Chris Abraham » Journalism

Social Media Marketing leveraging on Blogger Outreach

Chris Abraham — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:03:17 +0000

[Originally Posted on iStrategy] By now we all know how to start a Facebook Page, dress it, and fill it up with fans. We have sorted out how to grow, engage, and reward your followers on Twitter. It has taken a while, but we’ve all sorted out best practices and transparency when it comes to messaging on forums and reaching out to A-list bloggers. We at Abraham Harrison are there with you; however, it was not giving us the impact we needed for our advocacy and issue-oriented clientele. Reaching out to only the top-25 blogs via a bespoke blogger outreach might result in a real punch – if we really crush it. Sadly, if you limit your outreach to only 25 highly-influential bloggers, even a little failure can be devastating.

In order to maximize impact, we have added massively-targeted long-tail “b-z-list” blogger outreach to our tool set and it has become our bread and butter with over 80% of our active client service work.

What we do, effectively, is take the framework of traditional news release-based PR and adapt it completely to the unique culture of the Internet. In short, we have learned to treat thousands of bloggers with as much attention and responsiveness as most PR shops reserve for only national magazines, newspapers, blogs, radio, and television stations.

Before we begin any messaging, we quickly work with the client to get an idea of who they want to reach. All recipients must be bloggers and possess their own platform for citizen journalism. We don’t do direct marketing, we do PR. We only engage people who can repeat or carry our client’s message. We come up with a fantasy list of bloggers our client would like to reach. Some are fantasy and some exist. Our researchers will generally come up with a list of 5,000 blogs and then hunker down to discover their name and email. I am a computer geek originally so I know how to find the names and emails of bloggers; however, we have discovered that if you dig too deep to find someone’s email, such as into historical Whois records, then bloggers get pissed. If my team can’t find the person’s contact info in 5 minutes then they don’t really want to be contacted. Things move a lot smoother when there is awareness. By the time we collect all the contact info, we’ve generally winnowed the 5k to about 2,000.

We spend a lot of time, generally and per-campaign, breaking down what the client wants from a blogger outreach (buzz, traffic, sales, registrations, memberships, fund raising, etc) and what they have to give (books to review, information, exclusive content, lots of love, good-karma, or just content – a gift most certainly should never be an Amazon gift certificate).

After we sort this out, we then develop the message model that will eventually become an email. We ask our clients for any and all assets they have to share – video, copy, text, chapters, audio, images, photos, news – and roll them all into a Social Media News Release.

Here’s the genius part. Have you ever received a pitch from a PR shop? Isn’t there always some generally lame salutation like “Hello fellow blogger,” or “Dear Abraham” or “Dear new media blogger?” Lame. Also, isn’t there always either an attachment or an inline rich text press release? How is a blogger going to copy that image and that copy with those links over to their blog? It doesn’t work like that. And, why all the inline graphics and the tracking code in the email? They almost always get the email spam-boxed.

What we do is strip it all down to a simple email, all plain text, no tracking code, with a first name and the name of the blog in the email. We don’t attach anything, we place one link as a URL, to an SMNR, and that’s it. We tell the blogger exactly who we are, what we have to give, and explicitly what we want. If the email message plus the SMNR takes longer than 5-minutes to get through and post about, then we’ve failed. Maybe we’ll get a tweet, but a blogger doesn’t have ten to twenty minutes for posting for us for free, right? Longer than 5, at best a tweet or maybe something on Facebook. The money’s in the blog post and that’s what you want because most bloggers automatically cross-post to Twitter and Facebook anyway.

Here’s another trick. If a blogger receives an email and hits reply, he or she gets a reply from one of our staff within the hour. Too many PR shops work 9-6 and aren’t there in the INBOX. If a blogger’s pissed off, he’ll be more pissed by morning. We’re 24/7 and virtual. We’ll also never be snarky – never be snarky! Also, if a blogger wants to be removed, we remove them immediately. Sometimes for just that campaign but mostly forever, banished into our mailer, where we have a permanent “no fly” list, making it impossible to email them even if they make it onto the email list.

