My long tail blogger outreach strategy is periodically challenged or criticized as being too aggressive.

The argument generally goes as follows: If you send thousands of email pitches to topically and demographically relevant bloggers and online influencers in one go, you’re spamming. The real way to do it right is to reach out blogger by blogger, with each pitch being lovingly and relevantly written in series over time after investing months of time, previous to actually initiating a pitch, becoming best friends.

In my opinion, it is virtually impossible to resource enough time, talent and treasure to engage meaningfully with enough people, enough influencers, enough bloggers, to result in the sort of impact required to move the needle with any level of immediacy or timeliness.

To activate every single potentially viable blog and blogger, it’s essential to create efficiencies of engagement, especially when your goal is to pitch further down the long tail of influentials than is practically possible by hand.

Identify accessible & relevant bloggers who are open to a pitch

So, what my version of long-tail blogger outreach does is identifies as many bloggers as possible who are accessible by email and who have a blog germane to the campaign at hand and sends them a quick pitch all at once to quickly discover who is truly interested posting about my client or learning more about what the campaign is about. All at once. 100% discovery, discernment, inquiry, engagement, and response, all within days of the launch of the campaign. With the ultimate goal of as many quality, thoughtful, and topical earned media mentions as possible.

Look for the cumulative power of the long tail

It reminds me of the promise quantum computing has for the world of encryption and code breaking. The best example I can think of that illustrates this is the code-breaking efficiencies of the quantum computer compared to the a brute force attack from a conventional computer.

While even the most advanced computing systems still take millions of years to crack military grade public-key encryption, the promise of the quantum computer is that it will crack even the most inscrutable private diplomatic cable instantaneously no matter the rock hardness of military-grade encryption used.

Why? Because while a conventional computer must iterate through every possible variation in series until it hits upon the correct permutation, a quantum computer uses a theoretical concept called superposition to spawn every permutation of the private key simultaneously. The funny thing about quantum states is that all iterations, no matter how many required to break the sort of key modern spies use, are not separate or different, they’re all manifestations of one over millions of instances. When the correct password is discovered, all the failed instances fall away and only the successful instance remains.

So, let me break this down to a popular illustration: a Las Vegas hotel with thousands of rooms. One missing engagement ring. Traditional computers needs to check each room individually. A quantum search isn’t just hiring a thousand gamblers to each look in a room individually instantaneously, it’s much cooler than that. In this instance, this quantum bridegroom would create a thousand instances of himself, all him and not copies or clones, in a thousand rooms all at once. Cool, right? When our quantum bridegroom discovers the ring, in one of the thousand rooms, all other concurrent manifestations of him go poof and he stands in room number 1063, holding the ring.

In my experience, one of the reasons why folks are loathe to engage in blogger outreach is because it is a little like going door to door looking for the ring. Or, more aptly, going door to door selling Bibles, vacuums, or Girl Scout cookies. No matter how many salesmen (or Girl Scouts) you have knocking on doors, it’s nothing compared to creating a Girl Scout in quantum superposition, allowing her to sell Thin Mints to all possible houses in the entire neighborhood simultaneously by being in all possible states simultaneously, selling cookies to all the houses that want cookies while not selling cookies to all the carb-free households.

The quantum method of reaching out to bloggers

So, pitching all available bloggers simultaneously allows one to quickly — immediately — discern which bloggers are interesting in carrying the story and which aren’t, allowing my team to decommission all unsuccessful instances, releasing valuable resources, in favor of all instances that result in bona fide social media mentions.

This is not to say this sort of quantum blogger outreach is easy. While there are many efficiencies in this method, the huge number of bloggers one is able to simultaneously engage means that instead of reaching out to a couple-few A-list bloggers-a-day over the course of the year, you are likely to get thousands of responses from bloggers with hundreds of earned social media mentions, none of which can benefit from my mad quantum methods of engagement. Once the connection is made and the relationship is initiated, every next step of the way is completely conventional, completely in-series, person by person, blogger by blogger, conversion by conversion.

Reaching out en masse to thousands of bloggers simultaneously isn’t appropriate for all campaigns or all engagements — bespoke A-list outreach still has a real place in social media and blogger relations — but it can be an essential competitive advantage when launching a book or opening a new movie; activating advocates and allies on a political issue, or to push out information about an event or time-sensitive news. In these scenarios, one cannot invest months and months culling through a media list, failure-by-failure, hoping for success. One needs to quickly separate the chaff from the wheat and then lavish all the resources that would have been spent on all those failures on all that wheat, all those successes.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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It’s always a tough question: would you rather be the smallest fish in a big pond or the biggest fish in a small pond? Would you prefer to be the ugliest pretty person or the prettiest ugly person? Would you prefer to have the lowest IQ at MIT or the highest IQ at State?

This is all according to your preference, but when it comes to a blogger outreach campaign, the decision is never so zero-sum, not nearly so either/or. You can always do both, right? You can always secure hundreds of long-tail earned media mentions while you’re desperately working on securing coverage on Mashable and TechCrunch. You can lock in hundreds of posts short term while you’re wining and dining Pete Cashmore in Manhattan to make sure you become BFFs, so that you’ll have that inside track on getting column inches for your future newsworthy announcements.

However, in the meanwhile, getting those hundreds of posts on B-list-through-Z-list blogs ensures that you start building your reputation as a player. Consider this your bush league experience. Like doing your time in the small clubs. Paying your dues. In fact, most journalists and A-list bloggers glean their story ideas from the blogs they reach, from their influencers, blogs and bloggers who may well be less popular but are still highly influential.

Do you have the sort of news, offerings, and quality of content that can compete with the big players? Do you have the kind of prior relationships with the top bloggers and journalists or do they not know you from Adam?

This is not only about blogger ego and their desire to be treated like demigods by multinational agencies and their billion dollar consumer electronics clients–though that doesn’t hurt–it also has to do with the prestige of the blog’s content as well as the aspiration of what the blog and the blogger wants to become.

Where do you fit on that? You need to be realistic. You need to judge fairly where you are in the competition. Do you have the time, the resources, the reputation, the newsworthiness, the novelty, or the prior relationship to make it into TechCrunch? If not, that’s OK. There is no reason to fight over the top 25 blogs of your industry or the top 100 blogs in general, because there may be over one billion blogs worldwide, which equates to one out of every six people in the world.

Realistically, unless you’re the quarterback of your high school football team, you’re being unrealistic if you limit your options for prom to just the captain of the cheerleaders. There are so many appealing dates for prom everywhere in school. If you’re only applying to Harvard and Yale, you had better also be not only at the top of your class but also a legacy, score a perfect score on your SAT, letter on a sport, and have a well-developed set of extracurricular activities.

Work toward Prom King and an incoming freshman spot at Harvard College, but plan also on going to prom with someone and to college at all. Aim high but have a plan B and C. Remember, also, that being the best lover with the best prom date you get can always results in better dates in the future and being the best student in the college you are accepted to can always result in getting to Harvard as a transfer or in graduate school later.

Focus on being a big fish in a small pond. As you are working to succeed at that, you’ll naturally graduate to the A-list if you have the goods. But if you shoot for the A-list pond exclusively, and you don’t make the cut, you won’t have done anything to win with the B-list.

Start small and grow to make blogger outreach work for you.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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Over the last five years that Abraham Harrison has been pitching bloggers on behalf of clients, we have learned a thing or two about how best to reach bloggers, how to engage them, how to get them to carry our client’s message to their readership. Whether we’re doing an outreach to the bloggers of mainstream media and celebrity blogs or to someone who has just set up a blog for the first time, it all begins with the message model.

Below is an example of a message model we developed for Miriam’s Kitchen for National Homelessness Month. We didn’t use it because we focused on Give to the Max Day instead, but I think it is an example of our best work and I’ll put it aside and we’ll use it next year for sure. I will share the entire email pitch in total below but then I will go through a line-by-line explanation as to what we did and why we did it:

From: Chris Abraham <cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org>
Subject: November is National Homelessness Month

Hi <<First Name>>

November is National Homelessness Month and I’m reaching out to you to discuss the issue of homelessness in America. I’m also hoping that you’ll discuss this issue with the readers of <<Blog Name>>. I am a volunteer at a small kitchen for the homeless in DC and while working there it occurred to me that this issue affects every town, village, and city in America.

I have put together a microsite that puts the issue of homelessness in perspective and also uses Miriam’s Kitchen, the kitchen where I volunteer, as a model for addressing homelessness and untreated mental illness in the US capital city. There are a multitude of news, facts, videos, photos, and banners so please feel free to repost any of it:

www.miriamskitchennews.org

If you are able to post about this issue in any form, it would really help spread the message of homelessness in its many diverse forms and maybe suggest ways to help improve many lives. Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to help. Thank you so much.

Chris

–
Chris Abraham,
On behalf of Miriam’s Kitchen
www.miriamskitchen.org

OK, now I will go into more detail, section by section …

From: Chris Abraham <cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org>

The first thing you’ll notice is that I am doing the outreach in this example. Though not the norm, I personally volunteer and donate to Miriam’s Kitchen and people know that, so I decided to reach out as me because that’s the most authentic relationship. In other cases, the names of Abraham Harrison team members fit the bill. The next thing you’ll notice is that the email doesn’t come from either miriamskitchen.org or chrisabraham.com domains. Instead, we virtually always reserve a completely new and unique domain name for each campaign, in this case miriamskitchennews.org. Why? Three reasons:

1. Clients protect their domains. Most companies and organizations have very restrictive IT policies that limit the use of their domain and the allocation of email addresses. This makes it almost impossible to place social media news release content on their site, so we reserve our own because it gets around any of those issues.
2. Bloggers don’t trust PR firms. We prefer to reach out to bloggers as the client instead of as Abraham Harrison on behalf of our clients. Why? Not to be deceptive but because a strong majority of all the bloggers we reach out to are not trained in public relations processes and don’t generally feel comfortable being communicated to via a broker, so we always try to communicate as clearly and as simply as possible, so choosing something in-between the two is best, in this case cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org.
3. Spam detectors are always a risk. Because we reach out cold to upwards of five-thousand bloggers at a time, it is essential that we don’t put ever put mission-critical domain names in jeopardy of being black-listed as spam or being taken away by a fickle registrar such as GoDaddy.com. While we’re exceedingly careful when we target and how we engage each blogger, it is amazing how few email recipients need to report a single email as unwanted before the gray-bearded email wizards can ban and block an entire domain from being deliverable–we never want to put ourselves or our clients in that precarious position. While this has never actually happened to us or our clients, we have felt enough saber-rattling and there have been enough shots over our bow that we make sure we never put anyone into a defensive position. Ultimately, protecting our clients’ brands as well as our own is of top priority.

