Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

There is a fascinating discussion going on right now regarding roles, authenticity and marketing on the social Web.

It’s being shouted and whispered, and no matter what anyone says (including big mouth me) no one has the “correct” answer yet, if indeed there is a “correct” answer to be had.

Warning – in this post I’m going to use the term “blogger” to mean, “A person who creates original, unique content on the social Web.”   I am well aware that not every digitally-savvy person has an active, vibrant blog (maybe they only rock Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or some other platform) but the term “blogger” seems to have become accepted terminology for someone who knows how to communicate on the Web and builds/sustains some sort of community there.

Okay, here’s the question

At what point does an independent blogger who interacts with brands lose some element of his or her “authenticity?”

To be blunt, at what point is a blogger simply another node helping a company do marketing and outreach?

Again, I do not yet fully know the answer to this question for myself, much less for the rest of the planet (so put down those pitchforks, brothers and sisters.)  What I do know after finishing up this year’s South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference is that businesses and brands want what bloggers already have, and they want it badly.

They want blogger authenticity; what pioneering political woman Shirley Chisholm called being “Unbought and Unbossed.”

Why?

Because business-as-usual advertising and marketing is seen as inauthentic (or at least, all about rah-rah good news and therefore not the whole truth) so people are turning to the “digital back fence” – word of mouth from their friends online, because it is seen as unbought, unbossed and authentic.  In other words:  the truth.

There’s a PR/marketing term for getting talked about in a positive sense without having to pay for it:  earned media.  It means that your product or service is so good that it earns your business free publicity. People will talk about it of their own volition, which is seen as more authentic than paying them to say good things, i.e. paid media or advertising.

What is the best way to, well, earn this “earned media?”  One of the current answers seems to be to connect with digital influencers and bloggers at events like SXSWi.

From Jay Baer’s excellent post 13 observations from South by Southwest (SXSW) we have this snippet:

“There was also a lot of talk (especially among the big brands) on operationalizing social media, and creating true best practices for how to thrive in a real-time world where every customer is a reporter.”

Um, “operationalize?”

Yes, that basically means to take social media seriously and use it to drive sales and increase business, while measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) from those efforts.

Congrats, blogger, you are now part of a marketing plan; a node to drive sales and increase business for a brand.

Nerds As Nodes

I’m not saying whether this state of affairs is good or bad, only that it is what it is, and we’d better continue to acknowledge and talk about it.

There has been a power shift.

Brands have money, but bloggers hold most of the marbles.  Yes, you, blogger – the one trying to figure out how to pay your electricity bill – you hold most of the marbles in the new balance of power.

Brands want access to what you’ve worked so hard to build at 3 a.m. in your T-shirt and sweatpants:  authentic influence and community.

The question is, how many marbles do you trade with brands in order to pay the bills?  Is there a way to make money legitimately without you or your community feeling that they’ve bought your voice?

You’d better be thinking about these issues.  When you’re comfortable with the answers, go for it, but please do take the time to think, and I mean till your head hurts.

Or, don’t think about it. Fine. Take any and all goods/offers and run all the way to the bank, but don’t be surprised if you wake up one day with a pile of freebies and toys and a reputation (that you can’t shed) as a shill.

Respect what you’ve built online and always, always guard it fiercely.

Ask the brand and ask yourself the uncomfortable questions before unwittingly finding yourself in the Fire Swamp battling Rodents of Unusual Size.

Brands Are Not the Booger Man

Brands and businesses, please know that I understand your position, too.

You have products and services that you’re proud of and you want your business to grow, because it’s a good business, right?

I’m in the same position;  as a trainer and consultant myself, I have no problem telling our Tourism Currents clients that outreach to bloggers can be an integral part of their destination marketing – we call it “finding your online champions.”  I myself have been the target of such outreach efforts by tourism organizations, and they resulted in a few blogger press trips where I did a lot of thinking about my own comfort level as a “node.”   :)

Here’s my takeaway for brands….if a blogger is excessively accommodating, you’ve just been had.

Guard your brand’s reputation fiercely, too, because you’ve worked hard and you don’t need to toss it all away on “buzz” and “viral” crapola from a greedy digital snakeoil salesperson.  They can take their marbles and go home, in that situation.

I do not know all the answers, but I know enough to ask questions. Thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Yesterday, I sat down and began writing a post for one of my two travel blogs.

It was a post topic that I’d been meaning to cover for years, an annual January literary event at a museum.  Every year I’d blow it and forget to write the post until it was too late, but this year I put a big fat star on my calendar for the end of December, so I wouldn’t forget.

