Erin Caldwell’s PRblog

Shel Holtz’s post in which he mentioned having to deal with a misconception in a blogger relations campaign got me thinking about some similar issues we’d come across with the launch of Forward. I’m about to spill a lot about some of my strategy with Forward, but considering it’s not a business, and I’m all about sharing information and folks learning — what the hey!

We had a pretty quiet launch a little over a month ago. Well, I consider it “quiet” — no bells and whistles, no pitching people to write about us. I figured, if we had something worthwhile, people would write about it. If they thought we sucked, well … I hoped they’d tell us, which is why we strongly encourage feedback throughout the site. I did talk to some people at the NewComm Forum at the very beginning of March and clued them in to what we were up to, and many of them were kind enough to write about the site when it kicked off. But what was interesting was that we were initially faced with a few misconceptions.

Perhaps “misconception” is a strong word. It was more that the identity of Forward that was being created in the blogosphere was a little off from what I ideally wanted it to be. Some key factors:

• People were referring to us as a group of students. Reality: Even from the very beginning, we had non-student contributors.
• People focused on this project coming from Auburn University. Reality: Its roots are very much in Auburn (I’ll proudly tell anyone that!) but we have contributors from all over.
• Some people thought it was “Forward,” some thought it was “Forward Moving.” Reality: Obviously, it’s Forward.

Those first two are elements that I think give Forward a lot of credibility and interest. It shows that we’re offering diverse perspectives - with level of experience, as well as geography! So I felt it important to clear that up, and we consciously made efforts to hit on those points when we could.

I, and a few select contributors, kept tabs on who was writing about Forward, and made sure to thank them for their support (because we’re always genuinely grateful!) and politely pointed out things like our non-student, non-Auburn contributors when necessary.

We also launched the Forward Frappr map, to give a visual representation of where our contributors and readers are from. That is our “you can’t miss it!” approach to the geography issue.

Introducing new contributors with posts to the Forward Blog is a strategic choice, as well. This is an easy and legitimate way for us to showcase the diversity of our contributors.

And establishing the name of the site as “Forward,” rather than “Forward Moving,” well … that just took time and consistency on our part. That wasn’t a big one that I was worried about externally. But internally, in one of the early emails that I sent out to the contributors, I made sure to clarify that the URL happens to be forward-moving.com, but the name of the site is “Forward.” Once we were all set on that, everyone else naturally followed.

I imagine that those initial misconceptions were due to the lack of an “official” launch, in which there would have been a strategic communication effort with clear message points that would have allowed us to craft the Forward brand from the very beginning. As it was, people simply visited the site, had the information that was presented there, and the resulting buzz came from how they interpreted that information. LOL … so I guess it could be a good thing that those were the only things we had to clear up.

At any rate, those are some of my lessons learned and experiences so far. Many more to come, I’m sure. I’ll do my best to pause and share them here. (I promise!)