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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

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

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

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

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia.

And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

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

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

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

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

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

Good fences make good neighbors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media globalists unite

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada.

Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity. If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success. Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet. This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage. Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign. You need both quantity and quality of Likes. I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Thank you very much to Market Wire, Sysomos, CommPRO.biz, and SmartWomanGuides.com for including me in their Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 list:

• Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 (slideshare.net)
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• Heatmaps Reveal Where People Look on Social Media Sites [Research] (hubspot.com)
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In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

To the right, you’ll see, scrolling down most of this article, a full-length screen capture of the SMNR we produced for a launch campaign that we did for the first iPad tablet-only daily newspaper, The Daily. I am using this SMNR because we’re particularly proud of it, and you can explore it In Real Life (IRL) over at thedaily-newsrelease.com.

As I am sure you will notice right away, this SMNR — and all of our SMNRs — is a flat-file, traditional Web page. You’ll also notice that it scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.

No, we didn’t do this because we’re not good coders and don’t understand database-backed web applications like WordPress or Drupal. I have been developing Web applications since they were Perl CGI scripts, into PHP, then into Python-based Zope, and even Ruby on Rails.

We’re building our SMNRs on flat-file, scrollable, single-page Web pages because of human nature: people tend to click away from where we want them to be. We want them to be on-topic, on-target, and really considering the act of blogging on behalf of our clients. In this case, The Daily.

We use old-fashioned HTML standbys such as HTML anchors, allowing us to link within the same page. We don’t want people to miss anything and we don’t want people to get lost in a maze of pages.

We also use flat-file HTML on an Linux-variant Apache install because we tend to reach out to thousands of bloggers at a time — upwards of 8,000 — and we don’t want a database-backed website to get bogged down by a potentially heavy, all-at-once stampede of traffic. Flat-file pages tend to serve faster and more reliably because they’re generally much less resource-intensive.

What we did for The Daily, section by section

Let me go through the SMNR we created for The Daily, section by section, so that I can explain. Long story short:

If we can’t get someone we send an email-based blogger pitch to to post something within five-minutes of opening our email, then we’ve lost him. If it isn’t as easy as pie and as clear as crystal, then we might get nothing. If it looks like it’ll take six minutes instead of five, we’re lucky if we get a tweet or a post to a Facebook Wall. More about that later.

The banner

The banner is simply a quick, attractive “splash.” It’s always above the fold and needs to convey, in a single glance, what’s up and why we didn’t, in fact, waste the blogger’s time. The banner is useless but essential. It allows the client to clearly, as though in summary or abstract, convey the entire message of the campaign both visually and textually. Carefully selected choice slogans, logos, screen shots, and photos go in the banner. However, since it isn’t really possible to “steal” anything from the banner, all the content found in the banner should be replicated somewhere else deeper in the SMNR.

The banner may just seem like bling or flair but it’s is really the single opportunity the PR professional or publicist has to sink the hook, to build the resonance and excitement and to activate the passion required to encourage bloggers to spend their valuable time and finite energy on doing something for me and my clients for free.

One caveat, however, is to make sure the banner isn’t too tall that it blocks out the QuickLinks, below, or seems just like an advert or splash page instead of what it is, a multimedia press release rife with important, objective blog fodder.

The QuickLinks

OK, that’s rather hard to see, so I will make it a bit larger below so that you can see what I am talking about.

That’s better. Well, the QuickLink row is essential because it might be the only interactive part of the SMNR that’s above the fold for some viewers, especially those who are still running 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 screens. (Don’t roll your eyes about the small screen size — there are still millions of folks worldwide who are running small monitors, large font sizes, and also dial-up modems, not your big 2560 x 1440 resolution, double-screened 27″ LCD computer displays. You should work with and understand everyone and design to your lowest common-technology denominator.

So, the QuickLinks are a short-cut to what the blogger wants. These links don’t go anywhere off-page, but, rather, just link down to somewhere much further down on the single page.

And like I said, if we don’t do everything to make it as easy as possible to allow the blogger to search, discover, collect, and report on what we’re pitching, then we’re risking losing them.

The video introduction and the social network sharing

This is a two-parter. Obviously, the commercial that goes with the introduction of the then newly launched iPad-only daily news site, The Daily, is the main thing we wanted to promote. A no-brainer.

More importantly is what I circled in red, the “Share This” embed with the easy-to-share-to-Twitter-Facebook-Yahoo!-Etc. buttons. We never used to add this to our Social Media News Releases. Why? Well, we were afraid that if we did, bloggers would share on social media and social network and with either their Facebook or Twitter friends and followers instead of posting it on their blogs.

The truth is, the SMNR is all about making everything as easy for the blogger as they need it to be. Folks who feel the need to feed the maw of their always-hungry 24/7/365 blog, will always blog (and often then tweet and Facebook their post), and the folks who are interested enough but don’t have the time or interest in the topic or promotion or don’t feel like their blog is the right place for the news we’re pitching won’t blog no matter how much we may well disagree.

So, popping that little “Share This” array of buttons has quadrupled the number of earned media mentions that we get from folks who wouldn’t have blogged our stuff, our news, our clients, anyway — they are just interested enough to throw us a bone and share the Daily with their followers and friends.

The news

The news section is the most important part of the SMNR. Because there’s lots of great stuff to steal. Consider our Social Media News Releases to be one-page versions of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — which is to say that once we have appealed to a blogger enough that she has opened our email, read our pitch, maybe emailed us, clicked through to the SMNR, scrolled past the banner, the QuickLinks, and ignored the Share This buttons, we want the blogger to have to do as little additional work as humanly possible.

We also post as many photos, illustrations, screen shots, and logos as we can into each SMNR, inline, so that a blogger can easily copy-and-paste each image into the blog post and not need to download and then upload. We act as the host, happy to sponsor the image hosting to the SMNR. As many of these as we can because we never know which one resonates with each blogger.

So, we pre-link all the items in the bullet-list with text links to the daily. We link the phrase The Daily any and every time it comes up in the list. This will appall SEO gurus who think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know Search. I am an expert in search and my SMNRs are not Google-bait, they’re blogger-bait. We actually do not want our SMNRs to start competing with our clients’ sites — and they used to — but if we mess up all the delicate Google balance, then hopefully our SMNRs will not show up in the top-ten on Google, which is often quite challenging since most sites are absolutely terrible.

Actually, recently, we have had clients who have wanted to optimize their SMNR for search, but then you put the onus of linking, textually, on the shoulders of the bloggers, many of whom are not experts in search or HTML. So, we make sure that almost every single link has one linked textual on The Daily, just to make sure that every potential news item that a blogger might want to copy-and-paste onto his blog includes a link.

We never know what the blogger will or won’t steal, we don’t know how much or how little the blogger will copy, paste, then blockquote into their blog. Some bloggers go full-text, blockquoted, and then wrap the copy that we wrote in a bit of introduction and a parting shot into a blog-post sandwich where the copy, exactly as we wrote it, is the meat.

OK, you may have noticed that the page is pretty long. It requires quite a lot of scrolling, right? Well, remember how brief, concise, and minimal the blogger email pitch was? Well, the pitch might be laser-focused but the SMNR is everything but the kitchen sink. As many diverse and random and seemingly extraneous content and assets as we can find and collect we put into the SMNRs.

Those of you who have ever spoken to me about this before might want to jump ahead. I have an analogy for you. If you think of the Sunday paper and all those coupons, think of our email blogger pitch as a coupon for a big-screen TV at hhgregg.

If we can get that person who’s browsing the Sunday Post to cut out the coupon — already a huge task, to say nothing of even buying a paper, reading the paper, and braving the coupon section — and then pocket the coupon, get in the car, and drive to the store, once that guy gets to the store, he’s generally committed to doing something. While we’re pitching the TV, we’re just happy if that consumer ends up spending an equal sum on something — anything — else, just so long as it’s with hhgregg.

Same thing with an SMNR. The email pitch is the coupon selling a particular thing — the launch of the iPad app — and the SMNR is the big box store offering loads of other things, including bios, and other content. In the case of the Daily SMNR, a blogger may well come in to look at the offer to download and use the iPad app or to share the video with the readers of her blog but may report, instead, on Daily Editor in Chief, Jesse Angelo, who left the New York Post for a position with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

To me, it really doesn’t matter what news from the SMNR the blogger reports, it just matter that the blogger takes time out of her busy, busy, day to spend some time writing about our clients, for free. We really always remember that we’re not entitled to anybody’s time, especially if we’re not paying for it. No matter what, every mention is a gracious courtesy.

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

I always tell everybody that only 1% of all bloggers have media, communications, or public relations experience. Full stop. Even fewer of them are HTML gurus. Nothing can be assumed. I am not recommending pablum. I am not saying that we have to dumb down for the bloggers, it’s just that they speak a different language from ours in PR. We don’t share lingua francas. So, we always go out of our way to make sure everything is as simple and self-explanatory as possible without ever insulting the blogger.

In the above case, we always make sure that embed codes are included whenever any video is included — if we ever want to see it embedded inline in a blog post. We had an embed code in the first video at the top of the SMNR but it was deleted by the client. Even if our blogger knows how to find the embed code himself, we really don’t want him to leave the site to go hunt it down over at YouTube, as I explained earlier. We don’t want people to ever click away.

So, we include all embed code at a height and width that is optimal for most blogs, in this case 480 pixels wide. If the blogger is sophisticated enough to want a 853 x 480 video, he can go get that, we’re just making it as easy as possible to make the entire process take less than five minutes from the opening of the email to the clicking on Publish.

Social media and tags

The “Share This” buttons at the top of the SMNR are promotional. They don’t reference the client-owned Social Media properties. It is essential to make sure that we offer up everything and anything to the blogger’s consideration.

Finally, to make it as easy as humanly possible for everyone, we include a string of comma-separated topical keywords that each blogger can easily copy-and-paste into the “post tags” portion of your blogging platform.

Yes, I know. this SMNR has everything including the kitchen sink. Not true. It gets worse. If you explore the SMNR for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day the SMNR we did for the US Olympic Committee we made for the Winter Olympics in Canada, or one of the SMNRs for the Fresh Air Fund, you’ll see that there are all sort of other things such as banners with embed codes and additional videos and all sorts of other assets — really the kitchen sink, in many cases.

Favicon, header title, and meta description

One last thing that I want to discuss before we end this helluva long post is about fit and finish. Too often “single use” sites like this just don’t get the love they deserve. Make sure you take some time to create a nice “Favicon” aka favorites icon, shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon and bookmark icon. Also, please take the time required to create a strong and descriptive Metatag Title and Description tag as well.

<title>Introducing The Daily - Facts and Resources</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Daily facts and resources page. Introducing The Daily The first digital daily news publication built from scratch for the iPad by some of the best in the business to bring you information that's smart, attractive, and entertaining.">
<meta name="keywords" content="the daily facts, the daily resources, the daily facts and resources, the daily, thedaily.com, rupert murdoch, news corp, apple, mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone 3gs, iphone 4, steve jobs, macbook, macintosh, mackbook air, ipod nano, new iphone, ipod touch, apps, ipad apps, iphone apps, mac rumors, ipad reviews, apple technology, apple news, ipad news, iphone news, tech, technology, geek, geek news, gadgets, new gadgets, new technology">

Why? Why is it even worth the extra time to go back into the engine room and tool with the Meta Data? Well, the HTML Title tag directly contributes to what people see when they either bookmark your page, what they see in a browser tab, or what they see in the Title Bar. Easy-peasy. A real no-brainer. Also, despite what anyone at SEOMoz thinks, meta tags are still important and here’s why:

You’ll notice that all the text in the search result that comes up when your search serves up thedaily-newsrelease.com as a result is content that Google didn’t so much have to find or scrap; rather, it simply serves up the text directly from the Title we wrote and also the Meta Description we also wrote in the form of the search result headline and description.

I hope the previous 2,500 words have done a pretty good job of explaining why we at Abraham Harrison insist on producing a proper, well-produced, well-branded Social Media News Release (SMNR) — both philosophically, practically, and psychologically.

And because I really don’t know everything, please feel free to comment, contribute, share, and ask any questions you may well still have about the process, the evolution, and any technical details you might be unclear about or I have failed to cover. Thank you for your amazing attention span! Via Marketing Conversation via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz.

Related articles

• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• Why Using the Social Media News Release is a Big Mistake (hubspot.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The art of writing the perfect blogger pitch (biznology.com)
• Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective Than Traditional Press Releases (hubspot.com)
• Online newsroooms should go social (econsultancy.com)
• Flipboard, Smaller and Smarter, Launches on iPhone (prnewswire.com)
• Inbound marketing the way nature intended (socialmedia.biz)

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 abrahamharrison.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.

Related articles

• Testomonial from Miriam’s Kitchen (chrisabraham.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Please Support Miriam’s Kitchen on Give to the Max Day (chrisabraham.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Set up your Google+ Brand Page right now! (chrisabraham.com)
• Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
• Live people over Robot Armies and Zombie Hordes (chrisabraham.com)
• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• Write your blog to be taken completely out of context (chrisabraham.com)
• Amplify Twitter and Facebook with GaggleAmp (chrisabraham.com)

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

In order to keep on the cutting edge of social media I tend to play a lot. Experimenting keeps Abraham Harrison au courant. Several months ago I received a Twitter DM from Shel Holtz asking if I would help him promote FIR for him via my social networks. The link popped off to a companycalled GaggleAMP.

I joined up. One of the options is called AutoAMP which allows me to set up my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts so that anything that Shel Holtz allows to feed into his Gaggle would pass through into my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn streams, unfettered. Shel is one of my idols and all of his content is amazing; plus, I admire his For Immediate Release podcast.

I set it up. Why? Well, I would always retweet anything from Facebook I saw coming from either Neville Hobson or Shel Holtz so why not remove the middle man and just allow their good message to pass through to my followers, as I would have done anyway, if there were enough hours in the day.

This is very cool, I thought, I really need to speak to the dude behind this. That man is Glenn Gaudet. I was able to secure my own account, and I have been checking it out. And I like what I see. Why? Well, it is 100% opt-in and rewards everyone: the publisher who wants his message to be conveyed far and wide as efficiently as possible–especially through fans, friends, and family; the consumer, who feels attached, connected, and committed to the success of the publisher; and to the community of consumers, who can then compete for prestige and prizes through an optional “air miles” points system that can easily be used to incentivize group cohesion and might competition.

What I like about the founder, Glenn, is that his heart is in the right place. This is not a Ponzi scheme or some bait-and-switch affiliate network. It is all opt-in, it is all join-in, and your success is directly proportionate to your ability to have fans who trust you and who are willing to amplify your brand on your behalf gladly–willfully! And, the more they trust you and your content–like I do anything by Shel Holtz–the more likely they’ll AutoAMP and really act as an extenti0n of your own Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn followers.

Long story short, I am trying it out and there’s a lot of cool stuff going on here. I am frustrated because building a Gaggle takes a long time. Because of Twitter limits, you can only invite, via DM, 200 of your followers-per-day so in order to invite all of my 39,553 followers, I will need another 197 days — to say nothing of the other three accounts I have connected in addition to @chrisabraham: @marcon, @harrisonmarkw, @abrahamharrison.

