Shining Starters: 10 Tips For Blogger-People Relations

While there are many top ten lists for bloggers, most seasoned bloggers — independent and organizational alike — will tell you that writing content is only part of the equation for sustainable success. Virtually every successful blog does more than offer good content. Many establish a sense of connection and sometimes community despite a presentation-like format.

The ability to infuse engagement, outreach, and relations into any social media program is the difference between having a successful program vs. one that doesn't seem to work. After all, if anyone can write a post and be successful, then every blog would have better than 200 readers. Most don't.

A few months ago, we performed an evaluation on an internal blog for a government agency. Despite the opportunity to employ it as a strong internal communication tool, the apparent lack of engagement and occasional adversarial tone from employees had left the communicators at a loss. What were they doing wrong?

In addition to providing six primary recommendations and 14 steps to realign the blog to meet its original objectives, there were some additional concepts missing from the program that had nothing to do with the nuts and bolts and writing posts. They had everything to do with people-to-people relations and organizational values. Here are ten tips.

Ten Common Sense Blogging Tips Beyond The Post

• Treat others with respect, even when you disagree with them, and they will respect you.
• Listen to what others have to say, and understand their point of view before being heard.
• Never be afraid of holding a less popular opinion, and people will add more value to your opinions.
• Keep your promises, even if it means making fewer promises, and people will know they can trust you.
• Allow others to share in your work from time to time and they will take responsibility for it.
• When others see justice used in solving problems, it reaffirms their sense of right and wrong.
• Invest one-on-one time with people, answering their questions and joining discussions, and they'll know you value them.
• If you expose yourself to diverse viewpoints and ideas, you'll benefit from improved critical thinking skills.
• Praise efforts, but never be afraid to improve, expand upon, or correct them, and the recognition means more.
• Lead a balanced life because the best posts and stories don't originate from online content.

From time to time, you'll find some of the best read and/or social media experts stumble on these points too, either slipping into diatribe or extending niceties to the point of pushing forward concepts laced with problems. It's okay. We're all human.

More to the point, however, is that observing those ten tips makes all the rest more manageable. Here are some of the better ones that we've collected. Enjoy.

Five More Blogging Tips From Around The Web

• 10 Simple Productivity Tips for Bloggers>Daily Blogging Tips from DailyBlogTips

• 10 Tips For Writing Blog Posts That Shine from Top Ten Blog Tips

• Build Upon Your Strengths As A Blogger from ProBlogger

• Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers from Wired

• 10 Tips for Becoming a Great Corporate Blogger from Scout

Targeting Trends: UC Berkeley School of Law

According to a new consumer privacy study by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law) and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, most Americans do not want online advertisements tailored by marketers to their specific interests. This study contradicts some finer points from The IBM Global Study released earlier.

The report, entitled "Americans Reject Tailored Advertising," shows 66 percent of adults said no to tailored ads. Even more concerning for marketers, between 73 and 86 percent will reject tailored advertising when they are told what information marketers intend to gather, including tracking behavior on websites and in retail stores.

The Study Reveals Irritated Consumers

Behavioral targeting, which involves following consumers’ actions and then tailoring advertisements for the consumers based on those actions, have come under increased scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission. Marketers insist behavioral targeting helps deliver the right ads to the right consumers. Privacy advocates argue it is an invasive practice that labels people.

• 92 percent of those polled agree there should be a law that requires websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual upon request
•  63 percent believe advertisers should be legally required to delete information about their internet activity immediately, whether requested or not.

The report demonstrates that, while younger Americans are less likely to reject tailored advertising (54 percent) than Americans over the age of 24, marketers may be pushing too far ahead and too fast. Harris Interactive warned marketers that consumers were open to behavioral targeting as long as it was constrained.

Driving Advertising: IBM Global Business Services Study

Ever since Michael Gass posted highlights from the executive summary of the IBM Global Business Services study on advertising, some people have been wondering what it all means. We broke it down into the reality, rewards, and risks associated with four segments.

