There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle in the parenting/lifestyle blogosphere this past weekend, related to a brand’s blogger outreach program. The brand in question is KFC, and (from what I understand, as I wasn’t there) they invited a number of bloggers to an in-person event, with their children, to learn about KFC’s new kids meals.

I’ll disclose up front that I don’t ever eat at KFC because I’m sensitive to MSG and they put it in much of their food. This fact generally puts me in the category of people who think that KFC is unhealthy: if it makes me sick, it must be unhealthy.

But I also live in reality enough to know that there are untold millions of people, including many who live in my low-income neighborhood, who have very few food choices in their lives (we have a dearth of fresh food options in my neighborhood – called a “food desert” – as do many other urban locales, and we do have a KFC nearby, along with a half-dozen other fast food choices). While KFC could never be considered healthy on the whole, they at least seem to be aware that their kids meals need to have some healthful aspects, and they’re taking small steps in that direction. I’d rather see the kids in my neighborhood eat applesauce than mashed potatoes, and baked chicken rather than fried.

And I unconditionally support KFC’s, or any other brands’, ability to choose how they market their products and to and through whom.

Look Who’s On the Playground

Yet, following the KFC event, the blogosphere erupted because a number of bloggers, none of whom were at the event, felt it was inappropriate and perhaps disingenuous for other bloggers to promote KFC, given that the company’s “healthy” choices are not really all that healthy.

A few of those bloggers bullied the bloggers who were present at the event (which was public information once the bloggers in attendance started sharing on social media about it) by attacking their food and brand relationship choices. The bullies also hijacked the hashtag with negative information about the brand, and generally made a mess of this brand’s marketing campaign. (I’m not going to link to the haters to give them any credit for bashing, so you can go search #KFCKidsMeals on Twitter yourself.)

Many of these bullying bloggers did those things while saying “it’s our job to correct misinformation out there.” Which I appreciate – truly I do – because thankfully, in our country, you have the right to protest against whatever you want, in social media or otherwise. But if you’re a “professional” in the blogging space (and by taking money for blogging, you have become a professional), and you’re going to launch a protest, you ought to do so respectfully, professionally and in a classy way.

My friend Robyn Wright did a beautiful job of summing up what I consider to be the right way to protest, in a tweet:

Rather than attacking about food choices, instead use your voice to simply promote what you believe in. #KFCKidsMeals

— Robyn Wright (@RobynsWorld) March 24, 2013

Robyn also wrote an excellent post about how to respectfully dissent, related to this controversy.

The Echo Chamber May Damp it Down

As a marketer first, my instinct here is to feel bad for KFC. As an agency person, I’ve put together my share of blogger programs, and boy would I be upset if my brand or clients were on the receiving end of this kind of vitriol and bullying. KFC is making an effort to improve their nutritional choices (however incrementally), and they invited well-regarded bloggers in to help them promote a product launch. If bloggers weren’t receptive to that message, I would hope that they weren’t in attendance at that event. (That would be disingenuous.)

Many of you who read me regularly know that I don’t have a lot of love for a certain tier of bloggers. I feel like the parenting/lifestyle blogosphere is overly junked up by reviews and giveaways, and a major echo chamber has developed whereby parenting bloggers are mainly writing for and being read by other parenting bloggers. As my friend George G. Smith, Jr. says,

“If you….talk to someone outside the community – they will look at you crazy like when you mention Motrin Moms, Maytag and Dooce, Walmart Moms [ed: previous blogger controversies]….They would just stare at you and you’ll realize – oh yeah. We’re kind of crazy in our own little bubble world.”

So on some level, maybe a bunch of playground bullies won’t really make an impact, and KFC and other brands will continue to work with quality bloggers and create blogger marketing programs even after this negative experience.

But If You Can’t Say Something Nice

You bashing, bullying bloggers: As with most other things, there’s a consequence to your actions. Many of you have had wonderful, and lucrative, brand opportunities come your way as a result of your blogging. Those of you who are fortunate enough to be presented with these opportunities get to choose which brands you work with. You use your own moral compass to decide with whom you partner up and which brands you decline. As do your fellow bloggers.

If you make it treacherous and scary for brands to create blogger marketing programs, they will eventually cease to do it – and you’ll see fewer and fewer paid opportunities available for you and all your friends. And that’s when I feel bad for the brands (certainly not for you), because it’s potentially going to close an interesting and creative marketing channel for them. And if you keep bashing brands you don’t like, even the brands you do like won’t want to work with you – the risk will be too great that you could turn and bash them.