Let’s move on to the all-important subject line.

Subject: November is National Homelessness Month

The first, and sometimes only, thing a blogger sees when she receives our email pitch is the email subject line and the sender. Choosing a title is super-hard because we want to be as neutral and as informational as possible. Teasing or tricking a blogger into opening by being cute, mysterious, or clever in the subject line has almost always blown up in our faces. The simpler the better, especially when you realize that we follow up a couple times after the first outreach–something I will go into more in a future post. But first, the salutation.

Hi <<First Name>>

When we research bloggers to pitch, we always do our very best to discover the full name of the blog, the first name of the blogger, and the best address possible. We also make sure the name is correct because it isn’t always clear. I can’t tell you how many pitches my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, and my corporate blog, Marketing Conversation, get from marketers who address us wrong, mostly as Abraham. “Dear Abraham.” Those go straight into the trash. Next, our mailer, nicknamed “The Cloud,” has a mail merge feature, allowing us to personalize our email a little bit, within reason, and appropriately.

What’s behind that first paragraph?

November is National Homelessness Month and I’m reaching out to you to discuss the issue of homelessness in America. I’m also hoping that you’ll discuss this issue with the readers of <<Blog Name>>. I am a volunteer at a small kitchen for the homeless in DC and while working there it occurred to me that this issue affects every town, village, and city in America.

The most important thing is to make sure the first paragraph of every pitch is simple, clear, concise, and immediately addresses why you’re emailing. Yes, answer who, what, when, where, why, and how–but in very short order, so get to it! Who? Miriam’s Kitchen. What? Homelessness in America, an issue that affects every town, village, and city in America. When? November. Where? On your blog. Why? To share the issue with your readers How? Posting to your blog. I added the last sentence to proactively address why I was the person to be writing at all–because I am personally invested and this is meaningful to me, for real.

I am lucky enough to have Dan Krueger and Phillip Rhoades on my team. They’re both excellent BS detectors and masters of minimalism. For a pitch like this, Dan or I generally create a first draft. Then, the other two of us go through the draft line-by-line. As if it were poetry. We cut to the bone. This process is a direct result of three things:

One, you only have a blogger for a few seconds–if she opens it at all–so you must cut to the chase.

Two, we have all received enough pitches ourselves to know who does and doesn’t read our blogs, so the entire “I am a real fan of your blog and have been reading you a long time” are generally lies. So, after you write your first draft, cut out all the inauthentic praise. Truth be told, if your targeting is good and you have a great offer and are clear as to what you want, you’re effectively doing the blogger the favor of providing good content that they can easily and quickly pop onto her blog–and you really don’t need to flatter. I am not saying that you should be short, rude, or curt, but surely be very clear as to who you are, what you are, what you want, and what you need.

Yes, I do volunteer at Miriam’s–many times-a-month. If I didn’t–or if I sent the email out as someone else in the company, an online analyst, and that person hadn’t ever graced Miriam’s, I would never make that up. Everything in the email must be honest and true. This isn’t a con job, this isn’t a cheesy 11pm pick up, this is the sharing of relevant information–don’t feel like you have to sell to someone or fool someone to cover you. Also, be very careful about playing the heart strings too loudly when you’re doing an outreach on behalf of a charity. To be honest, the less said the better–allow the blogger to come up with her own conclusions–you really don’t have to tell the blogger what to think. Not only isn’t that necessary but it can be downright insulting to bloggers, who are by their very nature free spirits.

Now, on to the meat of the pitch.

I have put together a microsite that puts the issue of homelessness in perspective and also uses Miriam’s Kitchen, the kitchen where I volunteer, as a model for addressing homelessness and untreated mental illness in the US capital city. There are a multitude of news, facts, videos, photos, and banners so please feel free to repost any of it:

www.miriamskitchennews.org

One of the results of making the email pitch so efficient and tight is that there’s a lot left behind. Most folks who pitch to bloggers still include the kitchen sink in their email pitches: PDF or MS Word attachments are still very common. The majority paste their rich-text traditional press release inline in the email, along with inline images, logos, and graphics. We refuse for three reasons.

1. Our email pitches are all about starting a conversation. We’re more interested in getting an email reply that we can respond to than we are in firing and forgetting.
2. We always send plain text emails. We do not include anything that might result in spam-boxing. We don’t even include any “http://” prefixes in our links, assuming that the webmail or email client will activate the link when the blogger opens up their email and views the content.
3. We don’t take the blogger’s interest in our pitch for granted. The email, to me, is a speed date. We don’t want to waste anybody’s time or good will, so we allow the blogger to decide whether she wants to go on a second date. We like it best when the chemistry is so intense that our client and the blogger drive to Vegas immediately and get hitched–by which I mean we reach out, the blogger immediately likes our pitch, immediately posting to their blog as well as Facebook and Twitter–but we don’t want to assume any of that. We like to play it cool because a heavy sell never works, especially in an earned-media PR campaign.

On to the end of the email:

If you are able to post about this issue in any form, it would really help spread the message of homelessness in its many diverse forms and maybe suggest ways to help improve many lives. Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to help. Thank you so much.

Chris

As I said before, being clear as to why we’re writing is essential. Being clear what you want and what you expect is essential, too. Too many pitches I receive simply share their message but are never bold, brave, or courageous enough to make an ask: please post it anywhere, anyhow, to help spread the message of homelessness in America.

The most essential thing, however, is that this is really just a speed date. If we pass muster but the blogger just isn’t sure who we are or why I am emailing her, we need to be painfully clear that this email is not a fire-and-forget. That this email is the beginning of a connection and that simply hitting reply will result in swift answers. Also, accountability. We end just about every email with a direct request to the blogger to please let us know if she ends up helping and sharing–and that we’re appreciative either way. At the very least because she’s spent some of her time opening and reading our email.

Finally, the signature.

–
Chris Abraham,
On behalf of Miriam’s Kitchen
www.miriamskitchen.org

If you’ll notice, we don’t misrepresent ourselves–or myself–as being on the staff of Miriam’s Kitchen; however, we also don’t want to confuse the purity of the message by bringing a second brand into the brief message model, such as would be the case if I included Abraham Harrison LLC in the signature. So, we chose to split the middle.

What you’re thinking right now is “how in the heck could you blog so much about such a short email?” Well, it is because we spend a lot of time, many revisions, and three or more staff cutting, editing, re-ordering, and BS-detecting each message model. We’re very intentional, very formulaic, and also very careful. We don’t want to tell bloggers what to think. We don’t want to put words in their mouths, and we surely don’t want to alienate a blogger because we color the copy in such a way that they reject our pitch based on style instead of content and mission.

It is like a first date, especially for a man like me: it is more important for me to remember to be a good listener and not to spend the entire meal making it all about me. The longer my message model and email pitch is the more likely the blogger will feel like I might have sent them an email in error. I want each email pitch to be as neutral and factual as possible. All dogma, passion, color, interpretation, and story should be provided by the blogger–and don’t forget that everything that you cut out of the email message model can possibly find a happy home in your Social Media News Release.

While the email might seem very casual and conversational, winging it is not an option when you’re officially reaching out on behalf of your brand. This is doubly so when you’re reaching out on behalf of a client. The message model is a getting-to-know-you process and not simply a product. Before I explain what goes into an email blogger pitch, I need to explain this process and the philosophy that we have developed through trial and error since the Fall of 2006.

Being completely familiar with the client, the brand, the product, and the services, before moving forward with the pitch is essential. Anything we don’t use in our message model and email pitch we aggregate it into a social media, multimedia, social media profiles, news release.

This process of collecting all of the client’s assets and collateral material, including videos, photos, ads, bios, history, background, context, interviews, case studies, testimonials, and media mentions, help us then decide if there are any missing pieces that we need to request from the client or create ourselves.

Then we can interview the client to discuss what the subject of the pitch should be, what the ask is, and then which blogs and bloggers should be included–or excluded–and who to exclude is often more important than who to bring into the pitch.

My next blog post will focus on what I am all sure you’re curious about: the social media news release (SMNR), that “kitchen sink” catch-all supporting document that provides all the details, content, media, images, and greater story that has been pruned from the initial pitch but surely deserves being told.

A future post will be about the value of following up a couple times with any bloggers who don’t reply or post. We have evolved a process that does not email just once but also sends two follow-up emails to those bloggers who don’t reply at all. Funny thing is, we get only 25% of all posts from the first email. We get 50% of all our total earned media posts from the first follow-up email and another 25% from the final outreach, so I really want to go into the why and how of that–and how we handle something that might very well be scary to some of you and and might feel like we’re being a pest to others–and I will address all of those fears and perceptions.

Please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments you might have on your mind after reading this blog post and I will do my best to respond.

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Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

We’re proud to share the testimonial that Jenn Roccanti, Assistant Director of Development at Miriam’s Kitchen wrote for us after Abraham Harrison helped them promote their participation in Give to the Max Day: Greater Washington on November 9th.

We are so grateful for the commitment Abraham Harrison has made to helping us end chronic homelessness in Washington, DC. Their commitment has been shown in many ways, and the most recent example is their pro-bono work on our behalf for Give to the Max Day in November 2011.

They created a clear, succinct Give to the Max Day social media news release that was shown to more than 1,100 bloggers in the DC area. From that outreach, many bloggers joined the conversation about ending chronic homelessness by publicizing Miriam’s Kitchen’s participation in Give to the Max Day.

Abraham Harrison was a key factor in our ability to raise money to end chronic homelessness in Washington, DC on Give to the Max Day. For that (and the many other amazing things they’ve done for us), we are forever grateful to have them working on our behalf.

I am committed to the mission of Miriam’s Kitchen which is ending chronic homelessness in Washington, DC. While I volunteer as sous chef and dining room captain several times-a-month, this is the first opportunity that Abraham Harrison has gotten to work with Miriam’s. Via Marketing Conversation via Abraham Harrison

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When it comes to your direct mail campaigns, you’ve probably over-farmed your land.

You’ve been emailing and snail mailing the same donors you have done for a decade. It is time to leave the land fallow and let the lists rest. You have probably responded to lower donations and attention by relinquishing too much power to your direct marketing firm and they have been much more aggressive than you’re comfortable with, sending out many more snail mail and email donation requests than ever before. You used to blame the economy for decreased giving but you’re starting to believe it has more to do with the fertility of the donor list than it does with the economic collapse of 2008–or a lot less than you’ve been led to believe. You realize that the nonprofit space is ever more competitive, but your brand is strong and respected and comes up well in Charity Navigator, so what gives?

