These companies want to argue they deserve “earned” media coverage when what they are really doing is BUYING that awareness by paying PR agencies to go out and sell it for them. They aren’t earning it by some good deed or being awesome – they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf.

NOTE The following is basically a copy/paste of the comment that I left over at the article, so it’s written to Gail, which might read weird, so forgive me on that.  At the end of the day, I worship Gail Gardner for starting this conversation so please forgive my mild ‘tude — I am well-caffeinated and really passionate about this topic.

While I don’t believe or agree with a word in this post as the entire premise is flawed, however, I agree with everything that Doc Sheldon says in his comment — thanks Doc (we don’t know each other, I don’t think):

I agree that a blogger should have the option of taking pay for reviews, opinions or publicity, if that’s their chosen business model. For many, it is, and I have no problem with that. But when the required disclosure tells me that a blogger was paid to write about a product or service, it causes me to doubt their objectivity. If they’re okay with that, fine. Personally, I prefer that my readers believe I’m giving them an honest review, so I prefer to do independent reviews. That doesn’t mean that I think that every blogger that receives pay or gifts is being dishonest… just that it casts a shadow of doubt. One I prefer to avoid.

Let me explain the flawed nature. Firstly, I don’t believe that you, Gail, read the post very carefully at all; secondly, I never said their were thousands of exceptional bloggers — I believe that there are a few exceptions — awesome — bloggers, a number of payola bloggers, and then a long tail of passion-players; finally, your line, “they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf,” is just a little bitter but it is also not true.

We don’t want to get bloggers to work for us at all — we just want each blogger to consider what we’re pitching — yes, to the blogger, but also to the readers. We can only pitch content to the blogger for the benefit of his or her readers.

And, if we’re able to engage with them in such a way that the blogger sees a professional, reputation and content benefit to what we’re pitching, then, and only then, do we “earn” an “earned media” post.

And, the blogger is under zero obligation to write nicely; he or she is allowed his or her own integrity and journalistic distance and is more than able to trash it, to love it, to recommend it or not.

Which is the risk I take when I go any outreach. If my client’s products or services such or if we package it poorly or target it sloppily, then the entire campaign can roll snake eyes at best and at worst, there can be a huge media blow-back.

The biggest flaw in the premise is that we’re stealing from bloggers. That because we’re professionals we’re in some way duping or conning these poor guileless bloggers into doing work for us for free.

With earned media blogger outreach, there must be a win-win-win between the blogger, the client, and the readership or it really doesn’t work at all.

I so do enjoy the conversation, so thank you for that, Gail.

The post Integrity is inherent in earned media but not paid appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Why Scoop.it, Bundlr, Pearltrees, Storify & Pinterest should be part of your Web marketing plan

Second of two parts. Also see:
• Top tools to help you curate business content

Guest post by Gianluca Fiorelli
SEOmoz

Target audience: Businesses, brands, social marketers, SEO marketers, website developers, Web publishers.

In the last couple of years, the tools available to content curators have really taken off on the Web. Some are worthy of the hype and have partly changed the nature of content curation (Pinterest anyone?), and others have a great user base in the content marketing field but are less known to social media or SEO marketers.

Below I’ll list and describe the most interesting ones. It’s a very personal selection, so please add your own favorites in the comments.

Scoop.it: An all-in-one solution for content curation

Scoop.it is probably the best site for content curation right now. Even though it offers several ways to share the content you curate in your Scoop.it magazine on your social sites and to embed on your site, it’s mainly meant to be viewed on the Scoop.it site.

The final product is a magazine, where it’s possible to publish content suggested by the Scoop.it suggestion engine — from the sources you have set up, from its bookmarklet, and from the other curators you’re following on the site itself.

The overall quality of the curators present in Scoop.it is quite high, even though you must dig to find the truly remarkable ones. The system suggests users related to your topic. But if you want to explore topics you’re not curating, the Scoop.it search system is not the best one.

Scoop.it offers the opportunity to republish your curated content on your site: via widget, which you can configure as you want, and via RSS feed. If you have a WordPress or Tumblr blog, you can connect it with your topic page and republish your curated content there.

Scoop.it is a freemium product, and the free subscription is powerful enough for your typical content curation needs. But if you want to use your brand, your own domain/subdomain and have analytics (and connect your magazine to Google Analytics), then you need to subscribe to the Business plan.

For more insights about Scoop.it, read this post, which Gabriella Sannino published on Search Engine Journal, or this great guide by Chris Dyson on his blog.

Bundlr: Clip & save text clips, images, video and more

Bundlr is a “clipper site.” Think of it as Pinterest but not limited to just images and videos. In fact, with it you can clip and save in your bundles practically everything you find relevant online: text clips, images, video, code snippets and more.

