What Do You Do When They Throw You A Curve Ball?

by nina on February 3, 2012 · 1 comment

It is an undeniable fact that everyone has started to take notice of the powerful impact that a well targeted blogger outreach campaign can have on a product.

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/c-foto/c-foto1009/c-foto100900057/7846780-a-sweet-teddy-bear-is-sitting-on-a-white-background-holding-a-red-rose-flower-and-a-red-heart.jpgPR shops tailored specifically at reaching bloggers are popping up all over the place, and why shouldn’t they? There are millions of bloggers and even more blog readers. It would be a tragedy to leave these influencers untapped.In my position at Abraham Harrison

I am fortunate enough to serve as a bit of a gate-keeper in regards to the various pitches that come in for Chris Abraham.

Since we are in the industry of blogger outreach, and have been for 5 years now, I find these pitches to be quite interesting (even if they aren’t necessarily pitches that are applicable to Chris).

I like to look at the layout of the pitch. Are they tracking the email? Do they include links? Where are they linking to? Is there a social media news release? How easy are they making it for bloggers to post about their product?

Now I have a confession to make. On occasion, I like to take this curiosity one step further (I view it as scoping out the competition) and well, I like to respond. But not with your typical responses of “Great, I’ll make sure Chris sees this!” or “Thank you, but no, this isn’t a fit”. I like to throw them curve balls.

Most recently Chris received a timely pitch for a Facebook app called The Mural of Love (here, I will even throw y’all a bone and provide the link he was sent http://apps.facebook.com/themural).

What caught my attention was this email was a follow up email to an earlier sent message that I had merely chosen to ignore. I admired their persistence, it is something we incorporate into our campaigns as well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

So, I read the pitch and clicked the link.

Side note: to access the application I had to grant permission to my Facebook page, that is where I declined and lost interest altogether. I find whenever I do that, “I” end up posting on ex-boyfriend’s walls, or inviting my 75-year old Nana to play “Drug Wars” with me, completely without my knowledge or endorsement. Had I been provided with a Social Media News Release and more information before having to allow access perhaps I would have continued. I digress, back to the story.

Now, if any of you know anything about Chris you know this…While he may be a hopeless romantic/social media guru, the odds of him combining these two things and paying to send virtual teddy bears, flowers, and chocolates to his potential suitors’ Facebook pages are pretty slim. At his age, and this point in his seasoned love life, I truly hope he has advanced past this type of digital flirtation. For goodness sakes, he is a Forbes Top 50 Most Powerful Social Media Influencer, he can’t just be posting teddy bears all over the place!

Curiosity killed the cat and I had to email back. I said….

“Thank you, XXXXXX, but Chris is a middle aged bachelor so I am not sure that this app has much relevance to him.

I do admire your persistence, the brevity of your message model, and as a fellow practitioner I have some suggestions. I really think you all could benefit from incorporating social media news releases into your pitches.

When you are “cold emailing” and asking someone to click on a link and grant access to their Facebook wall more information prior to making that request would be beneficial. We do social media news releases for all of our clients. They not only make it easier for bloggers to post, but they also provide any and all information available for the blogger to research.

So they can rest assured that this is a legitimate pitch, offer, product, etc. I would love to hop on a call with you and/or your CEO and talk a little bit further about SMNR’s and how we might be able to help you offer them for your clients.”

What response do you think I got back?

………….radio silence……………

Which resulted in what? Me writing this post as a precautionary tale of how you need to have a contingency plan for all kinds of responses.

Bloggers are an eclectic, cheeky, and brutally honest bunch. You can’t just fire and forget because you don’t like the response you get back, or it is something out of the ordinary.

The out of the ordinary responses are the ones you have to be the most careful with!

[click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Drop magical thinking PR for social media science

by Chris Abraham on February 2, 2012 · 0 comments

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/Communism/einstein-communist2.jpgWhile neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing and retesting and being willing to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources elsewhere

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Choosing Content for Your Video Marketing Strategy

by speters on February 1, 2012 · 1 comment

Bloggers, site managers, and SEO specialists are always looking for new ways to boost traffic to their page and exposure for their business. They use social media platforms to market their website, they utilize backlinks and interactive features to maximize views and click-throughs, and they try to increase conversion rate with live chat software. Now, many of these people are looking to an old medium as the next frontier for online marketing and SEO: video. [click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

President Chris Abraham in Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers

by Jenna Levy on January 29, 2012 · 0 comments

…And he gets double credit for being 33, my favorite number. The man, the myth, the legend has done it again. Abraham Harrison President Chris Abraham made the cut this week as one of Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers. Way to go! He’s in great company alongside Chris Brogan, President of Human Works and Gary Vaynerchuk– wine and video king. The list was compiled using PeekYou’s social pull metrics, a handy tool measuring the number of people in your secondary networks. Check out the whole list and let us know who else you think you have made the cut.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta


{ 0 comments }

The anachronistic social media agoraphobic

by Chris Abraham on January 26, 2012 · 0 comments

http://d28v4r73i3n9fh.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/red-velvet-rope-policy-300x212.jpgTo follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia. And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →