Fake Plastic Noodles

Target audiences are important to identify at the start of a blog outreach campaign, but on the Internet there is the potential to reach a vast audience that traditional PR wouldn’t necessarily think would be a “good fit.” We have the potential to reach millions of people, but only if we can let that message go to a wider audience. That’s the beauty of digital PR: you never quite know who your campaign is going to spread to, and we have to stress that the target audience isn’t necessarily the only audience.

That said, I’m starting to think that blogger relations is turning out to be Mommy relations. There are so many strategies out there that only want to target “Sally(!), a Stay-At-Home-Mom whose children are the most important thing in her life, besides a clean house, of course!” Ugh.

Well, I’ve got news for you: Mommy bloggers are sick of being contacted for cooking and cleaning supplies, and they’re not the only ones who would be interested in writing about them. They’re one audience, but they’re not the only. We’ve worked for some time on expanding our outreach and while moms probably make up the majority of our friendlies, it’s starting to change.

However, to be fair, there are some very valid reasons why PR people target moms, and it’s not just because it’s a cooking or cleaning product. For the Mommy bloggers who don’t understand why so many PR people target them, this is why:

1. We already have established relationships with many. One of my colleagues works with over 150 moms on a near-weekly basis. She has a very friendly relationship with each one.
2. Results. Sorry to say, but moms are often most receptive to product reviews. Moms, like most people, like free stuff.
3. Despite all the complaining out there, there are still comments from moms on Mommy blogs that say something to the effect of “Wow, how do you get to do all these reviews? I wish someone would contact me!”

It’s been in the last 6 or 8 months that pitching a Mommy blogger can be a land mine. That’s why it’s SO IMPORTANT to do your research (as it is with any blog, of course). With as many moms up in arms over the infamous BlogHer debate, I encourage every PR person who wants to pitch a mother to please, please, please read their blogs, particularly the months July-Sept. 2007. I also encourage PR people to think outside the box in terms of target audiences online. That cooking or cleaning product could be of interest to a Baby Boomer male if he writes something applicable.

Side note: I’d like to add that I didn’t write about the BlogHer debate when it happened. The last thing I wanted to do was linkbait for the sake of linkbaiting like I felt some people were doing. In my office, we all had our own opinions on the matter (and it’s part of the reason I really wasn’t feeling the PR back in September), but I’ve moved on. I’m confident that we do this the right way. My job is my job and just because I’m in PR doesn’t make me a bad person. No matter what, I’m still the same Melanie when I go home at night.

For me, I’m curious to see how this will all pan out in the UK. I’ve done a fair amount of research on “Mummy” bloggers, and can tell you quite unequivocally, it’s not taken off yet. There are some, but they hold no where near the clout of my friendlies here. To be honest, I’m looking forward to expanding outreach into a different culture. It’s going to take a lot of research; definitely something that you can’t jump headfirst into. In a few months I’d like to finish the anology, Mommy bloggers in the States are to ____ bloggers in the UK.

Sunday morning I received a comment on my post about The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. The post itself was just a little blurb about how I liked the blog and thought it was a nifty idea. the comment, however, didn’t make a lot of sense. It read,

very interesting, but i don’t agree with you. -idetroce

Don’t agree with what? The fact that I like a blog? I approved the comment as there was nothing really suspect about it (no URL, no weird e-mail, etc.), but as I sat down to breakfast, something didn’t seem right to me. I kept on wondering if I should delete it or not. On the surface there was nothing wrong, but something…something was off.

I’ll admit I had a bit of inner turmoil deciding what to do. I would never delete someone’s comment just because they didn’t agree with me. What if Idetroce is a real person? What if he or she flamed me for not publishing the comment? I have only deleted one comment on this blog and it was because it contained some anti-gay messaging that was entirely inappropriate, and I still felt a little weird about it. I decided to Google the name to see if there was something more to the story.

Over the weekend many, many bloggers were hit with the same comment. Those who were curious started talking. Who was this person? Is it some sort of clever marketing ploy? Guerilla PR?

Eh, more like clever spam. Really clever spam. Clever spam because right now, it’s not really spam at all. It’s what I’m calling a Spam Flag. It works like this: someone sets up a robot to comment on people’s blogs with an innocuous comment with no suspicious links. If the person approves it or it posts automically, the spammer knows that the blog is “easy.” After a few days or weeks, you’re spam filter is chock full of the most vile web sites and language you’ve ever seen.

So is this Spam 2.0? 3.0? Instead of blindly submitting questionable links to sites, they’re preying on human emotions. Pretty soon they’re going to be delivering Wifi puppies to me who can transmit comments about male enhancement and “friendly ladies” right from my front door.

Needless to say, Idetroce is on my blacklist. Try as he or she might to “disagree” with me on this one, Idetroce has been outed.

Last night we received around 7 inches of snow and there’s more on the way. It’s too bad that I was planning on grocery shopping today, my car is completely snowed in.

Last Wednesday was our holiday party at Conor O’Neils. Despite the fact that the main room of the pub played a lot of Outkast (?), instead of more traditional music, we had a good time. Our CEO was nice enough to stop by, as he was in Detroit having dinner, the most deserving person I can think of won an awesome TV at the raffle and our boss went home with some *amazing* gifts, including three advertising books that we’ve been trying to get rid of for a year and a half.