Bundlr, as with any curation content tool, lets you share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus what you have clipped, and it lets you add your note about the clip. This is especially interesting for social content curation. Moreover, the page can be curated by more than one curator or can be kept private if you are curating a topic for internal use only (both available in the pro version only).

Bundlr lets you embed your topic page in your own site, too. The embed will get updated as constantly as you continue to clip new relevant quotes and images about your selected topic. Another way to embed a page in your site is via RSS.

Alternatives to Bundlr include:

• Snip.it is in beta and very Facebook oriented.
• Bagtheweb.com is a mix between Scoop.it and a clipper site. Its most interesting functionality is that you can create a network of “bags” to create a deeper curated content experience about a topic and its subtopics.
• Clipboard offers the opportunity to embed (or share on social networks or with a link) just one clip. For instance, click this link.
• (Oh, yes) Pinterest.

Storify: Curate coverage while adding commentary

Storify fulfills perfectly the “chronology” concept of content curation. With it, it’s possible to narrate a story aggregating the best content about the same topic from different sources, while commenting on it and offering your own vision about the event presented, as this Storify by Charles Arthur about sexism in the web marketing industry nicely displays.

For this reason, it is now widely used especially by journalists, but also by tweeps and bloggers who write about current news. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I really suggest you give it a tryout.

The list of sources Storify lets you build your story from is impressive:

• Storify itself
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Disqus
• Tumblr
• SoundCloud

You can also grab content from StockTwits, GetGlue, Chute and BreakingNews. Finally, the opportunity to search on Google and embed URLs you may have saved in your favorites or from your RSS reader makes Storify’s potential even grander.

Obviously, the stories you create can be exported easily to your WordPress site (both .com and .org), Tumblr and Posterous. You can also mail your stories directly to the subscribers of your newsletter if you are using MailChimp. Finally, you can share your story on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus via social buttons.

Be aware that while Storify is easy to use, it’s not that easy to create a story that grabs your readers. This post by Dave Copeland, Do’s and Don’t For Using Storify, describes perfectly how to create a story that won’t leave your readers indifferent.

Pearltrees: Compelling visual and social components

Pearltrees is one of the content curation sites on the rise among content marketers. At first glance, it’s not that different from any other social bookmarking site:

• You have a browser app that lets you “pearl” the page you’re visiting.
• You can connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Pearltrees account.
• You can import the links you may have saved in Delicious.

What makes Pearltrees unique is its visual and social nature. It lets you organize your interests into pearls (let’s say “topic”) and Pearltrees, which amount to folders where you can add the pages you pearled in a branch. On the social front, any other curator expert in your topic may ask to team up with you (and vice versa).

The social nature of the site is not limited to the cooperation between curators though. As soon as you create your pearls, the system will start presenting you related pearls, which can be added to yours in toto or just the branch you are most interested in. For instance, in a pearl I created about SEO, I added the one about Python, a topic that interests me, but I am not absolutely an expert of; hence it is better for me to rely to the deeper knowledge of another curator.

Finally, as any content curation site, it is possible to share your pearls externally (Twitter, Facebook, email — or embed them in your site. But you can also share pearls internally to, say, your curation team and those who picked a pearl from you in the past. An interesting function is the ability to export all the links present in your categorized pearls in an RDF file, which can be easily opened with Excel.

Why do I need to curate content?

There are at least six reasons for considering content curation as a tactic in your Web marketing plan.

1To conquer the Long Tail. From a strict SEO point of view, to have a section of your own site dedicated to the curation of the best content related to your market, or to dedicate a section of your blog to it, is a powerful way to enhance the Long Tail reach of your site.

You need to follow the principles of content curation — discover, add value commenting and providing perspective, credit the sources — in order to not simply push duplicated content onto your own site. Tools like Scoop.it, with the opportunity they offer to export your curated content feed into your site, make this operation easier.

2To find sources for original content creation. Another second reason is that by curating content you can collect, find and reuse (always crediting the original source) great ideas and information, and then use that in turn to create great original content.

Sure, for some specific topics it may be very hard to find content online, but don’t forget that a world outside the web exists with tons of sources, which can be easily collected and curated, as I explain in this video I shot for Distilled:

3To find great contacts for link-building outreach. This is almost a natural effect of content curation. To discover and share only the best content online (and offline) about your niche puts yourself on the radar of the content creators, a fact that can lead you to:

1. Having them linking to your curated content.
2. Establishing contact with them and possibly collaborating with them.
3. Creating the opportunity to create original content with them.

To create original content based on the content you have curated can be an excellent method for obtaining linkbacks from the sources you cite and use.

Also, social content curation is perhaps the best way to fulfill the objective of any RSS (Really Simple Stalking) plan, as it was described by Wil Reynolds at the last LinkLove conference.

