Tag Archives: Blog

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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Long Tail Blogger Outreach Webinar

I put together a case study and exploration of blogger outreach for a webinar I put on for a company yesterday and I thought I would share it here. I might go from calling it Long Tail Blogger Outreach to Deep Blogger Outreach or Deep Content Marketing. Anyway, it was meant to be spoken through so I will do that as well but for now check it out and let me know what you think. You can also find it over on SlideShare, Long Tail Blogger Outreach Webinar.

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Blog to differentiate yourself beyond your credentials and experience

Edelman recruited me because I blogged about Wal-Mart. Rosetta Stone invited me to blog for them because I blogged about learning German. AdAge invited me to write for their DigtialNext and Global News blogs. Blogging about social media marketing resulted in being invited by Socialmedia.biz and Biznology to blog for them. In the fervor of the presidential elections, I pursued column inches in The Huffington Post. In large part, I can thank blogging for most of my professional success. There is no more efficient way of expressing passion, what you know, and how you think than writing it out. A blog is the perfect platform.

In many ways, blogging made me. My degree is in English and Creative Writing and not in communications, public relations, public affairs, history, politics, languages, or computer science. However, I am a curious man at heart and am fascinated by the world we live in.

Put the work in and differentiate yourself

In any age other than this one, would I have been able to do any of this? This is a brilliant time as the barriers to entry have been demolished if you’re willing to put the work in. However, if you have no passion, really have nothing to say, aren’t interested in anything in particular, don’t feel self-motivated, and aren’t self-taught, you can always go back to school and get your master’s. And if you’re really self-destructive, continue on to a doctorate.

Isn’t it cheating to just go ahead and write your way into the inner circle instead of acquiring proper credentials by jumping through the traditional hoops? Nope.

And I am not talking about microblogging on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr, I am talking about writing proper analyses of what’s going on in your business or industry — or the industry in which you aspire to work — in your own words and reflecting your own understanding of the space, plus your interpretation of what it means.

Isn’t it cheating to just go ahead and write your way into the inner circle instead of acquiring proper credentials by jumping through the traditional hoops?

No, it isn’t. Primarily because you need to blog your way into the perfect job even if you’ve done your degree in communications (like my partner here, J.D. Lasica).

You need to blog to differentiate yourself well beyond your credentials and your experience. You need to blog to allow people to get to know who you are and what matters to you. I remember when I onboarded with the digital team at Edelman. HR had me take a writing test on a computer in an embarrassing little room.

What this means is that most companies, agencies, and businesses not only don’t know you at all but generally can’t know you.

The only way you’ll be able to effectively push through all the other thousand recent graduates to grab that ring is by blogging your talk. And you don’t need to wait until you’re mid-career like I am, you can start blogging your way into your first job in high school or as a college undergrad. You can even start moonlighting in your industry of choice while you’re getting that degree.

Boost your blogging in 2013

Nothing prevents you from entering into public discourse and conversation with the topmost influencers online. There’s nothing keeping you from becoming a participant in the AdAge Power 150. There’s no requirement at all, and you’ll only be judged by your words, insight, and persistence.

You can and will be rewarded for not holding your creativity, insight, and passion ransom — and don’t allow your university or boss to bogart your best, smartest work.

So, take this opportunity in the new year to either start a new blog or rekindle the flame you once had. Blogging’s not dead, Twitter’s not enough, Facebook’s a walled garden, and Tumblr’s cheating (you’ll always spend more time being derivative instead of being generative and you’ll never know because you’ll feel terribly clever not on your own wit but rather on the coattails of the charm, creativity, and brilliance of other people’s Tumbls).

Good luck and tell me what you think in the comments section below — I would love to help you out getting started!

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Write online to be taken out of context

I am in the middle of guiding some new bloggers over at Marketing Conversation on how to blog most effectively. It is pretty exciting and instructive because there are many things I take for granted.

One of the biggest trends I see is internal shorthand. What I mean is that my bloggers tend to write based on a lot of assumed context.

They simply assume that people who are reading content from Marketing Conversation or Because the Medium is the Message — or even an article on the corporate website — are in on the joke. That they grok the context.