Some of you bloggers have powerful platforms. Use them wisely and well. Be the professionals you become (whether you like it or not) when you accept payments for your work. Because otherwise, your profession (the paid part, that is) may someday go away.

For many companies the barrier to adopting social media or expanding their digital marketing strategy is risk. These are not small risks; these companies have come face to face with a reality that many of us can’t even fathom. Social media could literally destroy their companies, it could lead to huge regulatory fines, compliance issues and a variety of other issues that can put a choke hold on how many marketers would consider approaching a social media strategy. But the reality is that all risks can be managed if we look them straight in the eye.

While it may not be sexy, social media risk management is a necessary part of every social media strategy. It is important to understand the potential risks social media can bring to any company and put together a plan that mitigates that risk. There are a few common types of risk that need to be considered.

The PR Disaster

Every company has the potential for a PR disaster.  Social media can essentially take a PR issue and basically feed it steroids. It’s the equivalent of putting a Gremlin into a bath of water and triggering the spawning effect. This fear can cause companies who have tremendous opportunities for social media to literally refuse to even have a conversation about it. Social media becomes the evil gremlin that can destroy our company. And there are case studies to prove it’s not only possible, it’s a real risk. Netflix has become the poster-child for a PR Disaster that was fueled by social media. The results weren’t just a lot of negative publicity and outrage from their customers. It hit the company’s bottom line. The company’s stock price was $291.27 on July 12, 2011 which the company should call D-Day, the Day the company announced their over 60% price increase and their customers went to social media channels by the thousands to complain. On September 19, 2011 Reed Hastings published a video on YouTube apologizing that only made matters worse. By September 21^st the company’s stock price had dropped to $128.50. Since then the stock price has dropped as low as $52.81 and is still struggling to get anywhere close to its original pre-disaster value, currently creeping its way up towards $95. While marketers may be thinking their executives teams are behind the times and “just don’t get it”, the reality is that this is REAL risk and something that can’t be taken lightly.

PR Disasters Can Be Managed

A Crisis Management Plan is Essential for Every Company

While Netflix pretty much did everything wrong in managing their PR disaster, other companies have shown that you can manage a PR disaster in social media channels. There have been great examples from companies like the Red Cross, FedEx, and Domino’s. The key is that companies need to have a crisis management plan in place that includes how to respond in social channels when there is a disaster brewing. This should include what types of crisis are possible, what types of content will be used to respond, what type of tone should be used in messaging, who will be involved in the response and timing around an appropriate response. To be done well this should be laid out in a decision tree style response plan so when people are in the moment and tensions are high, it’s as simple as following a clearly defined response path. In the moment, there will need to be adjustments but the key elements should be clear.

And the best way to get executives and compliance comfortable that a crisis can be averted is to actually test your plans. Companies should run crisis simulations and actually test out how well their team responds, whether or not the tone of their messaging will produce the intended result, and better understand what needs to be adjusted before an actual crisis hits. To be clear, this isn’t creating a “social media crisis plan” it is about integration of social media into the company’s existing crisis management plan. If your company doesn’t have a crisis management plan at all, it’s time to get serious about protecting the company’s bottom line and get one. Remember, the risk is real and while it can be managed it requires the up-front effort to be prepared before the crisis hits.

The Compliance Disaster

On the other side of the fence we have companies who face regulatory risk with social media. These are regulated companies who have to follow very specific rules for how information is handled. Financial industry has to follow FINRA regulations and SEC regulations; the Healthcare industry has to follow FDA and FTC regulations; the insurance industry is subject to state and federal regulatory law and looks to the NAIC for standards; and every publicly traded company is subject to SEC requirements for dissemination of public information.

I bet you wouldn’t consider Netflix a regulated company, but this just hit them square between the eyes as the SEC recently raised questions and may seek legal action over whether or not a Facebook post by CEO Reed Hastings contained “material” investor information that must be disclosed in a regulatory filing or press release to meet regulations for public disclosure requirements.

Every message that gets posted on a social media channel can raise compliance risk. And for pharmaceutical companies it’s even worse. If ANYONE posts a message directed to one of their social media accounts that mentions a negative side effect of a drug, they are required to report it to the FDA which could result in their drugs being pulled from the shelves.

Compliance and Regulatory Risk Can Be Managed

Compliance and Regulatory Risks are Easy to Manage. They’re Known.

This risk is actually far easier to manage because it is a known risk. While a PR crisis is a bit of an unknown entity that requires a vast amount of flexibility to respond to the crisis at hand, compliance and regulatory risk is clear. There are regulations that must be followed and companies will have to create clear policies for how to ensure that social media content follows them.