Finally, we always reach out twice more to bloggers who don’t reply at all. Two follow-up emails. The second email outreach always garners the most posts. If we receive 200 earned media mentions (blog posts) during the course of the campaign, we’ll get 50 posts from the first outreach, 100 from the second, and maybe another 50 from the last. By the second email, folks recognize our email and take a little more time to look through it.

It is essential to our success to make sure we treat every single blogger with as much time, attention, kindness generally – and wrongfully – reserved for mainstream media and celebrity blogs and bloggers.

And it works, too. In the last 12-months we have helped the Fresh Air Fund earn 1,800 blog and social media mentions. 269 media mentions for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day, 109 for Survivor Corps’s Operation Survivor, 190 for International Medical Corp’ 2009 Member’s Project bid, 173 for Snuggle Crème, 294 for US Olympic Committee, 401 for BrandsClub, 295 for Kimberly Clark Healthcare HAI Watch, 180 for the MLK Memorial Foundation, 83 for Motionbox, and others… Now, that’s a lot of punch, both in terms of volume, buzz, coverage, to say nothing of the powerful SEO impact of having hundreds of blogs linking to your clients’ sites. Imagine that!

While long tail blogger outreach is a very powerful method on its own, if you’re able to make part of a larger, integrated, social media marketing campaign to include Facebook, Twitter, celebrity blogs, message boards, forums, a wiki strategy, a reputation management campaign and a crisis plan, you’re golden. [Originally Posted on iStrategy]

Interview With Chris Abraham the A-List Blogger

Chris Abraham — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:08:40 +0000

A couple weeks ago Ed Zitron reached out to me to ask me some zany and personal questions about both me and also my habits as an A-List blogger, since I blog for Marketing Conversation, AdAge Digital Next, SocialMedia.biz, and this one, of course. I enjoyed answering these questions but, as my friend Scott said, “Gee, you’re a high maintenance princess. I guess it’s good to make the flacks work.” I guess those of you who know me might verily agree. Sigh. Enjoy!

By Ed Zitron How to Pitch Me: Chris Abraham, AdAge, SocialMedia.Biz
Over the past few years, I’ve come full circle. First a journalist, now a PR rep. In this time, I’ve become fascinated with the pitching process – the gentle art of getting to know a writer and essentially identifying unique angles that will hopefully interest the journalist. Some consider it a dark, subversive art, but others, like my good friend and reporter Chris Abraham, realize its part of the process, and embrace it.
Chris writes for AdAge’s Digital Next, SocialMedia.biz, and a multitude of smaller blogs and guest-posts. He has more than 10,000 Twitter Followers, and insists that I don’t annoy him with multiple emails in the span of an hour.
So, allow us to take you once again into the mad world that is a journalist’s head, and see what his solutions are for the newspaper industry, PR as a whole and, of course, Tiger Sharks.
PR/Journalism

