Tag Archives: Public Relations

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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Grow your sphere of influence through reciprocity

So many people ask me what my secret is: to my Klout score (77), to my Twitter followers (43.5k), and to my acknowledged influence online, for what it’s worth. They wonder how I gamed Klout, where I bought my followers, and what PR firm got me into Forbes. Well, there surely are shortcuts and you can apparently game Klout and buy followers, friends, and Likes. I have tried out many of them over time but I don’t believe that growing and pruning Twitter followers or paying money for followers and Likes actually builds a social media community.

Surely, all that buying and gaming does something, but it’s not community. Maybe it’s for bragging rights, maybe access to perks, or perhaps just to establish to the people in your space that you’re really a social media player and not someone who ignored social media as an essential aspect of your organization until last Thursday.

Community is something different. And I believe that Google, in its charming Vulcan way, is finally starting to understand what virtual online community really is (and isn’t) and how to bestow holy Google Juice on the denizens of the Internet who have committed to moving in, staying, taking up residency and then committing to citizenship. Those are the people, sites, companies, communities, and organizations that I believe Google is trying to hard to identify and then favor. But since Google has a tin ear when it comes to who’s gold-digging, who’s using, who’s being an opportunist, who’s being a fair-weather friend, and who’s actually true blue, it has taken a while for everything to come together. And, though it isn’t yet perfect, they’re getting closer and closer.

If your ears perked up when you started to read that Google is really starting to favor all those who are deeply committed to connecting and engaging – and all of their various blogs, sites, platforms, and social profiles to boot – then you’re going to have a hard time. Why? Because you really shouldn’t care at all about SEO or Google or your Klout or Kred right now. You should care only about your natural allies, your natural prospects, people in your vertical, the folks who already love you to death, the folks who don’t get you at all, and also the folks who hate you, for whatever reason. And then there’s the next step, which is hard.

First, you have to acknowledge the fact that every single follower, friend, Like, and +1 you acquire represents a human soul who has committed to participating in your folly. Yes I understand how many spambots, fake accounts, Perlscripts, codeballs, and hectares of outsourced, unengaged, human clickfarms exist in the world, but these people will never and can never become anything akin to your online family, your online community.

What would I do if I were to do it again?

Well, what I would do is simple: I would first leverage the real relationships I already have. Every social media platform worth its salt allows you to shamelessly exploit all of your webmail contacts that you have collected over the last decade, as well as all of the real friends that you may have already earned on Facebook. You need to take it all the way, too: Don’t just follow all the folks who are already on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook; you need to invite all of your personal and professional friends to come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ (and others) just for you. If you cannot do this, then you’re really not willing to put enough skin in the game; you’re not willing to put your own personal reputation at risk in order to move your professional brand forward. This means you’re probably either a hypocrite or maybe know that you’ll eventually do something shady or short-game on social media that you really don’t want to be tracked back to your social media fingerprints.

All the individuals you’ll ever connect with in your online virtual community are indeed real people with hopes, dreams, fears, skepticism, concern, trust issues, and the like. It’s really best that you invite the people you really do know first so that you’ll always think twice before you engage with your community in a way that suggests you consider them — your followership and “friends” — to be just a professional asset.

There are so many social media marketing articles online that are putting dollar numbers on what each friend, follower, Like, and +1 means, similar to the valuation that direct mail marketers put on addresses and emails. Unlike this valuation that’s based on conversion and past performance, the numbers that you have been and will be able to collect are on an equal playing field. I am not naive: Yes, you can sometimes convert them to joining, buying, clicking, Liking, and +1ing; however, they’re also just as likely to throw your marketing grenade right back over the wall back at you.

When you’re working on developing an online community, you cannot just collect followers, you need to befriend them. They need to ask you favors and you need to ask them favors.

When you’re working on developing an online community, every social media action has an equal or greater reaction. These are not just numbers and assets that you can collect until you decide to seize the moment. Activate them to do something awesome, buy all your stuff, and change your world — and bank account — forever.

