Category Archives: digital pr

Blogger outreach is digital Public Relations

The current catch-all these days for what I do is social media; unfortunately, when what you do is described as social media, people tend to think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and maybe Google+. My expertise, however, is online community outreach and engagement. Back in 2006 I developed a strategy of blogger outreach that allowed my to reach out to more than just 25 top-tier bloggers by hand over time but to 2,500-5,000 bloggers.

I have always called this long-tail blogger outreach (though I would love your help with choosing a new name for it) because it focuses on the B-Z-list bloggers, the online influencers who are often overlooked by most social media teams at digital agencies.

While I agree that the top-25-50 bloggers do deserve deep, long-term, and personal engagement, spending that sort of time, over time, on “everyone else” would take all the time in the universe. So, what my team and I developed is the equivalent of blogger-brand speed dating. According to Wikipedia:

“Speed dating is a formalized matchmaking process or dating system whose purpose is to encourage people to meet a large number of new people” . . . “Men and women are rotated to meet each other over a series of short “dates” usually lasting from 3 to 8 minutes depending on the organization running the event. At the end of each interval, the organizer rings a bell, clinks a glass, or blows a whistle to signal the participants to move on to the next date. At the end of the event participants submit to the organizers a list of who they would like to provide their contact information to. If there is a match, contact information is forwarded to both parties. Contact information cannot be traded during the initial meeting, in order to reduce pressure to accept or reject a suitor to his or her face.”

After collecting between 2,000-4,000 blogs that are topically-, geographically-, or demographically-appropriate, preparing a content-laden microsite and penning a very short-and-sweet email message pitch, then I send out those 2K-4K emails, each and every one a speed-date, and wait, real-time, at the Inbox.

Before long, hundreds of email replies stream in. Some aren’t interested, some are game, and others are curious but need more information. Like speed-dating, we’re not interested in the no’s but we’re interested in the yes’s.

Of course we’re courteous and we’re present and we’re always kind — “hugs not horns” I always remind my team — and we’re never anything but earnest and polite — “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — but if they’re not interested, we don’t contact them again. And if they’re very unhappy, we’ll beg their pardon and put them into a Do Not Contact list; otherwise, everyone who replies is taken off the campaign list.

The secret sauce, however, is that this form of speed dating requires email — and email is unreliable. And people are suspicious and busy. And email sometimes doesn’t quite make its way to the Inbox.

So, a week after the initial email outreach, I send a reminder email, but only to those bloggers who didn’t reply at all. No reply results in a follow-up email.

And it works. Too many practitioners of blogger outreach, email marketing, email outreaches, or even triple-, double-, and single-opt-in mailing lists are just too shy, too feeble in their messaging, for fear that they’ll get hundreds or thousands drinks-in-the-face. Nope, not if you do it right.

If you do it right, you’ll get twice the response you did from your first email. So, for instance, let’s say we emailed 4,000 bloggers and a 1,000 bloggers responded. 250 would have responded to the first email outreach, 500 would have responded to the second outreach, and then 250 would have responded to the final outreach.

Yes, a week after we mail the first follow-up email, we send out a final follow-up and thank you, thanking the blogger (who has yet to email us or reply at all — pretty much radio-silent) for his or her time, for the inconvenience, and also to let the blogger know that he or she is welcome to take advantage of the opportunity when and if he or she gets around to reading and responding to the campaign pitch.

Our rule is to always be friendly, loving, generous, happy, kind, and even respectfully playful with each and every blogger, even the Grumpy Cats. Never rise to the bait, never fight fire with fire, never engage in snark/irony/sarcasm because the only person who is allowed to be anything but completely charming and gracious is the blogger.

Again, “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — our corporate mantra.

And you know what? If we do everything right, we’ll generally earn a couple-hundred earned media mentions directly shared on the bloggers’ blogs, we’ll also earn secondary mentions through Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, digg, and even, if we’re lucky, reddit.

If you want to learn more, feel free to take a look at this blogger outreach deck I created for my friends at Sage over on Slideshare.

And here are some links to additional posts I have made about blogger outreach in the past:

Blogger outreach and engagement is much more than social media. It could be seen as content marketing, yes, but it could and should be a communications strategy toward discovering and prospecting new and future influencers.