And, because I don’t have a cool podcast to promote like Shel Holtz’s FIR, I decided to make this experiment all about my very best asset: Marketing Conversation, Abraham Harrison’s corporate blog. All the content on MC is both stellar and moderate, which is to say it isn’t my stream or the streams of the other, personal, accounts, that are more chatty and less focused on producing simple, retweet-worthy, beautifully-curated content, both trustworthy and consistent — no floods of inconsistent or off-topic BS that could possibly hurt the web of trust both Abraham Harrison and I have developed over the years.

As it goes now, I have 63 folks in my Gaggle, including me. Even now, with so few, this surely amplifies like crazy. My total member reach is up to 144,234 followers and the total message reach is up to 3,452,474! It’s sort of like compound interest: I don’t really know what it is but compound interest has made quite a few savers millionaires over the years (it’s always the way time-travelers and vampires become billionaires, isn’t it?)

I was going to go through the reports and the metrics and the contests and all the other things that GaggleAMP offers but I think this is good enough for now — I will follow up with a step-by-step walk through the service next time. Right now I am working on building my Gaggle, I am seeing how well it converts to reach, retweets, clicks, and so forth.

All I can say is that, at the very least, it makes me happy that I don’t have to pay too much attention to posting my own great content from my collaborative marketing blog, Marketing Conversation, because I know that all the new posts are automagically posted to my @chrisabraham Twitter stream without my having to remember to do it all the time — and, even better, there’s a setting that allows me to preface each post that I AutoAMP from @marcon with “RT @marcon:” which is what I would do manually anyway. And since I am so busy, I like to automate as much as possible that I can as long as it’s an exact replica of would I would do anyway.

Another thing I like is that I can tweet something over on @chrisabraham and if I really intentionally and explicitly desire that tweet to go out amongst the members of my Gaggle as-is, then I can affix a simple #ga hash tag to the end of that tweet and it will be added to either my Gaggle members’ message queue or it will be automatically queued up to go out automatically via AutoAMP.

• Amplify your good message with GaggleAmp (socialmedia.biz)
• Amplify your good message with GaggleAmp (biznology.com)
• FIR Interview: Glenn Gaudet, President and Founder, GaggleAmp (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Interview: Glenn Gaudet, President and Founder, GaggleAmp (holtz.com)
• GaggleAMP Offers Social Message Distribution For Companies (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Join the FIR GaggleAmp experiment (nevillehobson.com)
• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #616: September 12, 2011 (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Speakers and Speeches: Shel Holtz on Content Curation (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Speakers and Speeches: October 2011 – Shel Holtz on Content Curation (holtz.com)
• 3 Ways to Improve Internal Content Sharing (hubspot.com)

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

Related articles

• You’ve probably over-farmed your donors (biznology.com)
• How to Double Global Food Production by 2050 and Reduce Environmental Damage (obxcommonground.org)
• Integrated Aquaculture (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• 400,000 Farmers in Southern Africa Using ‘Fertilizer Trees’ to Dramatically Improve Food Security (scienceblog.com)
• Fertiliser tree systems can double agriculture yield in two thirds of cases in East Africa (nextbigfuture.com)
• Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) (pensci.wordpress.com)
• Trees ‘boost African crop yields’ (bbc.co.uk)

Last week I spent two days attending the 2010 North American Alterian Engaging Times Summit since I have been a legitimate crazy-nutso fan of their SM2 social media metrics and monitoring tool since it the tool was called Techrigy SM2.  I have also written testimonials, case studies, testimonial videos, and instructional videos about the product. Anyway, I never really posted about it but I was a little more receptive when Lauren Eichmann reached out to me with her press release.  So, here it is:

Alterian Survey Reveals Brands Undervalue Customer Service Objectives with Social Media

The Engaging Times Summit survey also indicates that 35 percent of marketers say it’s still ‘too early to tell’ about social media ROI.

