We just discovered this lovely mention in Entrepreneur.com by Marshall Sponder, their Web Metrics Guru and writer:
PR firms such as Abraham Harrison have built lists of several thousand bloggers, by subject and tag, to use for clients’ campaigns, and anyone who has the time and inclination can employ the same approach, albeit on a smaller scale.
One of the things that Abraham Harrison does as a digital public relations agency is blogger outreach on behalf of clients. So what does that mean? Well, rather than reinventing the wheel, here is an abridged description taken from AH’s blog Marketing Conversation:
With each new client, and each new outreach, we identify a target demographic and identify bloggers who are leading and influencing that demographic. We call these groups of relevant bloggers the “universe”.
The universes are built using existing lists of bloggers AH maintains in combination with brand new lists (since each client has a different set of demographics they want to reach).
We then reach out to these bloggers in a 4-6 week campaign which includes an initial semi-personalized outreach email, followed up by 2-4 follow-up emails. The emails are terse and the majority of the messaging is “outsourced” to a social media news release (SMNR – a one-page simple HTML microsite) that is a “steal me” sheet for the bloggers to add pictures, content and widgets. Here is an example of a SMNR: http://freshairholiday.org/
Each one of these outreach cycles generally leads to 100-300 social media mentions in blogs and on Twitter (depending on how intriguing the client’s message and offering are), invariably reaching millions of people.
After last month’s earthquake in Haiti, I had the privilege of working on a pro-bono outreach AH developed on behalf of former client International Medical Corps. We emailed almost 10,000 bloggers and asked for their help to spread the word about donating via text message or online to support IMC’s efforts in Haiti. My job was to respond to bloggers who wrote back with questions, log any mentions on blogs or Twitter and thank bloggers for their help. We ended up with 171 blog and Twitter mentions that could be directly correlated with the outreach.
Granted this outreach was for a noble and timely cause, but pretty much all the feedback I received from the bloggers was overwhelmingly positive. Sometimes bloggers respond negatively and may think our efforts are “spammy,” but most of the time they are happy to oblige and impressed that there is a real person behind the emails they are getting.
It was a great learning experience for me, and I’m definitely looking forward to working on more campaigns.
You might be wondering why Abraham Harrison is so big on promoting it’s own staff and why the company isn’t afraid of “Brand Dilution” from letting our workers out of the box. Well, Chris Abraham, the Abraham of Abraham Harrison and COO has this to say in regards to all of those worries:
Too many “old school” businesses try to squelch the unique personal brand, thinking that it competes with or dilutes the parent brand. They feel like the employees need to be subsumed into the greater corporate brand; however, personal employee passion-based personal brand actually almost always enhances the parent brand. And, since it is so rare to find a passionate and excited employee, one should really try to encourage the personal brand growth. If you’re afraid of losing that employee via headhunting, you did something else wrong if you do lose her. Also, if you think she’ll get too big for her britches and she’ll be impossible to deal with? Well, look at your CEO — you deal with her, too! And, to be honest, the bigger her britches are the more influential she will be, so that’s generally a good thing. Besides, nice people generally don’t become jerks overnight. Well, I did, but most don’t. :)
I’ve never written so often in my life. With this blog, my own blog and Abraham Harrison’s company blog, Marketing Conversation, my days are packed with writing. But what better way to prepare for a career in PR - a profession that is based on one’s ability to effectively communicate – than by honing my writing (read: communication) skills?
And I’ve not just been writing blogs during my internship. I’ve also written case studies, client success stories, and employee bios. Each assignment, while different, is about knowing who I’m writing for, what is the most important information to convey, and how to do it in a succinct, yet interesting way.
I recently finished writing up a case study on the blogger outreach I did for International Medical Corps. I had to write just one page summarizing the context of the activity, the goal of AH’s communication strategy, the tactics used to reach that goal and finally the results of the outreach. Then I had to boil all that down to one concrete results statement that not only communicated what our effort had accomplished, but also positioned AH as the best company for the job. Not easy. But a really good exercise in developing targeted and concise messages which I’m positive is a skill I’ll need for any job in PR.
Social media started long long long. . . you get the idea. . . ago in the stone age. Back then sending messages consisted of drawing pictures on walls that were pretty much meant to reach the next generation. Those pictures looked something like this:
This translates pretty much as, “I had a successful hunt today, but sprained my ankle, I will probably be dead when my son reads this.”