Well, in agriculture, it is possible to over-farm your land. Indeed, it is probable, in a couple ways:

Ultimately, you need to do one or more of a couple things: allow the land to rest, either ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially, though this is impossible if you’re tending only one plot of land; enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides with the expectation that you will be able to increase your yield; rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil that has been depleted by your main crop, naturally returning your field to a cycle of fertility; or you can expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land, reaching into a greater diversity of quality of land, essentially hedging your bets over land of varying quality, durability, fertility, and health, resulting in a more consistent crop that is less dependent on any particular geographic focal point.

What this means to fundraising messaging is that you can no longer beat the same drums and rally the same troops. Not only is the economy in the sort of slump that is putting 100-year-old charities into seizure but there is less barrier to starting a charity or foundation, there is less trust that a charity will deliver the goods to the issues they purport to support, and then there is the Internet, allowing anyone to initiate a financial call-to-action on their own, completely by-passing traditional charities. So, while there used to be a very strong field from which to harvest donations, each crop results in a much lower yield. Deafness to your message because of over-mailing is only one symptom of this “over-farming.” The deafness is caused by direct mail firms stepping up the seven touches to 11, hitting the same lists again and again, going back further historically, and also buying cold lists from other organizations for cold hard cash, all in an attempt to make quarterly forecasts and budgets. This has proven a dangerous game because these are all very short games and the outcome has been devastating: people are deleting your emails and throwing away–hopefully recycling–your physical mailings.

Ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially: This is almost always impossible unless you’re sitting on a huge pile of foundation or grant cash. We at Abraham Harrison use email lists all the time and we never reach out more than three times to one recipient over the course of one campaign (one harvest) and then retire it until the next harvest. We sometimes go one step further by retiring some recipients if there haven’t been any recent conversions. Sometimes we allow that list to rest completely, not using it in any other campaigns, either, because the list had been completely over-used. This most often happens with tech blogs and parenting blogs (mommy bloggers, daddy bloggers, etc). Letting lists rest is not optional, it is essential. The only question is to whether you have more than one field in play or can increase the health and yield of your plot through some methods I will discuss below.

Enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides: As an aside, I am trying to get back into shape. This doesn’t only require exercising and diet, it also requires cross-training. Your muscles quickly become accustomed to the same workout routine, the theory being that you need to constantly “surprise” your muscle groups with different challenges–to mix it up. It’s the same thing with messaging as well as farming. How has the state of the art progressed? Are there new pesticides or pest-resistant strains of crops you can use? Or fertilizers? Or farming methods?

Have you been feeding the earth as well as the crops? Well, at Abraham Harrison, we’re working towards the best relationship advice ever: give the gift your recipient wants rather than giving the gift you want to give. It can be tricky. What do the members want that you have not given them? It is a challenge to praise your donors for their generosity, their support, and their sacrifice–effusively–when you feel like they’re being selfish cheap bastards. Is that true? Are you offering tote bags when nobody wants totes anymore? Could you reward your donors in a more public way?

The Internet allows much smaller donors to be actively appreciated for their micro-donations. My favorite podcast, No Agenda, while not a charity, spends well over half-an-hour of its 150-minutes lavishing praise on the people who donate cash-money to support their Thursday and Sunday live show. If you donate more than $33, have a birthday, or do something that Adam Curry and John C Dvorak consider to be PR, you get a shout-out.

If you pay in a few hundred dollars on a single show, you become an official producer, and if you accrue $1,000 in donations over-time, you receive an 0n-air “Knighting.” And their zealous listeners, myself included, eat it up. While this isn’t possible for many charities (why not?), I experience push-back again and again from my past charity clients who are uncomfortable with thanking bloggers who have promoted their cause or furthered their message because “we don’t do these sorts of endorsements.”

The biggest enemy of hallowed and honored charities and foundations is their resistance to innovation and reinvention and their addiction to tradition. Why can’t you shake up your routine? Why can’t you do things a different way? Why can’t you lavish praise on the smallest of donors?

The Internet allows all of these things to be easily and readily tested. Go ahead and play? Go ahead and borrow, copy, and steal things that have worked for other organizations, and don’t be afraid to invest more in your lists than you expect to extract, allowing some good will and equity to be left over after harvest for the next.

Rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil: I touched on this above a little bit: give more than you get and switch it up. That said, there is more. It is important to not harp on the same thing in your messaging all the time. How hard are you plucking people’s heart strings, and are you plucking the same string over and over? Fear, guilt, and shame are very powerful motivators but they’re also such strong elixirs that they can kill their emotional receptors, pitching the recipient into hopelessness and retreat, “why do I even write these checks anymore? There’s no hope anyway and I am throwing good money after bad, what’s the use?” That is surely two steps too far, to the point where the earth seems salted, a wasteland! That’s a bad place to be and generally unrecoverable, as far as that donor goes.

We have been helping the Fresh Air Fund for years and we were under retainer to amplify their yearly requirements and goals. What we did for them, with regards to crop-rotation, was to break the year into seasonal requests: Winter donations request, Spring search for host families and camp counselors, Summer camp stories and experience-sharing, and Fall thank you campaigns. While only one of those seasons focused primarily on donations, since the Winter Holidays are traditionally the biggest gift-giving season, the other three were hybrid messages. The three other seasons lead with stories of urban children getting into the fresh air, into renewing and enriching Summer camp and host family experiences outside the city, lead with needs of hosts and counselors, and generous thank-yous to everyone involved. These lead messages are also followed closely with opportunity to give, to follow, to Like, and to connect.

While we did also have extensive field-expansion strategies going concurrently, as I will discuss below, the crop rotation messaging strategy allowed the Fresh Air Fund to convey much more than just a glimmer of hope, they were able to show, in black and white, the copious success of the program, the long-term relationships that were formed, the real-time joy and happiness that was the direct result of donations of time and talent. They supported the seasonal messaging with direct mail outreaches as well as daily updates shared via Social Media to their followers and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

So, in this case, crop-rotation includes rotating the message, rotating the recipient pool, as well as rotating the medium, from blogger outreach to direct email to direct snail mail, to Facebook and Twitter. In our case, we garnered over 1,800 earned-media-mentioned annually in support of their other efforts.

Expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land: My uncle Jack used to own Oscar fish. These fish are omnivorous and are often fed small mice. They are also known to grow as large as their tank allows, though they will not outgrow their tank. That reminds me of many fundraising campaigns and the mindset of many charities and foundations. While they continue to do their best farming the lists and relationships they have, they’re often limited by what their lists are capable of producing in any particular economy or any particular news cycle, oftentimes ceding donations to the issue of the week.

In the case of the Fresh Air Fund, they were limited by a perceived relevance only to the Tri-State Area of the New York metropolitan area, the historical and logical region around Manhattan that traditionally supported the Fresh Air Fund with funds, families, camp counselors, and children. They also relied exclusively on the New York Times as a platform for development, a platform that is becoming less and less viable in the information age.

We decided that the mission, message and ministry of the Fresh Air Fund transcends New York and is compelling to not just the region but also the Nation and the world, and we were right. We started prospecting bloggers globally who were in the same vertical that the Fresh Air Fund historically had success with locally and that wrote in English. Compassion for children surely transcends the Hudson River, right? Why yes! We were able to drive conversation on behalf of the Fund internationally, rewarded again and again when bloggers would amplify their noble message, a message that has been a continued resource for inner-city youth since 1877.

Talk about expanding your field! If you can sing Olly Olly Oxen Free loudly enough to light up bloggers and blogs globally while also lighting up their associated Facebook and Twitter streams and reaching not only their readership, their followers, their friends, and their friends’ friends, you’re definitely taking a very bold and effective first step at bringing the powerful mission of your nonprofit, your foundation, you NGO, or your charity into entirely new and fresh land, raw and uncultivated but also not tough and over-farmed, either. You might have to start at zero with your seven+ touches toward giving, but you’re also not having to deal with insensitivity and deafness to message, either.

And that is to say nothing about the powerful effect that all that global conversation will do for your ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search, as well as search.twitter.com and on Facebook as well, where 800 million global denizens spend their working hours. The search benefits–the organic SEO–is beyond comprehension when it comes to the sort of due diligence that modern contributors go through before writing those checks any more. Oh, come on, you know it’s true–and why Charity Navigator scares you as much as Yelp! scares stores and restaurants to death.

None of this was even remotely possible before the efficiencies of the Internet. When dealing with Internet communications, you need to understand that this is a revolution and not an evolution. That it is now possible to easily, cheaply, and efficiently access a global market or a hyper-targeted market, reaching them right where they live and not in the hopes that they’ll open the Times on a particular date.

There are hundreds of millions of potential donors who have both never heard of you before or been emotionally abused by your incessant requests for money before. This is fresh meat!

And, while you’re cultivating these new recruits, you’ll be able to lean heavily on your oldest and main lists, allowing them some time to miss you, to rest, and to heal. To paraphrase Dan Hicks, how can they miss you when you don’t go away?

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

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• Integrated Aquaculture (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• 400,000 Farmers in Southern Africa Using ‘Fertilizer Trees’ to Dramatically Improve Food Security (scienceblog.com)
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Last week, I talked about using the long tail of blogger outreach — the idea that you can’t pin your hopes for most public relations efforts on only the A-list bloggers.

For each outreach, there are hundreds and often thousands of bloggers that are not well-known but have influence on the very people that your PR campaign is trying to reach.

I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work on an ongoing basis, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible.

You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like.

We need to be clear in our email that we want a post and the pitch to be shared with the readers of the blog. In our social media news releases, we need to make sure that everything can be copied and pasted as-is, that images are the correct size, that the links are already embedded, that copy and text is simple to copy and block-quote and that any and all banner ads or videos have a handy and easy to find embed code right there.

One cannot assume any technical proficiency, one cannot assume any PR or communications experience, one cannot assume that any blogger knows any PR-speak or knows how to deal with an embargo. One cannot assume that anyone knows what a press release is, or a social media release or what PRWeb is or, heaven forbid, how to keep an embargoed message holy. Long story short, if the message in any way seems more complicated or time-consuming than each blogger fancies it’s worth, then you’ve lost them.

