Tag 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!

Continue reading →

Drop magical thinking PR for social media science

While neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing and retesting and being willing to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources elsewhere

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

Continue reading →

Are you social media agoraphobic?

To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia.

And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Continue reading →

The anachronistic social media agoraphobic

To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia. And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Good fences make good neighbors

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

Continue reading →

A long tail strategy for AdWords for blogger outreach

Last week, I wrote about how to succeed with B-list bloggers, but maybe some of you aren’t convinced.

So, this week, I want to draw an analogy to successful Google AdWords approaches so that you can see how to apply that same technique to blogger outreach. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers online, there’s a lot you can learn from Google AdWords. Long-tail blogger outreach is like long-tail Google AdWords advertising. Instead of putting all your money on the top 10 most expensive and popular keywords that everyone bids on, smart advertisers segment their markets and hyper-target their highest-performing keywords with their most compelling ads and content while always pruning away their worst performers.

The same should be done with blogger outreach. There will always be blogs that are out of your league and your target audience. Instead of hitting your head against the wall by trying to make it onto TechCrunch and Mashable, learn to segment your blogger list, target more precisely while expanding your pool of bloggers past the top most blogs that tend also to be the most exclusive and difficult to break into — out of your league — to blogs and bloggers who are just starting out, who blog more from passion than ad revenue, and who are naturally more receptive to your content and your message based on a natural affinity.

Affiliate marketers have learned that they can reliably make money by spending money on Google AdWords by finding keyword phrases with such low bids that they can make money from the relatively small commissions or bounty they get from converting the click throughs to sales. Millions in yearly profits cent by cent, dollar by dollar. A cascade of small sales made by people who were so well targeted to that they were almost powerless to resist.

If you’re able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you’ll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions.

The same thing can be done with blogger outreach. If you’re able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you’ll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions. In concert, hundreds of earned media mentions both drown out a single post on TechCrunch and also do a better job or finding what you really want: sales.

All the most successful AdWords gurus, such as Adam Viener of imwave, realize that you can only make money in affiliate marketing with Google AdWords if you can make more money from your converted sales than you spend. You can’t do this unless you find the magic sweet spot where there aren’t many competing bidders who are bidding up the price of your keyword phrases so that you can both keep your spending low and also increase the likelihood that those who do stumble upon your ad will not only click through, costing you money, but also make a trackable major purchase, resulting in a commission–in commissions–that cover the costs of the ads and then some. This is not easy and the field fluctuates.

It takes expertise and vigilance, Adam tells me, and a mistake can be costly. One possibly apocryphal story reported that there was a very profitable keyword phrase that suddenly also became popular and the bids shot up without someone noticing, resulting in the equivalent of a Range Rover being lost in one day. Because of such high risks tantamount to the stock market, these folks are very good at discovering and milking the long tail, realizing that making a little bit here and there spread concurrently over hundreds and thousands of ads and keywords is more profitable, long term, than making a single big score.

If you’re loaded with cash and don’t really care about extracting value from your campaign, you can spend all your money on trying to get your ad copy at the top of every Google Search just to see it there but being constantly outbid by others, ultimately clearing out your budget or maxing your credit card; the same can be said with regards to blogger outreach: you can spend all your budgeted time and money pursuing the top bloggers while constantly being blocked by content from bigger, sexier, richer, more impressive national and global brands that have exclusive content and truckloads of valuable review products, better assets, and a promise of more and better traffic resulting in higher advertising revenue.

The most obvious thing you can learn is how easily it is to get outbid. Another thing you’ll learn is that AdWords can rapidly burn all your cash with nothing to show for it. Finally, you’ll learn that Google doesn’t wage a fair fight — they both play favorites as well as giving preference to quality of ad over quantity of bid.

What this means in Google AdWords ads is that you’re rewarded for the following: 1) Having lots of cash: a fool and his money are soon parted 2) Finding new markets: Being willing to hunt out holes in the market — keyword combinations that are not so obvious but are hyper-targeted to appeal to a new segment of visitors, bringing new opportunities for Google to make money 3) Creating an irresistible ad: no matter how much money you’re willing to spend, Google doesn’t make money unless visitors are compelled to click through 4) Becoming a long-term client: there are many cases where no amount or money and wit will claim you the top ad position on Google search, inline with organic search, because that spot almost always goes to the client who has made Google the most money, historically, over time.

These lessons map perfectly to blogger outreach.

The blogosphere rewards specialization and laser-targeting

The most desired, desirable, and “easy” keywords are like the top bloggers with the highest Alltop rankings and Klout scores are constantly being pursued. How realistic are you that you can even compete with all the others vying for their time and copy? If you’re Dell or Sony, you probably have the sort of brand recognition and respect to be able to get a blogger to schedule time to review your new gizmo pretty thoroughly. You’ll probably also have the sort of marketing budget that would allow you to offer a review product to everyone you engage.

You’ll probably have a graphic design department and a staff of copywriters who can develop an amusing and compelling pitch which could include press junkets and personal meet and greets. Finally, a company like Dell is able to commit the long-term time, staff, and expense account towards making sure their communications team developed and professional as well as personal relationship with as many online influencers and online journalists over time — to use Google AdWords parlance, they have learned how to appeal to Google on all levels.

How many levels are you able to compete on? If you’re unable to compete on any of these levels, you’ll go bankrupt trying. It’s not that A-List tech bloggers are corrupt, it’s just that they’re under pressure as well. They have only 24-hours/day and they’re heavily rewarded with traffic when they’re able to get exclusive content from a national player such as Dell. In the same way that Google AdWords rewards its clients for trying harder and digging deeper into the “long tail” in order to find new, under-served, markets, the blogosphere also rewards specialization and laser-targeting.

In a perfect world, one should only spend one’s AdWords budget on keywords phrases that display ads only to people who will convert into clients and customers. The better one knows one’s market and customer and the more time one spends finding out who and where they are and engaging them there, the more value you can extract from your sweat and cash.

Let’s say you’re preparing to launch your new book online and you want to use bloggers as an essential distribution channel, both great ideas. However, let’s think this through. Are you internationally famous crime fiction writer James Ellroy or are you an unknown first-time, self-published, crime fiction-writer? Do you have a huge war chest to fuel your promotional campaign or are you running on sweat equity? Do you have thousands of friends online who are already committed to buying your book because you have been developing your popularity online by sharing chapters and answering questions and giving free advice or have you been busily scribbling your work on yellow pads and consider your work protected by strict copyright and not something to dilute by giving it away?

Novice Google AdWords users waste a lot of money with limited results when they start out because they don’t understand how the competition works in contextual ad-buying: It’s an auction. A complicated auction.

In short, the way it works is that every keyword combination, such as “social media marketing,” competes with four things: the general popularity of the search, the quality of the keyword ad, the long-term success of the campaign, and how much money others are willing to bid for their ad based on their keyword choice, also dependent on their prior successes, ad spends, and long-term commitment. In shorter, while how much you’re willing to bid for a keyword phrase is important, it isn’t that simple.

With blogger outreach, you face the same odds as for paid search. If you are targeting only the top blogs, you’ll face immense competition and can easily be outgunned by bigger foes. If you target the long tail of bloggers, you can more easily land your targets and will build up success one blog at a time, rather than in one fell swoop.

Continue reading →

Chris Abraham

Because the Medium is the Message

Tag Archives: digital pr

Blogger outreach is digital Public Relations