Also, like real friends, you cannot just collect them, you need to befriend them. They need to ask you favors and then you need to ask them favors. They’ll ask you for help and guidance and you’ll do the same. Little things, big things, again and again, for different folks, the same folks. You need to build this community the same way you would build a muscle at the gym. You cannot just collect all these folks in a box awaiting the perfect moment when you can let them loose on whatever you’ve been planning forever. Tacit and weak connections are just that. Really becoming chums is something else. Don’t worry, you don’t need to become chums with everyone who follows and befriends you. Most of the folks you’ll interact with online don’t actually want to become your BFF.

Most folks who follow you don’t want to get married

The majority of the interactions I have with brands on a daily basis are superficial. Most of the interaction that folks have had with my brand has been superficial too. When I reach out to @KLM of Twitter, it’s to see what’s going on with my flight out of Schiphol. I don’t expect much, just timely information. When @KLM offers to spot me some time in their club or buy me a coffee or something, that’s terrific (and I am always easily bought); however, getting my question answered in a timely manner and to my expectations is what I really want — the rest is just garnish and appeasement (I love garnish).

Eighty percent of all of your interactions online should involve some sort of listening. That can indeed include commenting, retweeting, Liking, starring, Listing, +1ing, reblogging, and just thanking someone for including you in a #FollowFriday post or for retweeting something. Being grateful is one of the best things one can be when nobody gets paid a livable wage to read your updates, to share your posts, or to include you in anything. No matter how rock star you are, you need to go out of your way to search out, find, engage with, and thank all the folks who mention you, your space, your vertical, your products, company, or services.

Growing your sphere of influence

Once I have brought all the real people I know into the fold — not just from my personal address books but also from my current client base — I need to go poaching.

What I mean by poaching is to say, you need to go foraging — looking for new followers. One of the popular ways is to find out what sort of hashtags your industry, vertical, product or service uses to communicate among themselves. The same thing is true with message boards, Lists, Groups, Listservs, Pages, and whatnot. The great thing about the Internet and all of these simple-to-use social media platforms is that folks tend to create their own ad hoc communities when they cannot find them easily and quickly.

So, spending some time exploring Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo and Google Groups, email lists, and the magic world of message boards and forums is an essential way of getting to know the context of the world you’ve just elbowed your way into. Beware: every single community I have mentioned behaves a little like a very tight-knit family. Always go in submissive and make a point of quickly identifying a Majordomo: a tribal elder, high-poster, list or board owner, etc. If you would like to engage in conversations that are happening in a message board or an email list, engage the owner first and tell him or her what you’re up to and ask for some advice. Jumping in, all jazz hands and spittle, without knowing their context, their history, etc. (and without them knowing you) is more dangerous than you can imagine.

Simply put: If the hive doesn’t recognize you, it’s like poking it with a stick. Don’t be surprised when you get stung. Poor form. The solution’s easy and the analogy is easier.

Learn how to infiltrate the right way

How do you behave when you attend a party you weren’t directly invited to? What I do is this: I bring a nice bottle of wine or some beer. I dress as well as I think the nicest-dressed invitee will but no nicer. When I arrive, I ask around to find out who the host is and find him or her immediately. When I meet the host, I tell them why I am there: “Mike told me about the party and said it was OK to attend without him” or “Mike asked me to come and meet me here, but I just wanted to meet the host first” or “I live down the street and noticed there was a party going on and I thought I would stop by.” I then offer the wine or beer. I then spend as much time with just the host as makes sense, just so the host feels comfortable having me in his or her home and around valuables and friends and family. Only then do I grab a drink or wink at pretty people or take to the schmooze. Thing is, there’s really no reason to bullshit the host. If you are there because you’re looking to meet the neighbors because you’ve got a dog-walking service, let the host know and see if it’s OK to hit up his guests. If you’re really honest and the host likes you, there’s a pretty good chance that the host will take you by your elbow and walk you around to all the folks at the party who have dogs, introducing you to each of them, telling them your story on your behalf. That’s the perfect scenario.

