Left to Right: Isabel Kaliman, Liz Gumbinner, Beth Feldman, Anna Fader, Carol Cain, Erin Hanson.
The New York City Chapter of the Public Relations Society September panel, “Mother Knows Best: Meet the Mommy Media” featured five bloggers providing insight on the best ways to get your story covered in their blogs as well as various ways to approach them and establish a relationship first before sending out a pitch.
The event was billed as:
“Mommy bloggers and mommy media continue to grow at an exponential rate. They have established themselves as an influential community within our media culture. With women accounting for over half the population and moms as the decision makers of household purchases, it’s crucial that PR professionals include these influencers as part of their media outreach or as consultants and brand ambassadors to ensure successful programs for their clients. Join several influential bloggers to get an inside look on how to reach and foster relationships with them on behalf of your clients.”
– Erin Hanson, moderator of the panel is a senior vice president in MS&L Group’s consumer marketing practice in New York, and currently oversees global external relations strategy for Procter & Gamble household brands Swiffer, Febreze and Mr. Clean. Through her work on P&G, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft, she has amassed a wealth of experience working with mom influencers, bloggers and social networks.
Panelists:
– Carol Cain is Founder and Publisher of NYCityMama.com a Travel and Food site which highlights family-friendly destinations for travelers both in and out of New York. Before venturing into the world of travel blogging, she worked in Public Relations, and it is this experience that has helped her leverage successful relationships with PR representatives and brands nationwide. You can follow Carol on Twitter @nycitymama.
– Anna Fader, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Mommy Poppins. After a decade working as an award-
winning advertising creative for BBDO NY, Anna became interested in social media and blogging as a way to connect directly with customers. In 2007 she started a social media consultancy and her own blog, MommyPoppins.com which gets over 200,000 unique visitors per month.
– Beth Feldman is the founder of Role Mommy, a thriving online community dedicated to inspiring,
entertaining and empowering today’s busy moms to pursue their passion while raising a family. She is a former television network executive who pole vaulted off the corporate ladder to pursue her passion. Through Role Mommy, she also offers advice to parents on tweens and social media. You can follow Beth on Twitter @rolemommy.
– Liz Gumbinner is the co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the shopping and trend blog
CoolMomPicks.com, which has been called “the online arbiter of cool” by Parents Magazine and named one of Real Simple’s 3 favorite blogs for parents. She’s also the author of the popular personal blog Mom-101.com, and manages to balance it with a job as an ad agency creative director.
CoolMomPicks on Twitter, CoolMomPicks on Facebook.
– Isabel Kaliman is the founder and chief at Alpha Mom, an online destination and marketing research lab. The term “Alpha Mom” has been recognized by USA Today, The Today Show, and Good Morning America as the category generic for the ultimate influencer. Forbes anointed Alpha Mom one of the Top 10 Mommy’Hood Gurus and Parents Magazine named Isabel one of the ten “Power Moms”. You can follow Isabel on Twitter @isabelkallman.
ERIN How did you get into mom blogging?
CAROL
Started her blog two years ago and wanted to share with others what she was doing with her three sons. She would visit various places such as restaurants, hotels and started as a diary but became an informative site for parents.
ANNA
Was creative director at BBDO for over two years and started Mommy Poppins as a New Years resolution. She saw how well her blog worked with advertising to connect to consumers and left BBDO and transitioned over to social media.
BETH
Was VP at CBS Television. Spearheaded first mommy blogger press conference for New Adventures of Old Christine. Convinced CBS to partner with blogs. She left CBS to start her own PR/Consulting company to work with brands that wanted to reach out to mom bloggers.
LIZ
Started blogging in 2006. She was pregnant and started Mom101 as a personal blog which enabled her to write about being a mom. She then started a shopping blog for parents which became Cool Mom Picks that currently operates as an online magazine.
ISABEL
Alpha Mom started as a television network/Video on Demand channel that morphed online. She gets excited when readers send in email stating that the information/topic read on her blog was helpful and actually helped improve the health of women during pregnancy.
ERIN How do you respond to the title of “mommyblogger?”
LIZ
She does not like it and feels that it limits her audience. As a writer she welcomes a large audience. Prefers titles such as: Mom Blogger or Parenting Blogger. Mom blogs cover a wide range of topics so not all of these blogs are the same.
CAROL
She was introduced at a meeting as the “mommy blogger” and does not mind the title, but she considers herself to be a travel blogger and also reviews restaurants. The perception of the mommy blogger is that you are a mom at home with your kids. But Carol is almost never home, and anybody that knows her knows she is very busy.
ISABEL
Mommy Blogger defines the person not what you are writing about. Writers write about a lot of stuff such as family life, personal life, politics, etc.
ERIN How do PR people approach you, and should PR people approach bloggers like a journalist?
CAROL
We do not have the traditional corporate job, but we work with corporations to provide expertise and bring that into our blog/business. The blog is not just a hobby. I would take time to read the blog and see if it is right for your target.
ANNA
She did a blogger outreach program to send out a product for review and found that she still had to sit down and read all of the blogs and write individual pitch letters. Get to know the blog and the blogger.
LIZ
I have advertising clients say, “We need to reach the mommy market” and that makes me bristle as it puts an impression in your head of the stay at home mom raising the kids and performing traditional roles such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. She gets pitches that begin, “Dear Mommy Blogger, I have some great laundry detergent that would be awesome for your readers…”; this may work for other mom blogs, but not hers. With the bigger blogs you need to build a relationship. I look for things that are cool for my readers.
ERIN What makes you review a product? What breaks through the clutter and give space to cover in your blog?
BETH
When it resonates with me, I will tell the story through my voice. Bloggers are now innundated with stuff and will not do anything which led a client to ask, “What should I do?” I suggested an advertorial if the blogger will not review it, as it is done in a magazine. You can compensate those bloggers and offer them to write their own experience and a banner as well. Social media is a different ball game than dealing with a journalist.
ISABEL
Get to know the blogger. I would love to review products but that is not my specialty so I would send it to Liz and give her the exclusive. If you send me a pitch saying, “Daily Candy and others have reviewed it,” I do not care. Why be second if it has been done already?
ERIN What can we do to insure that the relationships are authentic?
ANNA
Knowing that you are going to get paid to write a review at least pay the blogger as a professional marketing person and not as a mommy blogger by providing me with a $25 gift card. She has to put in a disclaimer saying that she did not receive anything for doing a review. Think about who you are trying to reach and approach them appropriately.
LIZ
Product review networks that can do the work for you are good for mass market brands so you (as a PR person/agency) can say, “I got you fifty reviews.” Blogging is not a numbers game. But the influence surpasses traffic. Readers of my blog are producers on The View, Today Show, editors of Real Simple, Glamour and they get content from my blog.
ERIN Are you finding that public relations folks are contacting you and requesting that “this is exactly what I need to say…”
LIZ
My blog is for me. If there is a provision that states you must say…then we will disclose things, but we need to put it in our own words: “thank you for this sponsor…”
ERIN Has Twitter impacted your blog and changed the way you work?
LIZ
Twitter has compromised the blog world and now there is less of an obligation to comment on the blog. Twitter and Facebook are extensions of your blog. There is ten times more engagement on the CoolMomPicks Facebook fan pages. We will tweet a post and get fifty hits, but when we put up a post on the CoolMomPicks Facebook page we get five hundred. They have 55,000 Twitter followers and 11000 Facebook fans. We are still figuring it all out; is twitter microblogging, a way to workshop ideas, a newsfeed, or a promotional tool?
ISABEL
Develop a relationship and have conversations with people on Twitter.
At this point of the discussion questions were taken from the audience.
If I am a company/product/service and I have provided you the blogger with an opportunity to try my product, stay at my hotel, dine at my restaurant, etc. but you have a negative experience, do you still write about it?
CAROL
If I have a problem at the hotel/restaurant, I have to honest with my readers since that is my reputation. Some have requested not to write about it. If I experience a problem during my stay/meal, I will address it with the manager of the facility/restaurant/hotel as it is out of the PR person’s hands.
LIZ
I was on a cruise ship press event and people attending the event were saying how mediocre the facilities were but when you read it on the blogs it got raving reviews because those bloggers got it for free and felt they had an obligation to be kind to their host. PR Firms are now doing the work of marketing, promotions, but you have to put yourself in bloggers shoes. What is the blogger getting out of this, and what will they get excited about?
What if your clients are commenting on the negative posts on your blog?
CAROL
Do not get caught up in the back and forth. Some bloggers will do it for sensationalism. Make your point and let it go.
LIZ
Don’t make it sound like your legal department wrote a corporate response.
Do you like to be pitched via Twitter or Facebook?
