Monthly Archives: June 2010
Beautiful Ferrari Daytona
Long-Tail Blogger Outreach Campaign Nuts & Bolts
[Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1] Our rationale behind using a long-tail strategy on behalf of our clients is that while A-list bloggers may well be at the top of their power, impact, and influence, we at Abraham Harrison invest in quality blogs and bloggers well before they’ve become so popular and pursued that they’re almost impossible to engage, generally from being busy, overwhelmed and/or well-paid for blogging. We identify bloggers who may have a smaller audience but are authentic and have readers who value their opinions.
This is not to say that we don’t ever do A-list outreach. We do. But oftentimes we start with our long-tail blogger outreach, reaching out to upwards of 2,000 bloggers at a time. When we’re done with the outreach, we’ll probably have 5 A-list bloggers and a big win with a TechCrunch post but, we’ll also make sure we have a couple hundred “additional” posts, creating a reach that goes “long” down the list of influencers and “wide” in the sense that it cuts across lots of territory in the blogosphere.
So, using our team of researchers and tools like Alterian SM2 and eCairn, we identify blogger communities and assess their interests, collect their contact info and their names, and then reach out to all of the bloggers we can find that match your demographic. We tell our researchers that if they can’t find the name and email of the blogger easily within 5 minutes then the blogger probably doesn’t want to be found. We do not let our lists and universes of blogs ever go stale. Even if we already have topic-appropriate universes for a client, we always “refresh” that universe to make sure that we remove all the abandoned blogs and add all the blogs that have, subsequent to the creation of that original universe, come online.
Once we have started collecting the universes — in the case of the HAI Watch campaign it consisted of medical professionals, patient advocates, and those writing about eldercare, as well as people writing specifically about infection and infection prevention –we start working on messaging and putting together and building up the campaign’s social media news release (SMNR).
Since I am an A-list PR and social media blogger myself, the team and I are incessantly on the receiving end of pitch after pitch. From our experience, even top PR companies are sending their pitches to bloggers, as inline email posts or as Word Doc or PDF attachments. Not only are these messages encumbered with attachments but they’re often also heavy with graphics, images, and tracking code.
Our messages consist of a simple, three-paragraph email with one link, to our online SMNR, in the form of a plaintext email. We send it as plaintext, resisting the urge to embed branding or tracking code since the only sign of success when reaching out to blogs is a post or a tweet, and keep it as simple and as short as possible, as you will see below in an example of our email outreach, along with the variables.
Subject: This is International Infection Prevention Week
Hi <<First Name>>
Since this is International Infection Prevention Week, I thought the readers of <<blog name>> would be interested to know that Kimberly-Clark Health Care is on the forefront of protecting patients from Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) and has put together a campaign dedicated to that prevention called HAI Watch: Not on My Watch.
We’ve created a site that has information for both healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers. If you decide to share this with your readers, please use any of the images, logos, videos, etc:
Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to post, I’d really appreciate it if you’d send me the link.
Thank you,
Barbara
–
Barbara Dunn
barbara@haiwatchnews.com
www.haiwatch.com
The email is all about brevity. It is also all about being clear with why we’re emailing and what we want: it is International Infection Prevention Week and we want you to blog about Healthcare Associated Infection prevention. Short and sweet. We need to have them at hello. If they’re interested, they can either hit “reply” and ask questions and do a “Turing” test — to see if we’re awake at the wheel, this happens a lot — or they can click through to http://haiwatchnews.com to see what we’re on about.
If you take a look at the SMNR, you’ll notice that while we never attempt to force feed a specific message to the blogger, we do prepare the copy on the SMNR pre-linked and pre-written in such a way that all a blogger has to do is select, copy, and paste into their blog composition window — and then easily add whatever else it is they want to say about the information. We realize bloggers are busy, so we try not to create any unnecessary hoops they have to jump through. When a PR professional posts their press release inline in the email or as an attachment, getting any photos, logos, images, links, or videos from that email to the blog posts is just more trouble than it’s worth for most bloggers and breaks the 5-minute rule by two or three times — and really tries the commitment of the blogger. [Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1]
Long-Tail Blogger Outreach Campaign Nuts & Bolts
[Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1] Our rationale behind using a long-tail strategy on behalf of our clients is that while A-list bloggers may well be at the top of their power, impact, and influence, we at Abraham Harrison invest in quality blogs and bloggers well before they’ve become so popular and pursued that they’re almost impossible to engage, generally from being busy, overwhelmed and/or well-paid for blogging. We identify bloggers who may have a smaller audience but are authentic and have readers who value their opinions.
This is not to say that we don’t ever do A-list outreach. We do. But oftentimes we start with our long-tail blogger outreach, reaching out to upwards of 2,000 bloggers at a time. When we’re done with the outreach, we’ll probably have 5 A-list bloggers and a big win with a TechCrunch post but, we’ll also make sure we have a couple hundred “additional” posts, creating a reach that goes “long” down the list of influencers and “wide” in the sense that it cuts across lots of territory in the blogosphere.
So, using our team of researchers and tools like Alterian SM2 and eCairn, we identify blogger communities and assess their interests, collect their contact info and their names, and then reach out to all of the bloggers we can find that match your demographic. We tell our researchers that if they can’t find the name and email of the blogger easily within 5 minutes then the blogger probably doesn’t want to be found. We do not let our lists and universes of blogs ever go stale. Even if we already have topic-appropriate universes for a client, we always “refresh” that universe to make sure that we remove all the abandoned blogs and add all the blogs that have, subsequent to the creation of that original universe, come online.
Once we have started collecting the universes — in the case of the HAI Watch campaign it consisted of medical professionals, patient advocates, and those writing about eldercare, as well as people writing specifically about infection and infection prevention –we start working on messaging and putting together and building up the campaign’s social media news release (SMNR).
Since I am an A-list PR and social media blogger myself, the team and I are incessantly on the receiving end of pitch after pitch. From our experience, even top PR companies are sending their pitches to bloggers, as inline email posts or as Word Doc or PDF attachments. Not only are these messages encumbered with attachments but they’re often also heavy with graphics, images, and tracking code.
Our messages consist of a simple, three-paragraph email with one link, to our online SMNR, in the form of a plaintext email. We send it as plaintext, resisting the urge to embed branding or tracking code since the only sign of success when reaching out to blogs is a post or a tweet, and keep it as simple and as short as possible, as you will see below in an example of our email outreach, along with the variables.
Subject: This is International Infection Prevention Week
Hi <<First Name>>
Since this is International Infection Prevention Week, I thought the readers of <<blog name>> would be interested to know that Kimberly-Clark Health Care is on the forefront of protecting patients from Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) and has put together a campaign dedicated to that prevention called HAI Watch: Not on My Watch.
We’ve created a site that has information for both healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers. If you decide to share this with your readers, please use any of the images, logos, videos, etc:
Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to post, I’d really appreciate it if you’d send me the link.
Thank you,
Barbara
–
Barbara Dunn
barbara@haiwatchnews.com
www.haiwatch.com
The email is all about brevity. It is also all about being clear with why we’re emailing and what we want: it is International Infection Prevention Week and we want you to blog about Healthcare Associated Infection prevention. Short and sweet. We need to have them at hello. If they’re interested, they can either hit “reply” and ask questions and do a “Turing” test — to see if we’re awake at the wheel, this happens a lot — or they can click through to http://haiwatchnews.com to see what we’re on about.
If you take a look at the SMNR, you’ll notice that while we never attempt to force feed a specific message to the blogger, we do prepare the copy on the SMNR pre-linked and pre-written in such a way that all a blogger has to do is select, copy, and paste into their blog composition window — and then easily add whatever else it is they want to say about the information. We realize bloggers are busy, so we try not to create any unnecessary hoops they have to jump through. When a PR professional posts their press release inline in the email or as an attachment, getting any photos, logos, images, links, or videos from that email to the blog posts is just more trouble than it’s worth for most bloggers and breaks the 5-minute rule by two or three times — and really tries the commitment of the blogger. [Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1]
Rocking My Saris Single-Bike Trunk-Carrier!
On Far-Right American Demagoguery
- Image by http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67 via CrunchBase
Just received this in my inbox from Seth Godin. On winning. I found the part on demagoguery most compelling:
A demagogue cares so much about winning that he’d rather wreck the system itself than lose. It’s okay, he believes, to root for the failure of the republic or to destroy civility or democracy if it leads to something that could be called a win.
Seth’s post is about winning but it just reminds me how the far right feels like it is just fine to completely trash our peacetime-democratically-elected president and government just to get what they want — to win.
What is winning? Is there a vision? Surely not just returning our country to 1776?
To an orthodoxy that runs on two documents: the Bible and the Constitution, literally read and never interpreted?
Even though our Founding Fathers were enlightenment Masons who were more afraid of an ignorant theocratical America than whatever the right is afraid of.
They’re really not afraid of any of this stuff. They’re more interested at winning. They’re more interested in the win and are more than happy to trash everything, lie through their teeth, and get caught again and again in hypocrisy — conflicting realities — to leverage fear — all FTW!
Social Media Marketing leveraging on Blogger Outreach
[Originally Posted on iStrategy] By now we all know how to start a Facebook Page, dress it, and fill it up with fans. We have sorted out how to grow, engage, and reward your followers on Twitter. It has taken a while, but we’ve all sorted out best practices and transparency when it comes to messaging on forums and reaching out to A-list bloggers. We at Abraham Harrison are there with you; however, it was not giving us the impact we needed for our advocacy and issue-oriented clientele. Reaching out to only the top-25 blogs via a bespoke blogger outreach might result in a real punch – if we really crush it. Sadly, if you limit your outreach to only 25 highly-influential bloggers, even a little failure can be devastating.
In order to maximize impact, we have added massively-targeted long-tail “b-z-list” blogger outreach to our tool set and it has become our bread and butter with over 80% of our active client service work.
What we do, effectively, is take the framework of traditional news release-based PR and adapt it completely to the unique culture of the Internet. In short, we have learned to treat thousands of bloggers with as much attention and responsiveness as most PR shops reserve for only national magazines, newspapers, blogs, radio, and television stations.
Before we begin any messaging, we quickly work with the client to get an idea of who they want to reach. All recipients must be bloggers and possess their own platform for citizen journalism. We don’t do direct marketing, we do PR. We only engage people who can repeat or carry our client’s message. We come up with a fantasy list of bloggers our client would like to reach. Some are fantasy and some exist. Our researchers will generally come up with a list of 5,000 blogs and then hunker down to discover their name and email. I am a computer geek originally so I know how to find the names and emails of bloggers; however, we have discovered that if you dig too deep to find someone’s email, such as into historical Whois records, then bloggers get pissed. If my team can’t find the person’s contact info in 5 minutes then they don’t really want to be contacted. Things move a lot smoother when there is awareness. By the time we collect all the contact info, we’ve generally winnowed the 5k to about 2,000.
We spend a lot of time, generally and per-campaign, breaking down what the client wants from a blogger outreach (buzz, traffic, sales, registrations, memberships, fund raising, etc) and what they have to give (books to review, information, exclusive content, lots of love, good-karma, or just content – a gift most certainly should never be an Amazon gift certificate).
After we sort this out, we then develop the message model that will eventually become an email. We ask our clients for any and all assets they have to share – video, copy, text, chapters, audio, images, photos, news – and roll them all into a Social Media News Release.
Here’s the genius part. Have you ever received a pitch from a PR shop? Isn’t there always some generally lame salutation like “Hello fellow blogger,” or “Dear Abraham” or “Dear new media blogger?” Lame. Also, isn’t there always either an attachment or an inline rich text press release? How is a blogger going to copy that image and that copy with those links over to their blog? It doesn’t work like that. And, why all the inline graphics and the tracking code in the email? They almost always get the email spam-boxed.
What we do is strip it all down to a simple email, all plain text, no tracking code, with a first name and the name of the blog in the email. We don’t attach anything, we place one link as a URL, to an SMNR, and that’s it. We tell the blogger exactly who we are, what we have to give, and explicitly what we want. If the email message plus the SMNR takes longer than 5-minutes to get through and post about, then we’ve failed. Maybe we’ll get a tweet, but a blogger doesn’t have ten to twenty minutes for posting for us for free, right? Longer than 5, at best a tweet or maybe something on Facebook. The money’s in the blog post and that’s what you want because most bloggers automatically cross-post to Twitter and Facebook anyway.
Here’s another trick. If a blogger receives an email and hits reply, he or she gets a reply from one of our staff within the hour. Too many PR shops work 9-6 and aren’t there in the INBOX. If a blogger’s pissed off, he’ll be more pissed by morning. We’re 24/7 and virtual. We’ll also never be snarky – never be snarky! Also, if a blogger wants to be removed, we remove them immediately. Sometimes for just that campaign but mostly forever, banished into our mailer, where we have a permanent “no fly” list, making it impossible to email them even if they make it onto the email list.
Finally, we always reach out twice more to bloggers who don’t reply at all. Two follow-up emails. The second email outreach always garners the most posts. If we receive 200 earned media mentions (blog posts) during the course of the campaign, we’ll get 50 posts from the first outreach, 100 from the second, and maybe another 50 from the last. By the second email, folks recognize our email and take a little more time to look through it.
It is essential to our success to make sure we treat every single blogger with as much time, attention, kindness generally – and wrongfully – reserved for mainstream media and celebrity blogs and bloggers.
And it works, too. In the last 12-months we have helped the Fresh Air Fund earn 1,800 blog and social media mentions. 269 media mentions for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day, 109 for Survivor Corps’s Operation Survivor, 190 for International Medical Corp’ 2009 Member’s Project bid, 173 for Snuggle Crème, 294 for US Olympic Committee, 401 for BrandsClub, 295 for Kimberly Clark Healthcare HAI Watch, 180 for the MLK Memorial Foundation, 83 for Motionbox, and others… Now, that’s a lot of punch, both in terms of volume, buzz, coverage, to say nothing of the powerful SEO impact of having hundreds of blogs linking to your clients’ sites. Imagine that!
