A case study in blogger outreach gone horribly wrong.

UPDATE: Five months after posting this, I was contacted by the marketer criticized below for making anonymous comments about his product. Humbly and earnestly, he asked that I remove his name from the post. I'm happy to do so, as I feel he has more than learned his lesson and has likely emerged as a better man for it. I've also removed the agency's name in fairness to them.

Blogger outreach is a pretty common marketing trick these days. At its laziest, it’s just a bad e-mail pitch begging for coverage from a popular blogger. But the committed marketer knows to go straight for the easy win: free stuff.

Over on the J-Walk Blog, John Walkenbach seemed plenty happy to have received a free bottle of a liquor called VeeV — “the world's first Acai spirit.” Before even trying it, John wrote about the product, ran a picture of the bottle and promised to do some “live VeeV blogging” (ie, blogging under the influence).

Home run for the VeeV marketing folks, right?

You’d think so. But then they found a way to wrench defeat from the jaws of victory.

In the comments on John’s post, someone named “Bob” wrote this bit of obvious sales blather:

“Actually, it's not a vodka at all...It is the first Acai-based spirit. I've had it, and it's delicious! The best part about it is one of the ingredients, prickly pear, actually prevents hangovers! I know that sounds strange, but an alcohol high in antioxidants (acai) that cures hangovers (prickly pear) that tastes better than vodka and mixes just the same, is a very winning combination.”

Thanks to the commenter leaving an e-mail address, John used a quick Google search to confirm that “Bob” was actually an “experiential and mobile marketing specialist” at an agency that happens to have VeeV as a client.

Obviously, John was not happy with this pointless ruse.

“People don't like to be deceived by smarmy marketers. Next time, simply state upfront that you are affiliated with the company. That's happened here before, and people really respect that.”

It’s not hard to find the moral here. Reaching out to bloggers works, especially when you have full transparency about why you’re contacting them. You don’t need to post fake comments or try to be something you’re not.

In this case, the VeeV marketing people really missed a good opportunity to confront questions raised by the commenters in the original post and get some honest first-person feedback on their drink. Instead, they got some bad PR and lost a perfectly good bottle of booze in the process.

Thanks to my friend Greg, a J-Walk Blog reader, for passing this story along.

Comments

[John Carson]

Thanks Dave/Greg, I just sent this post to all my colleagues here.

Cheers,
John Carson
GCI Canada

[art sindlinger]

Nice, specific example as cautionary tale - thanks for writing it up

[Brian K]

Here is a great Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit from the blog council - http://blogcouncil.org/disclosure/content/

Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit

The Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit is a draft series of checklists to help companies, their employees, and their agencies learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them.

We believe in the principles of transparency and openness, and this document is a way of making this real on the inside. Our goal is not to create or propose new industry standards or rules. These checklists are open source training tools designed to help educate the hundreds or thousands of employees in any large corporation the appropriate ways to interact with the social media community.

[Michael E. Rubin, Blog Council]

Thanks for the shout-out, Brian K. Disclosure is astonishingly simple. I definitely encourage anyone who is reading this to check out the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Rip it up, remix it, and make it yours.

cheers,
Michael

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michael@blogcouncil.org / twitter: merubin
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.