Highlights From The IBM Global Study

IBM Study. Attention: Consumers are increasingly in control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world, as they continue to shift their attention away from linear TV and adopt ad-skipping, sharing and rating tools.
Reality. Companies will have to consider increasing smaller groups of consumers, with increased sensitivity that even similar groups will react very differently to their message.
Reward. It will reinforce the concept that demonstrating a product and service contrast works.
Risk. In a world full of purple cows, no cow is different.

IBM Study. Creativity: Technology is allowing for more user-generated and peer-delivered content, and new ad
revenue-sharing models, allowing amateurs and semi-professionals to create lower-cost advertising content.
Reality. Other studies show that there is already an increasing demand by consumers to have someone help them vet the quality of content from the quantity of the content.
Reward. Some new talents may be discovered, creating unique opportunities for companies to support them.
Risk. It may take considerable time to swing back from popularity- and affirmation-based recommendations to objective consideration. However, over reliance on consumer-generated marketing will fade as companies realize consumers have a finite amount of time to invest in every company with a contest.

IBM Study. Measurement: Advertisers are demanding more individual-specific and involvement-based measurements, putting pressure on the traditional mass market model.
Reality. Shrinking representative tracking measures that skewed toward select demographics died three years ago.
Reward. Companies will be able to better understand the consumer they are trying to reach.
Risk. Over reliance on click measurements produces disastrous decisions; over targeting to smaller groups already creates inconsistent messages for many organizations. Someone has to move beyond group think.

IBM Study. Advertising Inventories: New entrants are making ad space that once was proprietary available through open, efficient exchanges. As a result, more than half of the ad professionals polled expect that open platforms will, within the next five years, take 30 percent of the revenue currently flowing to proprietary incumbents such as broadcasters.
Reality. Broadcasters will either return to creating quality content and maximizing their revenues with non-advertising revenue or they will become indistinguishable and perhaps less entertaining than consumer content.
Risk. Budgets will shrink, advances will disappear, and the best broadcasters once offered will be gone. Bundling could make the auction markets less palatable much like uncontrolled rotates today.

There is little doubt that advertising will change dramatically in the next five years. And while many people consider it an evolution, some change has an equal opportunity to be a digression. What do you think? Did anybody read it? IBM Global Study.

What Others Think

• Follow the leader is a dangerous game, particularly when you follow Hippos… by Mark Allen Roberts

• IBM Study: The end of advertising as we know it by DreamGrow Digital

• Advertisers becoming more agressive, so what is the ideal relationship? at Zero Degrees

Marketing Movies: Why They're Different

According to Adweek, a new study by Stradella Road reveals that 73 percent of moviegoers first gain awareness of a new movie release from television and 70 percent from in-theater trailers, beating out word-of-mouth (46 percent) and the Internet (44 percent) and leaving billboards and newspaper advertising way, way behind.

However, beyond the initial exposure of a new movie commercial, an overwhelming number of people across all age groups have fully adopted digital technologies and increasingly depend on them to gain information about new movie releases and help with their decisions about which films to see. As with most advertising campaigns, television is effective to generate awareness but the Internet becomes the battleground in the decision-making process.

Key Findings From Stradella Road

• 94 percent of all moviegoers are online, across all age groups
• 86 percent of all demographic segments go online via a computer or mobile device once a day
• Moviegoers spend more time online (19.8 hours) than they do watching television (14.3 hours)
• 73 percent have profiles on social networking sites, and 69 percent watch online video content
• 93 percent report that they use Internet search to find information about new movie releases

What We Learned Marketing Indies

Our own experience marketing independent films demonstrated much of the same. Television, including news and reviews, dominated generating awareness. However, it was a strong personalized social media program that proved critical in creating a desire to see a film in theaters and prime audiences to purchase the DVD.

Social media also helped mitigate negative reviews, especially in that film fans would defend the film and point people to more positive reviews for a balanced perspective. But even more importantly, the social media program helped capture interested moviegoers and direct them to balanced insider information written by the producers (as opposed to a single critic's viewpoint).