Not only is that not true but it is dangerous because I am guilty of it myself. I would say north of 80% of the people I engage with on a daily basis online don’t know that I am president of a digital agency with over fifty staff and dozens of clients. I assume, too. I assume that I shouldn’t be so self-referential because “they” surely know who I am by now, I have been branding for years.

Not so.

And I have not even gotten to the most important part: even if people know who you are, what you do, the company you own, and it’s products and services intimately, their brand perception hasn’t evolved with your business. What I did in 2006 is quite a bit different than what Abraham Harrison does now, as a company.

Even worse, after we spend all of this time, resources, hours, money, and brain trust on creating insightful analysis and share it for free on our blogs and via Twitter and Facebook, we’re living in a Derridian world: “there’s nothing outside the text.”

In a world of excerpting, RSS-reading, sharing, retweeting, and sharing shares, simply all of the breadcrumbs required to bring a reader down the road back to you, your brand, and your sales channel needs to be contained not only in that blog post but also in that tweet, if possible.

Do not use acronyms unless you’re brand is that acronym. Every name of every employee should be linked to their bio on the corporate website at best case or to a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook profile at the very least. Every product or service should be linked to its exact corresponding sub-page on the corporate website if at all possible.

In blogging, we often do a much better job of linking to other people, companies, and blogs in the form of attribution than we do ourselves.

Even more essential to these constantly conceptualizing linking strategies is that the keywords should be hyperlinked and not some worthless [link] or a pithy here or there or my work or any of that, if at all possible. Search abhors a pronoun.

Finally, any and all posts should be wrapped in analysis, if at all possible. Don’t just excerpt a social media news article onto your blog or site, make it your own! While collecting news and propagating it through your blog with attribution links and excerpts and all that can result in your colleagues and neighbors and even prospects to learn of your existence, you’re not really adding value when you just propagate — it is essential to interpret, analyze, and synthesize, allowing all the marrow of your experience to be extracted in answer to, “well, that’s great content but it is content from your competitor so maybe we should be using them instead of you if they’re so insightful.”

In a perfect world, with a corporate blog, people should be subscribing to and reading posts on Marketing Conversation in order to learn more about the products and services and quality of mind of Abraham Harrison and not just to get an aggregation of the latest social media marketing news.

Sometimes I forget that and it is something I would like to share with you in addition to sharing it with my new bloggers.

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

I’ve run a social media marketing agencies since Autumn 2006. 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:

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’s 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 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 Facebookesphere 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.

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Inkybee tool for blogger outreach launches tomorrow

Anyone who makes blogger outreach easier is a friend of mine — and, if they do it smart and have the blogger culture close to their heart and respect the blog and its power and influence, I love. Here’s an announcement for Inkybee‘s launch tomorrow, February 7th — consider this sort of a scoop (nobody told me to embargo). The folks at Forth Metrics are smart and they do good work and make useful things.

Forth Metrics launches “Inkybee” – a web-based outreach solution for the PR industry

Forth Metrics has launched the full public beta of a new web-based comms tool called Inkybee. Inkybee is a simple tool for public relations, digital marketing, social media and SEO professionals. It is the brain-child of Forth Metrics’ directors David Cumings and Hugh Anderson who spotted an opportunity in web-based PR measurement. The PR industry – and the comms world in general – is being transformed by the shift to web-based digital media. Inkybee aims to help comms professionals with this transition.

Inkybee breaks down the barriers of cost and complexity for small organisations who are undertaking any form of outreach on the web. It finds relevant sites to target on the web, manages the outreach process and measures the end results. Much of its novelty lies in its simplicity, being accessible via a user-friendly web-interface. It is particularly focussed on outreach to blogs which represent a growing opportunity for influencer marketing and are also of increasing importance to search engine optimisation (“SEO”) professionals.

Co-founder, Hugh Anderson, said “It’s a hugely exciting milestone for us. We have been developing Inkybee for over two years and we believe we have created something that can really help the vast majority of PR professionals who are crying out for a simple, affordable solution to manage and measure their web-based outreach.”