There was no problem finding updated information about the event, and I was particularly pleased to find that the museum also has a blog, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter stream, YouTube channel (only one video, but hey, a start) and lo and behold, a Flickr photostream.  I linked to all of them in my travel blog post, because that’s the power of the Web – the simple act of linking actually helps you pull other blogs and sites up in search rankings, because linking to a site increases its authority in search engine algorithms.  Hey, my whole job these days is tourism and social media, so I love to shine a light on great places.

I ran into trouble when it came to finding a good photo and video to go in the post.   A photo or some sort of graphic is almost a must-have for a compelling travel post, and embedding a short video of this particular event into my post would also make it more intriguing and attractive to possible visitors.

When I don’t have a photo of my own, I always go to Flickr and look for images with the appropriate Creative Commons alternative copyright license (need more ideas for finding photos? Here’s how to find local photos for your tourism projects.)

Since the museum has a Flickr account for their own pictures and a Flickr Group Pool for others to contribute their personal photos, I figured I’d have an embarrassment of riches for wonderful pics.

No such luck….I struck out in the Group Pool and even though the museum had plenty of nice photos taken at the annual event, I couldn’t use any of them in my blog post because they all had the default Flickr Creative Commons license of “All Rights Reserved.” For this particular travel blog (which is ad-supported and for which I’m paid per post, so I consider it commercial) I needed an image with one of the least-restrictive CC licenses, simply “Attribution.”

That means that when I use the photo in my own content, I give attribution/credit to the original photographer, and I also link the photo in my post back to its original URL page on Flickr.  Confused?  Just look at the Whistler’s Mother spoof photo above in this post. Mouse over it to see the attribution, and click it to go to the source page.

Yes, if I contacted the museum and asked, they might let me use one of their photos, but it was New Year’s Eve and I wanted to post that day. I didn’t have time to wait around playing “Mother May I.”  I’m a blogger and I want it now, and I want it at 2 a.m. if that’s when I’m writing the post.  You can see our obsession with speed as either a total pain in the neck or a totally great opportunity to get the word out, fast.   I vote for Option B, of course.

If you want me or any other wired writer to have great material to highlight your destination, help us out.  Make it easy for us to toot the bloggy horn about your destination, attraction or event.

Give at least some of your Flickr photos the simplest license, “Attribution,” or even “Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs” would work for many blogs. Put a link to your photostream on your Web site or blog, to help us find it. While you’re at it, put a nice selection of available-for-media-use pics under the Media tab on your site. Yeah, ’cause we are media – even though you may never have heard of us, I guarantee you want our coverage and links.

Give us a few decent videos to help show off your goodies, about two to three minutes long, with titles and credits that say who you are and list your URL.  Make sure we can embed them, whether you use YouTube or some other service like Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo, etc.  They do not have to be professionally produced, but they do have to be interesting, with decent audio, and easy to embed.

Most bloggers could care less about email blasts (“delete, delete, unsubscribe, delete” describes much of my day) or pretty Flash-based Web site pages that we can’t link to or some giant press packet on a CD.  I know exactly what I want to write about and I do it on my own schedule.

Learn to think like a blogger and provide those nuggets that help us tell your story, because we want the world to know about you.

Feel free to let me know in the comments if I’m off my rocker and missing some obvious impediment, or if you have additional thoughts. Thanks!

Update:  Kudos to the museum! After I asked them on Twitter to switch some of their photos to a less-restrictive license, they did it, so here is the blog post that I updated to include two of their images and here is their whole set from the event.

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Many tourism organizations have asked me lately how they can find bloggers (and others active in social media) who might be interested in covering their destinations.   I thought it would be helpful to write up a quick reference list.

First, thanks for asking, because blogger outreach is one of the main topics that Becky McCray and I plan to cover when we launch our Tourism Currents social media learning community for tourism professionals in September 2009.  If you want to be kept informed about it, there’s an email signup when you click the Tourism Currents link.

Secondly, Becky has already started a new series on her Small Biz Survival blog called Tourism Tuesdays.  For example, here is her dynamite post Never Been There, about incorporating local folks into your tourism outreach campaigns.  I read Becky’s work because she always finds the nuggets that others might not think about or notice.

Want more? Go to the Twitter Search Engine and type in #tourismtuesday to see general tourism chatter (this is called a hashtag and groups together all tweets with the same hashtag marker.)  If you want to see general travel tweets instead, try #travel, #traveltuesday or #TT.

