bloggers and brands

09 Feb 2011

Tip: Maybe Don’t Let Your Trust Capital Situation Get This Bad

Some of you have been asking me to write about MckMama for a while now. (If you’re not familiar with MckMama, she is a blogger named Jennifer McKinney who blogs at MyCharmingKids.net, and who is most notable IMO to outsiders for the fact that she has inspired a huge following that is only surpassed in size by the legion of people who despise her.) I’ve shied away from it because I don’t feel like I’ve ever reached a sufficient understanding of the MckMama situation to provide any valuable insight.

That said: this is really interesting (if by interesting you mean “bad”), and I thought it might be an instructive point about the illusive nature of trust capital . Recently MckMama was hosting a giveaway involving Lansinoh breast pumps. In her posts on the topic, she had made reference to speaking to people “from Lansinoh” about the giveaway. Somehow (and when I say “somehow” I mean, one of MckMama’s detractors probably told them, since Lansinoh stated that the tweets were “address[ing] consumers’ questions about our involvement”) Lansinoh’s official Twitter account was informed of this and set about making it abundantly clear that Lansinoh had NOT been involved in any such giveaway, that they had never worked with MckMama in any capacity.

Well. That’s odd. And some confusion followed, which was kind of cleared up when Lansinoh posted on their blog that they had not run the giveaway, and in fact what had happened was that some PR subcontractor had given MckMama the pumps for a giveaway on her blog:

Late in the day on Feb. 7, Lansinoh was informed that Ms. McKinney was in fact part of a sampling effort carried out by a third-party service provider. Due to an unfortunate breakdown in communication, Lansinoh was not informed that four Affinity® Double Electric Breast Pumps were indeed provided to Ms. McKinney. Lansinoh is taking steps to address the breakdown in the approval process that contributed to this misinformation.

Well, I guess that PR subcontractor won’t be hired again, since Lansinoh wants nothing to do with any of this, reiterating “Lansinoh does not support or endorse the blog My Charming Kids or @MckMama.” Jennifer McKinney’s response is here, if you’d like to read it.

The takeaway for me is this: attention and trust capital are sneaky bitches . The whole thing reminds me of the story about Snooki from Jersey Shore getting gifts of competing designer handbags sent to her by companies who didn’t want her carrying their own bags. In other words: endorsement seems like a great idea until it doesn’t, and the audience turns on both you and the brand that you’re pimping.

Now listen: I’m an outsider, and I don’t know what the “true” story is here, and I’m not really sure it even matters. Both sides of the MckMama equation are pretty vehement about being right. But the only thing I know for sure is that when you have companies trying to absolve themselves of any kind of association with you, I think it might be time to reassess your personal branding message a bit. All bloggers have critics, and whether the criticisms are correct is really not relevant: if you get enough critics after you, they will become a market force of their own. This is why you cannot just ignore all of the critics and hope they will go away — what you might actually lose is all of your credibility.

07 Feb 2011

More Unsolicited Advice On Content Campaigns In Social Media

By anna

It was almost a year ago that I attended the Mom 2.0 Summit in Houston and listened to a keynote address from Heather Armstrong (Dooce), Maggie Mason (Mighty Girl), and Gabrielle Blair (Design Mom). Their keynote was excellent. In large part this is why I had been recommending the Mom 2.0 Summit to people who are looking for a more business oriented conference within the mommyblogging space. (Note: I still recommend it for people who haven’t been before, and for whom money is not an object, with some other reservations that are described here. And if you want to buy my ticket for cheap, let me know. Is that tacky? I don’t really care.)

One thing about that keynote keeps sticking in my craw in light of recent events, though. There was a moment during the Q&A in which Heather Armstrong answered a question about the future of monetizing blogs by stating that she did not believe that sponsored posts were “where things were going.” I remember this moment specifically because I had been curious about her take on that particular issue. And yet, here we are not even a year later, and everything is about content campaigns.

Well, I’m stodgy. I don’t like it, and maybe I’m sounding like a broken record, but here’s why.

1. A “content campaign” is still a sponsored post, and everybody hates sponsored posts.

Times change, and the environment changes. I get this. So it’s not 100% surprising that we are seeing more content campaigns plus advice on how best to structure them. While I admit that all sponsored content is not created equally, calling it a “content campaign” does not change what it is. People don’t like sponsored posts — they either don’t read them or they get suckered into reading them by people leaving the disclosure until the end of the post, and then they get mad. Filling up your blog — the valuable product that you own — with stuff like that is a questionable long term business plan for most bloggers.

As I have said before, different niches have different levels of comfort with sponsored content. How many readers you stand to alienate with too many sponsored posts can vary greatly. But if your only plan for monetization is to use sponsored posts, you may find yourself without any value (i.e. readers) left at the end of a busy season.

2. Advertisers do worry about overexposure.

You cannot just throw up sponsored posts all of the time willy nilly, even if this didn’t piss off your readers. Why? Because advertisers do worry about whether or not a blogger is overexposed. They will opt to go with another blogger if they feel that you have been using your space to pimp products too much. The reason they will do this is because every time you use content to sell a product, there is a tiny bit of credibility that is expended. If you use too much up without putting enough back in, you don’t have anything left to sell.

