Social Media Marketing leveraging on Blogger Outreach

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.