(Originally posted on Agencyside: Case Study: How to Do Long-Tail Blogger Outreach)
Digital PR in the form of blogger outreach still tends to focus all of its resources on identifying and engaging the top-25 influential bloggers in any particular vertical, searching for the tippy-top top-influencers. Out of those 25 identified bloggers, maybe 3 will end up posting over the course of a campaign — 5, if you’re lucky. While we do recognize the influence and impact of a post on TechCrunch or another top blog, we have developed another strategy that allows us to collect every blogger who has ever had a thematic interest in what our customer is offering, collect them into a universe, and then reach out to each and every one of them. In the case of the “Not on My Watch” public affairs/health campaign, the total list of bloggers hovered around 5,000.
In late 2009, Abraham Harrison was contacted by the client in hopes that we could elevate brand awareness that Kimberly-Clark Health Care had joined the fight against healthcare-associated infection. Since KCHC produces medical products and services that can protect doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors, Kimberly-Clark really wanted to get their brand out there. They wanted to increase visits to the site, as well as more generally raise awareness of their role in helping healthcare professionals and patients prevent the spread of healthcare-associated infection. Before we began our campaign, the client had already been running online contextual ads, driving traffic to www.haiwatch.com, as well as cross-promoting the HAIWatch.com site on the main KCHC site and also the associate HAIBus.com site — a tour bus driving around America, from hospital to hospital, offering continuing education classes on Healthcare-Associated Infection prevention.
In October 2009, Abraham Harrison began a five-month blogger outreach campaign on behalf of Kimberly-Clark Health Care. Over 5,000 healthcare and related-issues bloggers were eventually contacted and asked for their help to spread the word about the “Not on My Watch” site and the valuable resources it offered both patients and healthcare professionals. Through our campaigns, Kimberly-Clark achieved 269 earned media mentions between October 2009 and February 2010 and traffic to client’s site doubled. We estimate that our campaign resulted in 8 million impressions.
How did Abraham Harrison accomplish this? We leveraged the influence of the long-tail.
Abraham Harrison identified blogger communities, assessed their interests, crafted appropriate message models, and developed a social media news release. The bloggers were approached in groups spread across five months, with personal and immediate responses sent to every single reply to our initial outgoing message. Continual follow-up combined with timely and friendly responsiveness to requests for additional information ensured that coverage was achieved across a wide swath of the healthcare-related blogosphere.
Next week agencyside will post the next in this series: Blogger Outreach Campaign Nuts & Bolts – Research and Message Development.
Chris Abraham is President of Abraham Harrison LLC. Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and reputation management. You can connect with Chris on Twitter by following @chrisabraham. (Originally posted on Agencyside: Case Study: How to Do Long-Tail Blogger Outreach)