The end result was a more passionate fan base, one that not only referred people to see/purchase the film, but also take a personal stake in the movie as fans were invited to become as close to the film creators — producers, directors, writers, and cast — as possible. While the independent film had several hurdles to overcome via traditional publicity (40 interview requests, but no A-list cast available to accept them) and mass media (a remarkably low budget and relatively few markets), fans wanted the film to succeed.

What Can Product Advertisers Learn From The Movies?

The flow of information for products and services works relatively the same way. While diminishing, traditional marketing has an expansive reach that provides an excellent opportunity to generate awareness. However, immediately following that awareness, consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for information that will help them make purchasing decisions.

However, there is a piece of the equation that differs for products and services. One of the reasons that the public responds well to television advertising for movies is that movies are considered an important message whereas most products and services are only important to those selling them.

So, the hurdle most advertising creatives need to overcome is how to make what is the least important message in someone's life (an advertisement) into communication that can change behavior. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, "You say what you have to say. But you have to learn how to say it in a way that people can see what you mean." Or in advertising, sometimes they have to "feel" what you mean. If they don't, you can talk all day about yourself and never move anyone.

Encouraging For Nonprofits: Lee Aase & Mayo Clinic

The Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization and internationally renowned group medical practice headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota. And, according to U.S. News & World Report, it is ranked second only to Johns Hopkins.

As a leader in the medical community, it's no surprise that the Mayo Clinic has become a leader in social media. We even used its program as an example for hospitals in southern Nevada to consider, given Las Vegas-area hospitals' lack of presence online.

The Mayo Clinic is a fine example, especially since Lee Aase, manager of syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic, has accepted several interviews to share the benefits of developing social media programs for hospitals and nonprofit organizations. In addition to video, you can learn more about their program here and here.


According to Aase, the comparatively low cost and ease-of-use make social media an important communication component for every nonprofit communication plan. It is a sentiment recently shared by Seth Godin, who noted nonprofit organizations have been too slow to adopt social media and criticized them for placing too much emphasis on the "non" portion of nonprofit.

While Godin raises some good points, his logic is flawed. The lack of being among the top 100 anything online (Twitter or otherwise) is not an indication whether or not nonprofit organizations have effective social media programs. It only means that the potential target audience is less than everyone whereas Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, and Britney Spears have a larger slice of the potential to reach everyone.

Several nonprofit organizations do have fledgling social media programs in the works, including the March of Dimes, which will be partnering with BloggersUnite.org this November for Bloggers Unite: Fight For Preemies. There is also an independent filmmaker that we will be working with over the next three months to support several important causes related to veterans. (Details on both of these efforts will be released next week.) They won't show in the lists, but they will meet objectives.

What I Learned Speaking At NANO

Still, the March of Dimes and the filmmakers seem to be the exception. After taking a cursory look at the online presence of the top 20 nonprofit organizations (by funding) in southern Nevada in preparation for speaking to a handful of nonprofit executives at the Nevada Association Of Nonprofit Organizations (NANO), we discovered that with exception to the Nevada Cancer Institute, most nonprofit organizations here are largely nonexistent online.

They either have no social media program or have what can best be described as small pond social media efforts. A small pond social media effort usually consists of 100 to 200 people on a popular social media platform (regardless of where their supporters are engaged). The organization has a dialogue with its small group. There is nothing wrong with that (although some greatly diminish their ROI).

The United Way of Southern Nevada, for example, has several social media accounts consisting of a relatively small collection of advocates on each. They engage participants on these accounts, but none of these participants seem to have become advocates or evangelists who actively share United Way content beyond the small pond. And, when measuring online presence, it creates the illusion that they have a non-existent program.

In contrast, the Mayo Clinic excels in maximizing the adaptive nature of social media. For example, one of the many proven points that Aase shares in the Ragan video is how the Mayo Clinic employs social media as a media relations outreach tool and/or uses it to refocus media exposure that the clinic receives. The concept is one of several excellent communication tactics that have opened up via social media.

This touches on something else I learned from NANO members. Many nonprofit organizations may not be ready to engage in social media. The reasons may be varied, but the reality is that many do not know how to develop or manage a communication plan let alone a social media program. Most are best served only when they have the help of a communication champion.