Authenticity vs. robot armies rife with affiliate links

I get why folks have spent many millions of dollars creating a robot army of sites and links and posts that emulate a passionate blogosphere. A robot army rife with affiliate links is really much more manageable to control freaks who need to make sure they can predict ROI based on investment. This is probably the direct result of VC-funding. Those guys love seeing money in and money out. But it isn’t authentic and it isn’t real and these castles of cards are also vulnerable as we have been recently seeing as Google goes through revisions of its search algorithm, oftentimes removing or de-prioritizing entire portions of the Internet that have been produced at great expense to emulate the vigorous and organic, self-organizing, engaged citizenry.

I won’t lie to you, having hundreds of earned media mentions as the result of a very real digital PR long-tail blogger outreach to thousands of bloggers can be SEO gold. Some clients retain us yearly and we can turn those hundreds of posts to thousands of posts per year. The powerful secondary effect of the earnest PR earned-media campaign is SEO link juice, something we didn’t sort out until we were doing this for a couple of years.

Having hundreds of thousands of prepared keyword strings and copy and images and videos pointing back to our clients results in a white-hat link-farm effect, if you will, with one caveat: It is real. We don’t pay these bloggers to write. None of these bloggers are on the same server or the same node or the same cloud or in the same network. The vigilant army of real live Google site investigators can scrutinize these hundreds of posts with a fine tooth comb and there’s no harm and no foul.

When it comes to the empowered and powerful A-listers, they’ve been pitched a million times by the world’s top brands. In fact, companies and their agencies are falling all over themselves to appeal to these powerful few. Not much further along the tail, there are loads of blogs and bloggers who have never been kissed at all, never been pitched by a noted brand, never been engaged by a social media team or PR agent, have never received an offer to pass on to their readers or received a book to review, have never received super-super concierge service and follow up.

In so many cases, we’re their first. We’re their very first PR kiss and, as you know, nobody forgets their first (Image at top by friendlydrag0n on Flickr) via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

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• Real bloggers and real blogs always trump Robot Armies (socialmedia.biz)
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• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
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• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• Sometimes I get excited by something I post (chrisabraham.com)
• The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach (biznology.com)
• Spinn’s PR Links – October 18, 2011 (doktorspinn.com)
• We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• Inbound Marketing the Way God Intended (biznology.com)

Today my post came out over at Biznology titled The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach and I am really excited that you all read it even though I am no longer sure that “long tail” is the right way to describe it (thanks in large part to a 90-minute catch up chat I had recently with Richard Laermer, a huge mentor and supporter). Anyway, I guess this is the gist of the article:

People have only a finite amount of time, so their consumption of content, information, news, reviews and alerts are limited.  The closer you can get to the media organ that your target market consumes primarily and religiously, the higher the probability that content will register with the reader, will resonate with the reader, and will feel like it is intimate to the reader and his local community and experience of the world.

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• Go To Bad Pitch Night School (socialmedia.biz)
• Richard Laermer: Bad News Is Good News: All in the Pitch (huffingtonpost.com)
• Bad Pitch is Teaming up with HuffPo & Reuters for SXSW 2012 (badpitch.blogspot.com)
• For ranking algorithms, AdAge is no Google (searchengineguide.com)
• For ranking algorithms, AdAge is no Google (cash-bandit.com)
• Fire for effect when you can’t get a bead on social media (socialmedia.biz)
• Write your blog to be taken completely out of context (chrisabraham.com)
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Last week I told you how not to pitch a blogger in your PR outreach, so it raises the pregnant question of what exactly should you do?

For about five years now we’ve seen an extraordinary number of clients and potential clients who have frankly been afraid of blogger outreach because of the poor practices of companies and brands that have stumbled in their attempts to engage the blogosphere. So today I wanted to walk through our process to show you how it’s done. Just how do you pitch a blogger?

First off, we see if we already know anyone. We know folks at the top tech blogs, so we give them first bite. By the time that shakes out, we’ll have a couple-few-thousand blogs to QA and sort out. While we’re seeing how the A-listers pan out, we develop a message model that is inclusive enough to not alienate any single blogger but specific enough that each blogger is completely clear as to who our client is and what we want from them (a post, a tweet, an embedded video, a review, etc).

Then, we send out the first outreach and send four or five online analysts to man the inbox so that potentially a thousand replies can be triaged and responded to, like in a hospital emergency room. Who is spitting mad? Who needs more information? Who needs a little prodding or convincing?

Time should be a primary consideration

Time is of the essence. More conversions have been made with charming, patient, friendly and quick emails than have ever been made through just the pitch. Why is time ticking? If someone is a little pissed when they get the email and hit reply, they’ll be a lot more pissed and maybe drop an unhappy tweet if they’re ignored for a few hours. If they’re ignored for a day, they will amplify their displeasure by posting it onto their blog, effectively making it very sure they’re heard.

It has less to do with bloggers being vindictive or making their fame on your client’s good name but has way more to do with stepping up displeasure. “I want to be heard, I need to be heard, I have a grievance, and I will be heard no matter what.” To be honest with you, that never happens to us any more because we’re endlessly kind, patient, giving, indulgent, compliant, respectful and super-quick.

Super-quick is the biggest, most important thing. Latency is always punished. And have a system, because it is inexcusable to allow any of these thousands of “nobody” bloggers to ever get less than exquisite service. Don’t play favorites. Triaging the responses has nothing to do with the bank balance or Rolodex or fame or celebrity or reach of the blogger. It has to do with whether a blogger is

1. willing to post gladly
2. willing to post but needs more information
3. willing to post but leery of legitimacy
4. maybe willing to post but generally conflicted or confused
5. how did you find my blog and get my email?
6. unwilling to post but maybe willing to tweet
7. unwilling to post
8. unwilling to post and please remove my name
9. who the hell are you and how did you get my email address or find my blog
10. wrong topic, I don’t care about this
11. you’ve insulted me and I will seek vengeance

Honestly, even #11 is fine as long as you don’t meet that blogger with the same anger and menace as is being shared. Remember our mantra: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Walking into a drama that’s in progress

I always like to say, when I am speaking at conferences and on panels, that my online team never knows what they’re walking into but that responses like rage and frustration are almost never the direct result of our simple, minimal, friendly email pitch. In a majority of the cases, we’re walking into a drama that is already in progress. Sort of like when a beat cop responds to a domestic 911 call.

Cops hate responding to a domestic disturbance because nobody’s more likely to shoot someone than when they feel like their life is imploding and the only thing that can make someone that crazy is love. Too many cops have been shot as the direct result of unknowingly stepping into someone else’s personal or collective hell. So my team is trained to at least emulate endless patience, love, acceptance and generosity, though my colleague Leslie Quiros tells me that she really sometimes needs to stop, think and breathe, before responding online sometimes. God bless her.

Even more, after we collect and log all of these positive, negative and neutral responses, we wait a week and do it all again, but reaching out only to the bloggers who have not responded at all. While a few of these folks might be ignoring us by not responding, we have concluded that the vast majority of folks who don’t reply during the first outreach just don’t see it or missed it or, more likely, either intend to later but forget or simply don’t know who we are at first and just assume the pitch isn’t for real.

When we reach out one week later and then again a week after that, they’ve seen the email a couple of times and give it a try and are pleased to see that it’s authentic and that there are friendly online analysts more than happy to be friendly and kind at the other end.

It’s not about fooling the bloggers, it’s about authenticity

People are funny and I quite love my species — and I think that attitude is our secret AH sauce: We don’t consider the people we pitch to be the enemy that must be fooled into helping our clients. Quite the opposite. I started my company because I believe that there are lots and lots of vocal proponents on any topic under the sun who just have not been activated yet. Who don’t realize that their voice is important and that agencies like mine and clients like mine find that their choice to create their publishing empire, no matter how modest though it may be, is very exciting, very useful, and very cool to us and to our clients, to be sure!

And, unlike the simulated world of the elaborately constructed inbound link sellosphere, shilloshere, linkosphere, or whatever it is, blogger outreach is authentic. When we send out two-thousand emails pitched to two-thousand bloggers, the 400 bloggers who post over the course of a month don’t have to. We don’t pay them, we don’t trade horses, and we don’t make empty promises.

Not all 2,000 post, only the 400 for whom the message resonates. It is earned media. It is real, even if the blogger simply embeds a video or quotes the pitch email verbatim or copy-and-pastes the social media news release full-text, it’s up to each blogger. No matter what they say, no matter how editorialized, or matter how off message their interpretation may well be (and when it is, it is generally our fault for not being clear enough). It is a thing of beauty and it is ceaselessly amazing that folks online are so endlessly generous and active.

But it all starts with the right attitude–putting the blogger first is the secret of how to pitch a blogger.

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
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• Blogger outreach is scary (biznology.com)
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Tips for how your agency or firm should do outreach the right way

Unlike a few years ago, today everyone at least pays lip service to reaching out to bloggers, the same way that PR people have always reached out to mainstream media. That’s what my company, Abraham-Harrison, does and lots of other companies try to do it, too. But I am still surprised that many companies don’t do blogger outreach, even today. My conclusion is that what is holding them back is fear. Simply put, blogger outreach is scary.

And it’s not a completely irrational fear. It is true that bloggers are unpredictable and we all know, thanks to posts by the Consumerist and the Bad Pitch Blog, that one false move and you’re public mincemeat. Publicly shamed, drawn, quartered and, finally, drummed out of the corps.

We all know this, except that it isn’t so. The biggest faux pas that most agencies commit when they test the waters with blogger outreach has less to do with the natural meanness of the bloggers and more to do with the behavior of the agencies. In many cases, the bad experiences that many agencies blame on the rudeness of the blogger is square on the agency’s shoulders.

It is a case of the abuser blaming the victim, the blogger.

In truth, the blogger often has no context for a PR outreach, has never been part of the publicity machine, and often doesn’t know what’s expected, what proper and improper behavior is, and most often is just behaving naturally and not part of some insidious cabal aimed at defaming you or your brand or your personal reputation.

Consider your pitch from the blogger’s point of view

What’s happening is that a blogger has been blogging for a while, and eventually assumes that nobody’s really reading or paying attention at all. At that point that blogger drops the affectation that this blog is actually for mainstream consumption, develops a small coterie of passionate readers, they become an ad hoc community (maybe a few blogs are part of this evolving tightly knit emergent family), and then, uninvited, someone who is not part of this close-knit family elbows in and makes a big fuss.

This, often coming across to the bloggers, as “Do you know who I am?” is very rarely taken well, especially after that blogger probably has had to fight insidious attacks from trackback and comment spam only to receive an email that is poorly-targeted, insensitive, lies about the nature of the reason why he is emailing (“I love your blog and have been reading you for a long time,” when obviously that is not true because the blogger knows most people who read his blog), or he even just gets the name wrong, which means that the person who’s doing the outreach isn’t taking the time or attention required to at least give a good college try.

