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Chuck Hollis

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The Four Stages of Vendor Blogging

Successful vendor blogging requires a careful balance between corporate Kool Aid and personal authenticity

It’s not easy to be a public face for your employer, and doubly so when you’re using social media. Blogs, tweets, and the like value personal authenticity (and shun “corporateness”), forcing vendor bloggers to walk a tightrope:

  • Sway too far towards your own personality and beliefs and someone from PR or marketing is going to smack you
  • Sway too far towards the press release mentality of “old communications” and your audience will abandon you

It can be hard to accept this burden, and many a bright young blogger flames out as the reality of the situation settles upon them. Yet some emerge from the trials with a reasonable philosophy and are able to continue – witness the success of folks like Chuck Hollis, Val Bercovici, Barton George, Duncan Epping, Lori MacVittie, Brad Hedlund, and many others.

Let’s consider the stages new vendor bloggers go through as they mature into a viable and authentic voice for their employer.

1) Drinking the Sweet Nectar

It’s tempting to drink the corporate Kool-Aid and jump head-first into the fray with a company-logo shield in one hand and product sword in the other. After all, if social media is a sure way to promote your employer, why not take the plunge and reap the rewards?

Because it won’t work, that’s why. Adults don’t go for overly-sweet drinks, and they won’t read “Corporate Kool-Aid” posts. This category of writing tends to be totally over-the-top corporate cheerleading: Ignoring one’s own faults, jumping on the shortcomings of competitors, and expounding on the merits of simple press-release content.

New employees often start here, but those who have worked for a while often skip this step. This is why some “people who blog and work for companies” aren’t really “vendor bloggers” at all – see, for example, Chris Hoff and Marc Farley. But who is and isn’t a “vendor blogger” is a topic for a different day!

2) Stepping Over the Line

Whether they start with Kool-Aid or with self-respect, the next step for bloggers (and tweeters, Facebookers, and other public speakers) who work for companies is to step over the line and get slapped for it. Perhaps they will enter a discussion charged with corporate or real-world politics; perhaps they will overzealously release inside information; or perhaps they will simply overshadow the marketing efforts of the company. Regardless, the repercussions are terrifying: Loss of “the mic”, a reprimand from the boss, or even an employment threat.

This is usually the low point for a vendor blogger. An act of corporate promotion becomes a threat to their employment, and they begin to question the wisdom of it all. “Keep your head down and do your job” seems like a reasoned response. Many an aspiring “public voice” is silenced at this stage. Trust me – I’ve been there, too.

3) Parroting the Press Release

Those who decide to persevere after the corporate slap-down tend to resume with a stripped-down, PR-focused style. Their blog posts contain a straightforward paragraph of praise followed by blocks pasted from official press releases. Their posting becomes less-frequent, too, as their heart has gone out of it.

If the “over the line” stage is personally risky, the parrot stage poses the greatest risk to one’s reputation. We all know that the Kool-Aid tasted great, so we can forgive posts that start with “my new job is awesome!” But seeing a formerly-vigorous individual reduced to quoting corporate marketing is harder to take. If many blogs disappear after phase 2, more are ignored when they reach this phase.

4) Being Honest and Forthright

If they survive the earlier stages, vendor bloggers eventually emerge as honest and forthright voices for their employer. They will try to avoid drawing attention to faults, writing about the highlights instead. When pressed, they will point to their tie of employment and hope the reader understands why they cannot say some things.

Great vendor bloggers are compromised and have sacrificed some authenticity. But their honesty about the situation makes this ok, and their creativity and thoughtfulness keeps the readers coming back.

It’s a tough task and not everyone can do it. But some can, and they earn my respect.

Image credit: “One Hundred + 16 — Drinking the Kool-Aid” by Khürt

“Kool-Aid” is a trademark of Kraft Foods and is used here for the purpose of satire

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A Lesson In Failed Social Media Marketing

This morning, someone left a comment on a 10 month-old blog post about EMC Corporation’s products over at Gestalt IT. Although the writer, “Brian,” identified himself as “EMC Social Outreach Team”, the short message seemed somewhat spammy, including a bit.ly link to one of that company’s marketing promotions. Further investigation reveals what looks to be an inept social media marketing maneuver by “integrated sales promotions” firm, AlterSeekers. Let’s use it as a case study in how not to do social media marketing.

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam

Social Media Outreach

There aren’t hard and fast rules, but most agree that honesty, credibility, and real human interaction are critical for social media. No one likes talking to a robot, and we hate being spammed by them. But not all robots are mechanical: Many companies are hiring outside firms to spread the word about their products and services with real human agents. Some are laughably inept (like the dozens of poorly-worded comments posted to my blog from “Ugg Boots For Sale” and “Nike Air Force”), while others are probably fantastically well-executed (and thus unavailable as examples).

Skill aside, it is the intent of a comment or other social interaction that determines its quality. Blog comments are intended for discussion of the issues presented in the blog post. Links to other sources are perfectly acceptable if they advance the discussion, and the conversation often takes a turn into unrelated areas. None of this is a problem. Simply put, this is the essence of social media.

Imagine you are having a conversation in a public place and someone stops and joins in. You wouldn’t mid if they were really interested, and would probably be pleased if they had some special insight or suggested you talk to a friend in the business. But what if they stopped by, pretended to be interested, but instead were being paid to interject an advertisement for the sushi place across the street? Even if your conversation centered on sushi from the start, the stranger’s intent makes their intrusion unwelcome.

