Successful Blog

  • Home
  • Community
  • About
  • Author Guidelines
  • Liz’s Book
  • Stay Tuned

Welcome IttyBiz and Walmart!

February 23, 2009 by SOBCon Authors 2 Comments

This week was a great week for learning and a great week for SOBCon09!

It started with an email from Naomi Dunford, CEO of IttyBiz. The subject line was “Sponsorship info, please?” About 6 emails later we had a full-company sponsor deal that means a win for everyone:

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants (more on that below)
  • visibility for IttyBiz and direct sampling of new products to key influencers
  • Naomi’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how she built her business so quickly to a full sponsorship level.
  • about $700 worth of solid value for every attendee

The very next day, I enjoyed a call with John Andrews of Walmart. We extended the relationship we’d started at BlissDom09. In a short 9 or so minutes, we put together a package that included value in more directions than first meets the eye.

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants (more on that below)
  • visibility for Walmart
  • John’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how Walmart is connecting their vendors with their blogger evangelists.
  • and some other surprises

Because They Invested in Us We Can Invest MORE in YOU!

Thanks! Naomi and John!!

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: bc, IttyBiz, sponsors, Walmart

IttyBiz, Walmart, and You: The Secret to Serious Sponsor Love

February 21, 2009 by Liz Leave a Comment

This week was a great week for learning and a great week for SOBCon09!

It started with an email from Naomi Dunford, CEO of IttyBiz. The subject line was “Sponsorship info, please?” About 6 emails later we had a full-company sponsor deal that means a win for everyone:

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants (more on that below)
  • visibility for IttyBiz and direct sampling of new products to key influencers
  • Naomi’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how she built her business so quickly to a full sponsorship level.
  • about $700 worth of solid value for every attendee

The very next day, I enjoyed a call with John Andrews of Walmart. We extended the relationship we’d started at BlissDom09. In a short 9 or so minutes, we put together a package that included value in more directions than first meets the eye.

  • funding to help the conference — allowing us to better serve participants (more on that below)
  • visibility for Walmart
  • John’s participation — a chance for participants to find out how Walmart is connecting their vendors with their blogger evangelists.
  • and some other surprises

Because They Invested in Us We Can Invest MORE in YOU!

Why Sponsor Love Is Good for All of Us

How can I say it better than this?

Love makes the world go round, but my landlord wants bankable currency.

Conferences are expensive events. We all know that. We’re doing all we can to make this one as valued packed and affordable as we possibly can. One huge way to do that is to form solid working relationships with sponsors who have the same goals as SOBCon — to learn more about business on the social web and to form long-term, working relationships that make our lives better, smarter, and more fun.

Conversation becomes relationship and respect. We set goals in the same direction. They invest. We invest back. We all commit to the plan. When they invest — funding, time, valuable product, and expertise, we get to pass that love to you.

Want to get sponsor attention? Show that you’re invested too!

The BlogIt EarnIt Discount

It’s called the “Blog It, Earn It” discount. We’d like to hear from you about what “The ROI of Relationships” means to you. Tell us why relationships matter. How they affect what you do every day and how you do it. Maybe you can tell us how you see them changing the face of tomorrow’s businesses. We want to know how relationships and personal connections shape your world.

Heck, you can even write a love letter to a sponsor you’d like to have a relationship with. Pick a company that’s done something great for bloggers in the past and tell them why you think it was important and valuable that they did what they did. Propose an idea for how you might do something a SOBCon sponsor already listed on the SOBCon blog.

Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit). We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate – that’s over a 25% savings!

Or, if you can’t make to SOBCon09, you could “pay it forward” and pass the discount on to one of your friends — or offer it back to us as a gift for us to pass on for you.

Like I said, was great week for learning and a great week for SOBCon09!
We got the chance to pass on sponsor love on in the form of a price discount — Thank you, Naomi and John.

The Secret to Serious Sponsor Love

Here’s the secret to getting serious sponsor interest and support for your goals … find sponsors with goals you’re seriously interested in and take every opportunity to reach out, talk about, and support them.

People don’t care about what you know until they know you care.
People notice when you value them.
Sponsors are people too.

If we do this together, we could make a powerful noise.

SOBCon09 is only picking sponsors who get what we stand for and then “we’re loving them to death.”

Join in. Would you? — C’mon! Blog, Tweet, Talk!! The more we talk about SOBCon09, the more we talk about sponsors who participate, the more potential sponsors everywhere will see value in supporting all of us in more and more ways.

Sponsors notice you when you love them.

Love the good sponsors loudly and proudly. Love loud enough to be heard by the sponsor’s boss.

Do that and you can bet reluctant sponsors will notice who gets the love … and where it’s coming from.

You already know, I notice the good things you do.
And I’m thanking you.
Sincerely.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Register for SOBCon09 NOW!!

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Blog It Earn It Discount, how to get sponsors, IttyBiz, LinkedIn, SOBCon09, Walmart

Edelman Aces PR, NY Times Fails Research

March 12, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Howie Kurtz writes about the nonflap the NY Times tried to stir up over Walmart and its PR company, Edelman, pitching their spin to bloggers

What’s not in dispute is that what was once dismissed as a pajama-clad brigade is becoming increasingly influential, to the point that giant companies have to worry about what they say.