If you can identify a passion player, someone who is already talking about you, your products and services, or products and services you, too, offer, and you can woo them into becoming citizen brand ambassadors, and if you are their “first kiss,” then you’ll be able to develop a very large pack of proponents and passion-players who will be loyal and will have safely imprinted on your attention, your acknowledgement, and your generosity. To be sure, it’s much easier to prospect for new fans when these fans haven’t been wooed by another than it is to woo them away from a secure brand-attachment.

And, to be honest, every single blogger anywhere close to the top-50 has already been spoken for in a big way; and, generally-speaking, their brand sugardaddies probably have deeper-pockets and are internationally more prestigious that you may well be — so it behooves you to play blogger moneyball: find a large number of very talented bloggers who can personally assist you in your branding goals and bottom-line rather than spending your time and money on a few outrageously-compensated stars, most of whom are too busy and too distracted by an embarrassment of riches to actually give you all the time, attention, and coverage that you, your brand, your products, and your services deserve.

And remember, if you do all of this right, it’ll all be an earned media campaign, meaning you won’t have to pay each and every one of these bloggers to post, to cover, to review, or to promote. That’s not to say this’ll all be free to you — all of this can be expensive, both in terms of client service agency hours as well as in terms of the give, the gift, you pitch the blogger with, be it informational, a product, or a service. And you need to make it good. Unless it’s an offer that can’t be refused — give ’til it hurts — and you just expect a blogger to blog about you “just because” then you’ll always be disappointed.

As you can tell from my mantra, the blogger is always right. I have had clients get all diva about drop shipping the number of review copies of products in the past, telling me that they’ll go bankrupt because they’d need to drop ship 200 books or 39 pairs of glasses, asking me to pick and choose which of the bloggers should receive the gift. It doesn’t work that way. The bloggers have all the leverage. If you don’t make good on your generous offer, each and every blogger has recourse — and we knew they did — and it’s their blog! And their tweets and Facebook posts and their Tumblr and Pinterest and reddit and everywhere else.

But that never happens. Give ’til it hurts, understanding that better I do my job and the better and more generous my pitch is, the more bloggers will want to engage, thereby resulting in possibly hundreds and hundreds of requests, based on an outreach of 4,000 blogs — it’s only math. I would hate to hit the jackpot on behalf of a client only to find out that I have “bankrupted” them with my success success (and the client is never bankrupt, the client is generally just cheap with a tendency to exaggerate, though this had only happened a couple times in the last 7 years).

So, long-tail blogger outreach is an amazing platform to both discover and engage with a multitude of natural allies and the people who are already talking about you, and giving them all the tools, the copy, the content, the gifts, and the impetus to share stuff about you, as earned media mentions, in very short-order, all over the Internet (an entire campaign only takes around six-weeks, total). It also allows you to harvest all of the bloggers game enough to mention you and your goodies into your inner-most, inner-most, your sanctum sanctorum, where you can personally grow your relationship with them now and groom them into the future — build up your own Guy Kawasaki, Om Malik, and Robert Scoble prospected and recruited and from the bush leagues or from “high school.”

I didn’t expect this post to be so long, but I guess I had a lot to share. Do you consider what I am doing with blogger outreach to be “social media?” What do you think about the discipline? The theory of “everyone”? The concept of flirting with bloggers en masse and engaging with them in a very quick “yes/no” speed-dating scenario? Do you think it is worthwhile to reach out to thousands of bloggers — all the way down to “nobody” — instead or in addition to the top blogger celebrities? Let me know what you think in the comments. I am very curious as to what you think and would love to tweak my methods, evolving it over time. Thanks in advance!

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Digital advertising has banner future

Digital advertising has quickly advanced from a fringe buy to an imperative part of companies’ media mix.

Let’s go back ten years. Online advertising was maybe a fraction of the US total media spend. If it only took twelve years to get to where we are technologically, I can’t even fathom what 2024 will bring.

Robert Channick of the Chicago Tribune brings up an interesting point. The medium has leapfrogged every advertising vehicle except for television. Is this the next step? Could the two be integrated to create the next marketing revolution?