I think a lot of companies get caught in the conundrum of trying to use social media channels as an advertising and marketing “channel” which raises the highest amount of regulatory risk. This tunnel vision can prevent taking advantage of the real opportunity that social media channels provide; the opportunity to disseminate helpful content and build a robust content strategy that serves both customer and prospective customer needs. This requires an understanding of regulations to ensure that certain rules are followed, but it doesn’t have to be as big and scary as a lot of people think.

Once you sit down and look risk straight in the face, it’s easy to develop a plan to manage it. Don’t let the fear of the unknown stop your company from taking advantage of the opportunities social media represents. While the risks are real, the rewards can be very high, when managed well.

Are regulations and compliance concerns preventing your company from using social media channels? Social Media Explorer | SME Digital can help. Schedule a meeting with our team to discuss how we can help make innovation safe for your company.

Is your company facing regulatory risk? How are you managing it? Is your company terrified of a PR crisis? What tips do you have for companies that have real risk? Share your thoughts and concerns in the comments.  

From the beginning, our mission at Social Media Explorer has been to help businesses of all sizes use technology and innovation to grow and prosper.

The Louisville chamber of commerce, Greater Louisville, Inc., is also a tremendous resource and supporter for business growth in the local community. In a metro that is home to companies as large as Yum!, Humana, GE, Papa John’s and UPS, you might think small business would be easily overlooked by the area chamber. But you would be wrong.

Since 2000, Greater Louisville Inc. has highlighted the outstanding Louisville small business ecosystem with the Inc.credible Awards, which recognize top small businesses in a number of categories.

This year, Social Media Explorer LLC, is proud to announce that we’ve received the Inc.Credible Award for Innovation/Technology Utilization.  This particular award was presented by U.S. Voice & Data. To qualify, nominees had to have “demonstrated ability in adopting and utilizing technology to directly increase productivity, efficiency, revenue and/or profits.”  Additionally, nominees were reviewed based on informed decision-making process around technology adoption, strategic implementation and ability to measure results of utilization.

We’re so pleased to have been nominated, and were absolutely stunned to have won. There were 1,500 nominees for the Inc.Credible Awards this year, and 30 finalists across all categories. They all represent the thriving small business culture here in the Ville, and we’re proud to be counted among them.

Many thanks to GLI for this unexpected honor!

The fine folks at The Realtime Report have put together a very nice guide to understanding social influence measurement tools that should be rather helpful if you’re interested in understanding and leveraging influencers in your marketing program. And the fine folks at Appinions are offering a limited supply of those reports for free. Honestly, I missed this report when it first came out, but have recently read it and am quite impressed.

Not only is it thorough and thoughtful, but even breaks the tools (like Klout, Kred, Traackr and so on) down into personal influence and contextual influence spheres. I consider myself fairly well-read on the topic and I learned a few things here.

The good news is that I think they still have a few of the free downloads of the report left. Beyond that, the report will require a payment. But if you hurry over, you can download a free one. If you don’t get there fast enough, I believe the report will be just $20, which is well worth it.

As with any other niche in the social software space, influence measurement tools are ever-changing. Getting a bit of insight into how they work and which one or ones might be best for your business is smart. Check out the report.

Editor’s Note: Appinions, the sponsor of the report, is a client of SME contributor Stephanie Schwab. She did not, however, contribute to my analysis or this post. Social Media Explorer is not affiliated with Appinions or The Realtime Report as of this writing.

The Chartered Instituted of Public Relations (CIPR) released its first edition of guidance for use of Wikipedia last week. See the full guide in PDF form here. The standards are a collaborative and still on-going effort that includes input from both public relations professionals and wikipedia editors (whom someone has decided to cutely call “Wikipedians”) and has been endorsed by similar organizations in Canada, Australia and the Public Relations Consultants Association, a British organization similar to the CIPR.

You can see and even participate in future collaboration on this project on their project Wiki.

For those of you in the United States, the CIPR is essentially the British version of the Public Relations Society of America.

Wikipedia (Photo credit: Octavio Rojas)

The most notable suggestion (these aren’t rules or regulations, per say, but best practices) is that public relations representatives should not directly edit Wikipedia pages about their brand or organization. Instead, the public relations person wishing to update a page involving their business should pass on the suggestion to Wikipedia editors in comments and discussion forums around the site.

While at first I was taken aback a bit by this suggestion, after some thought, it appears to be a nice compromise, particularly since Wikipedians were involved in collaborating on the policy. Still, it’s a community manicured site and this policy essentially says that public relations professionals are not a part of the community, which I think is wrong.