Eventually people learned about fire and started using smoke signals, but those were cumbersome and the wind often mangled the sentences:
At some point someone decided to invent the alphabet and people started writing letters to each other. Those usually took months or years to reach their destination. They’d go something like this:
47 months later Adeliene would receive a reply:
As you can see the time it took letters to arrive usually resulted in a lot of problems. .. well that and people sending poison to each other on a regular basis.
People quickly decided that getting letters back and forth as quickly as possible was so important that it required running horses to death. Thus was born the Pony Express.
As people became interested in sending electric shocks through wires they eventually invented the telegram. A system of sending little bursts of noise along long long long pieces of wire. Of course those little bursts of noise could sometimes be misinterpreted.
Soon people moved on to telephones and party lines allowing many people to speak to each other at once and some to just spy and listen all day. Many middle aged recluses loved this pastime.
As we approached the 1980s and computers became more prevalent in the home, people decided to return to alphabet based communication. Dial up Bulletin Boards in the 80s were the peak of social media, but each system was closed off from the others so there wasn’t nearly enough space to spread crazy rumors.
Then Bob Dole invented the Internet (he said he did) so that people could send out great amounts of rumors, lies, facts, spam and everything else all day long to all over the world. This destroyed many of the little groups that had existed on the dial up bulletin boards and replaced them with giant web based bulletin boards that people could reach through a single phone number. Eventually, people did away with the slow dial up method and switched to “high speed” Internet.
People missed having their little cliques and groups though, so Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter came along allowing people to feel like they had thousands of friends. This also allowed urban legends, crazy rumors, and conspiracy theories to spread even faster. Since everyone is more willing to trust a “friend” when they say something odd.
The future is bringing with it cell phone mesh geolocation, augmented reality, face recognition, always connected, social media insanity. You won’t be able to walk down the street without someone adding “tags” to your face that everyone else with a camera phone will be able to see when they meet you.
Eventually everyone will be plugged into a giant machine that will stir all of our thoughts together and I’m pretty sure the end result of that will be something like this:
Neema Crafts is a cafe (yum!), weaving, and handcrafted paper workshop/store employing the deaf and physically handicapped in Iringa, where I used to live in Tanzania. Amazing panini, incredible cakes, and freshly roasted, freshly brewed local highland coffee… incredible. Neema saved more than one of my days there in the mountains of East Africa.
In addition to treating us customers to moments of culinary bliss, Neema has literally changed the lives of the physically handicapped and hearing impaired there in Iringa. People with handicaps in Tanzania suffer under strong discrimination and in the past have have few opportunities to earn good livings for themselves, regardless of their skills and talents otherwise. They are also subject to particular targeting for acts of crime and violence. Neema Crafts has changed all that in Iringa, providing training, employment, and as a result, status and futures for the handicapped of the city. It’s a truly amazing organization, making the world a better place for their co-workers and for anyone in Iringa craving a delicious bite!
Set up and run by a Yorkshire couple from Harrogate, Neema Crafts Restaurant is entirely staffed by deaf people and is part of the Neema Crafts Centre employing 103 deaf and disabled people in our craft workshops making everything from elephant dung paper to micro-solar panels. Also a physiotherapy Unit serving disabled children where you can also book an amazing massage. The restaurant, internet cafe and conference room (plus soon a guest house) serve fantastic food, cakes ice cream and some of the best teas and coffee in east africa. A favourite stop off for everyone from ambassadors to the guy with hardly a shirt on his back. A great place to relax and the place to go for the top tips to explore the area.
A tour of the workshops is the unexpected highlight of many an expat or tourists trip to Tanzania. The restaurant serves local dishes, but also a taste of home with cakes made to recipes from Susie’s (who runs the place with her husband Andy) great grandmother. The chocolate cake and carrot cake draw expats and all the VSO workers out of the bush to induldge. The ice creams and deserts like lemon meringue pies and rubarb crumbles are equaly fantastic and the chocolate toffee shortbread… The restaurant also features a childrens play corner with wendy house and books and toys so you can sip your coffee in peace while reading British and local newspapers or reading one of the second hand novels which we sell to raise money for the physiotherapy work with disabled children, playing a board game or browsing the development journals in the development library which is kept up to date with the best in development literature for the N.G.O. workers in town.
The Centre recently recieved rave reviews in the Rough Guide to Tanzania and the new Bradt guidebook and is soon to be featured in the National Geographic magazine for its micro-solar project. They run regular childrens clubs for the whole community in school holidays. Their deaf dance and drumming group are also amazing, having toured the UK in 2008 and danced for the EU embassy celebrations in Dar and zanzibar where they are currently performing in a major cultural event sponsored by the British Council. please also see these videos to hear more: http://www.vimeo.com/322277 & http://www.vimeo.com/322185 to hear from some of those who work at Neema Crafts.
Every month a evening event is held which ranges from Scottish dancing to concerts from visiting musicians often top international cultural acts from across East Africa. These draw a huge crowd of Ex-pats and locals in from the bush to have a great time! A truly British establishment fully imersed in the local community and including everyone and serving the most disadvantaged.
Please go vote, and if you are ever in Iringa, Tanzania (perhaps on your way to a safari in one of Africa’s best, but still little known game parks, Ruaha), stop on by and tell Susie and everyone there at Neema that you voted for them!
Looks like the smart phone revolution has really actually come this time, and is keeping pace with the social media revolution, or maybe they are completely building on each other.
A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.
What has given rise to this trend? What makes social networking such a popular mobile web activity? It’s easy to point to the proliferation of smartphones and their host of applications, 3G network speeds and more affordable data plans, built in web browsers and mobile-ready websites. Of course these are all important factors that have helped increase mobile social networks’ popularity. However, these measurements are the reason why mobile web use, in general, is growing, not specifically mobile social networking.
A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it’s an activity that taps into how people – normal, everyday people – go about their lives.
As twitter reaches 10 billion tweets this week (check the counter) and Facebook has over 400 million users and over 3.5 billion pieces of content, we find the data that definitely supports this huge success: the mobile data.
There’s no doubt that social networking sites depend on mobile technology, specially when the concept involves updating on the go. comScore released the data today about social networking from mobile phones. The change in Twitter and Facebook mobile users is remarkable as expected, and MySpace once again shows to be losing ground. Here is the table:
Basically, the future is looking very bright for social networking specially the ones that depend on mobile platforms to support and improve on-the-go interactions.
This is great news, but let’s not underestimate the magnitude of Twitter’s achievement of getting 10 billion total tweets and what’s more impressive, 5 billion of them came in the last 4 months. Even though the company has faced some scrutiny about security issues and traffic lately, Twitter is proving to be strong enough to overcome its troubles.
One more thing to know about Twitter is that it announced the decision to open its firehose to all developers in the beginning of 2010, giving ordinary developers the same access to real-time data as Google and Bing. This will open up many windows for new applications and revenue for Twitter, on top of the already great exposure provided by Google real-time searches which features live streams, including Twitter of course.
Trollers of the Internet, you have been looking for the next big thing. Facebook bores you. Twitter is too frenetic. For months you have been wanting something different — a way to connect with people online that will both stir your heart and turn your stomach, that will launch a thousand privacy debates and discussions over just what our society is coming to.
The experience is either an unbridled realization of the Internet’s awesome randomness, or a compilation tape of its greatest hits: Omegle meets Hot or Not meets Match.com, plus a liberal dose of shame.
Personally, as far as I can tell, ChatRoulette.com is just plain garbage. It’s a useless waste of time that I can’t see building any kind of real relationships without some better social networking structure. I don’t just see it as burning out, I truly hope it does burn out quickly.
We have been talking about the growth of social media in Latin America and now that some exciting numbers came in, let’s check out the quantitative truth behind all of our qualitative hype about these markets.
According to “Inside Facebook”, Latin American Facebook users grew by more than 10% from last November. The stats also point out that Argentina has the most FB users although Brazil is the country with the most potential due to the current growth rates and number of internet users. We have experienced this growth first hand through our two big clients operating heavily in Brazil. Mexico also shows great potential due to its current low penetration rate and large population.
Another very interesting research was made by Paris-based Semiocast, pointing out that only 50% of all tweets are in English. Although Twitter is still a young emergent in social media around the globe, different countries are showing great potential, specially…….. That’s right, Latin America. Coming in 3rd on the number of tweets the study shows the Portuguese language (majority coming from Brazil) and 5th is the Spanish. The two main languages of Latin America account for 13% of all tweets which means that on average, there are 4.5 million tweets in Portuguese and 2 million tweets in Spanish per day.
This all means that Abraham & Harrison is on the right track when it comes to anticipating for the latest international trends. We all know that the Asian market presents great opportunity for many different industries, but when it comes to the openness required by Social Media, Latin America presents the perfect setting. Latin America is quickly becoming a considerable piece of the Social Media pie and there’s already plenty of hungry companies out there.
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