LIZ
I do not like it. It is too public and puts us in a awkward position. Twitter is a monitoring device. Mentioned story of how she was at Hard Rock Hotel Chicago and was surprised that the Hard Rock General Manager tweeted her a reply which you can read about here.
ISABEL
You want to build a relationship and not pitch.
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This is not the real Gatorade Social Media Monitoring center, but if I was in charge this is how I would create it.
Photo by cleanwalmart Photo by StuSeeger Photo by benwatts Photo by molotalk Photo by yezi9713
Almost three years after the debut of Twitter and four years after Facebook, growing user adoption of these two websites by consumers can no longer be ignored by major brands. In the September 15 Wall Street Journal article, “Gatorade’s ‘Mission’: Sell More Drinks,” we get an inside view of Gatorade’s Mission Control room in Chicago:
“Sitting in a glassed-in converted conference room at Gatorade headquarters Meg Poulelis tweets encouragement to high-school athletes before big games and taps out responses to Facebook queries such as when to use the new protein drink. Ms. Poulelis is one of a handful of employees who staff “Mission Control,” part of PepsiCo Inc.’s latest effort to kick-start sales of Gatorade, which had been on a three-year sales slide. Staffers sit in Gatorade’s “Mission Control” room in Chicago, used to monitor the Internet and social-media outlets. Gatorade has four full-time people on the Mission Control effort. Whenever someone uses Twitter to say they’re drinking a Gatorade or mentions the brand on Facebook or in other social media, it pops up on a screen in Mission Control. On Saturday, the staff jumped into a Facebook conversation to correct a poster who said Gatorade has high-fructose corn syrup.”
I understand monitoring your product/brand image, but at what point do those brand managers that are responsible for the monitoring of what is being said jump into the conversation? We find out here:
“Aware that consumers may be wary of intrusion, Ms. Poulelis and her colleagues have to figure out when to pipe up—and when to hang back—when someone online is talking about Gatorade. “If they’re directly asking where to buy products, we’re going to weigh in,” Ms. Poulelis said. Mission Control, launched in April, represents an unusually extensive effort by a company to track social media, according to experts. Most companies are in some stage of figuring out social-media tracking, from hiring advertising agencies to do it for them to using free or off-the-shelf software tools to do it themselves. But few have staff monitoring blog and other posts alongside those tracking online-ad traffic, producing a consolidated picture of the brand’s Internet image. Gatorade hopes such coordination will help head off potential crises like a brouhaha last year over PepsiCo’s slow response to consumer complaints that an Apple iPhone application for its Amp energy drink was sexist.”
So does all this 24/7 monitoring and keeping record of what exactly consumers are saying about your product do anything to help with sales?
“It’s unclear yet whether tracking social media sells more sports drinks. Gatorade sales rose 7% in the second quarter and 2.4% for the first half of the year, according to the trade publication Beverage Digest.Gatorade remains under pressure from Coca-Cola Co.’s Powerade, whose sales increased 16.8% in the first half of the year in spite of a minimal social-media presence. Powerade’s Facebook page has less than one-tenth the followers of Gatorade’s page.”
No matter what new technology exists, good old fashion street marketing still remains:
“Powerade plans to roll out a social-media strategy in the coming months, but has done well so far relying on so-called street teams who pass out Powerade samples at athletic events, said spokesman Scott Williamson. “It’s old-school social media,” he added.”
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Facebook continues to grow in leaps and bounds with a majority of users in the 18-25 age category but the 45-54 and 55-65 age category has also made some gains.
For those driving and using their cell phones GPS is the obvious choice especially if you are lost. I hope I don’t get stuck behind the motorist watching TV, video, and playing games though.
The big reason so far is a lack of interest. Make a useful and beneficial service and watch it grow.
Is it Kentucky Fried Chicken or KFC or both?
In my hometown I remember the big bucket sign that proudly announced Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yes, I understand that times have changed, diets and eating habits change, and also restaurants change (except most of the diners I have visited). But is Yum! Brands confusing consumers and shooting itself in the foot by trying to change the image of Kentucky Fried Chicken with a new name and menu? In the August 12 Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Why KFC Franchisees Are Squawking” it seems that the franchisees are not happy and confused by the name/menu change:
“Marilynn Pankratz fondly recalls the time Colonel Sanders donned an apron at her Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and taught the staff how to fry chicken according to his Original Recipe. Ask her if KFC’s current president, Roger Eaton, would do the same, and she’s off: “Roger Eaton and his company don’t give a rat’s ass,” says Pankratz, who has run KFC franchises since 1963. “They hire marketing guys with blue blazers who tell us what to do with our damn stores. But it’s one thing to be behind the big mahogany desk calling the shots and another to be down here in the trenches.” Pankratz is part of a group of franchisees who blame KFC’s falling sales on Eaton’s decision in early 2009 to emphasize grilled chicken and sandwiches over KFC’s bone-in fried fare. Managers at the Yum! Brands -owned chain say they’re trying to reach health-conscious, on-the-go consumers. Many franchisees say the strategy confuses customers and hurts the brand.”