Finally, here’s my quick-and-dirty list of other ways to sift around online to find bloggers and the social media-savvy amongst us:

• The Travel page on Alltop.com – it features the latest headlines from tons of hand-picked travel bloggers.  Use the Search function on Alltop to find bloggers in just about any area of interest, like food or music or Cleveland.
• Travel Blog Exchange – a relatively new forum for travel bloggers, they just hosted a successful TBEX blogging conference that will no doubt become an annual event.
• Google Blog Search – this only returns search results from blogs, so it’s a nice filter rather than using the Big Google haystack to needle-hunt.
• Travel Blog List – this Invesp Consulting list of general travel blogs is sorted every which way and is a bit too unwieldy for finding the smaller gems, but it does contain lots of the major travel blogs.
• Travel Bloggers on Twitter – a blog post by Condé Nast Traveler editor Wendy Perrin, What You’re Missing if You’re Not on Twitter, includes many travel bloggers.
• Update Dec09:  If you’re mostly looking for amateurs – like this Latin America/Spain travel company that is thinking of offering free holidays to bloggers in exchange for content – the BootsnAll Travel Network has lots of bloggers around the world. Disclosure: Boots has hosted my Family Travel Guide since Feb 2006.

Hope that helps to get you started, and if I missed any resources, please note them in the comments below. Thanks!

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I recently received an email from a senior executive at a mainstream public relations (PR) firm.  She said that she has clients in the travel industry and they’d like to know how to reach out to bloggers, and specifically how to get a mention on my BootsnAll Family Travel blog.

You know what’s next (bloggers are a different breed because we’re public, rapid and sharing) so to save myself from drafting an entirely new blog post when I’ve already written what I want to say, this is what I told her, shared here with you….

“In response to your question, the answer is yes, I do get a ton of PR/marketing emails and end up deleting most of them, and blocking those that are totally unrelated to family travel, sent to me 4 times or with giant attachments that clog up my life.

It is too hard (and not worth it for my [travel blog] readers) to keep up with the rising, ever-more-desperate stream of notices (desperate because of the economy) about hotel packages, good deals on ritzy, live-in-a-bubble resorts in Cancun (I’m not a resort kind of traveler, as any reader of my blog knows,) how CVS Pharmacy products can help my family road trip, blah blah blah.

The flood is really starting to impede my ability to see/respond to important emails that involve actual writing or consulting work for pay.

I want to blog about places I personally visit and things I do with my own kids, not regurgitate – for free – press releases about resorts that I’ve never been to and will never visit.  I write for two travel blogs, two blogs about social media and another about drag racing – I don’t have time to plow through all that junk.

The few emails that resonate indicate that:

1. The sender actually reads my blog, and not just to get my name to “personalize” their email blast. I particularly like the copy/paste of my name such that the greeting is one font and the press release pasted below is another.
2. The topic ties into a place that I’ve been to and written about. I’ll admit that the current template on my Family Travel blog is NOT search-friendly and I’m addressing that with BootsnAll, but my topic categories can be found through Archives at the bottom of the front page.  You can’t read my mind to see where I’m going that I haven’t visited before, obviously, so PR might get lucky and hit me with something about someplace I happen to be planning to go (but I doubt it, so why waste your time?)
3. The email topic ties to my focus of budget, independent, family-friendly travel. I’ve lived in the Middle East as a preteen and with my own kids in Asia and Europe, and have traveled all over the US.  I am so NOT the kind of person to stay in some all-inclusive package place in Cancun or Jamaica, so don’t inundate me with off-topic pitches.
4. I would much rather support state/county/city tourism organizations than more commercial travel businesses.
5. I’d rather deal with someone who has already “hung out” on my blog, by leaving a comment or two on some of my posts. Problem is, hardly any PR rep who’s blasted an email at me has ever stopped by and left a helpful comment and participated in the blog’s conversation BEFORE filling my IN box.

When I DO say “y’all come” to tourism organizations, they are often clueless. They’re so used to broadcasting, they don’t know how to interact in a two-way fashion.

For example, I’ve been running the 50 State Series on my family travel blog for weeks now, taking family-friendly suggestions from Twitter and Facebook for each state. I’m giving state tourism organizations a chance to toot their own horn, but I can’t believe how hard it is to get them to respond. Hel-LO!  Here’s the Vermont family travel 50 states post; that is the kind of stuff I want to blog about. Thank goodness for my Twitter followers; at least they know how to respond to calls for tips or I’d never get a post done each week.

Other insights:

1. I talked about this outreach topic in a podcast with travel writer and blogger Pam Mandel for Canadian tourism tech expert Todd Lucier: A conversation with bloggers about their craft.  Some of your clients might find it helpful.
2. They should also read this guest post by my Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel:  6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)

Sorry if any of this came across as excessively crabby, but there’s no magic bullet for blogger outreach. Good PR has always been about knowing your target journalist or writer, establishing a relationship BEFORE you pitch and not pitching blindly.

PR folks Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse and Jason Falls have met and interacted with me on Twitter, on my blogs and in person at events like the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference. I respect their knowledge, count them as friends and would now listen to most anything they have to say to me. They’re the gold standard.”

That’s all you gotta do, really….

Did I miss anything? Am I, in fact, just too crabby? 

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