It also means that public relations professionals can’t be trusted. While I’m not naive enough to think that many can’t be … their job is to promote and promote they will … it bothers me that those who have strong ethics and would not cross those lines on such a site no longer can contribute.

I’ll give you an example:

I spent 12 years as a public relations professional for college athletics. One of the many roles I played at my respective institutions was sports historian and keeper of the record books. Sports records are not up for debate. Statistics are kept, recorded, reported to the conferences, governing bodies and the like. And, I’m assuming nowadays they get updated on Wikipedia.

As a public relations professional in charge of the official records of a given sports organization, I should not only be allowed and trusted to update Wikipedia with this information, I should be the ONLY such person allowed to do so. Or at least be the only such person who can verify the validity of the information.

So the policy is not perfect. But under the circumstances we live in — where public relations professionals have been known to manipulate or out-and-out lie in Wikipedia updates — it might be all we can do.

What say you? The comments are yours.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Scott Gulbransen, Kevin Hunt, Kipp Bodnar and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

As global brands migrate from social media marketing activation in the U.S. to foreign shores for audience engagement, social activation and even blogger outreach, it’s imperative to understand the cultural differences from country to country and continent to continent. Overblog, one of the top blogging platforms in Europe and now available in the U.S., recently conducted a survey of 5,000 U.S. and European bloggers that helps define some of those differences.

The survey, conducted in the month of May of this year in preparation for the initial results presentation at BlogWorld and New Media Expo on June 7, asked a variety of questions about blog monetization, brand involvement and influence. The results show a vast difference in American bloggers versus our European counterparts.

Image via CrunchBase

The survey indicates, in my estimation, that American bloggers are more professionally oriented, serious bloggers. Once could interpret the U.S. blogosphere is more mature as a marketplace that the European one. Among the specific findings

• 58 percent of U.S. bloggers have blogged for more than four years. Just 40 percent of European bloggers have.
• 94 percent of Americans blog about brands or companies while only 52 percent of our counterparts do
• Only 11 percent of European bloggers say they blog for their company while 43 percent of Americans do
• 34 percent of U.S. bloggers earn something for their activity compared to just 25 percent in Europe
• Half of European bloggers receive nothing, not even gifts-in-kind for their activities. Just 13 percent of American bloggers say the same

Perhaps the most shocking statistic from the findings for me what that just 32 percent of European bloggers say they use their actual identify when blogging. We’ll cover this more on Wednesday as I dive a bit deeper into the transparency issue.

But other differences and some similarities exist that are worth noting. European bloggers overwhelmingly blog for the passion of their blog topic. Some 51 percent say it’s all about the interest in the topic, compared to just 20 percent for U.S. bloggers. Very few bloggers on either side of the Atlantic say they blog primarily for the money.

And some 98 percent of U.S. bloggers are members of Twitter while just 49 percent of European bloggers are. Conversely, 45 percent of European bloggers have a dedicated Facebook page for their blog while only four percent of American bloggers do.

What all this tells us, in my brief analysis, is that the American blogging scene is far more mature than that in Europe, if you consider transparency, commercialization and traffic-minded promotion is “mature.” Europeans seem to lean toward more hobby and passion bloggers and much more of a pure-play “social” approach to blogging … sharing contact and connection on Facebook (people you know) versus Twitter (people you don’t know).

All of this is good, cursory information to know if you’re moving to a more international position for your brand. If you are, what I might recommend is the following:

• Be even more selective and careful approaching bloggers for sponsorships, promotions and advertising
• Facebook first, Twitter maybe not at all
• Lifestyle programming (think mom bloggers, hobby bloggers) is going to go over easier than straight business content
• Monitor various governing laws on disclosure and privacy

That’s what I see. What do you? Any of you European marketers or bloggers out there see the same things or is my lack of direct market exposure showing through? Please jump in the comments and help us all better understand.

The comments, as always, are yours.

NOTE: Overblog is a Social Media Explorer client. 

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Lee Odden, Kipp Bodnar and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

A friend of mine recently emailed me to say that she has a new client but they’re wary of doing a blogger outreach program, and do I have any metrics about outreach ROI, especially for driving sales?

I wrote back: You’re asking for the holy grail.

However, while linking ROI to blogger outreach is not simple, it’s also not impossible. Think about the decades (centuries?) of PR people who have gone before us. How did they determine ROI on media outreach when all they had was “impressions” (a very fuzzy number that was, and is: self-reported from print and broadcast media)?