4To obtain a great number of social signals for your site or social media profiles. Every well-executed content curation action tends to attract readers and to generate a great amount of social signals (tweets, +1s, likes).

Just take as an example the “anti-Google” posts Aaron Wall writes from time to time on SEObook. They are a classic case of “Elevation Content Curation,” as Aaron in those posts usually drafts a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings, which he widely credits with links and citations.

Another example is what Expo Comic Mx did so to obtain better results from its Facebook page: to post a tender photo set featuring a happy Stormtrooper family using the photos of Kristina Alexanderson. That photo – a great example of targeted content curation you can see at right – has obtained more than 13K likes, 756 comments, and was shared more than 7,000 times nowadays.

5For branding, ORM and reference traffic. The explosion of Pinterest, even though now it has evolved into a more complex social marketing tool, is a wonderful example of the benefits of being active and using content curation platforms.

Creating a qualified presence for your brand in those kind of sites, practicing a wise content curation activity, and being participative with other curators has been demonstrated as a relatively easy way to enhance the thought-out knowledge of a brand. It helps in dominating the SERPs for your brand name (which is great if you have Online Reputation Management issues), and it provides a constant flux of organic traffic to your site; traffic that – as happened with Pinterest – can become really big if those curation content sites you are using become widely known to the masses.

Finally, from a strict SEO point of view, the active use of content curation sites helps in making of your site an entity to Google’s eyes, which is now essential in order to gain authority and relevance and not being considered just a minor presence on the Web.

6To become an authority in your industry

Curating the best sources about your industry on your site and using your social media profiles as a medium to share your discoveries can really help you in obtaining the objective of becoming an authority and reference in your industry.

The reason is simple to understand: If you share, comment and credit only the best sources, then people will tend to look at you as an authoritative source of information, and the creators you cite will start desiring to be cited by you.

And we all know what it means to become an authoritative source on Google.

Related

• Top tools to help you curate business content (Socialmedia.biz)

• How to become one of the most respected companies in your industry (Socialmedia.biz)

The post Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Look for the cumulative power of the long tail

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

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

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

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

Identify accessible & relevant bloggers who are open to a pitch

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quantum method of reaching out to bloggers

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

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

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

The post The quantum method of reaching out to bloggers appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Message boards and forums are full of marketing gold, but if gold were that simple to collect, everyone would be loaded.

Instead of walking you through the boring pedantics required to be an effective message board marketer, I will instead share with you an exemplar using the author and journalist Paul M. Barrett, author of the new New York Times best-selling book about the cult and culture of the Glock handgun, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.

Long story short, I received a direct message via Twitter last November from @GlockTheBook asking me if I might be interested in receiving a copy of a forthcoming book about Glock, the gun. Out of nowhere. Obviously someone had done their homework, and I was identified as a gun owner and sports shooter. I jumped at the opportunity to receive an early copy of the book. The folks at Crown hooked me up with a copy for my Kindle, and I read it through and was wowed. I wrote an earned media review and quickly became part of the author’s street team.

Paul had an ambitious plan: divide and conquer the entire online Glockosphere. His marketing strategy was unique and bold, at least in comparison to other high-caste and high-pedigree writers I have met and consulted for. His marketing plan included not only the influential grass-tops but went for a deep-dive into the passionate world of the firearms, pistols, Glocks, and the Second Amendment grassroots – into the deepest reaches of the gold mine and into the lowly and often-ignored message boards and forums.

As it turned out, his lovely wife Julie Cohen was the reason why Paul reached out to me and to dozens of other gun  buffs and communities all over the Internet throughout the course of his book promotion campaign. In fact, I recently discovered that it was Julie who discovered that I was a brand new gun owner who loved taking my Glocks to the range to make holes in paper and sent me the DM asking if I wanted to received an advance copy to review.

Whether Julie is Paul’s puppetmaster, guiding him into the nooks and crannies of Glock-related conversation online no matter where they happen, it was Paul who was willing to get in there, all fisticuffs, and open himself up to trolls and haters in the rarefied air of anonymous communities with the ultimate goal of making friends and selling books. And yet I hope Paul Barrett’s experience marketing online by virtually shaking hands and kissing babies was well worth his valuable time. Actually I know it was.  A few weeks ago I got to meet Paul and Julie for coffee in person before he did a reading at Politics & Prose.

Message boards allow others to join the conversation — whenever

I will paraphrase Julie here when I say that no matter how prestigious a live book tour is and how personally fulfilling doing readings in bookstores always is for a writer, tours are insanely expensive, time-intensive, exhausting, and all too often completely ephemeral.

However, when you’re willing to add to this real-world dog and pony show the same kind and quality of community engagement online that you do during the book tour (all from the comfort of your home), then spending the time meeting people online, where they congregate anyway, is worthwhile.