The launch is in a free public beta with the objective of quickly moving to a paying model via an affordable, monthly subscription. Several hundred beta testers from all around the world have already been testing it privately and their feedback has helped to shape the product. To learn more about Inkybee, visit www.inkybee.com.

Why we created Inkybee

We created Inkybee to help smaller, independent PR agencies and businesses. We wanted to create a simple, user-friendly, affordable tool that would enable busy comms professionals to do blogger outreach more effectively, saving them time and allowing them to focus on more value-add activities.

We recognised that the PR industry in general finds blogger outreach a painful process and as a result has developed a reputation for doing it poorly. As the power of bloggers and the World Wide Web in general grows, we want to help the industry improve so that everyone benefits from better communication and relationship building. It is a win-win outcome for comms professionals and bloggers.

We started off on a measurement journey to measure the outputs of blogger outreach and online PR effectively. However, we soon realised that the additional pains of finding the right influencers and tracking relationships with them also needed to be tackled. So we built Inkybee to do it all.

We’ve got the first beta version of Inkybee running and it is working well, but there is a lot more to come. Specifically in three key areas:

In adding lots more helpful features and functionality – every week you’ll see improvements

Adding sophistication to our blog discovery tool – we have the technology to add a lot more firepower to make the results of this much, much better in due course.

As our database of blogs grows, we will work with bloggers to help them understand their own niches and the associated network of related, influential bloggers.

Whilst all of this development is going on we will continue to provide lots of helpful educational materials to make sure comms professionals keep learning to do a better job as this exciting area grows and grows.

More answers to frequently asked questions can be found on the Inkybee FAQ page

About Forth Metrics

Forth Metrics is a Scottish-based web technology company. It was formed in 2010 with a vision to create simple web-based measurement products to help smaller businesses that are unable to afford Enterprise solutions. It is one of a number of Scottish Enterprise backed technology companies in Edinburgh that are doing exciting things on the web. Forth Metrics’ expertise spans big data management, complex mathematics, digital, commercial and creative prowess. Forth Metrics is a member of Scotland IS, the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and AMEC. To contact the company please email info@forthmetrics.com. For more information visit www.forthmetrics.com.

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How NOT to pitch a blogger

I talked about how blogger outreach is scary, and I talked about why this fear exists for most people before they start talking to bloggers. In great measure, these fears exist because of the horror stories that have resulted from wrong-headed approaches.

In the five years that we’ve been reaching out to bloggers, we’ve learned just as much about how NOT to pitch as we’ve learned about the right ways. The main thing to keep in mind is how you feel when you are on the receiving end of a misguided PR pitch. If you just stick with that mindset, you’ll avoid the lion’s share of pitching mistakes.

Now, I have been getting pitches for my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, since 2004 or so. Now, Marketing Conversation gets loads of pitches as well. Some of the insulting things that abuse me to no end include sending your pitch to “Dear Blogger,” or to “Abraham” when my name is Chris Abraham.

I can generally tell when a compliment is hollow: they’re either too general or way too recent and specific. It is very easy for even the least sophisticated of my fellow bloggers to sense sucking up or kissing up, especially if you haven’t done any homework or any research at all.

Also, if you don’t have your formatting sorted and it looks like you obviously copied and pasted back and forth and I can make out weird spacing and a strange mixture of fonts and sizes, I can tell you’re probably cutting corners and doing things carelessly and without concern for how I will perceive it–as though half-assed is all I am worth since I am not a Mashable or TechCrunch. People don’t like it when they can obviously tell that you’re going through the motions until something else better comes along. Bloggers will always call you out if they sense you’re just calling it in.

No, I also don’t blame the agents too much. They’re often understaffed, juggling too many balls, have insufficient experience, or lack technological skills and are just doing their best. The agencies are why these agents are oftentimes coming up short. And, at the end of the day, many agencies have given up on earned media because earned media can be risky and it can oftentimes be an all or nothing venture. Outreach failure is easily possible when there is very little cultural awareness and understanding of how best to appeal to these thousands and thousands of very real people who wield very real power and influence over popular consensus and perception.

Perhaps the only thing you’ve come away from this article is that you need to hire me in order to get some of that white-hat link-farming SEO love. So, let me warn you: it doesn’t work unless you spend a lot of time, money, energy, and creativity to actually put together a plausible and meaningful PR campaign.