Howie gives the bloggers the Times poked and prodded equal time to tell their stories (which includes the fact that the Times reporter doesn’t understand that a blockquote is our indication of taking an excerpt… except it’s not something we invented, it comes from academic practices).

—Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine, The flack flack

Wal-Mart Logo

Public Relations. It’s called public relations because that’s what it’s meant to do–establish relationships between companies and the public. Walmart needed some. They hired Edelman to help them tell their story by providing press releases. Edelman, as part of their effort, enlisted the help of bloggers to get the Walmart message out. Edelman belives in bloggers as a way of reaching people. In editorial, we call this creative thinking. Good firm, good strategy, good execution. Walmart and Edelman get an A in PR.

New York Times on the Web

At the New York Times, however, they didn’t think of it as PR or as creativity. They were looking for a story–with bloggers involved, maybe a scandal. Would it have been a scandal if the writers were small-town newpaper journalists? I don’t think so. You’ll notice The Times tells the story of one blogger weaving in bits about a second making a pile of details sound representative of a large group–but the size of the group isn’t defined. Then sweeping generalizations come. To quote from the article, Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in PR Campaign, written by Michael Barbaro,

But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.

Some bloggers? How many is some? I wonder.

Some bloggers posted them without telling their audience was that a scandal, a mistake,or an innocent lack of knowledge on the part of someone who’s being called an amateur when it’s convenient, but not today?

As a number of people have pointed out, however, bloggers are far from the first people in media to do this. (Dan Gilmor has a good overview of the controversy.) People say all the time that Mainstream Media cover various corporations or government initiatives as if they were just reproducing press releases. What about the Video News Releases, stories planted in the Iraqi press, or a quarter million dollars for favorable coverage of No Child Left Behind?
says Marshall Kirkpatrick in his piece When pitched bloggers go bad: Walmart and the blogosphere

The question is one of knowing intent isn’t it? Knowing intent, in this case, should be considered both on the part of the blogger and on the part of the New York Times reporter–who failed to contact the numerous bloggers who had things to say such as this:

Yours truly is one of the people to which Mr. Barbaro is referring in this last paragraph. I have been “fed” some of these “exclusive nuggets” and have had topics suggested for posting. And though my blog was not mentioned in the Times article, I’d like make to make one thing clear: excluding this one, I have written 12 other posts on Wal-Mart in the last five months. I started writing them long before I knew about or heard from Wal-Mart’s PR firms.

Every one of those posts is original. That is to say, I picked the article, the theme, and everything that was written- every sentence and every word and every typo. I challenge Mr. Barbaro to find even one sentence in those 12 posts that was written first by someone else.

I also have a question or two. How is it that my blog escaped your notice? It is the number one blog in Technorati about Wal-Mart. It has a dozen highly original, detailed, and analytical posts on that firm, each of which averages over 700 words. It’s written by a former MIT professor whose dissertation and first published papers were about information technology in the retailing industry. I ask not out of concern for not having my blog included in the article but because of this: if you missed that, what else did you miss?
— David Starling, The Business of America Is Business

I have to say that the research on The New York Times article leaves a lot out there waiting to be brought forward. The story is much more fascinating than what actually made it into print–just as bloggers are.

Finally this from Rich Edelman’s own blog:

We are proud of our groundbreaking work in reaching out to blogs on behalf of our clients and proud of this work for Wal-Mart. I suspect our clients have benefited hugely from insights gleaned from dialogue with bloggers.
Here are three blog postings from people I know and respect discussing the issues raised in the NY Times article:
The first is from Paul Holmes, editor of the Holmes Report, a PR trade publication. The second is from Jeff Jarvis, a widely respected blogger considered a leader in blog standards. The third is from Dan Gillmor, author of “We The Media.” As always, I appreciate your views.

Update: Robert Scoble suggests blogging — not emailing — is the best way to reach bloggers.

THAT’S an example of someone who “GET’S IT.”

Blogger is starting to feel like it rhymes with “second-class” citizen.

Let’s hire Steve Rubel, a VP at Edelman, and ask him to do PR for bloggers as a group. Then the NY Times can write a piece called Bloggers Enlist Bloggers in PR Campaign.

I like the sound of that one much better.

But then I would.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Gate Keepers v Amateurs by Jeff Jarvis
Mr. Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Fiends

Filed Under: Personal Branding, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, bloggers, David_Starling, Jeff_Jarvis, Marshall_Kirkpatrick, New_York_Times, Rich_Edelman, Stevel_Rubel, Walmart

Recently Updated Posts

How to Build up Your Career by Showing Off Your Uniqueness

How to Build up Your Career by Showing Off Your Uniqueness

How to Know if Your Marketing Strategy is Working

How to Know if Your Marketing Strategy is Working

3 strategies for achieving business growth

Three Strategies for Achieving Business Growth

Build a foundation that will grow with you

Build a Foundation that Will Grow with You

Should Computers Have Warning Labels – The Disgraceful State Of Computer Safety

Why Your Company Is Chasing Too Many Bad Sales Leads

Why Your Company Is Chasing Too Many Bad Sales Leads



From Liz Strauss & GeniusShared Press

  • What IS an SOB?!
  • SOB A-Z Directory
  • Letting Liz Be

© 2022 ME Strauss & GeniusShared