What do you most want out of a pitch? How do you like to be pitched?
I need any pitch to be as simple as possible for me to respond to. If you don’t have my in 3 minutes the most you’ll get from me is a tweet. Too many people have crap gifts or they don’t have any gift at all — or any activation request: why do I care? Even if I know you — I recently blogged for a friend — I will become very frustrated if your pitch requires me to download PDF files, JPG files, sort out EMBED code, find quotable text, and everything else. Things work well if you collect all of that content — premasticated, if you will — into an online Social Media Release (for example).
So, if you’ll notice, you have EVERYTHING available there for the taking — no ZIP files, no PSDs or PNGs — everything is “stealable” from the site — copy and images and videos and so forth – because we’re painfully aware that if you don’t have someone in a couple minutes, you lost them to “never” or “later.”
Also, I’m a sucker for getting a book or a galley in the mail — if someone sends me a book, I always read it and try to blog it — I don’t respond well to PDF downloads or telling me about a book and expecting me to blog about it — I will be more devoted if it comes via FedEx or UPS and even more points for a signature and an author business card — but that’s just me.
What makes a good PR professional?
You in particular do a great job because you treat me like royalty and you also pester me, which I don’t consider pestering because you basically act as my personal assistant until the call is scheduled, the interview is conducted, and then you ping me with great follow-through until my post is posted — and you never criticize me for writing whatever I want — you’re always grateful — also, you have high-caste clients and I always want to get onto a call with someone cool.
What grinds your gears about how PR pros treat you?
I think WORD or RTF or ZIPPED attachments are terrible. Pitches that have a “no reply” email address suck. Pitchers that don’t reply right away when I reply to their pitch suck. Stingy or guarded PR reps suck. PR professionals who use CC or BCC and don’t have their outreach sorted out to a professional level suck. PR professionals who don’t ASK me for anything won’t get anything. This isn’t flirting. I can’t read minds. Also, when a pitch is obviously a cut-and-paste — the “real” written part and the pasted “stock copy” — generally different fonts, different sized — usually a serif personalized paragraph followed by the stock email — send to everyone — that is in Verdana. You know what I am talking about — it is hypocritical — they’re pretending to be authentic but they’re really just popping a small message and a really long, annoying, “why should I care” pitch in there.
What can PR pros learn from writers, journalists, etc. about how to do their jobs better?
PR pros need to learn one thing: bloggers are not below the line. Bloggers need to be treated with as much attention and grace and follow-through as any journalist at the FT — no matter what their “caste” or their “compete.com” stats — you can’t treat a Power150 dude good and then a mommy blog bad — they all need to be treated with respect and with as much courtesy as anyone else.
Also, the initial email should only ever be a “so, here’s what I am doing, are you interested” and not complete pitch. Get to the point.
What’s your absolute, downright worst journalist-PR experience?
Well, I have been pretty lucky because I have a thick skin and because I spend more time learning from bad pitches than I do getting angry or frustrated.
How can the flacks of the world endear themselves to you, and build a gods-honest relationship with you?
I don’t know — how have you been able to make me take an hour of my time off to answer some silly questions? Probably by appealing to my ego (33%) and to my curiosity (33%) and to my interests (33%).
Misc
Do you think that social media really is that key to the ‘future of journalism’?
I think community and conversation is the future of journalism. I am platform agnostic. What journalism did wrong is this: journalists, reporters, and papers have started to let their contempt for their readers to show. They fancy us a bunch of dumbasses who don’t care any more about civics and duty and politics and so they have therefore holed themselves up with the Academy and have tried to write and teach for the readers they wished they had rather than the readers they are losing every day. After a while of inviting your priest and your teacher to your backyard BBQ, you get tired of them telling you how you shouldn’t be drinking beer or eating pork so you stop inviting them to the party — journalism and print media don’t give people the gift they want, they try to give us the gift they think we should have — and with social media the company store is no longer the monopoly that it once was. That’s the basic tenet of market capitalism: give the market what it needs, right? Well, the “stewards” of “our culture” are realizing that they cannot “maintain the culture” for us and also make a profit from advertising and profit.
What’s annoying or encouraging you about journalism and writing in general?
I am reading some really awesome books, all telling the end of advertising as we know it: “Making News in the Digital Era” by David E. Henderson; “The Chaos Scenario” by Bob Garfield; “Twitterville” by Shel Israel; and “No Size Fits All” by Tom Hayes & Michael S. Malone — some very amazing insights into what’s going on right now and what’s coming up in the short-term future — it isn’t really the future, per se, but just a clear look into the tip of the wedge of the present.
How would you save newspapers?
I would turn every newspaper into its very own “AOL” — and I would make news an important PART of the new virtual online community, but I would basically convert the paper into something that news papers have always served as, along with churches and the lodge, which is the hub around which a city spins — and this community would mean that journalists would become only 50% of the equation — the rest would be “citizen” hosts and guides and also paid online facilitators, path-finders, and moderators — experts in their city. There is a market for this and a lot of the opportunity had been stolen by Yelp and other highly-targeted and highly-relevant national sites — because newspapers were too busy being holier than thou and not becoming an answer to what was, indeed, needed by that community that the paper publicly professed as being important to them.
What’s your favorite movie?
My favorite movie of all time is Being There, starring Peter Sellers.
You have to fight an animal over 150lbs – which one do you choose, and why?
I would choose a Tiger Shark because I think I could take it and even if I couldn’t take it, I think being eaten by a shark is a noble way to go.

Newspapers Need to Stop With the Civics Lessons or They’ll All Die

Chris Abraham — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:11:16 +0000

I think community and conversation is the future of journalism. I am platform agnostic.

What journalism did wrong is this: journalists, reporters, and papers have started to let their contempt for their readers show.

They — print media and serious news papers — fancy us a bunch of dumbasses who don’t care, any more, about civics and duty and politics and so they have therefore holed themselves up, right next to the Academy, and have tried to write for and teach the readers they wished they had — or used to have — rather than the readers they are losing every day.

Here’s an analogy. After inviting your parish priest and your childrens’ Sunday school teacher over to your backyard BBQ a couple-few times, you may get tired of them judging you — telling you how you shouldn’t be drinking beer or eating pork — so you stop inviting them to the party after a spell.

Journalism and print media don’t give people the gifts they want, they try to force-feed us the gift they think we should have — and with social media the company store is no longer the monopoly that it once was and we don’t need to spend every morning poring over the paper — unless we’re boning up for the Foreign Service exam or are on assignment from our school marm for a civics class.

That’s the very basic tenet of market capitalism: give them what they want, not what you think they need. Right? (Actually, that’s generally good advice: give people the gift they want and not the gift you want, yourself.)

Well, the “stewards” of “our culture” are realizing that they cannot “maintain the culture” for us and also make a profit from advertising and subscriptions.

What Will We Tell Peoria? Forum at National Press Club

Chris Abraham — Thu, 14 May 2009 03:13:17 +0000

What Will We Tell Peoria?
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB FORUM: WHAT WILL WE TELL PEORIA? THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WASHINGTON BUREAUS AND WHAT COMES NEXT
WASHINGTON — As newspapers are forced to close their Washington bureaus, the National Press Club, the world’s leading professional organization for journalists, will hold a forum May 13 to examine what impact this has on how the folks back home get information about the federal government.
The forum is free and open to the public. It begins at 6:00 p.m. with a reception. The panel will start at 6:30. Seating is limited. Please reserve by calling the Club’s reservation line, 202-662-7501.
Speaking on the panel are:
Andrew Alexander, former Cox Newspapers bureau chief and now Washington Post ombudsman;
Clark Hoyt, former Washington editor for Knight-Ridder and now New York Times public editor;
John Walcott, McClatchy bureau chief;
Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Politico; and
Cynthia Dizikes, Washington reporter for the MinnPost, an independent online news service based in Minneapolis.
The forum will be moderated by Gil Klein, director of the National Press Club’s Centennial Forums Project and a former national correspondent for the Media General News Service.
“Since the Civil War, the Washington bureau has been an essential part of getting news about Washington to the folks back home,” said Club President Donna Leinwand. “With these bureaus disappearing, Americans are losing a watchdog of their congressional representatives, and they no longer will have inside information on how actions in Washington affect their communities.”
This event is part of a year-long, nationwide series of forums the National Press Club launched in its centennial year to examine the First Amendment, freedom of the press and the future of journalism. These forums reached 40 audiences in 35 states, the District of Columbia and Canada. They brought together leading local journalists to talk about where the news business is going and how to protect its core values.
A report of the findings of those forums, as well as summaries of each one and video clips from many of them can be found at www.press.org/juncture.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Gil Klein — National Press Club Centennial Forums Project director, 703-338-2721. E-mail gklein@press.org.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB:
The National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. Founded in 1908, the Club has 3,500 members representing most major news organizations. Each year, the Club holds more than 2,000 events including news conferences, luncheons and panels, and more than 250,000 guests come through its doors.

