Another Story of Ham-Handed Blogger “Engagement”?…

…Or an example of another snarky blogger? Alas, I suspect the former.

All we can say to corporate America is once again, if you’re planning a blogger campaign, consider hiring a consultant (like us) to help you. Joel Spolsky has written a scathing essay about his experience with Sprint and their Power Vision Network. Ultimately, it appears that Sprint has some lessons to learn here (many of which we cover BTW at our conferences, seminars, and consulting sessions) about blogger engagement:

“Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.

That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.”

Conclusion? Have some finesse. Work on having an agenda that’s a little less transparent. Form a relationship, cultivate a bond of some kind. Sending out phones to targeted “influencers” is a one-way, old world, broadcast model notion. An engineer asking a blogger for their input because they’ve read a post of theirs about interface concerns forms a two-way relationship. Here’s a question to Joel — was the PR person a blogger themselves? Would it have made any difference? Our feeling is that to engage a blogger, it helps to BE a blogger.

“Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments.”

“There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing…”

“…I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.”

Conclusion? Understand your audience. Don’t send a geek engineer a product that a geek engineer that won’t respect. Make sure you are providing something of real value. Beware that it’s real easy to post negatively too. If you aren’t sure, hire a blogger to help you.

“And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic.

Ouch. Conclusion? Ask/hire for input before pushing for a “review.” This was a classic example of how sending Spolsky a prototype phone a year ago could have saved Sprint from shipping a sub-par product, and could have given them a heads up that he’d pan the thing as is. As I suspected, other bloggers in the program also seem to want to be more than just co-marketers, and have influence over the product’s direction.