. . . or anywhere really.
I heard overwhelming feedback from attendees that brands seemed unprepared (or unwilling) for the conversations that they were having in the BlogHer’11 expo hall.
If you are a brand or an agency, here are some of the questions you should come prepared to answer:
Why are you here?
It’s the question humanity has been asking itself from the beginning of time, but BlogHer is not the time that you should be asking it. Brands seemed unprepared or unfocused on a core objective. Is your goal to sample product or build relationships?
How can I work with you?
Do you have actionable information for bloggers regarding how they can work with you in the future? What are the next steps when the expo hall doors are closed and everyone has gone home? What is your follow up plan?
What are you working on?
What’s coming down the pipe for your brand in the next 6 months to a year? Do you have anything worth talking about? How will you be working with bloggers and integrating social media into those campaigns? Do you have any clear cut projects that you can talk about?
What other brands do you work with?
If you are an agency or sending an agency representative, bloggers want to know what other clients they are working with. Bloggers are looking for opportunities to work with you.
How can I get in touch with you?
This one should be easy enough right? You are here in the expo hall because you want to connect. Not enough cards, using the BlogHer app for the contact information, or not wanting to hand out business cards at all are just a handful of the complaints that are heard echoing from the expo hall.
This is pretty basic stuff. Which is why it stirs up so much frustration when these simple touch points become difficult.
I think the overarching problem is a mixture of a few things:
- Brands an bloggers goals seem to be misaligned. Bloggers really want to work together with brands on a campaign level at some point and some brands seem solely interested in product sampling.
- Brands are sending agency representatives that don’t fully understand the vision and strategy of their company. If a brand is using an agency there should still be a direct brand representative present at an event like this.
- Brands aren’t thinking through their long term strategy when it comes to building relationships with bloggers. It’s nice to shoot your product out with a canon all over the expo floor – but then what?
Don’t get me wrong. Bloggers bring their own bag of mixed nuts to the table that a brand has to deal with. In that sea of faces you’ve got varying levels of business savvy, influence and stability. And a lot of bloggers need to ask themselves the same questions that I outlined above for brands.
The bottom line is that a brand needs to be prepared for that mixed bag. Whether a blogger just wants to pimp you for free stuff or they are looking for ways to work with you in the long term, you need a plan of action – or ultimately you are just wasting your time and money setting up shop.
Good post. Another thing brands need to realize is that a women’s tech conference is not the place to send “booth babes,” especially for tech products. A friend approached someone in the Samsung booth and wanted specs on the different products and no one could tell her. The answer about the difference between 2 tablets was “This one is bigger?” Not acceptable. They needed to send product reps who could actually represent in a respectful way. The failure to do so showed a profound disrespect for the audience – and, as you know, this audience broadcasts their experiences to a large viewership.
Seconded, Sue. That booth was a hot mess. I sat there and plugged in one day, also wanting to talk to them about my Samsung phone. I wanted information on new models, etc. because I wanted to be brand-loyal.
Um, I sat there for an hour until a blogger friend came in and chatted with me. They (the Samsung people,) said nothing to me for a WHOLE HOUR.
lol! When you said “Booth Babes” I totally thought you were referring to the construction workers with hard hats at one of the booths! That was enough to make me skip the booth!
Great post. I had the exact same concerns, as I’m one of those bloggers who wants to develop a long term relationship with brands and I wasn’t getting past “review this on our site” from most brands at Blogher.
And I was dying at those “booth dudes”. I would bet that most of the women at the conference were in relationships and barely felt comfortable taking a free kudos from out of their hard hats. Now me on the other hand…
Good advice. I felt confused at some booths.
You raise excellent points! I went to blogher11 with a list of brands I hoped to connect with, most had a clear objective which became readily apparent within 2 minutes of convo. 1 brand rep acted as if they were a clerk in a dept store, showing me stuff like they were selling it to me. I quickly,politely ended the convo but was able to reach out to the company via phone with happy results.
Great article Rachel! Bloggers are not just there for FREE swag! We really want relationships and to be valued. It has to go both ways and sometimes it’s frustrating when it doesnt.
I left most booths with my questions either unanswered or half answered. Sometimes the brand rep passed me off to the agency person, sometimes it was the other way around. Most times, the person who could have answered my question wasn’t there at all. It seems many of the brands are stuck in the ‘we’ll give you product to review and give away” loop rather than looking for ways for us to actually work with them. It was a frustrating experience. I’m going to think long and hard about spending the money to go to New York (again) just to possibly have the same things happen.
Melanie, I suspect that because the event was held in San Diego that a lot of the brands hired outside agencies to work their booths & that resulted in the frustrating lack of info to be had. I think Blogher10 was better in this regard as so many brands have big NYC offices & think Blogher12 might be a lot better as well.
We spent the money to go there, why couldn’t the brands? (That was rhetorical, btw).
I expected the same presence and service in San Diego as in New York, and it didn’t happen.
Excellent advice!
I loved evo but my bad experience was there. A brand had a man looking for women who were pregnant and inviting them to a secret suite.
The woman there was too busy to talk to me so I offered to come back later. When I returned she started talking about products (breastfeeding). A man sitting across the room who didn’t seem to be paying attention occasionally offered breastfeeding tips (awkward).
Then someone else came in. The rep then ignored me again. I told them I had to go. When the rep did talk to me she kept referring to my high risk pregnancy. Since I never hinted that I had a high risk pregnancy I eventually figured out she meant I am of advanced maternal age – or too old to be having a baby.