Bloggers did not fall of a turnip truck. If they don’t see the value in the pitch, they won’t post; if they fancy that you’re just asking them to post because you want to vampire bat on their Google juice, then you’re likely to be in a whole lot of #fail and possibly a whole lot of pain. The white-hat link-farm organic SEO pwn effect is only secondary if you are, the entire way along, a total Mensch and have amazing assets, viral-quality video, a great pitch, an accurate target, and a gentle, kind, and generous follow-through.

It is sort of like dating. You need to remain present during the entire date and not even get angry or resentful–or hostile–if you are not invited upstairs for a night cap. If you’re caught just calling it in and going through the motions, just being on the date because you’re hoping to get lucky at the end of the night, you’re likely to end up either hurting someone else’s feelings or destroying your reputation. Enjoy the company, enjoy the date, enjoy the diversion, enjoy the desert, enjoy the wine, enjoy the walk in the park, enjoy the play, enjoy the coffee, and then be surprised and appreciative when and if you’re invited upstairs for a night cap.

If you are truly present in blogger outreach, and what you do is driven by what’s good for the blogger as well as what’s good for you, you might be pleased with the results.

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Add a blog and blogging to your New Year’s resolution

Photo credit: ELTMAN

Edelman recruited me because I blogged aboutWal-Mart; Rosetta Stone invited me to blog for them because I blogged about learning German; AdAge invited me to write for their DigtialNext andGlobal News blogs; blogging about social media marketing resulted in being invited bySocialmedia.biz and this blog, Biznology, to blog for them; and in the fervor of the presidential elections, I pursued column inches in The Huffington Post. In large part, I can thank blogging for most of my professional success. There is no more efficient way of expressing passion, what you know and how you think than writing it out and a blog is the perfect platform. Continue reading →

Blogger outreach is only earned media and not paid

My definition of blogger outreach has always been about acquiring earned media coverage from bloggers and online influencers.

My definition–and my assumption–has always been that blogger outreach is public relations and not paid media. I may well be mistaken.

“Earned media (or free media) refers to favorable publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising, as opposed to paid media, which refers to publicity gained through advertising. Earned media often refers specifically to publicity gained through editorial influence, whereas social media refers to publicity gained through grassroots action, particularly on the Internet. The media may include any mass media outlets, such as newspaper, television, radio, and the Internet, and may include a variety of formats, such as news articles or shows, letters to the editor, editorials, and polls on television and the Internet.” (Wikipedia)

I recently had a Twitter chat with Serena Ehrlich, Director of Marketing for Mogreet during which we discussed the fine points of blogger outreach.

We agreed on everything except on whether blogger outreach was pay-per-post or earned, what bloggers wanted from a marketing pitch.

To quote @Serena, “Just smile, pay and disclose,” in response to my post, “don’t roll your eyes at social media influencers.”

I quickly responded, “Funny. I am an “earned media” social media marketer. There’s never “pay” so much as “gift” which is generally access, info, news,” and Serena asked, “do you find them moving towards pay? All blog conference preach payment (but I’m earned too so I get ur point)” and I responded “Don’t forget, most bloggers online have never been corrupted by blogger conferences :)” and, finally, “You don’t NEED to be sneaky in social media. You cannot CONTROL the conversation and you had better be as open as humanly possible.”

And that’s really the reason why people prefer the blogs and bloggers that offer predictable and controllable paid-content. Because you can control them by virtue of contracting with them over currency and sponsorship.

That comforts many but it lacks a number of important things, the most important of which is penetrating deeper into the conversation online, engaging with the newest talent–bloggers who have never been kissed or who have been blogging and sharing with their small circle of compadres in perceived invisibility (“what am I even doing this for, didn’t I start doing this so that I could get free review swag from Brooks, Nike, Saucony, and Mizuno?”) and in utter desperation (“I don’t have the time for doing this any more–I should be running about running instead of writing about running”).