Some of the benefits are simple: Message boards are a permanent record, so all the sharing that Paul did, all the questions he answered, and all the good will he fostered is there for the life of the board. Not only that, but because of the asynchronous nature of message boards, Paul needs to linger around each board for weeks to make sure he’s a responsive participant. It’s not as quick as just popping into a bookstore, spending a few hours reading and chatting, and then leaving.

Message boards aren’t real time. They required Paul to monitor responses and come back over the course of couple of days or a week. This allows more people to engage over time, allowing Paul the ability to really consider his responses or draft and revise his response before committing. It also allows members and participants to get over being star struck and get real.

It also needs to be said that, for every message board member who actively asks questions, makes accusations, or debates an issue, there are at least a hundred, maybe a thousand, non-participants who are every bit as committed to their message board community.

These “lurkers” were completely engaged when they saw Paul and “NYC Shoots” go at it in a heated debate on The High Road forum. By showing commitment to the community and a bit of bravery when challenged, Paul earned respect in the community, earning new fans and protectors as well as showing what he was made of in front of potentially 143,051 High Road registered members.

If bravery, boldness, and heroism under duress and challenge can’t sell books, I don’t know what can.  If Paul M. Barrett, an assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion and The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America, still thinks it is essential to engage the lowly, antiquated message board and forum as part of his book publicity tour, what’s your excuse?

Via Biznology

The post How one author won over the gun buff message boards appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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 Biznology

The post The anachronistic social media isolationist appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Become a big fish by starting in a smaller pond appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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 Biznology.

The post Social media success demands talent above technology appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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 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!

The post The Social Media News Release explained in detail appeared first on Inside Social Media.

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 <[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]>

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 [email protected].
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.

(Via Biznology)

The post Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch appeared first on Inside Social Media.

The value comes from penetration, permanence, perseverance and persistence. There are only a finite number of members of every organization’s email list. Mashable and TechCrunch have a sizable but vertical (narrow) audience. When we reach out and pitch to thousands of bloggers, however small or niche, if they’re within maybe one but generally a handful of loosely defined topics, we always reach well outside of the echo chamber of a conversation that tends to get contained within the walls of a tech blog or mommy blog.

By reaching out ever further, we don’t assume that anyone outside of the five major urban centers are obsessed with the top five major papers or the top five major blogs. Doing so makes the critical mistake that if you get covered by the FT, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you’ve got the world covered. In fact, I will use a newspaper analogy to try to illustrate my point.

The top A-list blogs and bloggers are analogous to David Gelles and the top journalists at the FT, the Times, Washington Post and the Journal. Though highly prestigious, getting your new startup covered by Mr. Gelles may very well not be enough. Outside of Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston and Miami, the United States is also a collection of regional, city, town and village daily papers as well as weeklies and newsletters and journals, both academic and professional, and email lists and Web-only news sources.

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

The Internet is such a gift. Never before has it been remotely possible to reach out to thousands of publishing platforms in one go, with just a team of five, globally or geographically, with a couple follow-ups and concierge service, with the reliable results of hundreds of posts and their associated tweets, retweets and secondary coverage. Add to this long-tail “theory of everyone” campaign a more one-to-one, relationship-based, Rolodex outreach to your most connected agents to-to list and you can have all the mentions in the rarefied air of the A-list as you can manage in the time allowed (and with what you have to pitch — sometimes the quality or sexiness isn’t there and it can be a super-tough sell, requiring horse-trading, etc.) in addition to the hundreds of earned media mentions that one can very reliably acquire — with the first posts showing up two weeks after the contract is signed and going on for another four weeks.

Building connections with the top influencers

One of the biggest issues with A-list outreaches that I experienced when I was at NMS and Edelman is that what happens when you only have a prior relationship with only a handful of top-tier semi-professional and professional bloggers and blogger networks that are germane to the topic or demographic of the client? What happens if you don’t know enough and the ones you do know aren’t interested or don’t think it’s interesting or a viable post?

There are times when you’ve been given a huge retainer by a huge client to push a “meh” product to an A-list that’s not interested and the time passes, the bell rings and you’ve rolled snake eyes. Nothing. No coverage — or very little, surely not aligned to the client’s expectation — or your boss’s.

We discovered that we were a lot less vulnerable to panic attacks when we bought insurance. At my agency, we do pursue A-listers, of course. But those relationships are real. They take time. Since we don’t have a strong vertical, we don’t know who we’re going to need to engage in the A-list at any one time. And, when we do sort out the A-list in any particular blogosphere, thanks to the help of eCairn, then we need to spend time building that connection, personally, with the top influencers. While that is happening, we task our seven blogger researchers with finding everyone else, using a very well-thought-out collection of keyword phrases. In general, we have two weeks or less before our first outreach. The clock is ticking.

Via Biznology

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