3. There is about a 4000% discrepancy in what bloggers get paid to do the very same campaign.

Now that Clever Girls Collective has partnered with Federated Media for content campaigns, the number of people getting sponsored content deals is much bigger than before. But not all of these deals are created equally — there was a recent content campaign that was advertising a rate of $75 for one post to people in Clever Girls Collective who wanted to apply to be a part of the campaign. But according to my sources, that Clever Girls Collective rate is anywhere from 10 to 60 times lower than what a blogger on Federated Media would be offered for the same campaign. THE SAME CAMPAIGN.

Now, maybe you’re thinking $75 is not such a bad deal for one post? And besides, you’re not with Federated Media, and you’re not big enough to command the rates that some of the bloggers who are represented by Federated Media can claim. This may be true, but remember, when you do a sponsored post, you are not working as a freelance writer — the $75 does not just cover your writing labor. It is the price that is attached to the eyeballs who will be reading the piece on your site. And if those eyeballs get tired of looking at sponsored content, how are you ever going to get to the point where you can command more money?

4. If you must do a sponsored post, broker the deal yourself.

The most egregious thing about the rash of content campaigns, though, is the amount of money that bloggers are leaving on the table by letting other people set up these deals for them. If you want to do a content campaign, sell it yourself and take home all of the profit. Think about what kinds of products come up organically in your blog, make a list, and then go pitch some independent businesses for these deals. Most small business owners are easier to convince on this kind of stuff because they’re looking for new ways to promote, and they often cannot afford what a placement through a big ad network would cost them. If you can come up with a good pitch, send them over a professional looking media kit, and show them how well-targeted your blog is for their product, they will sign up. You might have to email or call a few places before somebody signs up, but you’ll take home so much more money in the end that it will be worth it. Plus, you’ll get experience that you cannot get any other way.

Categories: bad ideas, bloggers and brands, blogging basics, trust capital Tags: clever girls collective, Federated Media

07 Dec 2010

One Line Bios And Figuring Out Your Blog’s Story

By anna

story

One thing that appeals to people about blogging is that somehow, by doing it regularly, people figure out what it is that will make them happy in their lives.

Not everyone. Not always. But often enough, for people who really commit to blogging on a regular basis, whether they do it for personal or professional reasons, blogging has the effect of making you gravitate toward your real passions (a little part of me died inside writing that last word, just so you know). It has something to do with the act of writing down stuff every day — in the process of doing that, you sort of figure out your own story. You figure out where you fit into your own narrative.

Now, if you want to be a professional blogger, it’s not really enough to just meander around and get to your story when you feel like it. You’ve got to have your story ready to go right away, or at least act like you have it ready to go right away. And you cannot really make your story super complex and multi-layered, with a bunch of sub-plots and multiple dreaming sequences that require elaborate waking mechanisms like that movie with DiCaprio and the spinning top. Or rather, your story can be that complex, but you need to have an easy version ready so that everybody can remember you in the short term, before they have time to get to know you and all of the many different incarnations of special snowflake that make up you.

When you are a professional blogger, trying to reach people, you need to make a story that is really easy for people to understand. One of the things I was telling a consulting client last week was that all of the bloggers who are known have some kind of “thing” that is theirs. And that maybe it’s not such a great thing, but whatever, they own it. In the best cases, this thing isn’t the only thing they are, but it is the thing that allows them to be remembered. For Il Duce, it is “the first woman who was fired for writing about her job on the internet.” For Pioneer Woman, it is “the city gal who found love and moved to a cattle ranch.” I am “the mommyblogger who says what other mommybloggers only wish they could say.” Now, none of these things comprise the whole of our identities as bloggers — in fact, some of them are not even true, strictly speaking. But they are easy to latch onto. They are things.

Every blogger needs to figure out what their thing is going to be — what their short version story is going to be so that potential readers can grab onto it, and take it away with them easily. The thing becomes like a virtual business card for you, and even if the first person who takes it away is not your ideal reader, they might take it with them and give it to somebody who is — they might hear your name mentioned and then say, “Oh, she is the one who ____________” within earshot of just the right person. How do you go about developing your story? I can tell you that in my own case it was not intentional — it happened as a result of interacting with the community, of always feeling like I was standing in a room where there was something crazy happening and nobody was saying anything about it, and feeling compelled to say something. But the process reminded me of some ideas listed I read awhile back in a post by Anil Dash that dealt with one-line bios. The majority of the post is about some tech dude who invented RSS . . . blah blah who gives a crap, when are you going to get back to the part that pertains to me . . . ahh! Here: he featured Conan O’Brien’s Twitter bio as a particularly fantastic example of a story conveyed through a one line bio:

Dash’s advice for writing a one-line bio, which might be thought of as a quick way of expressing your thing, your story, to people who are quickly passing by, is as follows:

In that way, one-line bios strike me as offering some important lessons about the architecture of meaningful things on the web: They should be brief, and structured just enough to give you a starting point without constraining your creativity. They should pack in enough meaning that they have value on their own, but be useful when annotating a larger work. They should be portable enough to work on almost any kind of website. And they should be useful enough that they can succeed even if the ego of their creators is modest enough to not demand credit.

And you? What do you have to say of yourself?

Categories: bloggers and brands, monetizing the mommyblog Tags: blog story, trust capital