What my version of long-tail blogger outreach offers is the ability to efficiently get deeper into the conversation, move further down the list of bloggers, into a social media conversation that’s a hell of a lot more like the blogosphere circa 2006: a cloud of conversations, reviews, insights, editorials, and exposures that reflect something and someone a lot more in touch with what they believe rather than the political and commercial give and take associated with the slick, safe, produced, and programmed world of mainstream media.

In my experience, bloggers want content that’s fresh, relevant, and germane to their topic of interest or expertise; they also want to be associated with something cool or flattering: a brand they like, a company they respect, or a product they have always loved, have been interested in trying, or have never heard of (or have yet to be released).

Being offered exclusive content, getting to be first kid on the block for something, or having the bragging associated with being identified, tapped, and invited, openly, into the fold of a worthwhile organization.

If you need to pay a blogger a posting or linking fee in order to get them to write about you, your social media agency is not doing their job; in fact, they’re just spending your money and they’re getting easy and safe posts but they’re certainly not doing right by you when it comes to identifying, engaging, and building a true relationship with the taste-makers and influencers in your space.

And, because you don’t have to earn their coverage based on the merits of the pitch, it calls into question the quality of the gift.

First, let me define “gift:” a gift is anything that a blogger considered valuable or germane to their news cycle. It could be exclusive content, it could be unique access to a person or technology, it could be the generous use or advance access to a product or service with the express intent of giving them time to experience, review, and critique it to share it with their readers.

It can even include exclusive blogger access to giveaways, discounts, membership, or coupons for the blogger’s readers.

But no, apparently every single blogger who has ever been to a blogging conference has been convinced–conned–into holding their posts ransom to a fee card. I mean, I see it all the time: folks who respond to any query with a fee sheet, be it their price for a “sponsored” post or even for just a keyword link.

I can understand offering me a price list for advertising space in the form of a banner or sponsorship credit, but these bloggers, who I will not name, are impenetrable when it comes to working on building a relationship, on becoming a preferred news channel, or even taking the audition towards becoming an official permanent member of one or more communications programs. This is a pity.

Why is this a pity? Well, most of the true A-list bloggers do not put such a mercenary barrier between companies, organizations, and brands–which is how they became A-list bloggers–by being likeable, accessible, having character, being popular, and having integrity.

The entire culture of the blog is supposed to be more authentic, more honest, and less under the thumb–and in the pocket–of the products and services about which they write. Right?

Long-story-short is that my long-tail strategy for blogger outreach, influenced heavily by the Cluetrain Manifesto, digs much deeper than just the top-50 or even to top-600 bloggers; in fact, my strategy doesn’t care anything at all about Klout, Compete, Google PR, or even page views or age of site. The only thing my strategy cares about is whether they’re topically-, linguistically-, and geographically-appropriate, targeted, and viable.

When you have a list of 1,000-9,000 viable and germane blogs for any particular campaign, you can readily dismiss anyone and everyone with a hand out and spend more attention grooming, encouraging, and rewarding those bloggers who are interested in being part of an interesting campaign, and innovative product, a special appeal, a new opportunity, or hot (exclusive) news.

At the end of the day, I will certainly collect a spreadsheet of all the folks with their hat in their hand, asking for payola for a positive post or a pre-written link through (they’re explicit that the link is a follow-me Google link-juicy link and not the hated “nofollow” blockade).

I will deliver that spreadsheet to the paid content and paid advertising folks–if they exist or are interested–along with their price sheets and offers. But when most of my colleagues and I, in our sundry agencies and associations, are hired to engage in blogger outreaches, our tasks are very similar to the tasks associated with traditional PR: connect with journalists and see if they’ll be willing to cover you.

These campaigns don’t have a discretionary bribery fund. We’re lucky if we even have the kinds of endless review copies that we want to circulate to all interested parties.

Our mission requires that we simply thank the folks who get back to us with their rate sheets and their requests for links and sponsorship, put them aside, and move on to build a connection, a conversation, and a relationship with all the other bloggers who are willing to enter into a conversation–a negotiation, if you will–first, before you shut me down before I even have a chance to make my appeal or to reach a mutually-beneficial agreement.