Channick’s research shows that online advertising is looking at a 20 percent increase in 2012. Everything from search and banner ads to commercial videos will clock in at $31 billion, only 2 percent growth in the U.S. ad spend. Marketers are chasing their audiences, they’re seeing the internet as the vital ingredient that its been groomed to be. Facebook pages have become the infomercials of this generation. The introduction of technologies like smartphones, high-speed Internet and the almighty iEverything has only prompted more creativity. Search advertising is the largest segment of online spending at 46 percent, video advertising is the fastest-growing, up an impressive 52 percent from last year.

Now it’s a question of finding the happy medium. The lines have blurred so much between digital and traditional advertising, it’s interesting to see clients become so much more familiar with the bells and whistles of social media. Where you used to have to spend hours explaining Facebook and Twitter and hand hold through the process, now companies are itching to make their online presence known.

What sort of businesses use banner advertising? (marketing.yell.com)
How should you plan your banner advertising campaign? (marketing.yell.com)
How effective is banner advertising for website promotion? (marketing.yell.com)
What makes a good banner ad? (marketing.yell.com)
Digital Media and Marketing Objectives (rhetoric114.wordpress.com)

Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market

I’ve run a social media marketing agency since Autumn 2006 so Abraham Harrison is almost five years old. In that time, we’ve learned quite a lot. One of my biggest learnings is that you can’t always get a direct bead on your demographic target–and that’s OK. We’ve worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global non-profits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn’t always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out: What I’ve learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.

I call this “fire for effect,” which is a term taken from artillery for when you don’t quite know where your target is or your target is well-guarded or sheltered. So, what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly. (In artillery, you generally try to have someone down range, a forward observer, who can help you drop your mortars closer and closer, called adjusting your indirect fire, which I will discuss further along.)

Let me bring this analogy back to social media marketing. In two instances, I have seen indirect social media marketing work wonders. 80% of what we at Abraham Harrison do is long-tail blogger outreach. Instead of “sniping” at just the top-25 most influential bloggers in any one vertical, we dig deep and often come up with between 2,000-10,000 relevant blogs. Most client projects make it easy for their general appeal; however, in a couple notable cases, firing for effect was the only thing we could really do: targeting health care providers for a client that sells health care devices and targeting astronomers for a global radio telescope project.

What we quickly realized is that not only were the doctors and scientists that my clients most desired generally not blogging, they were also very busy and quite invulnerable to the sort of blogger PR pitches we were wont to do, but they were also unpredictable and often volatile.

Doctors were almost impossible to access directly and scientists tended to be impolite whenever they received a plea via email from someone they didn’t know — typical A-lister behavior.

What we needed to do was to brainstorm and expand our campaigns to include everyone around the doctors. Since the campaign was a public affairs campaign on hospital acquired infection-prevention, we brainstormed on who else is in the space–targeting the “ground” immediately around the docs, expanding as far out as we had budget and time.

Who did we come up with? Well, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, public policy bloggers–the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long. All the earth around the OR, an impenetrable fortress, was razed and we super-saturated the blogosphere, the twittersphere, and the Facebookosphere with discussion, mentions, messaging, excerpting, and commentary about the very real issue of healthcare associated infections in today’s hospitals and clinics: ventilator-associated pneumonia, surgical site infections, cross contamination, etc.

The same thing with the scientists who are associated with the radio telescope campaign. The scientists were there, they were just snippy, so instead of risking too much negative feedback, we instead isolated them and instead reached out to everyone around them: science nerds, space geeks, techies, amateur astronomers, sky watchers, backyard astronomers, and stargazers.

When it comes to blogger outreach and engagement, the goal is never to convert the blogger into a customer, I must remind you, but is always to message through the blogger onto his or her blog as a post, tweet, retweet, or wall post. If the blogger is a gatekeeper, a blockade, to the blog and the blog’s readers (and to the spiders and bots, busily indexing links and content for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), then you must abandon them and move on to the more accessible publications–generally the hobbyists, the amateurs, and the aspirants of the social media and blogosphere.

Amateur hobbyist bloggers are generally hungrier, more available, more grateful, and don’t have the hundreds of “date offers” that journalists, professionals, or A-listers generally have–they’re interested in making a name and are generally pretty amazed when a brand or an agency is sensitive and generous around to notice a blog that’s not solidly in the A-list and are generally really appreciative and open to building an authentic relationship.