It’s not that the blogger is out to shame and embarrass PR agencies. Most vindictive bloggers are already in the top of the blogosphere and receive tons of bad pitches a week. No, the typical blogger would really love to help. It really took a great heap of combined insult to get your client’s and agency’s shame and ineptitude raised up the flag pole for everyone to salute.

Blogger outreach can be scary, but only if you aren’t thinking about it from the blogger’s point of view. If you stop and consider how to make good use of the blogger’s time, you might get what you are looking for with nothing to fear.

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz

Related articles

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• Bloggers Outreach launches. A new site to connect bloggers to bloggers, and brands to bloggers (garybembridge.com)
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I am in the middle of guiding some new bloggers over at Marketing Conversation on how to blog most effectively. It is pretty exciting and instructive because there are many things I take for granted. One of the biggest trends I see is internal shorthand. What I mean is that my bloggers tend to write based on a lot of assumed context. When they write my company name, they might choose AH instead of Abraham Harrison; and, since that AH is on a corporate blog, they might forget to link it to the best page in the corporate Web site.

They simply assume that people who are reading content from Marketing Conversation or Because the Medium is the Message–or even an article on the corporate Website–are in on the joke. That they grok the context.

Not only is that not true but it is dangerous, because I am guilty of it myself. I would say north of 80% of the people I engage with on a daily basis online don’t know that I am president of a digital agency with over fifty staff and dozens of clients. See, I make the same assumptions.

I assume that I shouldn’t be so self-referential because “they” surely know who I am by now, I have been branding for years. Pretty darn shamelessly if you ask me — at least I thought so. Not so.

And I have not even gotten to the most important part: even if people know who you are, what you do, the company you own, and its products and services intimately, their brand perception hasn’t evolved at the speed of your business. What I did in 2006 is quite a bit different than what Abraham Harrison does now, as a company.

Even worse, after we spend all of this time, resources, hours, money, and brain trust on creating insightful analysis and share it for free on our blogs and via Twitter and Facebook, we’re living in a Derridian world: “there’s nothing outside the text.” Let me explain . . .

In a world of excerpting, reading, sharing, retweeting, and sharing shares, or decontextualized via RSS or auto spamblogs, simply all of the breadcrumbs required to bring a reader down the road back to you, your brand, and your sales channel needs to be contained not only in that blog post but also in that tweet, if possible.

Each post needs to be as self contained as a biosphere.

You need everything that you could possibly need to have your post make sense on the same page, within the same post–for three reasons:

1. If you’re quoting another post, excerpt as much of that content to make your point and make it unnecessary to need to link out to read that other article–they won’t make it back
2. If you don’t have everything sorted out, completely contextually-inclusive both with references as well as with your branding, your products and services, all on your article’s back, then something might get left behind
3. If everything’s not completely clear and tidy and tied with a bow–fully sorted–then you’ll lose them anyway because you need to grab them in short-order, every time.

Do not use acronyms unless your brand is that acronym. Abraham Harrison, LLC, is not yet AH or even AHLLC–we’re no IBM. Abraham Harrison should always be linked. Every name of every employee should be linked to their bio on the corporate website at best case or to a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook profile at the very least. Every product or service should be linked to its exact corresponding sub-page on the corporate website if at all possible.

In blogging, we often do a much better job of linking to other people, companies, and blogs in the form of attribution than we do ourselves.

Even more essential to these constantly contextualizing linking strategies is that the keywords should be hyperlinked and not some worthless [link] or a pithy here or there or my work or any of that, if at all possible.

Search abhors a pronoun.

Finally, any and all posts should be wrapped in analysis, if at all possible. Don’t just excerpt a social media news article onto your blog or site, make it your own. While collecting news and propagating it through your blog with attribution links and excerpts and all that can result in your colleagues and neighbors and even prospects to learn of your existence, you’re not really adding value when you just propagate–it is essential to interpret, analyze, and synthesize, allowing all the marrow of your experience to be extracted in answer to, “well, that’s great content, but it is content from your competitor so maybe we should be using them instead of you if they’re so insightful.”

In a perfect world, with a corporate blog, people should be subscribing to and reading posts on Marketing Conversation in order to learn more about the products and services and quality of mind of Abraham Harrison and not just to get an aggregation of the latest social media marketing news.

Sometimes I forget that and it is something I would like to share with you in addition to sharing it with my new bloggers.

Via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

I’ve run a social media marketing agency since Autumn 2006 so Abraham Harrison is almost five years old. In that time, we’ve learned quite a lot. One of my biggest learnings is that you can’t always get a direct bead on your demographic target–and that’s OK. We’ve worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global non-profits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn’t always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out: What I’ve learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.

I call this “fire for effect,” which is a term taken from artillery for when you don’t quite know where your target is or your target is well-guarded or sheltered. So, what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly. (In artillery, you generally try to have someone down range, a forward observer, who can help you drop your mortars closer and closer, called adjusting your indirect fire, which I will discuss further along.)

Let me bring this analogy back to social media marketing. In two instances, I have seen indirect social media marketing work wonders. 80% of what we at Abraham Harrison do is long-tail blogger outreach. Instead of “sniping” at just the top-25 most influential bloggers in any one vertical, we dig deep and often come up with between 2,000-10,000 relevant blogs. Most client projects make it easy for their general appeal; however, in a couple notable cases, firing for effect was the only thing we could really do: targeting health care providers for a client that sells health care devices and targeting astronomers for a global radio telescope project.

What we quickly realized is that not only were the doctors and scientists that my clients most desired generally not blogging, they were also very busy and quite invulnerable to the sort of blogger PR pitches we were wont to do, but they were also unpredictable and often volatile.

Doctors were almost impossible to access directly and scientists tended to be impolite whenever they received a plea via email from someone they didn’t know — typical A-lister behavior.

What we needed to do was to brainstorm and expand our campaigns to include everyone around the doctors. Since the campaign was a public affairs campaign on hospital acquired infection-prevention, we brainstormed on who else is in the space–targeting the “ground” immediately around the docs, expanding as far out as we had budget and time.

Who did we come up with? Well, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, public policy bloggers–the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long. All the earth around the OR, an impenetrable fortress, was razed and we super-saturated the blogosphere, the twittersphere, and the Facebookosphere with discussion, mentions, messaging, excerpting, and commentary about the very real issue of healthcare associated infections in today’s hospitals and clinics: ventilator-associated pneumonia, surgical site infections, cross contamination, etc.

The same thing with the scientists who are associated with the radio telescope campaign. The scientists were there, they were just snippy, so instead of risking too much negative feedback, we instead isolated them and instead reached out to everyone around them: science nerds, space geeks, techies, amateur astronomers, sky watchers, backyard astronomers, and stargazers.

When it comes to blogger outreach and engagement, the goal is never to convert the blogger into a customer, I must remind you, but is always to message through the blogger onto his or her blog as a post, tweet, retweet, or wall post. If the blogger is a gatekeeper, a blockade, to the blog and the blog’s readers (and to the spiders and bots, busily indexing links and content for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), then you must abandon them and move on to the more accessible publications–generally the hobbyists, the amateurs, and the aspirants of the social media and blogosphere.

Amateur hobbyist bloggers are generally hungrier, more available, more grateful, and don’t have the hundreds of “date offers” that journalists, professionals, or A-listers generally have–they’re interested in making a name and are generally pretty amazed when a brand or an agency is sensitive and generous around to notice a blog that’s not solidly in the A-list and are generally really appreciative and open to building an authentic relationship.

Why do all of this? Why expend all this energy and munitions on indirect fire? The obvious answer is to smoke them out. Since we’re often able to start a wildfire of blog posts, tweets, likes, retweets, and Facebook shares, there’s really nowhere for these well-fortified A-listers, scientists, professionals, and surgeons to hide.

And since all of the messaging, all the wildfire, is no longer coming from up range, from our battery, then it is no longer associated with us or our clients. Now, the wildfire is owned by the blogosphere instead of the client or my agency.

This means that the public affairs messaging, the content from our social media news releases, and the emailing back and forth between my crack team of online analysts and the hundreds of bloggers who take up the flag of our outreach, become detached from the final end-product: the rash of intense conversation, posting, tweeting, and retweeting that has all of a sudden lit up the social mediasphere like day actually comes from an impressive number of bloggers and readers from the space and not, at the end of the day, directly from us–so, it is much more likely that these unassailable influencers will end up, at the end of the day, be influenced anyway, without ever being pitched directly by us.

We have seen this happen time and time again, so much so that we have cliches for these things: priming the pump, setting the stage, tenderizing the steak, fertilizing the field–and, of course, carpet bombing (I like that last one the best, but my management team wants me to stop using military analogies, so please forgive me for all the above).

Because nobody believes me that this all works, I like to collect “thank you blogger” posts (from the clients who allow) wherein we “thank” the people who blog and tweet for us, through earned media (we don’t pay anyone–all of this isn’t payola-based) and the numbers speak for themselves: Thank You Habitat for Humanity World Habitat Day Bloggers, Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!, Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers, Thank You Snuggle Crème Bloggers, Thank You To All Of The Olympic Bloggers, Thank you Alzheimer’s Bloggers, Thank You Habitat For Humanity World Habitat Day 2010 Bloggers, Thank You HAI Watch Bloggers, Thank You MLK Memorial Bloggers, Thank You Motionbox Bloggers, Thank You To All US Winter Olympic Bloggers–so, the proof is in the pudding.

At the end of the day, the results outlive the campaign on organic search. When hundreds of blogs and tweets are published online–public, archived, and indexed–most of which link to your client’s social media news release, Web site, issue page, or landing page–hundreds of posts from a diversity of blogs and sources, almost always focused on a very impassioned three-week span. While I don’t condone link-farming or any black hat or even grey hat tactics, earned media mentions–where “earned media” means that you make the offer–the pitch–to the blogger and the blogger decides if and when he or she will post and how he or she will post.

Some bloggers post the our pitch email directly to their blog and that’s cool. A majority mention that they received a pitch from us and our client as well as excerpting and blockquoting a sizable amount of our very own copy from our social media news release. A minority actually spend the time to go in and write up a brand new piece, researched and contextualized, and we love those, too. We’re realistic: we’re reaching out to someone, asking for their help, not paying them anything at all except attention, and then expect them to do us a solid and actually post about our clients for free? Well, we’re always darned grateful for just about any mention–even, believe it or not, the spiny ones. It’s all good.

And, at the end of the day, as they say, any publicity is good publicity as long as they link our client’s name, product, services, and keywords as close to right as possible.