SEO Strategies Aren’t Either Or But Both

Chris Abraham — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:07:17 +0000

Nick from Search Engine Optimization Journal says it short, sweet, and right on, Is Organic SEO Really Your Best Option?

For years SEO practitioners have been proclaiming the virtues of organic SEO. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not PPC. Etc. By the same token, PPC experts have been signing the praises of PPC – it’s fast, it’s dynamic, it’s targeted traffic, and it’s not organic SEO. Does it really matter?
Personally, I think that your Internet marketing efforts should all work together. It’s not a matter of SEO vs. PPC. It’s more a matter of whether or not you are targeting your traffic through the tools that are available to you, and organic SEO is one tool at your disposal. And it’s a valuable tool.
Organic SEO is about targeting the keywords that are important to your business and achieving business results for your targeting efforts. There’s more to it than simply picking keywords out of a vacuum and throwing them against the wall. The idea is to target the keywords that searchers looking for a service or product like yours would use to find it. If you can identify the keywords that the market thrives on then you can drive traffic to your website. You can do this through organic SEO and PPC as well as through other avenues.

The only thing I might add is the power of digital PR, blogger outreach, and online engagement to help out your war of search placement; otherwise, this is the best I have read in quite a while.

This is not a game of panaceas, it is a game of content-creation, site architecture, organic SEO strategies, PPC, and all the rest, over time. SEO is about consistance, predictability, and is much more of a war than it is a battle.

Mind you, try not too lose to many battles along the way.

Whiter than Wonderbread and Puffy Clouds

Chris Abraham — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:49:42 +0000

One thing that I am not is touchy about the fact that I love what I love. And I love Moleskine notebooks. And I love manual typewriters, especially the Hermes 3000, and I love quite a lot of other like-minded stuff. Well, Moleskine notebooks are #122 in the list of Stuff While People Like. Sad but true.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days. Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked: typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Let’s see what else I like that white people like — the bold ones I feel especially strong about:

#122 Moleskine Notebooks
#120 Taking a Year Off
#119 Sea Salt
#115 Promising to Learn a New Language
#108 Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music
#107 Self Aware Hip Hop References
#106 Facebook
#99 Grammar
#98 The Ivy League
#92 Book Deals
#90 Dinner Parties
#88 Having Gay Friends
#81 Graduate School
#80 The Idea of Soccer
#79 Modern Furniture
#78 Multilingual Children
#77 Musical Comedy
#73 Gentrification
#72 Study Abroad
#70 Difficult Breakups
#61 Bicycles
#58 Japan
#57 Juno
#56 Lawyers
#55 Apologies
#54 Kitchen Gadgets
#53 Dogs
#52 Sarah Silverman
#51 Living by the Water
#50 Irony
#49 Vintage
#48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
#47 Arts Degrees
#46 The Sunday New York Times
#45 Asian Fusion Food
#44 Public Radio
#43 Plays
#42 Sushi
#39 Netflix
#38 Arrested Development
#37 Renovations
#36 Breakfast Places
#35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
#34 Architecture
#25 David Sedaris
#24 Wine
#23 Microbreweries
#21 Writers Workshops
#20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
#19 Traveling
#18 Awareness
#16 Gifted Children
#14 Having Black Friends
#13 Tea
#8 Barack Obama
#7 Diversity
#6 Organic Food
#5 Farmer’s Markets
#3 Film Festivals
#2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
#1 Coffee

Holy fuck, I am pretty darn white!