Why do all of this? Why expend all this energy and munitions on indirect fire? The obvious answer is to smoke them out. Since we’re often able to start a wildfire of blog posts, tweets, likes, retweets, and Facebook shares, there’s really nowhere for these well-fortified A-listers, scientists, professionals, and surgeons to hide.

And since all of the messaging, all the wildfire, is no longer coming from up range, from our battery, then it is no longer associated with us or our clients. Now, the wildfire is owned by the blogosphere instead of the client or my agency.

This means that the public affairs messaging, the content from our social media news releases, and the emailing back and forth between my crack team of online analysts and the hundreds of bloggers who take up the flag of our outreach, become detached from the final end-product: the rash of intense conversation, posting, tweeting, and retweeting that has all of a sudden lit up the social mediasphere like day actually comes from an impressive number of bloggers and readers from the space and not, at the end of the day, directly from us–so, it is much more likely that these unassailable influencers will end up, at the end of the day, be influenced anyway, without ever being pitched directly by us.

We have seen this happen time and time again, so much so that we have cliches for these things: priming the pump, setting the stage, tenderizing the steak, fertilizing the field–and, of course, carpet bombing (I like that last one the best, but my management team wants me to stop using military analogies, so please forgive me for all the above).

At the end of the day, the results outlive the campaign on organic search. When hundreds of blogs and tweets are published online–public, archived, and indexed–most of which link to your client’s social media news release, Web site, issue page, or landing page–hundreds of posts from a diversity of blogs and sources, almost always focused on a very impassioned three-week span. While I don’t condone link-farming or any black hat or even grey hat tactics, earned media mentions–where “earned media” means that you make the offer–the pitch–to the blogger and the blogger decides if and when he or she will post and how he or she will post.

Some bloggers post the our pitch email directly to their blog and that’s cool. A majority mention that they received a pitch from us and our client as well as excerpting and blockquoting a sizable amount of our very own copy from our social media news release. A minority actually spend the time to go in and write up a brand new piece, researched and contextualized, and we love those, too. We’re realistic: we’re reaching out to someone, asking for their help, not paying them anything at all except attention, and then expect them to do us a solid and actually post about our clients for free? Well, we’re always darned grateful for just about any mention–even, believe it or not, the spiny ones. It’s all good.

And, at the end of the day, as they say, any publicity is good publicity as long as they link our client’s name, product, services, and keywords as close to right as possible.

Via Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz

Fire for effect when you cant get a direct bead on your market

Tech Talk: Create Your Own App on Appsbar.com in about 60 Minutes –for Free!

As digital engagement spreads from the web (Facebook, Twitter, websites) to smart phones and tablets, apps have become a critical factor to gain user attention by providing a function, service or information. It’s more than the icing on these devices that we buy and use. With the smartphone/tablet dimension, apps are embedded into the user experience landscape as serious, useful and fun additions to their device. Often the availability of the apps to improve the function of the devices from phones to tablets and the variety of apps available make the choice of host product purchase a real effort in research prior to purchase.
(Article first published in abbreviated presentation as Tech Talk: Create Your Own App in About 60 Minutes with Appsbar.com – for Free!! on Blogcritics.org)

There are a few key few issues concerning the app marketplace. First is the exclusivity of an app to a particular platform. Often your favorite iPhone app is not available on Android or Windows or tablet platforms. Cost is an issue. While there are a number of apps in the free to three dollar range, there are apps with premium prices ranging from five to twenty dollars. The third issue is that perhaps the app or function you want or need is not currently available or doesn’t function in the way you need. I heard of a woman who wanted a “mirror” app so that she could see what she looked like on the fly– but she couldn’t figure out where to find that app.

Should you be so entrepreneurial as to want to create an app, you have a few choices. If you were smart enough to get into IT when in college or are taking classes for that, you know where you can make extra bucks — creating apps on the side. If you are a “geek freak”, you could dig into this as a DIY project and buy the books to create an app yourself. Or if you are like the rest of us (especially moi), you could hire a programmer and find out what it will cost. The price tag– even on the bargain end can be about $3000. Most of the pro apps cost about $10,000 and can cost up to $100,000 or more depending on the sophistication of the app. The time frame for app development can range from six weeks to three months. Until now, these were the only options you had.

The apps paradigm has shifted courtesy of Appsbar.com, an open-to-all-ages website that offers members the ability to quickly and easily build an app for a specific platform with lots of bells and whistles in about 30-60 minutes– and it’s free! Plus once you create the app, it’s funneled to the Apple, Android or Windows markets for others to download. It’s a win-win proposition. In a little more than 2 weeks since the site launched, eleven thousand apps have been created.

Appsbar.com is a new website that allows anyone of almost any age to build their own app on a variety of platforms including iPhone, Android and Windows and also get them into their respective markets. The “digital engagement” that appsbar.com provides allows you — as the user– to create the app for anything or everything you want– depending on how much time and creativity you bring to the table. Generally speaking, if you are thinking about a relatively simple app to build, it could be done in about 30 minutes. The more complex you want to make it, the longer it will take– 60 minutes is about the baseline. However if you get really creative and want the veritable kitchen sink, it could take longer.

Here’s what the site (and their press release) says you can create on an appsbar app
•Event Notifier – which delivers real-time or scheduled notifications to app users.
•Menu – allows creating of catalog of products or services.
•Form Builder – which can be used for customer service surveys, a restaurant to-go order, or answers to questions asked through the app.
•Social Interaction – adds the ability to share content within an app across social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
•Soundboard – lets users create a unique “app ringtone” by uploading any sound which can play when a user shakes or taps their mobile device.
In addition, appsbar can also handle RSS, photos and videos like other similar services

This isn’t just for play boys and girls. This is serious business masquerading behind a fun game-like wizard that will be blowing away the competition in a very short time. As the community grows, watch what happens as the members connect, communicate and collaborate. It’s bound to create something exponentially better than anything out there. This isn’t just for consumers only– bloggers. brands, companies can create their own apps for micro-consumer engagement. There are a wealth of uses for this application wizard.

I was able to snag an interview with CEO/founder Scott Hirsch to talk about this new site and honestly- to ask a lot of questions because appsbar.com is as big a shift in paradigm in the app world as iPhone was to cell phones. Flat out truth, appsbar is on its’ way to changing the perspective of the marketplace and how apps are created and how much the public wants to be involved in the creation. So far there has been little public involvement until now because the public had no way to get involved in the interface of building an app. Hirsch and company have remedied that situation.

How?
1) it’s free
2) they created a very simple wizard to walk you through the building process so that anyone from 18 to 70+ can create their own app.
3) the collective imagination of the appsbar user community is creating new processes for and ways to create apps and the appsbar team is learning from that collective imagination just how to integrate or improve upon what the users have created or asked for to facilitate the building of the most customized app around at the phenomenal price of free plus your own time.

I had the opportunity to interview CEO Scott Hirsch about Appsbar.com and ask a slew of questions about the site– and app development; questions about funding, advertising and how long the site will remain free. The podcast provides answers to all these questions.

I tried the Appsbar.com wizard to create an Android app for my blog. The app creation wizard is easy to use and it’s a lot more fun than a Zynga game. Pick your platform and get started. Do realize that after you complete the first version of your app, you will want to upgrade it as you figure out all the options that you can add to the app and how to make sure that it integrates with your goal.

The community of members can share information and also ask for additional features (coupons, discounting capacity) and the Appsbar.com team will start working on it. While it’s taken me a little longer than the hour, it’s because I kept changing the visuals, the essential app is easily done in 60 minutes or less and I took longer because as I saw the options come up, I was playing with the integration of those options into the app. In other words, I was throwing the kitchen sink into the app and it was definitely fun. Check out the site www.appsbar.com

Thank you to Scott Hirsch of Appsbar.com and Joe McGurk/ Rubenstein PR for facilitating this interview which literally was done in 3 days.

Thanks to Chris Abraham & MarketingConversation.com too.

Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com

'Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover' on AgencySide

lotsofbags 200 'Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover' on AgencySide While we wrote a proper case study on our 2007 CAFE Standards public affairs campaign years ago, this is the first time I really sat down and explored one of my favorite blogger outreach and digital PR campaigns — one we did in support of MSHC Partners, RIP, and the National Environmental Trust three years ago. Thanks to the gang at Agencyside for publishing Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover today. Via Chris Abraham.

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