Chicago, IL – 24 August 2010 – Alterian (LSE: ALN), the leader in customer engagement technology and solutions, today announced the results of its Engaging Times Summit survey on brand socialization, engagement strategy and social media ROI. Summit attendees comprised more than 400 senior-level marketing executives from major brands including Cisco, American Greetings Interactive, Dave and Busters, RAZOR and Western Union.

Results showed that when asked about the most important social media objectives, 24 percent reported that retaining existing customers is the central objective, 26 percent believe driving brand awareness is the most crucial aspect, and 30 percent are aiming for new customer acquisition. Less than one percent cited that the most important objective was to offer customer service.

“It’s surprising that brands are reporting that they don’t highly value deploying customer service in the social media channel,” said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. “Many are underutilizing this approach, as all brands need to be prepared to handle their customers’ complaints and act on them. While marketers may have different objectives than those working in the customer service department, it’s important to have a cross-channel strategy and integrate outreach to gain maximum exposure and positive chatter about your brand online.”

Despite a lack of emphasis on customer service objectives in social media, survey results showed that about 90 percent of marketers believe that cross-channel coordination is indeed vital in marketing campaigns. Similarly, a majority of 61 percent of marketers said their brand’s engagement with consumers occurs both online and offline, suggesting that engagement takes place on multiple platforms.

The State of Social Media Engagement
Based on survey results, marketers said they are increasingly viewing social media as a means for engagement as opposed to promotion. Three out of four respondents indicated their brand is either ‘somewhat’ or ‘extremely’ engaged in social media. Only 22 percent reported they are not very engaged, and three percent said they are not engaged at all.

Yet the survey showed that measuring ROI is still a challenge. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42 percent reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI.

While some marketers might be on the fence about ROI, the majority (57 percent) said they believe investing in social media has been a worthwhile investment for their brand.  Thirty-five percent claimed it’s still too early to tell, but not a single respondent reported that social media is not a worthwhile investment.

“There are tools available today that help marketers measure the influence of their social media investment, and consequently understand the ROI for their social media efforts,” said Connie Bensen, Alterian’s Director of Community Strategy. “It’s just a matter of identifying what you want to measure and tracking progress in a way that is appropriate for your brand.”

One in five marketers who attended the Summit are indeed measuring ROI in terms of brand socialization, a promising figure for the future of social media marketing. For more information about best practices, visit the Alterian web site for Bensen’s Social Media ROI whitepaper series.

About the Engaging Times Americas Summit
The annual event features thought leadership from some of the Americas’ leading brands, giving attendees the opportunity to learn how major organizations are extending and expanding their brand’s social and emotional connections in a cross-channel way (e-mail, direct mail, social media, web).  The Alterian Engaging Times Summit 2010 was held August 17 & 18 in Chicago and was attended by more than 400 marketers from around the country, including keynotes from Stan Rapp, co-founder of Rapp Collins and Don Peppers from Peppers & Rogers Group.

Other presenters included American Greetings Interactive, Walgreens, Edelman, Western Union, Razor, Mars, Acxiom, Bank of the West, Epsilon, Dave & Buster’s, Cisco, WOMMA, Harte-Hanks, Ogilvy, Peppers & Rogers, 1to1 Media, Covalent Marketing, and Forrester Research.

About Alterian
Alterian (LSE: ALN) enables organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with their customers and prospects through social, digital, and traditional marketing channels. Alterian’s Customer Engagement solutions are focused in four main areas: Social Media, Web Content Management, Email, and Campaign Management & Analytics.

Alterian technology is utilized either to address a specific marketing challenge or as part of an integrated marketing platform, with analytics and customer engagement with the individual at the heart of everything. Working alongside a rich ecosystem of partners, Alterian delivers its software as a service or on premise. For more information about Alterian visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.