We currently have around 80,000 bloggers in our lists, but those lists are not used like traditional mailing lists, because of the constant new growth and attrition in the blogosphere. (via Abraham Harrison)
With each new client, and each new outreach, we identify with the client what the demographic is they want to reach, then we ID the bloggers who are leading and influencing that demographic. We call these groups of bloggers that we identify as the group influencers a “universe”.
The universes are built by rechecking the existing lists (adding newcomers and culling deadwood), and by building up 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 make their blogging about our client super easy. Here is an example of an 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 is), invariably reaching millions and in many of our campaign’s cases, 10MM+ people.
We integrate twitter campaigns (followership-building, messaging, and community engagement), Facebook, Youtube promotion, and A-list outreach as well. The most basic of our campaigns start at $5000 a month, and the more complex campaigns top $20K per month.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7f521802-2502-4342-ac37-b92d84f28045)
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the post – there are some great tips in here, and I like the idea of using an SMNR to give bloggers all the info they need.
Question: what typically warrants a follow-up email? Just bloggers who respond, or those who don’t? If you’re sending follow-ups to those who don’t respond, what would be the typical messaging and process so as not to come across as “spammy”?
80.000 sounds like an awful lot of bloggers to have.
Doesn’t that make the information you send out a bit redundant?
Wouldn’t it be more helpful to target the most influential of the lot and wait for a ripple effect?
Laetitia and Kari, I am having folks from my team respond here and address your questions. I think I would prefer they they address your questions and I have suggested that they collect your questions together and respond to them in a follow-up blog post or two, since these are things that lots of people ask, especially because most folks can’t believe what we do actually works with high efficacy and repeatedly. They should be posted pretty soon – thanks so much for commenting and reading.
Hey, Kari, yeah the SMNR really helps make the process go more smoothly. Follow up emails are sent to bloggers who don’t respond, though those who do respond are replied to as well. Generally to avoid sounding spammy what you need to do is address the bloggers in a conversational tone. Once they realize there’s a person (or people) on the other end of the email they tend to respond pretty favorably.
Laetitia, we don’t send out every message to all 80,000 bloggers. We send messages out to those who blog about the subjects that we’re trying to promote. Influential bloggers only have so much time and therefore space in which to write about things, so it’s best to contact many less influential bloggers and gear towards getting as much press space as possible. A lot of small influence can quickly become a large influence.
Good questions! The follow up email ONLY goes to the people who didn’t respond. It is a way of reaching the people who thought it was spam, people who didn’t relate to the first message or people who just didn’t understand what you were asking. In order to solve these issues, the message gets adjusted in a way that is personal and relevant to what they are blogging about, even more so than the first message. If the message is relevant to them, it is much more likely that they will use the info and not treat it as spam. People who do respond, should receive an immediate and customized message regarding the response.
80.000 is the total number of bloggers we have registered. From this number we use only the 2-3 thousand that will find the information relevant. Blogging about shoes to an advocacy blog is the mistake that most pr agencies are guilty of these days and thank God we are not one of them.
Awesome — thanks guys.
New blog post with some specific steps on how to follow up. Thanks all!
Following up on Blogger Outreaches and Staying Relevant