While long tail blogger outreach is a very powerful method on its own, if you’re able to make part of a larger, integrated, social media marketing campaign to include Facebook, Twitter, celebrity blogs, message boards, forums, a wiki strategy, a reputation management campaign and a crisis plan, you’re golden. [Originally Posted on iStrategy]
Gowalla FAIL
I was at a conference this past Friday and became friendly with a number of different folks who use social media tools I had never tried before.
One had posted something onto Facebook using Gowalla – a tool similar to Four Square. I recently started using Four Square and have found it to be quite addicting so I thought I would give Gowalla a shot.
After signing up for the service I was offered to find which of my current friends were already using Gowalla by entering my gmail/password. Big mistake. I just wrote this email to the developers/help of Gowalla and have yet to hear back:
Gowalla,
I was thinking about trying a Gowalla account after I saw a friend post from Gowalla onto Facebook. I signed up for an account and without my authorization, Gowalla SPAMMED my entire gmail address book with a message “I’m putting together a collection of photos where I’ve been. Check it out.” I cannot tell you how much this infuriates me.
I was simply following the instructions to see which of my contacts already had an account and without my OK, my 200-300+ contacts were spammed. This is a horrible business practice. I know you are a relatively new company trying to get more users, but this is a terrible and sneaky way to do it.
I am going to blog on a few different sites about this and urge anyone thinking about joining Gowalla to forget about it. Whoever programmed that feature into your new members should be fired.
At the very least it should be an opt in to message your contacts. I never write to companies, but this really ticked me off and I want you to know about it.
As you can see I was not happy. If you were thinking about trying this service, I would advise against it.
iPhone 4 Video Calls Awesome But Still Proprietary
(Originally a comment over on Make the Logo Bigger) Love the commercial and if anyone can make mobile video conferencing work, it is Apple. The reason why it has not worked yet is because these systems are all proprietary. My Nokia N95 is set up for video calls; however, nobody else has a video phone like my N95 and also the stupid networks I were on didn’t support it either… so, it isn’t going to really happen until there is a platform agnostic tool — such as QIK — that will allow many many mobile platforms/phones/etc to work with it and allow everybody — not just N95 or iPhone 4 users.
What Does Beth Kanter Mean by "Free Agent?"
I spent last Friday at Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference in DC and had an amazing time. There, I got to spend some time with Beth Kanter. She just co-authored a book called The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change with Allison Fine. Well, since Beth Kanter needs to be translated, I asked Martin Oetting what “free agents” meant, really, and why that term is any different than influencers and influentials (I have not yet read the book). Well, Martin wrote me an amazing explanation that I will share here in full, with Martin’s permission:
Okay, my take on this is that here, the focus is not so much on the degree of influence that a person has. This whole debate is organizational. It introduces hierarchical old-school organizations to the idea that individuals can also make things happen because they are highly networked. It’s a way of framing things to teach old school organisations that they now need to reckon with individuals who can become powerful because they know how to wield the social web.
These organizations often still think that they are the only way to effect change in society, by being hierarchical and huge, and that they do not need to pay much attention to the networked way of organizing, simply because they are powerful. Explaining the free agent means explaining that networks created by individuals — in a short time! — are also becoming powerful models of a more decentralized type of organization. Power is moving away from being dependent on size, towards being dependent on a capability to network.
I think such a free agent is influential in both “available ways”. As far as I can see, opinion leadership / being influential can depend on two qualities – the quality of knowledge, or the quality of connectedness/networking ability. Some people are influential because they know an awful lot about a certain subject, and people trust them for it. These are the traditional opinion leaders — trusted sources with regard to a particular subject. The computer geek who gives advice on PCs, the car enthusiast who always tells people which car to buy. Online, they exist in all shapes and sizes, in forums, on blogs, etc. The other type of influence is not based on what you know, but on whom you know. These are what Emanuel Rosen calls hubs (Gladwell calls them connectors), i.e. people who are all about making connections with people, introducing, linking, etc. The influence comes from the “social side”, not so much from the “content side”.
Now of course, you can combine the two. And you can add the Social Web to someone who knows about stuff AND who knows how to network with people, and that person can become very influential. Scoble, etc.
But the term “free agents” suggests to me, again, that this is not so much about influence, but rather about the power of the individual. It’s a way of saying “social web” without using the term. A free agent is just one person. By calling that person free agent, they are making a statement that says “This one person can act and effect change, and you better reckon with them,” without saying yet what type of influential the person is. Most likely, it’s someone who knows both a subject and who can connect people.
What do you think? In response to this amazing, I replied:
I think The Networked Nonprofit IS a new version of nonprofit Cluetrain… “Why don’t I do it myself, why do I need your organizational oomph when I don’t believe you spend enough money on helping and too much money on admin,” right?
And Martin replied, “Exactly! That’s totally it.”
See Beth, Martin Oetting was Moses to your burning bush that is not consumed! Did we get it right?
