So you’ve built up your personal brand to superstar status. Everyone is watching. You are setting the pace and rocking it as an A-lister. Your community loves & adores you. Everything is awesome right? What could go wrong?
An unintentional mistake …
I’ve watched it happen over the past couple of years. The blogging community is a warm tight knit community. But as with any group the leaders are held to high standards. They’re expected to set the bar.
It’s easy to sit back & watch the kerfluffle unfold. In the past I haven’t said much out loud because it was ‘safer’ to support people in the back channel. We went thru the puppet fiasco with Shel Israel. I got to know him at a personal level by supporting him in the back channel. The puppet videos weren’t funny if you put yourself in his shoes. And there is the person on Twitter who has a parody going. I’m not interested in being on their radar.
This spring I watched when Jeremiah Owyang made a slip on his blog. We talked by phone & he told me that many of the anonymous comments were from the same IP. I was glad to be able to offer my support & suggestions for weathering the storm.
Most recently I saw a post on SocialMediaToday criticizing Gary Vaynerchuk’s PR blogger campaign to promote his book, Crush It. I received the same email & agree that there was one sentence that won’t motivate me to engage:
On your side, anything you do with him is going to get an influx of readers to your blog due to his massive and loyal following.
I was interested in participating in promoting Gary’s book because:
- as a past librarian, books are amazing
- we were invited to suggest how we wanted to share the book with our community/network (allowing creativity)
I didn’t know Gary & so his personal brand wasn’t a motivation (hence that last sentence didn’t resonate with me).
What are the ramifications: At the time I put my opinion on the post, 600 people had viewed the post. I see that 2000 have now. I understand John Cass’ intention to use examples to teach others but at what expense to Gary’s brand? We agreed that we get bad pitches every day but this one came from a social media superstar.
The conversation was taken up on Shel Holtz & Neville Hobson’s live interview on Friday. Gary apologized & said that he realizes that some things could have been done differently.
My take aways:
- I disagree that an effective blogger campaign requires reading each person’s blog to find what motivates them. It’s not scalable. (Gary was trying to grow his community – the email just didn’t describe his book to connect with the audience)
- scaling a brand & connecting with potential new audiences on a personal level is difficult. How can one connect & build relationships?
- empowering others to help you with your work has its risks. They need to understand the space because even though this email was signed by someone else, it still represented Gary’s brand.
Gary graciously expressed his apologies many times in the interview. He did say that of the 500 emails, he had a 50% response rate which is really good. What success rate do professional agencies have?
I look forward to seeing Gary’s book (and the other nine! He signed an unprecedented 10 book deal). You can read John Cass’ follow up is here & I respect his opinions. John’s intent was to use it as a learning experience. After commenting on the post Gary sent me a personal note & we are now connected. He works 19 hrs a day & I am guilty of that too. We need to support each other as we’re all going to make mistakes. Let’s speak up for what we believe in & not be too hard on each other. What will happen when you stumble?
Photo credit: gicol/Flickr
A heartfelt apology is a great way to connect with people in any medium. It also leaves those who were simply looking to accuse (for sport) with no place to go.
Connie, thanks for appearing on the show, it was great to hear your opinions and good to see your post here. I had a few follow up thoughts.
Gary’s brand did not suffer because I criticized him; it suffered because he sent a bad pitch. His company sent 500 pitch emails, and 200 people responded positively. I’d be curious to know why the other 300 people did not respond. Some probably because they were not interested, busy, or maybe like you, did not like his last paragraph. Surely his email did more to damage his reputation than anything I did in writing a post about the email.
I could have just ignored the email; I could have just deleted it. But if I had, there would have been no opportunity for Gary to know I did not like the email his employee sent me. Or perhaps for many other people to voice their concerns. Isn’t open discussion about issues what social media is all about, the opportunity to discuss what we think about people’s and companies actions?
I think there’s a big difference between giving unconstructive criticism and giving constructive criticism. I think it is perfectly acceptable to give your opinions about issues you are passionate about. I’m really passionate about the marketing concept, and the idea that marketers listen to their customers and audiences when building a product or marketing campaign.
Regarding your take aways:
Would you send an email to someone promoting a product without first reading their blog? I think there’s a whole body of discussion that’s occurred in the last ten years when it comes to building an effective blogger relations campaign. One big take away I’ve learned from people like Dan Gillmor, Shel Holtz, Stowe Boyd, Neville Hobson, Todd Defren, Robert Scoble, Susan Getgood, Chris Andersen, Gina Trapani and more is that you should read a journalist/blogger’s stuff before pitching them. It’s seen as common courtesy.
You are right engagement has problems with scalability, it is tough to build the infrastructure and resources to be able to engage, but if we don’t, then surely our alternative is advertising and interruption marketing techniques. Just because connecting and building relationships takes time doesn’t mean we don’t do it. Gary’s company is at least a $50 million company according to reports I’ve seen from his interviews with people like CNN; surely his company can afford to hire a few extra people to manage engagement for community management or media relations? Hasn’t the ROI of social media been good for Gary’s company? Robert Scoble at Microsoft, Jeremy Alliare at Macromedia, Richard Binhammer at Dell and you, as one of the leaders in the online community management movement have demonstrated that engagement works, the strategy is sound. Why would we abandon it now?
Interesting question about agency successful rates with personal pitches and bad pitches, we’d have to ask the industry.