December is a very interesting month for an online outreach campaign. Right now, every campaign in the works for us has some sort of Christmas element to it: charity, gift giving, gift finders, gift guides, etc. In theory, it makes sense to have online outreach campaigns during this time of year. After all, more and more shoppers are staying in to purchase online, rather than go out and brave the hellish nightmare that is the mall. However, I’ve noticed a trend in our December campaigns doesn’t bode well for PR cheer…

Even though many online consumer campaigns are timely, newsworthy and (under normal circumstances) of interest to a blogger, it takes a lot more work to achieve any sort of placement than it would in months like March or September.

E-mail pitches that are normally replied to within hours take days (if they are replied to at all). They usually begin with “Melanie, I am SO sorry I wasn’t able to e-mail you back sooner. It’s been so busy here!” This is something I’m used to and I try to explain to clients and more traditional PR colleagues that bloggers, unlike feature journalists, aren’t scrambling for holiday stories. They already have their own in the form of family and friends. Product reviews and web site mentions get thrown to the wayside in exchange for their own brand of Christmas magic.

The fact of the matter is, people aren’t reading blogs as much as they’re reading reviews on Amazon. Online outreach campaigns are not perfect for every product just as much as they’re not perfect for every time of year. A campaign has to be really stellar to get through all the white noise of Christmas music and screaming toddlers. There are a few tactics that I think do this best:

• Charity: People are generally in more of a giving mood and saying that your Client A is stopping world hunger or supporting climate change initiatives resonates very well. I haven’t seen a holiday charity campaign bomb yet.
• Cutesy holiday virals: There’s a reason why I’ve had no less than seven Elf Yourself requests in my inbox. Before you ask, here’s mine. (Side note: As I typed in the URL to link to the site, it took nearly three minutes to load. Ya think maybe some other people are on it?)
• Giveaways: These are generally a sure thing any time of year, but during the holidays who doesn’t want a little something for themselves too?

Maybe these seem a little too easy. I think they’re pretty much common sense, but then again I think most of digital PR is common sense, and I see way too many campaigns or ideas that make me scratch my head in wonderment. Stellar PR doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to work.

I didn’t do a weekend mash-up on Saturday because I’m a lazy bum and I haven’t done a proper post this week because I’m a busy bum.  I have, however, been keeping an eye on little bits of the blogosphere that have caught my fancy.  Keep yourselves busy, loves.

Happy Birthday!

Women rejoice!  It’s the 100th birthday of the bra!  Whether strapless, push-up, shear, t-strap, or sport, know that your girls are resting comfortably in history.via College Candy
photo via AdClassix

 Viral video rehash

Already with the “Best of 07″ lists, here are the top 5 viral videos of the year, according to Mental Floss *

Gotta love this one… It’s a recording of a cop from Dearborn (about 25 minutes away from Ann Arbor) who thought he was dying from eating too many pot brownies.  The kicker is that it was pot stolen from one of his police investigations.  It was all over our news for a week straight.  Klassy.

*Please note that I sooo wrote about Kellie Pickler not knowing that France is a country first.

Even more cities that I would not want to drive in

Looks like London is nothing compared to this roundabout in Swindon:

 I guess I can turn my list of “Reasons I Will Not be Driving in London” to my list of “Reasons I Will Not be Driving in England”

via Web Urbanist

Our holiday party is on Wednesday, so stay tuned for pictures.  I’m also off for a few days this week, so hopefully I can get caught up with some much needed blogging.

I am sitting right now in a ballroom at my alma matar, Eastern Michigan University, representing my company at an internship fair. It certainly brings back a lot of memories of the days where I woke up at 11, didn’t feel guilty about eating pizza at 3 am, and only had to worry about a paper with a looming due date, but more importantly, it’s had me thinking about my own PR education.

In my PR classes, there was never any mention of digital PR, the blogosphere or the power of word of mouth. I don’t think things got much farther past the “Be careful what you put on MySpace” warning. I’m not sure too much has changed. Nearly every PR student that I’ve encountered in Michigan has barely any idea what I’m talking about when I give the shortened version of who I am and what I do. Once I do my shpiel, you can see, like magic, the light bulb go off in their heads.

There are some programs, UGA, for example that have a stellar reputation for teaching online PR, (check out Karen Russell’s blog, Teaching PR), but so many who do not. So here I am, doing my small part to try to educate internship-hungry students (who don’t care where their internship is, only that they get one) about the importance of digital PR in under two minutes.

Baby steps, baby steps.

So where has Melanie been?  Let’s call it “around, but not engaged.”

Truth is, I’ve been feeling a bit apathetic about blogging, especially about PR.  Many have touched on this before, but lately it seems like all PR posts from around the blogosphere are exactly the same.  It goes like this:

1. Some bad pitch is sent to random high-profile blogger
2. PR bloggers scramble to either save face or talk about how they would never do such a thing
3. Everyone pats themselves on the back for being above said criticism

I’m guilty of this too, no doubt.  It’s just a symptom of lagging business during the month of December coupled with the want or need to keep up the blog.  Between this week and next, I’ll have taken three vacation days and wrapped up four campaigns.  I’m super busy right now (or at least scrambling to get everything done so that I don’t have to think about work while I’m sitting on my couch watching old episodes of Sex and the City), but after that, there’s not much to talk about or learn from.

Hopefully, I’ll have some news to share soon, but in the meantime, here’s where I’ve really been.

• Crossing on more thing off on my list of things to do before I leave the country (Frankenmuth)
• Writing and designing reports like mad
• Buying a new iPod
• Christmas shopping
• Doing better at updating Twitter (even though I’m still not sure I like it)

I suppose I am meaning to say that December is going to be more about me and less about the job I do.  I’m sure things will pick back up in January, and should anything drastic happen, I’m sure I’ll be there to aggregate the content :-P

Another fantastic example of our American education system…

Ugh.