Oscar Winner Prediction Roundup

Chris Abraham — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:51:07 +0000

Via Search Engine Journal, Oscars Predictions for 2009 Winners Online:

AOL’s MovieFone 2009 Oscar Predictions : AOL has put together a slideshow of their Oscar Pool predictions and have picked Penelope Cruz for Best Supporting Actress & Sean Penn as Best Actor from the film Milk.
Oscar Frenzy : A blog crazy about the Oscars with their predictions list and a vibrant commenting frenzy, Oscar Frenzy has gone against the grain and predicted that Revolutionary Road will win the Best Picture.
MSN Movies : MSN, like most other online entertainment sites, is not predicting that Mickey Rourke will win Best Actor, and feels that Sean Penn will win it for Milk, although they say Rourke should win because he has earned it.
Oscars on Go.com : Of course since ABC is hosting the actors they can’t really predict the winners without there being any controversy, but they have set up the Official Oscars site with live streaming of the Oscars and the Red Carpet festivities.

Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive

Chris Abraham — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:43:00 +0000

We do brand reputation and online reputation management and the number one thing we tell our clients is that if you don’t amplify your brand online — add some signal to the noise, if you will — then someone else will. And, you can do this before you’re attacked or you can do it afterwards as an ORM campaign, which, like going to a plumber when your pipes burst, is generally much more expensive. Better to maintain than to repair. Here’s a great article from over on Online Publicity Journal that you should check out, Be Proactive – Don’t Wait Until Negative Press Finds You!:

The internet has allowed people who have normally been quiet to now have a voice, and sometimes a loud one. That voice can easily cripple your business model and stop or slow down revenues coming like a wrench thrown into the gears. One online complaint can send ripples very quickly through your business model.
Whistle blowing websites are everywhere and frustrated clients and customers are waiting for a reason to shout and make noise if things go sour with their experience. If you haven’t’ done any proactive online marketing and your reputation has not been tarnished yet than that is great. But all it takes one angry customer to ruin that good luck streak and you just never know when it could occur.
Many times it will be from an angry customer you have never even heard from who just didn’t even bother contacting you first to try to fix the problem. If you take a proactive approach right from the beginning you can allow yourself to build up a barrier and wall against new, fresh new negative publicity coming in. It is much easier to build a barrier for you business of positive information before negative press finds it way to your search results.
With consumer confidence down and online customers becoming more and more savvy each day more and more online shoppers want to see a squeaky clean online image. If they see any angry clients or customers it could easily trigger them to purchase or do business with a competitor. Online publicity is a very quick and easy way to start building a clean online reputation.
As others pick up your releases you will effectively add more content to your search results. As these links sit and age they become anchored into the search results making it much more difficult for any Rip Off Report and Pissed Consumer listings to make their way to your search results generated by someone search for your personal or business name.

Blogs Have Either Died or Consolidated

Chris Abraham — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:33:52 +0000

While I have only met James Joyner of Outside the Beltway fame once, we keep in touch a little bit. I have always admired his business and blogging acumen. Well, it is James’ 6-year blogiversary, and he writes, via Ryerson Review of Journalism Blog:

The blogging landscape has changed markedly in the intervening period, with many of the top blogs of early 2003 long gone and quite a few relative newcomers having taken over the top rungs. Relatively few of those who started when Steven and I did are still at it.
Political blogging has gone from an almost entirely amateur niche enterprise into something much more similar to the mainstream press, a process that has been both good and bad….
Because there are so many voices now, though, and many of the best have been acquired by major media outlets and think tanks, there’s a certain Establishment feel to the blogosphere that didn’t exist years ago. The rise of RSS readers and aggregators like Memeorandum mean that fewer of us are using our blogrolls or just keeping a log of interesting things we’re finding on the Web; instead, we’re much more apt to write about what everyone else is writing about.

My Top 91 Social Media Blog Posts

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:30:11 +0000

I am not willing or able to say that the following 91 blog posts about social media, blogging, new media, social networking, etc, are the definite top-91 posts because I didn’t have the time or attention to go through all of my 5,437 blog posts: