and Asia Pacific).

4. The majority of bloggers are still part-timers – adjust your strategies accordingly - Outside of the United States, the majority of bloggers surveyed blog for less than nine hours per week.

5. Most bloggers will acknowledge when a post is supported by a corporation - While more than 80 percent of bloggers, no matter their region, say they would acknowledge sponsorship of blog posts, North Asian bloggers in particular tend to be less likely or willing to acknowledge sponsorship.

If you are in the social media space, some of these takeaways are no brainers, but as PR people, we know how important it is to put numbers behind our thoughts.

There is no question that Twitter is all the rage right now, but when we know that “microblogging is used by more than 75% of all bloggers, and those in APAC and Europe believe they are blogging more often because of microblogging,” it tells us something about how bloggers worldwide like to communicate, and that is what we can take away from this survey.

It is not necessarily eye opening to find out that “PR professionals are failing to read the blogs and truly understand their target bloggers’ communities,” as many of us know from reading the Bad Pitch Blog, but what is eye opening is that bloggers realize that some PR people are trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Take a look at the findings when you have a chance, but if you don’t, just remember that your client may have the best product, service, idea or spokesperson in the world, but if you do not know how to communicate with the media you are pitching, whether it is print, online, radio or broadcast, you won’t get too far, and you will wind up with some frowning clients.

Thanks to Jessie Dienst for passing along this Text 100 survey.

Tracking Online Discussion: Social Media Monitoring and Market Research

by Lauren Begley

A few weeks ago, I attended a panel session on social media and market research. The panel consisted of social media gurus, market researchers and public relations specialists. It was interesting to see representatives from each camp defend their professional mode of evaluating consumer behavior in the digital space, as each brought something different to the table.

On one hand, the market researchers felt their work was valuable because they were able to answer the ‘who’ question. Who is saying what online? In their defense, the market researchers brought up the 1-9-99 Principle. This is the notion that one percent of people online are extremely vocal, meaning they regularly comment on blogs, message boards, forums, etc. Nine percent are somewhat vocal, meaning they occasionally share their opinion in digital form. That leaves 99 percent of online users who rarely or never share their opinion in the digital space.

Their argument was that merely analyzing the organic online discussion only captures one percent of the online population’s sentiment. This is where, they believe, market research comes in; professionally facilitated research studies are able to gain insight from a cross section of online consumers, and allow practitioners to pull information from those who are online but might not leave as obvious a paper trail.

On the other hand, the public relations camp supported their role in online sentiment monitoring, either manually or through paid search functions such as Compete or Radian 6. While it is important to determine the “who” when monitoring consumer sentiment in the digital space, the PR pros emphasized the fact that they are able to “listen in” on what consumers are saying to each other, as opposed to tracking what consumers might say in a focus group.

By tracking organic consumer sentiment—whether it’s negative or positive—we can understand the ‘buzz’ and where it is coming from. More importantly, these organic expressions come from consumers who are so compelled by a brand they feel the need to share their opinion. In a sense, they become brand ambassadors as soon as they post their comment publicly, so it is essential for the company to evaluate their opinions.

After listening to both sides, I see value in each. I think in order to be as informed about consumer sentiment in the digital space, it is important to understand both the organic ‘buzz’ while also finding a way to quantitatively measure the who, what, when and where online.

Tomorrow's News Today

by Jessica Slevin

What if you could get tomorrow’s newspaper today? According to Muck Rack, "now you sorta can." This innovative new site provides a place for journalists to gather and tweet about what they are currently working on.  Users can sift through the site by links, beats, sources and pictures to keep up with real-time news.  This is a great resource for PR professionals to keep with what people are talking about and to find reporters to connect with.  While Muck Rack is the go-to Twitter source for journalists, there are also affiliated sites for other professionals such as Designers, Developers  and Venture Capitalists (and even for Beer Lovers and Pets on Twitter!).

Sites like Muck Rack force us to think about the possibility that social media may one day “beat out” traditional media for getting the news to the people.  We have already seen several examples of this in the last several months. First there was the U.S. Airways crash in January, when a Twitter user posted the first images and commentary about a plane crashing into the Hudson River (see Lia Lobello’s post here). More recently, we saw the controversy over the Iran Election (see Michael Blankenship’s post here). Last week, when Michael Jackson went into cardiac arrest and the whole world waited on the edge of their seats for news, people tweeted about his status before a single article went live on a traditional news source. Traditional media is feeling the threat of losing readers to online media, and some publications are even folding under the pressure (Vibe magazine, for example).

