Socialmedialand

Posts Tagged ‘authentic blogger outreach’

At #180series yesterday the audience asked our panel an interesting question (via our Uservoice forum):

What are some popular examples of social media gone wrong?

I guess there are some very famous examples of social media snafus – Dominos, MotrinMoms, etc. All classic stories of big brands ignoring the online community until too late and then scrambling to do damage control. But the question got me thinking about social media gone wrong from the other side – small brands trying to use social media to increase awareness and buzz around their products and failing to do so.

“Authentic” Blogger Outreach

A little while back a coworker brought me a proposal [edit: I misrepresented this situation in my original post] that an agency (The Agency) had sent to us as a bid to work on one of our current clients. It was a blogger outreach plan complete with an example of previous work The Agency had done for a client that sold organic juice for children (Juice Client.)

In this case, I’m using the term “blogger outreach” in a very broad sense. The basic premise of the campaign was that The Agency had hired 5-7 people to impersonate blogger personas. These people were very close to the personality type they were taking on, but they were not the actual person. For example, one persona was a “daddy blogger” father of two who was very concerned about diet, organic food and nutrition for his kids (Daddy O.) The person playing Daddy O was also a father and may have cared about diet but was not actually Daddy O. In order to fulfill the “authentic” part of the plan, Daddy O created a fake Facebook account and a few other traces of his personality across the web in case anyone searched for him. Personally, I don’t think that’s very authentic at all.

The process was that Daddy O would search for forums and blogs about health and kids and write some sort of response. He would work in how he bought Juice Client product for his kids and they loved it and since it was also good for them, he was happy. Then he would include a link of course. I clicked on some of the links to his responses that were included in the case study to see examples of this in action. In the ones where his post was still there, it was the first and only post that was ever made under that screen name. When people responded to him he didn’t return and continue the conversation, and when you looked at his profile it was basically a short description of his persona and a link to Juice Client. In the other ones it was clear his post had been deleted.

The one question I keep repeating in my mind as I’m reading and looking through all this is: WHY? Why did you have to make up people? There are so many legitimate (actually authentic) daddy bloggers, mommy bloggers, parent communities, etc that you could have reached out to and gotten real people’s honest opinions on this. And that kind of campaign would have been way more beneficial. Because those people are real, and talk about this stuff all the time, if you’d gotten them hooked on your product they would still be singing its praises right now, whereas the fake bloggers you created are only going to do it on the clock and stop as soon as you quit paying them. No wonder it never took off.

There’s an easy way and a hard way to do things. Taking the time to contact bloggers, send them samples of your juice, ask them to post honest opinions on what they thought about it and disclose that they were sent free juice – That’s the hard way. It takes time, some money, and patience. The easy way gets you links right away, quick results that you can show the client and then end your engagement before they realize that won’t last.

Sometimes the hardest thing is the right thing (pretty sure I stole that from some song somewhere – just can’t place it…) and in this case it really is. Social media is sometimes put forward as an easy, quick thing to do when in reality it’s not. It’s a long term commitment where the pay off isn’t always immediate. We, as agencies, consultants, PR professionals, social media experts (or amateurs), or whatever you call yourself, need to prepare the client for that. It’s our job to explain to them how this works and why they need to take the time to do it right rather than go for the easy, quick win. Let’s all take that responsibility a little more seriously.

Thoughts? Think I’m being too hard on The Agency? Share your opinions in the comments!