Kentucky Fried Chicken offers a unique food product that other restaurants have tried (and failed) to copy, so why is Yum! Brands now trying to copy the other chains?
“The civil war over what KFC should stand for erupted last year when the company introduced grilled chicken with the slogan “Unthink KFC.” Some franchisees saw it as a bald effort to distance the chain from its much-cherished Southern fried legacy. “Kentucky Fried Chicken hit the streets with 11 herbs and spices, pressure-cooked, and by and large the general public doesn’t give a damn how many calories are in it,” says Wallace Fowler, who runs 60 franchises. “
I do not eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken everyday. In fact, I may only visit once or twice a year. But when I do, there is nothing like the fried chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken. The one thing that makes Kentucky Fried Chicken is the fried chicken. No bones about it. Yum! Brands, stay true to your product, and your market.
You can read the full article here.
Could this be S. Larson?
A few years ago I was a Citibank credit card holder and would receive mailings from Mr. S. Larson. These mailings would not only provide me with good news, but also bad news informing me of an increase in my annual credit card fee, or that the annual percentage rate on the card would have to be increased. After receiving the bad news I felt the best way to address these issues would naturally be to respond to the person informing me of these changes: Mr. S. Larson. There were various occasions where I attempted to contact Mr. S. Larson so he can answer my questions, but I was never able to get hold of him (or her).
I was amazed to read the August 8, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, “Mystery Writer: Does Citibank’s S. Larson Really Exist?” that I was not the only customer trying to reach S. Larson:
People who use Citibank credit cards have wondered about that for around two decades. S. Larson sends them letters—millions of letters. S. Larson always signs these letters in the same diligent hand of a grade-school penmanship student. The words “Customer Service” appear under S. Larson’s name. S. Larson has no title. S. Larson has no gender. But when those in receipt of letters from S. Larson call Sioux Falls to speak with S. Larson, S. Larson never comes to the phone.
When Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman contacts Citibank to get more information about S. Larson, Citibank refers to the usual reply:
Citing “privacy and security,” Citibank won’t say anything about S. Larson except “we are proud of S. Larson.” Mr. Russell phoned Sioux Falls, demanding to speak with S. Larson. “S. Larson was always unavailable,” he says.
Another ex-worker who knows S. Larson—”It’s a human being,” she confirmed—phoned S. Larson and asked about giving an interview. “S. Larson? That’s not a person,” says Larry Russell, who runs a financial Web site in California. Four years ago, he realized his interest payment had jumped from 2.99% to 32.31%. He complained in writing. S. Larson replied that he was “not eligible” for a refund. Finally, a service rep gave him an answer: “I was told that Larson is not a human being,” says Mr. Russell. “It’s a name spit out by the system. There really was no S. Larson.” Caller: “May I speak with S. Larson?” Rep: “I actually can’t transfer you.” Caller: “And she’s customer service? What’s her job?” Rep: “She is President of the Disputes Department.”This person still lives in the neighborhoods and doesn’t want to be found,” she said. That was all she would say about S. Larson
Finally Mr. Newman does the same as other Citibank customers have done and picks up the phone to reach S. Larson:
There are 167 Larsons in the Sioux Falls phone book. Luckily, Citi’s automated directory is open to anyone who dials its main number. A spoken request for “S. Larson” brought up a Chris Larson, a Spencer Larson and a Nicholas Larson. Then a request for Sandra Larson delivered a direct line in Sioux Falls. “Hi,” said a woman’s voice, serious yet sympathetic. “I am in the bank today, just away from my office right now. If you’re calling about a Citi Card account or a refund check, you will need to dial 1-800-950-5114. Otherwise, leave your name and number, and I’ll return your call shortly. Thank you.” A message was left. S. Larson hasn’t called back.
Hey Citibank – free tip here (really, I won’t charge for this one), how about you give S. Larson a Twitter account and be the voice behind Citibank? Try it!
Read the full Wall Street Journal article.
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