How to Lose Bloggers and Alienate Community

So your company (or the company your marketing agency represents) has decided to do some blogger outreach. You want to connect with bloggers – in a geographically targeted area or on a national level, it doesn’t matter. You’ve done your research and selected which bloggers you want to work with. Whether that number is 5 or 500, you’ve chosen them based on a variety of factors, but whatever those factors may be, you know that they are influencers of your target demographic. If you want to make the most of that influence, you’re going to want to keep a few things in mind. Here is a list of things NOT to do when working with bloggers…unless you want it all to blow up in your face.

Make promises that you can’t – or never intended to – keep.

All your research tells you what is important to this particular market. So you promise the bloggers you will provide [money/exposure/product/etc.] for their participation. Only you can’t deliver on that promise. Whether it’s due to circumstances beyond your control, or you thought you could get them involved and they’d forget about it… If they’ve provided the services you agreed upon when the relationship began, and you don’t deliver on your end of the deal, that’s a broken contract. That’s bad business, no matter how you look at it.

Don’t clearly state what your expectations are…

You’re going to be let down if you expect bloggers to provide X, Y, and Z if you only tell them about X. If your original agreement offers compensation for X, and the blogger agrees to that, you cannot expect them to also deliver on Y and Z without negotiating original compensation if you decide to mention them at a later date. “Oh, by the way, that blog post you wrote? I also need you to tweet it five times, like it and share it on Facebook, get five of your friends to comment on it, and promote it on StumbleUpon, Reddit, and LinkedIn now.” Just because you’re working with a blogger who uses social promotion for their own posts doesn’t mean that you automatically gain access to that additional work if it was not clearly outlined in your original agreement.

…And call them out for not doing the additional work.

It’s bad enough to tack on additional work after an agreement is made, but it’s even worse when you fail to tell the blogger about what is expected. What really takes the cake is when you make assumptions about what the blogger should have done, and then scold them for failing to have read your mind. If you ream them out publicly – by which I mean not in private email, even if it’s just in the company of other bloggers participating in the same project – you may think that you’re saving yourself from blame. What you’re really doing is showing the other bloggers – influencers in their sphere, your target demographic – that you cannot take responsibility for your own communication failure and that you’ll lash out at the people who have been helping you. A public temper tantrum, particularly when the witnesses know (or learn of after the fact) what the real story was, will only make you look unprofessional and untrustworthy. And you’ve just done it in front of the people you’ve deemed the most influential with your target demographic.

Tell the bloggers how little they are worth to you.

While some bloggers are willing to work for free or the “love of the job,” many are professionals who require a certain level of compensation. If you pile on additional responsibilities without offering additional compensation, there is a very real chance that the bloggers will call off the deal. You wouldn’t do your work for free, so why should they? If a blogger approaches you to request additional compensation for additional work you’ve requested – or else they’re off the project – your response should not be that you can find someone to work for less and that you never needed them in the first place. Your response should not be, “I don’t need this to be the best, and I don’t care that you have [insert experience and credentials here] because we don’t need all that. You’re not worth that much to me.” If your contract states that you’ll make $60,000 (hypothetically) for performing your duties as a marketer, how would you react if your boss told you you’re only going to make minimum wage for the rest of the week because all they need you to do is answer the phone, and that’s how much the company pays its administrative assistants? A simple, “I’m sorry, but that’s not in the budget,” will suffice, and you’ll avoid having your biggest influencers tell all of their friends how little you really think of them.

Lie.

This was partially addressed under the first point of promising on things you don’t intend to deliver, but it encompasses a lot more. There are lots of things you can lie about, and the size of the lie doesn’t really matter. If you lied to say “the check is in the mail,” but it still hasn’t arrived three months later – for any of the bloggers on the project – what else might you be lying about? Are you lying about what your business is really about? How about your product claims? If you lack basic corporate responsibility in honoring contracts with your bloggers, will they really believe in the claims of social responsibility that you were asking them to promote? These are the questions the bloggers may raise in the social sphere – and the resulting damage control on your end will be substantial.

In conclusion…

If you decide to make the move and connect with bloggers, you need to remember that the entire reason you’ve made that decision is their influence over the larger community you want to reach. You are forming business relationships with the bloggers you work with, so remember to treat them with the same professional respect you would with any other service vendor. If you mistreat your other vendors, you’ll want to treat bloggers with more professional respect – because the bloggers will talk, not just amongst themselves, but to the rest of the world.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.