And I do exactly the same thing when it comes to infiltrating communities I have not been invited to. I used the word “infiltrate” intentionally instead of “join” because so many marketers have rudely and shamelessly crashed parties without any care or respect for the community. Turn on any teen movie and you’ll see something quite similar in action (I am thinking about the party scene in “Mean Girls”). So, while you may very well be as well-intentioned as can be, folks are not going to trust you right way. By virtue of being in communications, marketing, sales, or in any way wanting to evangelize or promote yourself or your brand anywhere, you’re immediately guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.

I had every intention of geeking out and sharing some tools and step-by-step processes that one can use in order to engage online. However, I really think the first step has more to do with being willing to allow the folks with whom you’re engaging in your brand new, bouncing baby social media empire to be human: hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, concerns, and issues.

In fact, communities are so used to being abused that you’ll be surprised and insulted by the level of caution, dread, and mistrust you’ll wander into, even if your intentions are pure and you’re just looking for ways to discover, engage, and help folks online. Because of the people who came before you, it’ll most likely always be an uphill battle.

So, I have a very important quote to share with you before I let you loose into the wild to meet your social media, online virtual community, fate, and attributed to Plato, Philo of Alexandria, Ian MacLaren, and the Rev. John Watson:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

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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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Target Twitter audiences of every size with a theory of everyone

Photo credit: Fora do Eixo

Well, as you all know who read this blog, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I believe that anyone who spends their time and talent online are online influencers and potential important brand ambassadors. Marketers balk with visions of lost dollar signs, especially when the in-house social media communications professional generally balances email newsletter, traditional PR and site copy. Marketers forget that influencers aren’t necessary partial to the brand, with the loyalty of a salary or paycheck. They may, shocker, actually be genuinely interested in the topic.

Leveraging the brand’s equity to build one’s own brand is common, a fame narcotic if you will. While I encourage each one of my colleagues to build their own brand equity I need them to maintain egalitarian and democratic values when engaging online on behalf of clients. I don’t want them to lose their tone and voice, I just want them to filter it depending on the audience.

Don’t know where to start? Well, I know for a fact that there’s a guy in Brazil who will hook you up with thousands of Brazilian tweeters almost immediately for a fee. That’s somewhere to start. Once you’ve bought your online friends, you have to deliver the je ne sais quois to keep them. If you suck, are salesy, don’t tweet or post very often, are selfish, don’t play games or bait conversation, don’t give til it hurts, even all of these thousands of purchased followers will start unfollowing you almost immediately.

It is sort of like being an opening act to U2: you might have 30,000 folks who didn’t come to see you who are there to see Bono but there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever buy your album. There’s every reason they should but you really could make a mess of it — if they don’t, it is your fault as they were your customers to lose. Same thing with buying followers and likes. If the targeting is completely off, if you suck as a host, or if you’re boring or rude, they’re gone — at least the real ones are.

Stated simply, the state of the art in social media is still bespoke, based on old models of public relations where each particular PR agent has a Rolodex and that card represents years and years of personal relationships . Very precious and personal connections, formed and tempered over time, built on trust.

And, this very same framework has been mapped directly into social media where many agencies and companies spend all of their time taking their current 25 mainstream media contacts and 25 social media contacts to dinners at Mortons. There’s not enough budget or time to prospect much further or deeper than that.

Which is a sincere pity.

How can one take an old PR model that only concerns itself with an easy-to-manage elite core of gate-keeping journalists, publishers, and broadcasters and map that onto a new media model? A model that could potentially include anyone and everyone who should decide to commit to starting blogging. Producing content for online consumption, resulting in becoming an online influencer. It’s like the circle of success.

In this theory of everyone, in this theory of long tail digital PR outreach and engagement, it is essential to find viable ways of 1) discovering everyone — because there are potentially a lot of people that show up in your net when you’re being inclusive and indiscriminate 2) keeping that list up-to-date as blogs are launched and shuttered every day.

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