Media pubicity: selling and buying

A representative of a new social networking site focusing on the AEC community sent me an email a about a week ago inviting me to review and consider publicizing his site.  I looked briefly at the email, decided not to delete it (most news releases find their way into the trash can) but didn’t rush with excitement to check out the site and write a glowing review. I would get to it later, maybe, I thought.

A few days later, the representative emailed me again.

Mark,

I enjoyed reading the post from Wed. (6/16) on your Construction Marketing Ideas blog. I think it’s a fair assessment of (Ed: name of website removed), and one shared by many first time visitors. I genuinely appreciate the feedback. It can be difficult to get an honest read when the initial audience is largely comprised of contacts with personal connections.

So, I get the impression we over-sold it a little, especially on the community pitch. It is indeed a fine line between who we know we can be and what we are at the moment. We have been successful building the brand aesthetics and have an excellent start on the content and media, but that third component of audience is only now becoming the focus of our efforts. We feel the social media functions offer a unique opportunity for firms and businesses in the AEC industry. And we are dedicated to pushing the technology and functionality to optimize the usefulness for the industry. We just need to get the industry to try it out.

While I completely understand the necessity for a full evaluation prior to making any kind of recommendation, I invite you to at least join the community and take the opportunity to test out the functionality. We could use an extra voice in our community to let us know how we can improve the tools. We even have a group focused on the development of the site – from the home page, to the KnowledgeBase, to the new community – which is open to any community member.

I’d also be happy to answer any questions you have about the team, our mission and our affiliations. If you’d like to set up a time to talk via phone, let me know.

Thanks for your time and attention.

My posting “Can you fake it until you make it” discussed the art of finessing the truth a bit to make a selling point.

Interestingly, when I read this email, I mistakenly associated it with a bad case of an “overselling” error by one of our company’s own representatives, which happened to occur the same day as the relevant posting.  Somehow, in my mind, I connected the difficult internal business  incident with his email and the “memory” of a posting on this blog, and so I responded to the person who wrote me by saying: “No, the overselling problem doesn’t apply to you, it does to me.”

Well, of course, there still is a problem here because I fell for one of the commonest marketing problems and challenges — the faulty perception where we mistakenly link one cause to another effect.  The social networking site publicity seeker’s assertion:  “So I get the impression we oversold a little” didn’t have anything to do with our own “overselling” mistake, but his use of the words resulted in me connecting the dots falsely to assume he had responded to a posting I (never actually) made discussing he dangers of overselling!  And here is the real surprise.  I only realized my erroneous conclusion when I set out to research and find the purported original posting to write this blog entry — and discovered the person writing to me was writing about the challenges of finessing the truth, not “overselling” — at least the type of overselling I experienced.

Frankly, misunderstandings like this are both good and bad from a marketing perspective.   Sometimes you want people to make a faulty association (with something good, reputable, or popular) and clearly you don’t want to be associated with anything bad (crime, scamminess, spamming) and often these mistaken associations occur even though you don’t seek out to deliberately or even subtly mislead anyone.  As an example, in some of our communities, our independent publications are mistakenly associated with “official” construction association publications.  We never represent ourselves falsely.  We put a small association logo within our publication as we are allowed to (and encouraged) by the associations to show our memberships, but nothing inside the publication suggests anything more.  But some people think we are THE association publication, and I suspect, in some cases, they choose to do business with us because of this faulty assumption.  (In other cases, we actually publish official association publications or special supplements in co-operation with the relevant associations and, in these cases, of course, we let everyone know the link.)

Now, what about the assertions and hopes for some attention from the person representing the new website seeking to create a social networking environment within the AEC community.  I looked at his site again last night, and it seemed quite well designed, but I didn’t rush to log in or “join the community” This is simply because it requires more effort and identity-sharing than I’m prepared to do right now as our deadline approaches.  In any case, at the time I was reviewing his site, I thought  though the “overselling” he referred to related to something that happened which had nothing to do with his email!

Are there ways he could have received more or faster attention to achieve his media publicity goals?  (I suppose he has my attention now, but equally, now I’m committed NOT to publicize the site right away to cover my own embarrassment.  In any case, I rarely name any other organization publicly unless I can share clearly positive news.)  Possibly.  But I’m not sure any of these options really made any more sense than the direct approach.

• He could have connected through someone I trust and already respect.  This would involve reading my book and previous weblog postings and then dropping a line to that person/organization seeking an introduction.  Best of all, (and most effective) would be making that request through one of our paying clients.

• He could have arranged to advertise here in some way or another.  Sponsored weblinks here are only $12.00 a month, for example, and you can cancel anytime.  The time and effort for me to set up the weblink would “force” me to look at the site in question.  Then, if it has intrinsic merit, I probably would be happy to plug it.  (I realize there is a supposed Chinese wall between editorial integrity and paid advertising — but in the business-to-business and blogging world, the lines are much more blurred, and sometimes a little “dash” goes a long way.

• He could have created some buzz by connecting and participating in some of the existing communities and forums I belong to or even lead (such as the LinkedIn Construction Marketing Ideas group.)  Of course, he needs to be careful not to be cheesy or violate the forum guideline rules for advertising and self-promotion, especially since his organization hopes to sell advertising in its social networking group.

All of these ideas of course don’t overcome the fact that he represents a commercial business which is hoping to make money from advertising and sponsorship — and in some ways, that makes him a potential competitor to me.  I don’t really worry too much about that in deciding who or what to write about here:  after all this is a Construction Marketing Ideas blog but equally I tend to be more cautious in promoting/publicizing organizations seeking attention to sell their own wares than to truly serve the community without expectation of return.

I’ll get to the site/community the person wrote about eventually (maybe sooner than later) but leave with one parting observation.  I looked for a real physical address on the website and an explanation of the organization’s corporate organization/ownership, and couldn’t find it.  This is a yellow flag to me.  Is someone putting on airs where the smoke is greater than the substance? Maybe, indeed, there is some overselling here and I should just wait a while until the site really proves itself some other way.  But then we have the chicken-and-egg story that plagues marketers and start-ups all the time.  How do you successfully launch something new?  This is a topic for the next posting.

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