Hello, Brian

Now let’s turn to the comments by “Brian.” The post at Gestalt IT was written in September, 2009 and is an exploration of EMC’s plans unifying their storage array platform. It was pretty popular last Fall, and one of the authors eventually went to work for EMC. But readership has declined since, and no one had commented in nine months.

Then, along came “Brian” with the following insightful remark:

“Great thoughts on EMC! I’m curious if you’ve heard of EMC’s new 20% capacity advantage guarantee? Check out this paper – and we challenge anyone to beat it! http://bit.ly/ao57rm — Brian, EMC Social Outreach Team”

This short comment is not a contribution to the discussion. “Great thoughts on EMC” can be translated as “this post is about EMC but I have nothing to add to it.” The rest is an advertisement, plain and simple, for a marketing campaign centered around EMC’s “20% capacity advantage guarantee.” The fact that they used bit.ly to shorten the link proves this – they’re tracking clickthroughs with it!

One positive element of the comment is the identification of “Brian” as a member of “EMC Social Outreach Team.” This is much more transparent than most spammy comments, and shows that the perpetrator was more inept than devious. But the fact that the Disqus profile belonging to “Brian” was not filled out was less than transparent.

Dissecting Brian

So who is Brian and what is the EMC Social Outreach Team? A quick check on his (unclaimed) Disqus profile reveals that “Brian” made similar comments on seven industry blogs. All but the one on Gestalt IT contained unique human-written and readable commentary, but none was in any way insightful or related to the discussion at hand. And all included that same bit.ly link. This, and the fact that “Brian” hadn’t commented anywhere else, is clear proof that this was advertising and nothing more.

Happily, bit.ly link statistics are open to the public. A quick run over to the tracking page for that link (http://bit.ly/ao57rm+) reveals that “Brian” got 35 clickthroughs in his short career as a comment spammer. Not great. It also reveals a tracking parameter in the URL, “SOC-UNIFIEDGUARANTEE-Social”. Finally, it shows that “Brian” used a bit.ly login belonging to “amberbragas” – now we’re getting somewhere!

“Amber Bragas” is a fairly unusual name (see Google), and LinkedIn contains just one person by that name. She works for a company called “AlterSeekers”. A quick search reveals the Twitter page for @AlterSeekers (not linked), which calls itself “an integrated sales promotions firm” and claims “We get marketing and we get results.”

Jump over to the AlterSeekers web site (not linked) and one is greeted with a flash header featuring a photo of none other than Amber Bragas! Considering the mission of AlterSeekers, the connection to IT industry companies, and the bit.ly connection, I feel safe in assuming that “Brian” is actually a spam bot employed by this company to drive traffic to EMC’s guarantee. He could even be AlterSeekers employee, Brian De La Torre.

I’m going to guess that this was a “proof of concept” pitch by AlterSeekers to win EMC’s business. There is one click from July 16 (perhaps a demo), then more clicks and comments starting on July 19. Similar comments were posted by “Marlon” (De Jesus?) and “Justin“.

It would appear for the offending party searched Google for “emc unified storage systems -oracle“, an amusing construct that reveals the intent of the perpetrator. Why exclude Oracle? They left a comment as “Brian” or “Marlon” on just about every blog post that search returns. The visitor came from Port Washington, New York (home of AlterSeekers) and the IP address traces as “alter seekers inc.” I guess we can be pretty certain who the guilty party is!

Bye, Brian

Whoever Brian is, he’s not part of some “EMC Social Outreach Team”, nor is he “making authentic connections with your customers.” He’s spamming blogs with tracked marketing links. And he’s also apparently out of a job.

EMC Marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis (who I will link to) responded this morning with two tweets that speak for themselves:

We found out about it yesterday morning, and quickly shut it down. Somebody’s bad idea, quickly fixed. (1)

and

Someone thought it would be clever to go to an external “social service”. Imagine our collective horror …(2)

‘Nuff said, Chuck. EMC is really astonishingly good at real social outreach. They don’t need this pathetic and spammy “social outreach” by a third party. Chuck quickly took responsibility and shut it down, demonstrating the correct approach to this sort of thing.

Lessons Learned

Social media is about being genuine and, well, social. You can’t hire an outsider to do this for you. Your customers will see through inept attempts to “join the conversation.” As AlterSeekers own web site notes, one has to make “authentic connections” not post transparent blog comment spam.

This is the core problem facing so many “social media marketing” firms. They employ people who aren’t part of the conversation, use inappropriate metrics, and try to entice non-genuine behavior. Regardless of whether you sell flowers, cars, or IT equipment, you cannot outsource the conversation. You must rely on genuinely engaged and authentic commentators.

One must also consider the goals of this sort of campaign. Clearly, AlterSeekers was trying to entice people to click through to that one link. When social media goals focus too narrowly on a single specific action, they tend to look like spam and go off the rails. Goals should be broader, guiding the conversation and spreading the message rather than just taking a single (albeit measurable) action like clicking a link.

Returning to our example of the street corner conversation, what if the sushi restaurant encouraged sushi lovers to spread the word about their love of sashimi? They would undoubtedly encourage more sushi eating! And what if they offered discounts or supported a sushi club? They would drive real traffic and, more importantly, a devoted audience. Fresh sushi sure beats canned spam!

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam