Ellie Brown is one great asset here at Abraham Harrison. I hope you’ll go and check out the rest of her articles over on Writing practice makes perfect. Here’s one of her recent ones:
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. :)
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