Via Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz

I decided to take lots and lots of time to go through as much registering and setting up of Tumblr as possible before we all run out of patience.

This video goes through all aspects of registering, logging in, setting up, and developing content, blogging, uploading images, audio, and videos. Feel free to skip around and maybe you can learn how to use one of the most hip, chic, and popular blogging and content-sharing platforms.

I got to meet Cece Salomon-Lee of PRMM a while ago but only finally got over my Bronchitis recently so I took the opportunity of being in the desert in some pretty light to do the interview — so, please visit Cece over at her blog and read PRMM Interview #16: Chris Abraham on PR and Social Media:

I met Chris Abraham, President of Abraham Harrison, while he was in a San Francisco late last year. While we were unable to record an interview at the time, I sent Chris some questions via email. Here are Chris’ video responses, as he shares his thoughts about his company, why they don’t consider themselves a PR agency, and what he would like to see in 2011.

Briefly, Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. He can be reached on Twitter @chrisabraham.

If you are interested in submitting suggestions for future blog posts or would like to be a guest blogger, please contact me.

Via Marketing Conversation

There was quite a Brouhaha over at the corporate blog of Abraham Harrison, Marketing Conversation, #112 on the AdAge Power 150, and its name was Alice in NeverLand — and this is basically a repost, of sorts, of what’s going on over there at MC in a post called This is by far the worst blog post ever — and if I were you, I would just go over there and read the article there and all the amazing comments over there too.

Just realize that the first 5 comments were written before I went in and updated the post to make a very self-conscious and hopefully humorous commentary and response to such a fantastically poor, unedited, shameful post.

I had requested a post about a Twitter chat back and forth and also a bunch of blog comments that my CEO and business partner, Mark Harrison, had engaged in with Mr. Olivier Blanchard — basically, an amazing back-and-forth about the pros and cons of outsourcing social media marketing services to an agency like mine versus the general belief that each and every company needs to, surely, do it in-house only for reasons of authenticity.

Well, that’s not what I got when I ended up finally taking a deep look at the Alice in NeverLand post, which you’ll see quoted-in-full below.

While the below post was originally written on Jan 7, 2011 at 18:09 by our brand new blogger Geri, we do have editorial constraints and this not only breaks the editorial standards of Abraham Harrison, of Marketing Conversation, but also everything that is right and good in the world.

I am sorry.

We’re probably not going to use Geri any more and I don’t really trust my current editor to edit this blog anymore because it is obvious from the article that nobody actually read this article before transitioning it from Draft to Published.

There was a severe dereliction of duty that sort of made me, my company, and this blog pretty much a laughing stock and the target or derision.

My first reaction was to bring it down. Maybe nobody saw it. My second reaction was to keep it down. Maybe nobody saw it. By the time I saw it, Olivier Blanchard and four other folks had already commented and asked if the blogger was indeed drunk.

Everybody assumes the blog is written by me, even though the writer is very clear. I guess because I RT the articles and post them to my FB wall. I don’t think acerbic humor is always — or even often — the best way, but putting your head in the sand surely doesn’t work.

I am lucky that I had breakfast with someone who knows Olivier and knows the cool kids so I had some insight that there was major derision being perpetrated on my behalf in some group or another, so I needed to address it directly and do my best to disarm it. Address and disarm. Each one is very case-specific.

Because I like to think I have a sense of humor, I am going to openly mock this post as a way for me to process my intense shame and humiliation as both a man and a writer. To be honest, autoblogs and splogs do a better job using RSS and random algorithms.

If my editor wasn’t so amazing at so many other things in the company, his head would roll, that’s for sure. Instead, we’ll just have to sort something else out.

First of all, I personally commissioned this article, so my editor and the blogger should really have taken this task dead seriously. I never saw the article before it was posted.

Secondly, the article is supposed to paint both our CEO, Mark Harrison, and our company, services, and business model, in a most excellent light.

Finally, this article tangles with the social media old guard as well as one of the most respected members, a man I respect, appreciate and fear, Mr. Olivier Blanchard — this article would surely attract the attention of Olivier and all of our peers and colleagues.

What’s more, now that this blog has ascended to #112 on the AdAge Power 150, people are actually reading it and this isn’t just like sort of chatting to oneself in the in the mirror in the morning — people are actually paying attention.

Well, that said, I am going to mock this article right along with you…

OK, here’s the article, originally named Alice in NeverLand:

Obviously, there is something wrong with the title. Obviously, Alice doesn’t belong in Neverland; and with regards to using Social Media as a means to promote products and services, a Firm’s President, or a CEO establishing business relationships to his clients through actual and personal exchanges of online LOL’s and pokes is actually, well, obviously wrong.

That made my head hurt. I don’t even know what that means.

As a President or as the Chief Executive of any multimillion dollar enterprise who wishes to extend customer reach and consequently gain products and services promotion through the former, would you do this yourself when you can, and when you are very much able to trust a dedicated and a genuine Social Media and Digital PR expert like Abraham and Harisson to do this for you?

First-things-first, the blogger got our name wrong. Abraham Harrison LLC is the long form and Abraham Harrison is the short. Harrison is spelled with two-Rs and one S.

Secondly, one of the reasons why this blog, our promotional style, our blogger outreaches, our messaging, and our social media news releases (SMNRs) work is because we try to keep things open, honest, and editorial. Only the facts, ma’am. This entire post reeks of shameless self-promotion. We don’t allow used car salesmen in our client services team, we surely don’t need one writing for our blog.

Thirdly, That entire paragraph doesn’t mean anything either. It is simply a string of words, not unlike the sort of autobot and splog services offered by SEO and link propagation services. No wonder why, over breakfast the other day, a social media insider asked me if these posts were only for SEO. I wanted to say no, but how can I defend this stream of meaningless nouns, verbs, etc, that seem to me to be more like padding in a K-12 book report when you’re very low on your word count and need to get the work in before next period.

Can you really be “friends” with the magnitude of literally, a hundred thousand followers? No; of course not. You don’t have to really be friends with them. Business is not about that type of intimate friendship we know of. Business is business, so we say. Friendship in business means taking care of your current customers, and creating awareness to the uninformed ones about what you have to offer.

OK, this is where the story began and it actually makes me wonder what the previous paragraphs were for? This is the story. No, in social media, one doesn’t need to make friends.

Maybe with the elite but surely not with everyone. Additionally, most people who engage online with social networks and social media don’t want to date or to marry, they want something much more fleeting, much more transactional, and much more efficient — without the chance of feeling being hurt.

Plus, the way some social media managers gush, it can often blow back and result in embarrassment amongst some less chatty people and it can also end up feeling like all this chatting isn’t worth it in the end — that it might be better to just call the 800 numbers because at least those customer service people are rewarded, in most companies, for getting things done and getting off the phone and on to someone else (with the happy exception of Zappos).

From the comment of Mr. Mark Harrison himself to the post of Mr. Olivier Blanchard in his blog The Brand Bulider entitled Stating the Obvious:

The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.

It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.

Here’s just one example of many I can provide – from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:

Here are some of the first year’s results:

• From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week
• More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers
• From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined
• Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)
• Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time

This is the premise that gave birth to Social Media Marketing, and outsourcing this to an experienced and a true blue expert like Abraham and Harisson is the best thing any dreamer can do.

Again, “Abraham and Harisson?” Seriously?

You can do in-house Social Media Marketing yourself; you can also be good in it, too. But there are people who are already better in doing this stuff, and the experts in Abraham and Harisson are some of (if not already) the best among them.

Again, shamefully self-promotional, heavy-handed, salesy, and, to be honest, very poorly-written. I am having a rare experience of giggling uncontrollably (nervous laughter or unbridled glee from amusement, I cannot tell) while grimacing and feeling my blood pressure spike. I am very confused and scared. Someone, please hold me!

The stuff below is double-block-quoted and is Mark’s stuff, so I will just let it be — he is my CEO after all — a little respect and professional courtesy:

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.

And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.

And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.

Outsourcing your Social Media to agencies is just about the best option there is. If you are sailing your way through the murky flood of competition, adding additional passengers to your Ark will just put you at the risk of sinking to abysmal depths.

So, from the J. M. Barrie Peter Pan analogy directly to the Old Testament Bible story of Noah. I am really confused here. The article should have been rejected for rework and then, after that was done, should have been edited for consistency and so forth. And, of course, since I requested it and because it reflects on the reputation of our CEO, it should have been vetted by someone in the C-Suite, right?

Mind you, we would really prefer being an open space. We have 35 people and we encourage them all to blog; however, isn’t it interesting how important it is, one grows and expands as a company, to vet, to edit, and to do QA? To quote Swingers, “Our baby’s all grown up.”

Social Media outsourcing agencies like Abraham and Harisson are the lifelines that save you when you call SOS. They make your customers happy. Happiness means satisfaction. Happiness and satisfaction means trust, and trust leads to loyalty. Yes, these can be attained in the hands of outsourced social media firms; and look, the fireworks spell R-O-I.

All true. Except the whole “Abraham and Harisson” tragedy. And that fact that it is also meaningless hyperbole and tripe. Aside from that, I really loved that one. More Mark:

And ROI?

• Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
• Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.

You see, Alice wears a blue dress, not a tattered green shirt and a pair of green pants. She fell down a hole when she was walking though the forest; she wasn’t the one who flew to Never Land and played with Wendy and Tinkerbell.

What? WTF? Huh? Best line ever since devil in a blue dress: “Alice wears a blue dress, not a tattered green shirt and a pair of green pants” — I don’t know what it means, but I know I am going to have it tattooed in cursive down my flank once I get to Las Vegas after I get really, really, drunk.

Your Social Media Presence is better when it is outsourced to legitimate and trusted agencies like Abraham and Harisson. It’s all about fitting the right figures in the shape sorter of Social Media Marketing. Not unless you want Peter Pan to save Alice from the Queen of Hearts and then live happily ever after- now that would be another seriously messed up story.

Wow, I guess the writer of this blog was committed to the analogy. To the point of a runaway train. Without every realizing that the man that was being featured was not Mr. Harisson but Mr. Harrison, the Chief Operating Officer.

I might be being really hard on the editor of Marketing Conversation and on the writer of this post; however, at the end of the day, the buck stops here with me. And it is my reputation on the line. So, it is I who must throw myself on my sword here. No blame game. I should have been more careful and more responsible about what was happening — and maybe I should make sure all of the posts should at least be passed through me via email so that I can at least give a final approval. At least for a little while. So, that’s what I will do.

