I attended a great, informative session presented by Cincinnati Social Media with Jory Des Jardins, cofounder of BlogHer, as the featured speaker, who reminded the audience how important it is to understand your audience.

She provided helpful insights about the blogosphere overall and how brands can successfully and ethically work with bloggers. But what I found most engaging was her breakdown of blogger types based on their specific motivations.

Check out the white paper Best Practices for Marketing to Women Online . While written specifically about marketing to women bloggers, the paper is one of the best I have read with regard to understanding blogger motivations and best practices in reaching bloggers. I think many of these insights can be applied more broadly.

Marketing is most successful when you understand the motivations of your audience. Let’s not forget this rule applies to bloggers as well.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America

Excerpted from an FTC press release (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/08/news2009.shtm):

“The workshops will bring competition, consumer protection, and First Amendment perspectives to bear on the financial, technological, and other challenges facing the news industry as consumers increasingly turn to the Internet for free news and information, advertisers increasingly move their ads onto online sites and reduce advertising buys as a result of the recession, and news organizations struggle with large debt that was taken on when times were better.”

“The workshops will consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism and how those economics are playing out on the Internet and in print; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; factors relevant to the new economic realities for news organizations, such as behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policies – including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy – that have been raised as possible means of finding new ways for journalism to thrive.”

The Digital Age has changed how we consume information and who is delivering that information. News organization are obviously feeling the impact and having to consider new business models. With the FTC wading into discussions around the Fourth Estate and with it the role of user-generated content and new technologies, we should all pay close attention. These conversations and their outcomes could have significant ramifications across our business and that of our clients. Stay tuned.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America

Crises happen. Interestingly, how communicators handle a crisis now garners bigger headlines than the crisis itself. What used to be the stuff of case studies and water-cooler gossip among marketers now makes national headlines.

Perhaps reality TV has made us more interested in the exchanges that happen behind the scenes versus the actual performance. Or maybe it’s the voracious, instantaneous news cycle. The why doesn’t really matter much. How organizations fail to respond to a crisis affecting them is news, and it can be critically damaging to revenues, reputations and brands.

The pork industry’s traditional response to the swine flu outbreak (Forbes article) and the missteps in how Domino’s Pizza reacted to the YouTube video posted by two of its former employees (BusinessWeek article) are two very recent examples of this phenomenon. People began Twittering about how the organizations were handling, or not handling, the situations as the drama was literally unfolding.

What is so frustrating to observe is that solid crisis communications planning could have helped these organizations avoid such obvious pitfalls. Done correctly, crisis communications planning lays the foundation for a thoughtful, rapid-response approach. Effective crisis planning must help you quickly engage the right channels to deliver your message, mobilize your advocates and build dialogue with important stakeholders.

Too often communicators and marketers indefinitely postpone crisis communications planning, considering it a marketing luxury separate from their integrated marketing plans. What they fail to bear in mind when making that decision is that the time and cost associated with lost confidence is far greater than the cost of planning.

Pattie Kushner
Senior Vice President
Director of Public Relations, North America