I’m sure I looked even older because I didn’t sleep much (the bed was hard & I was having too much fun chatting with my roommates). But doesn’t she know there are celebrities having babies at 47??! I’m much younger than that!
She wasn’t sure exactly what the plan was so as I was leaving she handed me her business card and said to contact them for samples (it was vague).
Not that I had any desire to work with them. I loved the product but it left such a bad impression that I won’t promote or even buy it.
-Janet
Even better when they aren’t an official sponsor right? I’m pretty sure I know who you are talking about as I’ve heard a few stories. Brings up another important point for brands – they need to be familiar with each events policies . . . (cough cough)
And you DON’T look like an old lady trying to have a baby for heaven’s sake!
Great post. I think PR, media and brands have slot to learn about working with bloggers.
I didn’t go the Blogher this year, but if people are having the same experience over and over, you have to ask yourself if the conference did a good enough job prepping the brands. Any brand that is interested in events will have a specific goal for their event budget…if it’s not matching what the attendees have in mind then it doesn’t seem like the event was the right fit to begin with.
Rachel,
Yes, you have to respect a company that won’t pay for a suite or sponsorship. It makes them look cheap.
A better angle would’ve been to talk to everyone – their products weren’t just for new moms.
And thanks for making me feel better
-Janet
Such a good post . . . I’m linking back from ShePosts!
This is a great post. I went to the HTC suite and really liked the Flyer. No one in the booth could answer my question about how much the product retailed for… seriously.
One thing that really bothered me was to have pharmaceutical reps in the Birds of a Feather: Patient Bloggers session asking how to work with us. It felt quite voyeuristic, to be honest. I was there to connect with Bloggers, and if they want to listen fine, but we did spend a good amount of time talking about how medical companies could work with Bloggers. I think handing out business cards and asking to talk later would have been more appropriate.
This is a great post! My company (EdenFantasys) had a booth on the trade show floor for the first time (although we’d been to BlogHer before in different capacities) and many of the things described here were the opposite of what we did: we do it all in-house, we all had business cards, and we have ways to work with bloggers beyond the product review. In the brands’ defense, it can be hard to have the in-depth conversation you are looking for when there are other people waiting, or when I don’t know anything about your blog. If we’re going to talk about projects, I need to know more about you first
It does however, make me upset to hear that some of my fellow sponsors didn’t do the same. A lot of the “booth babes” you saw were just younger junior account reps from PR firms. I think next year in NYC will be different. This is a new space for a lot of these firms, there is much to learn!
Thanks for the insight
This is a fascinating post, and the expo hall was fascinating, both from an experience perspective and from a blogger/brand view. It was my first BlogHer, and my first corporately sponsored conference (I work in the nonprofit sector). The juxtapositions—PlaySkool! sex toys! potato chips!—were unsettling, to say the least.
Love this post, I think it gives the brands a lot to think about. For me, there were only 3 booths I had any interest in (raisins, Lee jeans, Boiron), so I was disappointed to have so little offered from them in terms of a conversation. At the Lee Jeans booth, I walked up when it wasn’t busy, asking to try on a pair of jeans they’d told me about the day before. She said they were “all booked up” for the day, and had another fitting in two minutes. Um, there’s no one in the booth… I am asking to TRY ON JEANS, and you’re saying no? Sheesh.
I keep nodding my head and looking for a “like” button to all these comments. So much for brands to think about here. And so very true.
I didn’t want to be brand-specific, but I have to question the purpose of many of the brands that were there. In this case, *why* come to blogher at all? When I mentioned to them that I style blog, they looked at me and replied “oh. Well. you weren’t on our before-blogher contact list. I guess we can squeeze you in, later…” Again, the fitting tent was empty. It didn’t make sense, as they seemed to have no interest in meeting bloggers new to them.
There was another booth who only wanted us to “like” their FB page and grab a coupon. No talk of future campaigns, no talk of their company.
So many companies did miss the big picture here. I agree with what was mentioned above: that Blogher needs to do a better job of schooling the brands. Perhaps they should hire Rachel to do that.
Of course, there were some brands that truly did “get” it and were ready to sit down and discuss, or plan future conversations. It’s true, in a big expo hall it’s very difficult to plan a future campaign, but if the idea is (and is it?) to meet and learn more about bloggers, setting future appointments is a great way to do that.
Great post, you said some of the things I was thinking but didn’t put into coherent sentences! Were the sponsors there to sell their product individually (buy this mattress!) or set up relationships with bloggers? And by relationships I don’t mean “Try this yogurt and then you can blog about it”.
Some booths were great. Others where I asked specific product questions but didn’t get answers were not.
I understand needing to know how brands can work with you, but I would have been thrilled if the reps in the booths could just answer my product-related questions! I approached a bed manufacturer to simply ask if they had any literature or flyers about the bed they were demoing in the booth. (I was eyeballing this bed forever, and was hoping to get info on specials or maybe where my closest dealer was?) I was told “No, we don’t have anything like that. Google our website and you can find more info there.”
Seriously?
I think that’s it’s great to know how to work with bloggers, but don’t forget: we are also CUSTOMERS! I am actually in the market for a high-end bed. Too bad, this company won’t get my business based on the fact they blew me off in lieu of focusing on free PR with bloggers. Bleh.