From now on, there is more of a process. Our favorite MC blogger, Robin Pangilinan, will work with our editor to make sure the first round of edits are complete; then, I am going to make sure that each post goes through Priya, Ann, and/or me, via email — at least for now.

How does that sound? How do you do it? What do you do? What would you do in a situation like this?

When I read in the New York Times about how effective Bill Nichol was promoting his Squinkies toys last Christmas season to hundreds of mommy blogs and mommy bloggers, sent the link all around the office.

Abraham Harrison blogger Geri Casas took up the task and blogged about the campaign and also shared how our company has been doing campaigns like this and how cool it is to see it work for other people. We didn’t credit any agencies because a social media agency was never mentioned.

Luckily, Mr. Steven Style popped in to let us know that The Steven Style Group was behind the tremendously successful blogger outreach campaign. Thank god he did, too, or he might not have received the credit he deserves because it isn’t mentioned anywhere on his site.

If you dig down into the posts of some of the moms, they do mention the agency: Blogfully: We Love our Squinkies, Ann Crabs: Squinkies Giveaway, Mom Blog Network: Squinkies Giveaway for example.

I just want to congratulate Steven Style and the Steven Style Group team on their amazing success last gift-giving season and Bill Nichol and the Squinkies for choosing an exceptional agency! Via Marketing Conversation.

2011 might be the best year to start a blog with one caveat. Ed Lee agrees in Blogging – Alive and Kicking:

I’ve seen a few posts from the Pew survey talking about the decline of blogging and the rise of Twitter. Boyd has the best link here but my first thought was:

Isn’t Twitter a form of blogging? RSS feed? Reverse chronological order? Comments? Blog roll (of sorts)?

Last I saw there were 200m blogs being tracked by Technorati – of which 10m or so are probably legitimate (not spam) and active. There are 160m Twitter microblogs and about 6m tumblr accounts – also blogs.

So like RSS, where the act of subscribing to a feed may be on the decline but the use of RSS is still alive and kicking as the backbone of the Internet, blogging as an expression of longform content may be waning – but blogs as a technology and trend is very much alive and kicking.

I actually have more to add to this:

There is less competition for any particular topic
While there may be a number of professional blogs out there blogging on your topic, the relative number of blog-curious and casual bloggers has decreased. It is impossible to be a successful casual blogger and blogging is hard, so the blogging “middle class” has thinned out.

Therefore, most of the people who are saying that blogging is dead or who have given up their blog for Twitter or a Facebook Page actually just don’t have the heart, passion, talent, or commitment.  They’re the same people who tell you to forget about writing a book because books are dead.  No, books are not dead and neither are blogs — they’re just hard!

Most of the remaining blogs out there are ghost towns on life support
Now there are just aggregation blogs and spam blogs in the ghetto and there are the professional and advanced amateur blogs in the elite.  Since blogging is so hard and requires so much commitment and talent resources, all you need to do is commit time, talent, and long-term budget and you should be dominating your space in no time — well, as long as you consider “no time” to be between 6-18 months.

What that means is a minimum of four short posts and one long post a week, each and every week until forever.  Yes, forever.  Until your company closes or you sell it — and even then, you might want to keep the blog as it will help you leverage yourself into you next thing.

A blog is like an African Gray Parrot in that it is a long-term investment requiring that you build it into your estate planning.  In the past,  businesses really didn’t think long-term about their social media and blogging strategy and their plan often didn’t outlive their Summer Intern.

If you plan to honor your employer, your company, or yourself, you need to be willing to not just maintain your blog on life-support just by paying for hosting and renewing your domain name but you really need to invest.

Success begets success in blogging and with your blog
Case in point is Marketing Conversation, Abraham Harrison’s corporate blog. Until 6 months ago, I was really the only person writing for it.  Then Phillip Rhoades got the passion, and now we have made it a priority to hire bloggers to fill out the daily posting requirement.  In just a couple months, our ranking on AdAge Power 150 went from almost 300 to 130.

While I had never let Marketing Conversation become a ghost town, it wasn’t a priority of the company as a while.  I didn’t have enough buy-in from the 34 other members of the team.  Now, everyone’s committed.  And success begets success — and success makes it much easier to assure that I will have the budget of talent and money I need to make sure MC keeps improving and growing, including budget for a design and template make-over.

I hate to say it but people really so love a winner.

Blogging technology and blogging platforms have gotten easier, simpler, and more convenient
With Tumblr and Posterous as well as Twitter, Facebook Pages, and old reliables such as Blogger and WordPress.com, it couldn’t be cheaper, simpler or more convenient.

Even Moveable Type, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other blogging and content platforms have gotten less complex — and even hosting companies have started to meet their clients half or all the way to installing blogs.

One click and your software is updates, one click and you’ve installed a new plugin, one click and you have installed WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla from your Web Hosting administration control panel dashboad like cPanel, Webmin, SirectAdmin, Fantastico, etc.

Plus, it is easier to get a pretty nice template for free or for just a little bit of money.  I am not proud but I use the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes for both Marketing Conversation and for Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message.  I plan to upgrade them both, but for now it is essential that I just make everything as simple, easy-to-read, and SEO-friendly as possible as Thesis meets all of those needs for me for now.

Blogging courses, blog platform developers, and blog template designers are easier-to-find and afford
Back when I started blogging back in 1999, it was all me. Even 5-years ago, it was tough to find s Drupal guy or a WordPress guy — it was even tougher finding a quality (and also affordable) designer who did more than create a design in Photoship, slice it up, and dump it on me to shoehorn and hack it into a proper Drupal or WordPress template.

Now, awesome programmers, developers, plugin developers, Drupal and WordPress programmers, and designers and shops that are able to go from initial branding brainstorming through blog and site design, through to user experience and content, through designing and approval, all the way to a final product: an easy to install, widget and plug-in compatible, theme template.  What’s more, they’re able to add all the bells and whistles, too, as well as develop and program any particular bespoke plugin that can really make your blog or social media web 2.0 website hum.

These folks were almost impossible to find and when you did, back in 2006, 2007, 2008, even 2009, they were not what they purported to be or they were over-booked, too expensive, or unresponsive.  In 2010 and 2011, with the economy as it is and since most of the deepest pockets already are wired for sound, these coder rockstars are willing to work with you to make sure that everyone comes out feeling like they’re a winner.

Bloggers, community managers, content curators, and comment moderators are well-trained and plentiful
If you decide that you want a blog but can’t really commit to more than one post a week or one post a month; or if you’re considering turning off the comments on your blog; or, if you’re keeping away from committing to Twitter or Facebook Pages; or your current blog, Twitter profile, or Facebook Page is a ghost town, then you really need to hire a dedicated blogger, a blogger who understands that writing is only 1/4 of the job.

Another 1/4 needs to be spent on engaging with the social mediasphere and blogosphere, moderating comments, responding to questions and comments, and the like.

The third quart needs to be spent monitoring what people are saying online to make sure you remain on top of what people are saying as well as searching for opportunities to engage in questions and conversations online, on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs, and on message boards.

Finally, the last quarter needs to be spent on marketing and promoting the blog and your brand online.  Making sure you remain part of the conversation.  Reading other peoples’ blogs, keeping on top of your industry and the other blogs in your space, and seeing if you can connect to them and become part of their community.

In the past, finding someone like this was almost impossible.  It is still tough but easier.  And there are so many people looking to get into this sort of work that the fees are reasonable.

Don’t expect your community management to be found all in one person, however.  Your social media team requirements might require several people.  Be sure to try out Odesk and Elance as we have found some excellent staff there.  Also, be sure to check out Craigslist, though I highly recommend not making “must be in the same city as the company” a requirement as the best people are often not in your city or even in your country.

The real-time web is alive and blog content is hotter than ever before, just ask Google
In the past, Google treated every page on the Internet with just about as much attention.  Since the resources allocated to Google was finite, it did tend to give more attention to online content that was updated regularly, but blogs were no different than newspapers or any other active content.  However, in recent years, Google has felt the heat from the real-time web, its biggest dog being Twitter.  Search.twitter.com as well as Facebook search have replaced Google in many situations in the past when Google wasn’t able to keep up with tasks such as monitoring.  In response, however, Google has caught up.  Now, any blog that is not a spam blog is considered to be just about holy.

Google now has a dedicated blog index, Blog Search, and makes a point of indexing blog content immediately.  If you sign up for Google Alerts, you will see your blog content come into your inbox just seconds after you commit to Publish or Post — if you’re blogging on a daily basis, Google will allocate more than your fair share of Robots to indexing your blog.

Blogs are inherently better at search engine optimization because search engines still prize text above all things
A blog is written in text and search engines are expert at indexing and finding content online based on literal strings of search text. While the future does hold fuzzy-logic searches that use synonymic and logical search results, for now, literal text is still king.  If that string isn’t on your corporate website, your site won’t come up.

Blogs, on the other hand, are a culmination of hundreds or thousands of articles written by and commented on by lots of different people in different situations and a sundry of contexts, therefore, there is a prodigious amount of messy copy — lots and lots of similar string of content that mean something close to what your company does and offers and sells but not exactly what you would say or how you you say it.

That’s a good thing.

It is called keyword diversity and keyword diversity is good because unlike your behavior when your do a vanity search on your company or your company keywords, you can never be sure how your prospective clients will find you.

For example, when I started in 2003, what I did was new media and I was an expert in new media strategies and new media marketing.  Then it was emarketing and ePR, then digital PR, social media marketing, and all these other things.  Blogging allows me to keep up every day as opposed to the once or twice a year when I edit and update the Abraham Harrison corporate website — if that.

So, there is lots and lots of keyword diversity, lots and lots of natural keyword density — not stilted like is often found on a professionally search optimized website — and there are links, hyperlinked keyword phrases, and lots and lots of pages with copy and text by the barrel-full.

What’s more, each page of a WordPress or Drupal blog has a user-readable URL, such as http://ahpr.us/case-studies instead of http://ahpr.us/node/196 — which is something you see all the time and not very pretty.

Finally, while your corporate website probably had dozens of pages updated periodically, blogs have thousands of pages, each of which can be seen any number of ways: via post, category, tag, year, month, week, day, etc.  This means that, in aggregate, you can have 5x-10x the number of “pages” for search that you actually have posts for.

If you’ll notice, though, that I put all these SEO incentives at the end of this post.  If you write a blog based only on its SEO prowess, then your blog is going to really suck.  You will write your blog into that ghetto I talk about.