Blogger outreach is in many ways the same, and perhaps even easier, to track, than traditional public relations. Here are some ways you can add tracking and metrics to your blogger relations programs which will help you quantify the results of your efforts. These ideas are more or less in order of easy to complex; doing all five will really juice up your blogger outreach measurement.

1) Set Goals

While some of my SME colleagues advocate that you can have success without defining upfront ROI goals (and I agree with that in some situations), I find that giving clients some expectation of an outreach program’s capabilities sits better with them and helps me and my team stay focused. Note that I said “some expectation” – I never sit down with a client and say something like, “we’re going to deliver 10,000 clicks to this product page which will result in $1,500 in sales.” Instead, we talk about what success will look like to this client. Are they looking for awareness of the brand in general? Engagement in a coupon or promotion? To drive sales of a particular category or product? This is a give-and-take: we may have suggested blogger outreach to them, in which case we have to help them understand where we can measure our efforts. We then set some broad goals based on some of the measurement ideas which follow.

2) Measure Online Activity

We’re marketers, not necessarily web developers or analysts. But if our client’s (or company’s) goals include tracking online activity, we have to have a direct line to understand the online activity our efforts, including blogger outreach, are generating.

One of the first things I ask a client for (as an agency – if you’re internal, you as a social media person need this too) is access to their Google Analytics (or other analytics package). I want to be sure that their analytics tracking is set up properly to really capture all of the traffic and conversions our efforts are sending to them, and I don’t want to wait for their internal team to get back to me to understand how our efforts are performing. Yes, I know, Google Analytics is scary for some, but there are some great tutorials out there to help social media marketers learn to segment their efforts; I promise if you spend a little bit of time with it, it won’t be nearly as scary.

I recommend setting up Advanced Segments in Google Analytics to track the bloggers you’re reaching out to, keeping in mind that their traffic could also come via their Twitter accounts or Facebook pages (or Pinterest, or Google+….). You can put all of the blogs you’re courting into a single segment, or divide them up in some way that helps you understand the activity in each. For example, if you’re an iPad app for kids, you may have separate segments for tech blogs, app blogs and parenting blogs. If you track your outreach time and costs for each segment, then assign a value to the segment’s activity (keep reading), you’ll begin to understand where your time is best spent.

3) Compare Blogger Outreach Activity With Advertising

My colleague Nichole Kelly advocates for treating social media activity like other forms of media; again, if you’re the social media person this may not be second nature to you (vs. if you’re also well-versed in media buying, etc.), but this is an important place to stretch your knowledge. Follow Nichole’s advice and consider ad-like metrics for your outreach efforts and compare that against other marketing spend the company is doing. For blogger outreach, consider your time, payments to bloggers, cost of coupons or promotions, etc. in the total cost, and then divide that by the impressions, clicks, leads or sales you get from those efforts.

Get with your media buying counterparts to compare your numbers to theirs and see where you can improve, and where you’re ahead. If they’re still spending on television, I’m pretty sure you’re kicking their butt with blogger outreach.

4) Track Coupons

Everyone loves a coupon, right? So do many bloggers. If you’re mounting a blogger outreach campaign to a segment of blogs for whom coupons are appropriate (typically frugal, parenting, app/tech/gadget blogs, plus others), consider setting up exclusive coupons for the top bloggers you’re trying to attract. Not only can you get more attention from the blogger if they feel they’re getting something special to share with their readers, those coupon codes are gold in terms of helping you to track ROI. When they’re redeemed online you ought to be able to get a report (from your e-commerce folks) on redemption rates and total sales against the coupon, so figure out which bloggers sent the most traffic and at what dollar value.

Some marketers can take this through to offline, particularly if they control the whole channel; if you’re a retailer you can track a coupon distributed online all the way through to point of sale. However, for product or service companies this may be more tricky – getting third party retailers to report coupon metrics back to you is a pretty complicated process. So consider this for driving online activity through blogger outreach first, and then get creative translating your efforts to offline programs.

5) Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

Your company may already have an affiliate program: an online referral program whereby affiliates (often websites or blogs, sometimes emailers or other online marketers) get paid a flat dollar amount or percentage of sales for every sale they send through to your client’s/company’s site. You can use an existing affiliate program for blogger outreach too; or, if you plan on doing a lot of blogger outreach and you don’t have one, ask your company to set up an affiliate program to help you with your efforts.