Specifically, the communication learning curve for someone like Aase and the learning curve for a nonprofit administrator or executive director are not the same. And what seems easy to me, Aase, or Valeria Maltoni, is a completely new skill set to non-communicators. The same holds true for businesses.

For me, it has changed the way I present social media content threefold. First, social media is best viewed as an environment where people congregate as opposed to a medium unto itself. Second, the experiences people have with individual communication online are significantly different from organizational communication. Third, "dive in" advice tends to leave organizations with the "now what?" dilemma, especially for non-communicators.

Forgetting A Public: Public Relations

Earlier this year, Salary.com published the 2008/2009 Employee Satisfaction and Retention Survey that revealed 65 percent of employees were passively or actively looking for new jobs.

What made the survey stand out is that employers only estimated that number at 37 percent. In fact, while employers had a good sense of overall employee satisfaction, they often overestimated the degree of satisfaction by nearly 2 to 1.

Lori Rosenwasser, writing for Forbes, used it to once again remind employers that there may be some fall out for companies that are "not actively recruiting" but are also unconcerned with retention. The most misguided assume employees are holding on to their jobs for dear life.

As evidence, consider The New York Times article that points out employers are too uncertain to hire employees despite an upturn in the economy. With job seekers currently outnumbering openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000, continued uncertainty could become self-fulfilling.

While there is some prudence in waiting to fully understand the financial consequences of health care reform, increasing likelihood of potential tax increases and regulations, and rising cost of labor; being overly cautious could further hinder growth, aggravate employee loyalty, and diminish customer service as employees who already feel like they have made sacrifices are asked to do more for less despite signs of a turnaround.

The Public Behind Multiple Publics

Very few employees exist as a singular public anymore. Many of them, especially in larger companies, are also direct or indirect shareholders, customers, industry influencers, regulars, activists, and marketers. Specifically, they don't come to work every day to receive a salary.

They come to work because they might believe in the product or service. They might come to work because they appreciate their 401k may be tied to the company's performance. They may serve on commissions or in associations that either self-police the industry or interconnect with government. They might be fans or friends of the company via an online group. They may vest or fund organizations that lobby government against the industry in which they work. And the list goes on.

Can public relations really afford to consider a news release limited in its scope to the media? Can investor communication claim the economy is the cause when employee-investors might know better? If a company decides to save dollars on the assembly line, do employee-customers decide to purchase another product? Do employees feel forced to join online communities and support the company, granting it even more access to their semi-public communications? Are companies inveterately funding organizations that will press for their next tax increase or sweeping industry changes?

The challenges in meeting the needs of the most neglected public are exponential, well beyond the questions posed by Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBlog on Workforce. While she rightly suggests that companies operate with integrity, leadership, and responsibility, maybe it's time that public relations professionals consider companies are much more transparent than they ever imagined.

Where Employees Are The Message

To that extent, it may even be the story-beyond-the-story that has Domino's, Ford Motor Co. and Kellogg Co. turning employees into marketing talent. While the story talks about a move to cut marketing costs while creating a bond with audiences, it also creates an opportunity to share multiple messages with multiple publics, especially those that consist of one public with multiple roles.

While not always confined to executives, one of several examples includes GM Chairman Edward Whitacre Jr. attempting to build rapport with viewers before urging them to try GM's vehicles.

"Before I started this job, I admit I had some doubts. Probably a lot like you," Whitacre says as he strides down the halls of GM's Design Center in Warren. "But I like what I've found. I think you will, too."

Is this a message to customers? Or employees? Or investors? Or all of the above? Is it advertising? marketing? public relations? social media (once it is placed on YouTube or a blog)? Or all of the above? Is it a cost-cutting measure? Exercise in transparency? High touch message? Or all of the above?

The move really isn't only about messaging in the current market nor does it necessarily require employees. As advertisers and public relations professionals work toward message integration, it becomes more apparent that communication needs to touch multiple publics for different reasons, especially when those multiple publics can be traced back to the one most responsive to high touch messages.

Right on. It's a bit more complicated than sending a news release, but someone needs to advise executives that the modern employee isn't the same employee that they knew two or three decades ago. Without their support, it's all upstream.