Hasbro faces social media backlash after blogger shenanigans
Martyn Yang is just your average blogger. His hobby: writing about a number of Hasbro product lines, including Nerf.
So it's not all that surprising that Yang, who lives in Australia, was eager to respond to an email he received from a Hasbro employee asking if he'd like to give away a popular Nerf accessory to some of his site's readers.
9 examples of great blogger relations
Last week Sally Whittle wrote about the ‘top 5 amazing PR offers’ sitting in her inbox at the time, taking a comical dig at some bad examples of blogger engagement in the process.
Her advice is valid, and I suggest taking a read, but it’s a shame that it’s usually the poor examples of blogger relations that often inspire such pieces.
It’s really not rocket science. Do your research, read the blog, offer the blogger something that’s interesting or more importantly, relevant - and try not to buy them off in the process. The ‘treating bloggers like people’ stuff also applies, but that’s largely just common decency that should be applied to any communications - so doesn’t classify as a rule of blogger engagement for me.
As such, I’ve put together a selection of examples of great collaborations below.
Stats should, as always, be taken with a pinch of salt – since the real benefit of this kind of activity is usually longer term. But in some cases, there are some figures to back up particular campaigns.
Does Apple's textbook success prove that tech bloggers are too gullible?
It's official: Apple's attempt to revolutionise the textbook industry has 'succeeded'.
Just three days in, more than 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded via iBookstore - and iBooks Author has been downloaded 90,000 times.
In fact, over the course of a single weekend Apple has established "a very strong following with authors, publishers, faculty and students and may capture 95% of digital textbook market."
Court: blogger isn't a journalist, owes $2.5m
In the age of the internet, every individual may have their own personal printing press, but that doesn't mean that the same legal protections afforded to journalists are always available to bloggers.
Something that Crystal Cox, an Oregon-based blogger who is facing a $2.5m judgment for publishing information an investment firm alleged was defamatory, knows all too well.
What big brands can learn from bloggers
Businesses are usually at the forefront of online marketing. But when it comes to utilising social platforms, there's a lot they could learn from humble bloggers.
In this post, I look at some social promotional tactics that mega-brands could benefit from, if only they could carry them off.
Buying bloggers: when will brands come to their senses?
The cozy relationships brands have forged with bloggers have been controversial from the start.
Are marketing and PR initiatives that target bloggers smart strategy, or are they little more than a flawed "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" approach to social media?
The concerns over the latter have been so great that government agencies have scrutinized how brands work with bloggers, and how those bloggers promote those brands to their readers.
Brands buy 'influence', but do they really get it?
Forget 'audience', 'unique visitors' and 'page views.' Thanks to social media, more and more brands are looking to base media buys on new metrics like 'influence.'
Take, for instance, the brands that are turning to the Influencer Network put together by Condé Nast's Vogue.
AdWeek describes the Influencer Network as "a panel of some 1,000 women deemed to have sway over other women, based on how active they are on social networks like Facebook and Polyvore, a fashion site where people create collages of outfits and share them with other members."
PR firms need to get hip to the new rules for reviews
PR has always been a tough industry. At the end of the day, PR firms are in the business of selling stories in a world filled with stories.
But PR firms aren't without tools that can help their clients stand out. One: free product.
J.C. Penney part deux: look at our high-quality paid links!
It's been a bad week for J.C. Penney, which found itself penalized by Google and scrutinized by the media after a paid link scheme apparently orchestrated by an outside vendor -- now fired -- was uncovered and detailed in the New York Times.
Not surprisingly, J.C. Penney isn't sitting idly by. It's defending itself.
Kuwaiti blogger sued for bad review #BenihanaKUW
Kuwaiti blogger Mark Makhoul recently wrote a very critical review of Benihana on his blog. The restaurant's reaction? It sued the blogger...
The reaction of the restaurant to this criticism provides an excellent lesson in how not to respond to criticism online, and it has seriously backfired so far, with the story spreading all across the Middle East and further.