The beauty of affiliate programs is that you typically only pay for success….success in whatever way you define it. Looking to drive sales? Connect to bloggers and give them a VIP (top-dollar) affiliate commission in order to drive sales. Combine that with a coupon and you could really drive ROI. Know that some affiliates will take time to put your company, product or offer into their queue; also as with any blogger outreach effort, some will hit, and some will miss. Bloggers who are most likely to want to join your affiliate program are frugal/coupon bloggers and those that write about “products” often: craft, tech, shelter/home, travel etc. Though don’t hesitate to suggest it to any bloggers you work with, if you have an affiliate program available.  You can also track sweepstakes entries, video views, anything really – as long as the value to the affiliate is worth their traffic (which they could send to you or to someone else who will pay them more for their efforts).

Savvy bloggers will take an affiliate commission over a sponsored post payment if they think your product/offer will resonate with their readers, and then they’ll push it harder than they would for a sponsored post.

In the end, don’t forget: with any blogger outreach effort, do what you can to go beyond the standard pitch (you all know I don’t believe in pitching, I consider bloggers as marketing partners), and you’ll see better engagement which should lead to greater ROI.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

 Image source: flickr (Charlyn W)

I returned from the Blissdom blogger conference about 10 days ago and am off to Dad 2.0 Summit this week. There’s a lot of blogger love happening out there, and it’s wonderful to be in the middle of it, helping to connect brands and bloggers in creative and fruitful ways.

Lately, though, I’ve been coming home from parenting/lifestyle blogger conferences both inspired and dismayed. There are some really cool ways in which brands are engaging with these bloggers, and some of those efforts come through at blogger conferences. For example, at Blissdom, ConAgra launched their Child Hunger Ends Here campaign, encouraging bloggers to add the hashtag #childhunger to their tweets to donate one meal per tweet sent during the conference. The hashtag was flying and 20,000 meals were donated, with ConAgra matching to get to a total of 40,000 meals. Bloggers for a cause … I love it.

Microsoft Office and Windows worked with a well-known parenting blogger, Janice Croze from 5 Minutes for Mom, as the host of a live webcast from their Blissdom suite on time saving tips with Office products. Janice was exactly the right host for the busy mom audience they were trying to attract, and choosing to broadcast from Blissdom gave those viewers a peek into the conference.

So that’s the good. But there’s some ugly too.

Every time I go to a blogger conference I meet new bloggers, and of course I always ask them what they blog about. Every time, at least a handful of newish bloggers say, “oh, you know, I write about products and do giveaways and stuff.” And I cringe. It’s not that there can’t be good review blogs. Look at Cool Mom Picks, HighTechDad, or DadLabs, blogs which have been around for a long time and have a very clear point-of-view and target audience; they all do reviews really well. It’s the new breed of “review-giveaway bloggers” (at least that’s what I’m calling them) that gets to me.

Over the years, it’s become clear to many people that some bloggers earn some money through their blogs. Advertising is rarely a good source of income for new bloggers, but payments from brands can be, and so a new crop of bloggers has appeared who want to get their slice of the pie. These new bloggers rarely have a well-defined niche or point-of-view. Some are poor writers. Their content is nothing but review after review, giveaway after giveaway. And to top it all off, many of them take payment for reviews – something which is anathema to most legitimate bloggers and, in my opinion (and many others’), should never be offered by a self-respecting PR agency or brand.

You all know these low-quality review-giveaway blogs; I’m not going to name them here. They’re the ones which have “reviews,” “giveaways” and “pr friendly” as their main navigation points on their blogs. They’re also the blogs that are turned on by the “make money fast by blogging” or “blog from home” come-ons in Google or Facebook ad results. And if you’re on the brand or PR agency side, you’ve no doubt encountered these bloggers pitching you – with their hands out, looking for you to pay them to do something with your brand.

I think these review-giveaway bloggers are giving all other bloggers (parenting and otherwise) a bad name. I’ve encountered dozens of clients and potential clients who, when I bring up the possibility of creating blogger integrations for their brands, say, “why would I pay for a review?” – as if that’s all they think bloggers do. It’s very hard to convince them that a creative blogger relationship can be an extension of their marketing efforts and reap rewards for both parties. Sadly, the blogs they find in searches and the blogs that reach out to them are mostly the ones looking to make a quick buck or score some product. Because brands get turned off so quickly, they never have a chance to meet or work with blogs who can bring their audiences to bear in an ethical and holistic way to help build a brand’s profile among their communities. And that’s really a shame. As a social media agency, it’s my job to help them understand that there is a better way – that true marketing partnerships with a small number of quality bloggers can yield great results. I’m working hard to do that.