All modern blogging platforms have RSS built in, making sharing with Facebook and Twitter effortless
Each and every blog post has its own unique page and each of those pages has a unique URL.  That URL represents not a static page but a record in your blogging platform’s relational database.  While that URL represents a page, your blog can render that content in other way.  For example, as an RSS feed.  Blog posts with their unique, user-readable links and their RSS feeds are super-easy to share as well as index as well as reference as well as link to — much easier than a lot of companies make it with their Adobe Flash-based sites that don’t have “permalinks” or “anchor links” built in.

Twitter and Facebook thrives on content links.  If you run a blog and install “digg this,” “share this,” “tweet this,” “like this,” “reddit this,” and “Facebook this”to make sure sharing your content is as convenient as humanely possible — and write compelling, timely, and popular content — then you too can be part of feeding the giant maw of the 24/7/365 Twitter, Facebook, and social media monster that lives and thrives on content like yours.

That’s it for now — and sorry to hit you with this firehose!  Merry Christmas!

Don’t you hate it when bloggers only offer teasers or abbreviated one-line summaries through their RSS feeds?  Well, me, too, and so does Kirsten Wright in her post Stop shortening your posts in your RSS feeds:

When I subscribe to your blog via RSS, I am telling you I like your content. I am explaining that I want to read it, but I am also telling you I don’t want to have to go to your blog every time you write a new post. I want it simple, I want it delivered, and I want it my way.

So please, I am begging you, STOP shortening your blog posts in the RSS. Giving me the first 3-4 lines from the post and then the little blue link to “view article…” is obnoxious. Guess what? I don’t want to have to click “view article”. I should already be viewing the entire article in my reader because that is why I subscribed to your blog.

I know why you shorten the posts, and give the reader the “teaser”. You do it because you think it will drive traffic back to your site and get people to click around.

You want to know what it really does? It makes me stop reading your posts.

Yes it does!  Yes!  And thank you, Kirsten, for putting this to words!

I have been seething inside.  I keep up with the Power 150 OPML and a thousand-five-hundred additional feeds via Google Reader on my ThinkPad and iPad all the time. Reader allows me to easily, and magically, keep up with what’s going on in the blogosphere and amongst my peers.

Most of the time, I am able to peruse full-content, decontextualized, via Google; however, quite a few blogs have begun only offering one-line teasers via their RSS feeds, requiring each feed-surfer to link over to the blog to get the rest.  I read via RSS because it is simple, efficient, and easy and on my terms.

If you need to bait-and-switch me over to your blog, thinking your content is so unique and special that I won’t be able to pass, you’re dead wrong.  I have kept quiet but thanks to Kirsten Wright of Wright Creativity I no longer have to.

I try to read the New York Times every day on my Kindle.  Today I caught Squinkies Maker Savors Demand for Holiday’s Hot Toy in today’s paper.

What caught my attention was that the article suggested that a massive outreach to over 300 mommy blogs was what tipped Squinkies into the super-hot toy category for Christmas 2010:

The retailers liked the Squinkies well enough. “The orders were good, but nothing like what we anticipated this could be,” Mr. Nichols said.

He knew the retailers would test it in August. To pique interest before Squinkies were even on sale anywhere, he reached out to more than 300 bloggers, sending them products for review and giveaways.Anne McGowan, who runs the blog DealWiseMommy.net, said her son and her nieces understood what the toy was right away, from playing with vending machines in restaurants. And she was relieved at the low price. “That’s one of the best things about the toy: they’re not very expensive,” Ms. McGowan said.

In Waterloo, Ont., Erica Kloetstra, who runs BassGiraffe.com, said the collectible angle pulled in her 4-year-old daughter. “She’s like ‘Now we have to get this, and this, and that.’ That’s why we have so many,” she said.

While tiny toys can be choking hazards, the retailers and Blip emphasize that the toys are for children age 4 and up. And bloggers noted the same. “Due to the small size, my son (which is 2) has placed them in his mouth,” Amanda Blake, who runs FairyGoodMommy.com, wrote, saying that her older daughter now plays with them in her own room. “I do not recommend anyone under the age listed on the package to play with them or have them lying around.”

“Mommy bloggers are incredibly powerful,” said Ms. Phillips of Wal-Mart, in part because they explain to their readers what a toy does or what age it’s appropriate for. “Just getting customers aware of what they are, how do they work, what do I do with them” is quite helpful, Ms. Phillips said.

When the toy hit shelves in August, “the read was fantastic,” she said.

This especially excites me because most blogger outreach and blogger engagement campaigns limit their outreach to only 25-50 very popular blogs, over time. Other campaigns aren’t generous enough with their “give” and limit the number of review and test products they’re willing to drop-ship to each blogger.

Abraham Harrison LLC, my agency, has been doing massive long-tail blogger outreaches for our entire life, since March 2007. We routinely identify and reach out to thousands of bloggers — all of the bloggers in any particular demographic or topic — and commonly receive hundreds of requests by bloggers for more information and for review copies and test products.  That’s the key.  That impact. That impact is powerful and important, especially with seasonal products such as toys, for example.

When it comes to blogger outreach, it is important to get as much volume and penetration as possible.  The only tried and true way we have found to do that is to locate every relevant blogger and reach out to them all, engaging them all in a friendly and responsive way, and then send anyone and everyone who requests one, a review copy — of a book, of a toy, of anything — never saying no to the tune of hundreds, even. In other words, the more successful the outreach campaign, the more expensive it could become and the more gratis product you’ll have to deliver.

But too many clients shy away from this and say things like, “we’ll only honor the first 30,” or “we have only budgeted for 70″ and this is actually the wrong tactic.  Do what Mr. Nichols of the Squinkies did: he sent Squinkies to every blogger who wanted one. Sure, Squinkies are inexpensive, but even in the case of more expensive products, considering the amount of general overhead surrounding books and other products, the cost of not becoming hot and getting the kind of coverage and excitement generated can be failure and defines the saying Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish.

When it comes to limited blogger outreach that only focuses on the “top-25 most influential blogs,” whatever that means, it is hard to push or goose the tipping point. The only way you can move the needle is to stop playing favorites, stop limiting the number of review copies and products, and reach out to any and all bloggers, regardless of their Klout and compete.com score, who are germane to the product, service, outreach, brand, and campaign.

I hate to be salesy but what the hell — come check out my company’s testimonials, case studies, and client list.

Effie Kapsalis helped make something very very cool. Something brilliant, actually. Something you need to check out: Anthologize.

A brilliant idea is defined by how hard you slap yourself in the forehead, saying, “gee, that’s awesome — but so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?”  Anthologize is that simple, elegant, “it never occurred to me” idea that I have been waiting for forever: a WYSIWYG way of drag-and-dropping together a linear narrative out of what is often an amalgam of reverse-chronological, jumbled-together, blog posts. And export it into an online, web-accessible “book” or even a proper eBook in the PDF, ePUB, or TEI format that can be exported and popped into your favorite eBook reader like the Amazon Kindle or Sony eReader.

This brilliant-but-simple-idea-that-never-even-occurred-to-me had a gestation period of one week and is called Anthologize and presents itself as a free, easy-to-install, and easy-to-grok wordpress plug-in.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. © 2010, Center for History and New Media. For more information, contact infoATanthologizeDOTorg. Follow @anthologize.

While I have already installed it into both Chris Abraham and Marketing Conversation, I am overwhelmed with how many posts there are on both blogs that I have yet to organize my thoughts and do something with it.  However, there has been quite a bit of press on the Anthologize project already.

Digital Campus

In our first-ever live broadcast, Digital Campus hosts the big reveal of what came out of One Week | One Tool, a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored institute at the Center for History and New Media that brought together a diverse group of developers and scholars to produce a useful software application for the humanities (and beyond) in just one week. Joining the regulars on the podcast are four members of the One Week team, Boone Gorges, Kathie Gossett, Effie Kapsalis, and Steve Ramsay. The tool revealed, Anthologize, is a WordPress-based platform for book publishing. Regular Mills Kelly finds Anthologize as beautiful as his Hawaiian vacation. (Download the .mp3)

Smithsonian 2.0

And you can now see and experiment with what we built, Anthologize.  It’s not a tool with a big scope – it does one thing well (although it is an alpha, so there are known issues). It enables researchers, curators, writers – and bloggers in general – to compile, edit, and publish anything available through RSS feeds. From Anthologize, you can send out your compile work as an eBook, paper publication, or TEI (an open XML format for storage and exchange).

ReadWriteWeb

Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to easily publish their content in a variety of book formats, including PDF, ePUB, and TEI, an open XML format. Anthologize can handle WordPress blog content as well as feeds from other sources, allowing these items to be updated, reordered, and edited, and then exported.

Blogging has become an increasingly important tool for scholars and educators to share their ideas, but once blogged, that’s often the end-of-the-line for that writing. Anthologize organizes this content and enables users to publish and distribute their work in additional ways – via print or e-readers.

BBC Tech Brief

Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket reports on the success of “one week I one tool”, in which a group at the US Center for Digital Humanity spent a week designing and building a digital tool from scratch.

They posted teasers about the project online but did not reveal the result of their work until the seven days were up:

“They put together a great open-source tool: Anthol­o­gize, a Word­Press plu­gin that helps you take online con­tent like blog posts and col­lect, edit, design, and for­mat them into a book — for either dig­i­tal or print. Solid soft­ware, with obvi­ous util­ity for lots of peo­ple, not just aca­d­e­mics.”

And it’s open source too – which makes it a free for all. Bookbinding is certainly a lot less fiddly these days…

The Atlantic

Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows scholars, conference organizers, and bloggers to create eBooks out of websites. Its creators imagine it could be used by researchers to “sketch ideas, collaborate with co-authors, edit and develop research notes into arguments, publish conference proceedings, and engage in public scholarly communication without the typical barriers.” Or perhaps teachers will turn their class blogs into custom publications.

So, what separates Anthologize from commercial blog-to-book services like Blurb or Lulu? (Both fantastic services, IMHO.) First, it’s a WordPress plugin, so if you’re familiar with that tool (as many are), it should be easy to manipulate.

“Because it’s open source, third-party developers can create translators and importers for other formats as well, and contribute them back,” added Doug Knox, director of publication and digital initiatives at the Newberry Library, and part of the One Week, One Tool team. “Lulu and Blurb — and others like FastPencil — are focused on commercial blog-to-book publishing. They don’t have as much flexibility in importing existing content, and they aren’t as open to extending the range of output formats.”

This was all the result of the One Week One Tool project and, to be honest, shows that Rapid Application Development can be the start of a true gift and a true legacy to the world of coding, open source, and online publishing and personal publishing empowerment.