What I had to say, in appreciation, is that my team and I don’t need to waste a lot of time–these bloggers surely do get to the point right away. There’s not a lot of resource-intensive back and forth: it’s very clear what you’re getting.

But it comes right back down to what I thought blogger outreach and blogger engagement was: earned media public relations campaign wherein you pitch bloggers cum citizen journalists and they decide whether or not what’s in it for them or their readers is consistent with the quality of news, offer, or “gift” that my team and I are willing to give.

And I don’t even know what is valuable anymore, really. I understand the desire for revenue and the desire to not be taken advantage of by big brands (with deep pockets, assumedly) who should really be willing to put up or shut up. Fair enough, but there’s a lot of opportunity and future associations that are dismissed out of hand as a result.

What these brands, associations, nonprofits, companies, and their associated advertising, marketing, and PR companies want is earned media even though they could very well afford the $150 link fee or the $250 sponsorship in any single blogger’s rate sheet; they could probably afford a thousand of those, presumably.

The reason they come to Social-Ally or an agency like mine is because what they get for that money up front is PR garbage. They’ve all been through IZEA, they’ve all been through the SEO link-buying frenzy, and they’ve all bought sponsorship and ads just about everywhere.

What they haven’t found is authentic journalism from someone who is not paid for nice things; someone who has the integrity and character to offer balanced, quality, reviews and insights, be they good or not so good, consistently and over time–and these folks, the folks that my clients are looking for when they look for blogger outreach are not the folks who sound like car-salesmen or infomercial pitchmen when they write a client-friendly (or even client-doting) sponsored post, they want someone who is really passionate for Mizuno running shoes for example or has had a relative build a Habitat for Humanity house of has hosted a child during the summer for the Fresh Air Fund.

They’re looking for taste-makers, of course; they’re also looking for brand ambassadors; they’re looking to get married rather then just getting lucky; and they’re hoping that the enthusiasm of being associated with a real PR campaign from a recognized brand is enough (for now).

And, what they’re really hoping–all except a very few clients (and those are really just in it for the links, I’ll be honest–is that that boundless pride and excitement really translates into an irresistible, passion-infused, post that no longer ever happen in mainstream media.

They’re not looking for neutrality or objectivity–they’re happy with fanboys, fanbois, and bona fide enthusiast-obsessive, but they’re more excited that the end-result is organic, hearth-felt, and extemporaneous–what each earned media blogger wants so say rather than saying what he or she thinks we want to hear (which, like I said before, almost always sounds like the forced song-and-dance of a veteran used car dealer).

Anyway, there are loads of mommy bloggers, sports bloggers, gadget bloggers, tech bloggers, and sundry other topics and categories–none of whom are in their top-50–who have decided that they’re not citizen journalists but something more along the lines of the paid circulars in the paper or the “paid advertising” or “advertainment” section of most commercial magazines.

That’s fine. But because most blogger outreach campaigns are resource poor and their agencies a little lazy, the experience of most blogger outreach campaigns don’t go very far down the list of bloggers–or are restricted to just a certain class, PageRank, Klout, or Compete score, all they ever get is a load of jaded mercenary bloggers who readily hold their posting ransom, posting–or dropping links–only for the highest bidder.

The reason is simple: most brands are not national or global enough to command the attention of the real top bloggers. These bloggers have mostly maintained a semblance of journalistic and community integrity–being honest and open in their review, coverage, or sharing; however, they also have a strong level of discernment as to what they will cover, when they will cover it, and what sort of terms their article or post will follow (first right of refusal or first post or an ability to leak before an official announcement, etc).

TechCrunch will only cover your startup if you’re willing to reveal financials to them in a big way; Om only covers it if he things is personally cool; etc.

I am not saying that these top guys are saints. There is a lot of money going on. There is a lot of access. There are a lot of business class tickets and flights to corporate headquarters being offered, but none of these things (should) effect the quality and comprehensiveness of the copy, be it a review or announcement or just the editorial commentary.

Below them, there are the folks who have been able to accrue the correct metrics–the semi-pros or the advanced amateurs. To them, their “blogs” have become businesses, which is cool enough, I get it; however, they’re exclusively pay-to-play.