So how can we stop the proliferation of these kinds of blogs and this “pay-for-play” mentality? I feel the answer lies primarily with the PR firms. As I’ve said before, agencies need to step up their game, and realize that “pitching to bloggers” does not mean paying for reviews, paying for giveaways, or paying for links. Blogger relationships can and should be marketing partnerships: use bloggers as spokespeople, have them write content for you or appear in videos, bring them to headquarters to talk to your staff, have them conduct informal focus groups or product parties in their hometowns. Pay them as marketing consultants and expect professionalism from them. If you don’t get what you expect from your relationship, be sure to give them feedback so they can do better; many of them don’t come from marketing backgrounds, which in no way diminishes their power to connect and deliver their communities to you.

If you’re an agency who uses a “spray-and-pray” pitch approach, sending mass emails out to dozens or hundreds of bloggers at a time, or if you’re ready to hand any blogger $50 to do just about anything – stop. You’re really the ones creating the breeding ground for these poor quality blogs.

The future of blogging, at least in the lifestyle/parenting category, will have to be defined by more and better: more actual content, better content, more focus, better writing, more ethical behavior. It’s always great to see new high-quality blogs, but I’d like to see the the blogosphere grow less rapidly, if it means low-quality blogs will go away as their authors realize that there’s no such thing as easy money.  Agencies, you have the power to help make that change.

Big thanks and welcome to Full Sail University, a new sponsor here at SME. Their online master’s degree program for public relations professionals is just a click away. Hit their advertisement over there in the sidebar and sign up to get some free information about it.

Frankly, I was impressed by the course offerings for the degree. There’s a fair bit of new media and social media learning to be had there. If a master’s degree in PR is something you might be considering, it’s certainly worth a look-see.

While I can’t speak directly to their faculty’s experience and didn’t attend the institution, Full Sail is an accredited U.S. university which has garnered a number of distinctions as a distance learning provider over the years. It was founded 30 years ago and is headquartered in Winter Park, Fla.

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A new influencer identification tool has emerged that has quite a bit of promise. Socmetrics, a one-year-old company out of Boston, is similar to mBlast in that it looks at influencers through a topical filter. While Tom Webster may very well be influential in the worlds of social media marketing and market research, he is also an influential voice on wine. And mining his conversations and those around him shows that if you’re looking for it. Tools like Klout, which look at influence in more of a reach-based formula, don’t make topical distinctions very well. Socmetrics does.

Added to the topical focus is the fact that Socmetrics also offers pre-curated lists over over 100 categories. So you don’t have to start with a broad, keyword search that tends to push back a lot of junk data. Instead, major categories have been culled for accuracy and many broad topics (social media, automotive, moms, etc.) have already been cleaned to ensure the data is good.

Using Socmetrics you can still do a keyword-based search, like that I recently did for “banking.”

I like the fact the search returned not just news media and bank brands, but also bloggers and other influencers that talked about the topic. It also didn’t just give me a list of those with the top number of Twitter followers and call it a day. Socmetrics takes into account multiple channels and reach including YouTube, Twitter, blog readership and the like.

When I drilled down to a singular person on the list, Anna O’Brien, you might think the tool is flawed. O’Brien is the director of social media at Greenlight, a London-based marketing firm. What does she have to do with banking? Well, she was formerly the Vice President for Social Media at Citibank, North America. So she carries some weight of influence in the banking world.

This indicates to me Socmetrics’s algorithm credits a bit more stickiness to influence than tools like mBlast do. Unless O’Brien writes about banking regularly, the short-attention span of an mBlast tends to leave someone like her off a list. While public relations professionals certainly want to reach influencers who are most influential now, there’s an argument that even someone who hasn’t taking to writing about a certain topic in a few weeks is still an influential person to that audience.

Socmetrics topical influencer platform looks at three primary factors in determining its rankings:

• Peer Validation – Does this person interact with other influencers in the topic and are they followed, retweeted, etc., by their peers.
• Topicality – Is their content on-topic or close to it consistently versus diffused and scattered around other subjects. Are their followers interested in the topic in question, too? This would account for an influencer who blogs strictly about one topic versus someone who mixes personal and other topics in that might attract an audience perhaps not as interested in the core topic.
• Ability to Drive Action – Does this person get shared? What is their engagement rate relative to each platform, then overall. Does their audience respond with comments, shares, likes, votes, etc.?

While each are interesting data points in an overall influencer identification program, there will always be debate as to which is most important or if other factors belong. This is primarily why I’ve always said that each service out there — Traackr, Klout, mBlast, etc. — is just one way of looking at the data. None are necessarily better than another and all are valid points of consideration. Socmetrics is yet another. I like the way they score and rank and the ease of use of their tool. But it won’t ever be the only way to organize or find influencers. If it is, you’re not looking at enough information.

Socmetrics is primarily focused on agencies and brands. It’s pricing starts at $400 per month for total access to its database. For that price you can track a list of up to 25 people. Tracking more scales your price upward. You can do scans and export data without tracking, though, so with some manual labor, you can get lots of use out of the system without having to pay more. Socmetrics doesn’t limit your ability to search the database or the number of seat licenses that can use your account. But if they have to store more data, they charge for that.

You can save multiple lists as well, though your 25 person tracking limitation will kick in at some point. When you find an influencer in your searching, a hand “Add to List” button is there to easily sort and track the individuals in question. The system pulls in their latest content, Compete.com data on web traffic and more. There’s a lightweight CRM system on top of the tool as well, so you can keep notes about outreach or preferences in each influencer’s profile.

Perhaps adding the icing on the cake value to the tool is its monitoring and ROI reporting. With your lists of influencers, the system will monitor and index all of their content and flag any that mentions your product or brand. So PR firms doing blogger outreach to a targeted list can produce a report that says, “Reached out to 25 influencers and landed placement with 22 of them.” Plus, with the monitoring function, you can easily see what they’re talking about now, which aides in your ability to reach out with relevant information that’s top-of-mind with them.

Socmetrics is online at socmetrics.com.

What do you think about this approach? Are they missing something? Do other tools like Traackr, mBlast or even Klout have something they don’t? The comments are yours.

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• SocMetrics Leads Growing Cluster of Boston Startups Trying to Cash In on Social Media Tech (xconomy.com)
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• 17 Alternatives to Klout (readwriteweb.com)

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Matt Polsky, the  Social Media Manager as well as the Reputation Manager for Veterans United and VA Mortgage Center. 

The rise of social media and content creation has brought on new challenges for businesses of all shapes and sizes, especially when it comes to managing one’s reputation. Reputation isn’t a single stationary object, but an equation that includes many pieces, such as being known for quality products or services, being likeable, actively engaging customers, or the ability to offer valuable and relevant content.

Social media gives you the ability to communicate in real-time with your customer base and gives you a chance to build strong interactions. With social media you can provide special incentives, promotional codes, as well as sneak peeks at upcoming products.

Since being a social media manager as well as an avid user of most forms of social media, I have a hard time seeing any reason why a business wouldn’t want to use social media. However, with all the plusses, it still seems like the perfect PR tool is still highly underused. So why would a company not want to use social media?

Image via CrunchBase

After looking deeper into the issue, I realized some companies just can’t handle social media. Take Netflix for example, the first day they announced they were hiking up prices and splitting the comapny, their Facebook page received 66,000 negative comments, 5000 comments went to their blog, and the #DearNetflix hashtag received a hit almost every five minutes. Netflix had no clue what to do with this flood of comments and it took them a whole three days for a single response. In that three day period there was no “we understand” or “sorry for the inconvenience” or even a single explanation, nothing, which outraged fans even more.

After this fiasco, Netflix has had to do some major reputation repair that could possibly set the company back and give Blockbuster a chance to gain a solid chunk of market share. Still, could this problem have been avoided if they didn’t have their social media channels? In all likelihood, no, and it could have been worse.

Customers still would have sent emails, called customer service lines, and wrote letters expressing their discontent. Of course, these types of communication are all one-on-one, which would eliminate members from feeding off each other’s comments; but even at that, it still wouldn’t stop the millions who subscribe to different social media outlets from blogging and posting on their own platforms. At least with social media outlets, you have the ability to send a mass apology in conjunction with apologizing personally to major influencers.

In a perfect world, I would like to think most companies would take a more proactive approach and have their PR department ready for any negative reaction, especially when any sort of news would outrage the customer base; however, the business world is far from perfect and there are slip-ups similar to Netlix’s occurring all too frequently.

From my experience, even if you produce a great campaign that promotes a positive reaction, complaints will still happen at some point, so it’s best to be prepared in advance. Social media sites allow customers to tell companies exactly how they feel by posting on their wall or by shooting them a tweet, and when businesses run into negative comments, handle them with speed and care. Show the customer you are doing all you can to rectify the situation or at least are acknowledging the discrepancy.

Matt Polsky is the Social Media Manager as well as the Reputation Manager for Veterans United and VA Mortgage Center. Matt keeps a special spot in his heart for military veterans and enjoys working with the nation’s leading provider of VA home loans. Connect with Matt on Twitter @mattpolsky.