I definitely get more of my news from social networks than traditional media. Amidst all of the celebrity news last week, a historical music venue burned down in the town I went to school in.  How did I first find out? Twitter and Facebook statuses, of course. Users posted photos and videos long before the local news stations even got to the scene of the fire. While keeping up with technological advances seems only natural for people in my generation, I can’t help but wonder when (or if) all age groups will catch on to using social media for 24 hour news. Now more than ever, we’re just a click away from the news.  We can customize our news intake through alerts and feeds so our personalized news report comes straight to our inbox on our preferred schedule. How do you get your news? Are you still loyal to traditional media or are you always looking to the newest social network for your breaking news?

76% Unhappy With Agency Online PR

by Carl Foster

Last Thursday I attended PR Week’s PR and the New Media Conference in London. It was, on the whole, very informative. But the event was always going to be challenged by the mixed 100+ person audience and their different levels of knowledge. This was best illustrated by the vote response to one question about Twitter. When the delegates were asked how often they used Twitter 31% said everyday, 31% said they had never used it and the rest were somewhere in between.

Now, while that response was interesting, the result of another one of the votes was positively alarming. When delegates were asked if their PR agency did as good a job in the online sphere as in the offline sphere, a clear 76% said no. What?! Haven’t PR agencies spent the last five years or more espousing the benefits of blogging, podcasts and Twitter? Haven’t we all been at conferences and seminars learning how we can deliver value through these new and developing channels? Aren’t we, in fact, supposed to be leading this field and taking this space from marketing types? I’m sure the answer for many is yes, but it is clear that we haven’t, as an industry, been doing a very good job.

I’m not sure if PR Week is planning content around the results of the votes (I hope so), but if there was one takeaway from the conference for the agency world it is that there is a huge gap between what clients want and are expecting and what agencies are delivering. In times of recession and prized new business leads, delivering results orientated online PR campaigns is something that we should all be focused on.

Some Frequent Warnings/Reminders

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Some people say that the worst force out there for the implementation of “social media strategy” is the cynic. I respectfully disagree. As people around Peppercom will likely tell you, I’m often railing against what I see as a force more dangerous than “the Philistine,” to use Matthew Arnold’s vernacular: the overenthusiast. People who believe in using social media for social media’s sake. So, since my role on the team is to be a healthy skeptic, I thought I’d share a few of my most oft-cited warnings with you:

Misconceptions of the Rate of Technological Change: "The number of people who have reliable Internet connections in the past decade has mushroomed. Yet, I hear others talking about how we might all be wirelessly connected in five years, and I think about the technological bubbles many people live in. The length of time it takes for technology to move from early adopters to the public at large, the difficulty of infrastructure reliability on a national basis, the digital divide that is too often ignored, and a variety of other factors can't be forgotten."

Realities of the Digital Divide: "We must remain "aware that, for all the discussions we have about the way the Internet is a primary driver in fundamentally changing the ways in which consumers interact with producers, fans interact with media properties and brands, readers interact with authors, and people simply interact with one another, we cannot pretend that there still does not exist a great digital divide among socioeconomic classes in individual countries and, even more sharply contrasted, between various peoples around the world."

The Man Who Motivated Michael Jordan…and His Sales

by Rob Longert

It isn’t too often that I click on a banner ad, but I couldn’t pass this one up…

The Charlie Murphy character from the Dave Chappelle Show left me speechless at times and I haven’t really seen him since the show went off the air, so clicking on this banner ad was a no brainer.

The ad took me to a microsite for “Leroy Smith, The Man Who Motivated Michael Jordan.”  At first glance I had no idea what the site was for. Was it a new Dave Chappelle show? Was Charlie Murphy coming out with a new movie?

I was wrong on both accounts. The site was built by Nike and is dedicated to “Leveraging Michael Jordan¹s highly anticipated Hall of Fame induction” via a “Air Jordan Hall of Fame (HOF) Collection” coming onto the market this summer, according to a press release from SportsFuzion, Inc.

As of 2006, “SportsFuzion has been the owner of the exclusive worldwide rights to the Hall of Fame’s trade names, logos, trademarks, designs, and photos for use in sportswear.” That said, earlier today they put out a press release, saying that Nike and “His Airness” went “behind their backs to cut them out of the deal” which “has become their worst nightmare.”

In legal land, Nike and MJ might be in the wrong, but from a PR perspective, the Leroy Smith microsite is well done, the brand has been optimized in terms of media outreach to big-time sports bloggers (such as Sports Biz with Darren Rovell, and Page 2) and they chose to use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as their social media channels, which seems to be working out for them as they have about 161,000 views on their featured video, 8,000 fans on Facebook, and 3,357 followers on Twitter.

It could be that I am a huge fan of MJ, a fan of Charlie Murphy or that I am a sucker for a funny online video, but I think the site works and Nike gets what it takes to launch an engaging campaign.

Do you think Nike and Air Jordan are in the wrong, or should Leroy Smith live on despite the suit from SportzFusion, Inc.?