They’ve sold their souls to the real market of the Internet these days: keyword phrase links designed to transfer Google juice from a blogger’s blog directly to a company’s site, product, service–or to deposit an affiliate link into an advertorial review designed to drive a direct sales funnel to a commissioned sale.

These strategies are part of my previously-mentioned social media robot armies and zombie hordes: link-farming, affiliate marketing, and inbound marketing.

That’s all well and good but it is not blogger outreach. And if it is, maybe we need to rename blogger outreach to blogger relations instead. Or, rather, I think we need to make sure that we call these payola blogger outreach what they really are: inbound marketing campaigns with a blogger component.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we at Social Ally call it, it’s what you hear (thanks, Frank Luntz). Let me ask you: what do you think of when you think of a blogger outreach campaign?

Do you think of earned media first–traditional PR mapped to bloggers–or do you think of blogger outreach as a way of identifying bloggers who would be amenable to sponsorship, paid posts, or bough links? Or, both?

I really like to know how that phrase is used circa 2012 instead of 2006, when I started Abraham Harrison, RIP, and if I should even be using blogger outreach to represent earned media blogger relations campaigns on the Social Ally website. I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

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Integrity is only inherent in earned media

[author]Yesterday I wrote a post called Blogger outreach is earned media not paid, right? wherein I asked if earned media was a think of the past and whether payola, pay-per-post, pay-per-link, sponsored posts, and site sponsorship were the new de facto in digital PR.

This morning, Gail Gardner wrote a post in response, accusing us digital PR professional of stealing from bloggers since we agencies do get paid for doing blogger outreach only to “talk bloggers into working for free” on our behalf:

These companies want to argue they deserve “earned” media coverage when what they are really doing is BUYING that awareness by paying PR agencies to go out and sell it for them. They aren’t earning it by some good deed or being awesome – they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf.

NOTE The following is basically a copy/paste of the comment that I left over at the article, so it’s written to Gail, which might read weird, so forgive me on that. At the end of the day, I worship Gail Gardner for starting this conversation so please forgive my mild ‘tude — I am well-caffeinated and really passionate about this topic.

While I don’t believe or agree with a word in this post as the entire premise is flawed, however, I agree with everything that Doc Sheldon says in his comment — thanks Doc (we don’t know each other, I don’t think):

I agree that a blogger should have the option of taking pay for reviews, opinions or publicity, if that’s their chosen business model. For many, it is, and I have no problem with that. But when the required disclosure tells me that a blogger was paid to write about a product or service, it causes me to doubt their objectivity. If they’re okay with that, fine. Personally, I prefer that my readers believe I’m giving them an honest review, so I prefer to do independent reviews. That doesn’t mean that I think that every blogger that receives pay or gifts is being dishonest… just that it casts a shadow of doubt. One I prefer to avoid.

Let me explain the flawed nature. Firstly, I don’t believe that you, Gail, read the post very carefully at all; secondly, I never said their were thousands of exceptional bloggers — I believe that there are a few exceptions — awesome — bloggers, a number of payola bloggers, and then a long tail of passion-players; finally, your line, “they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf,” is just a little bitter but it is also not true.

We don’t want to get bloggers to work for us at all — we just want each blogger to consider what we’re pitching — yes, to the blogger, but also to the readers. We can only pitch content to the blogger for the benefit of his or her readers.

And, if we’re able to engage with them in such a way that the blogger sees a professional, reputation and content benefit to what we’re pitching, then, and only then, do we “earn” an “earned media” post.

And, the blogger is under zero obligation to write nicely; he or she is allowed his or her own integrity and journalistic distance and is more than able to trash it, to love it, to recommend it or not.

Which is the risk I take when I go any outreach. If my client’s products or services such or if we package it poorly or target it sloppily, then the entire campaign can roll snake eyes at best and at worst, there can be a huge media blow-back.

The biggest flaw in the premise is that we’re stealing from bloggers. That because we’re professionals we’re in some way duping or conning these poor guileless bloggers into doing work for us for free.

With earned media blogger outreach, there must be a win-win-win between the blogger, the client, and the readership or it really doesn’t work at all.

I so do enjoy the conversation, so thank you for that, Gail.

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