May 6, 2013

Blogger outreach is more PR than social media

blogger-outreach-large

Discover and engage your allies with long-tail blogger outreach

The current catch-all these days for what I do is ‘social media’. Unfortunately, when what you do is described as such, people tend to think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and maybe Google+. My expertise, however, is online community outreach and engagement. Back in 2006, I developed a strategy of blogger outreach that allowed me to reach out to more than just 25 top-tier bloggers by hand but to 2,500-5,000 bloggers.

I have always called this long-tail blogger outreach — though I would love your help with choosing a new name for it — because it focuses on the B-Z-list bloggers, the online influencers who are often overlooked by most social media teams at digital agencies.

While I agree that the top-25-50 bloggers do deserve deep, long-term, and personal engagement, spending that sort of time, over time, on “everyone else” would take all the time in the universe. So, what my team and I developed is the equivalent of blogger-brand speed dating. Continue reading →

December 17, 2012

Turn your website into your social media brand HQ

Image by elycefeliz on Flickr

Make your website your communications hub

Target audience: Businesses, brands, developers, marketing professionals, SEO specialists, geeks, general public.

At the end of the day, none of us owns anything we do on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus. What we do own is our personal properties.

No matter how many hours I spend at the Java Shack or Peregrine Espresso, I am just a customer. Social media and its social networks may feel like a home to some of us, but they’re really just private public spaces, similar to coffee shops, the Politics & Prose reading area, or the ballroom at the Rosslyn Marriott. Continue reading →

November 6, 2012

Are you using updated keywords for your business?

Or, why your keywords suck and are outdated

You probably built your website years ago. You’ve probably never updated your CV, just added your latest jobs and clients to the top. Your corporate bio, what you do, your products and services were probably written back either when your company opened, when you ported your brochures to the web, or the last time you did a major revision. Like I said, probably years ago.

Why does this matter?

If you don’t add the exact, literal titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords people are using to find you and your services, then you won’t be found at all

Language evolves very rapidly, and how it evolves has little or nothing to do with what you call yourself, how you describe your products and services, or the keywords you have locked and loaded into your tweets, your websites, your hashtags, your textual links, your Google AdWords contextual ad campaigns, your Facebook ad programs and Twitter promoted tweets.

If you don’t refer to your services in the same way that others do, you’ll be surprisingly invisible when it comes to your prospects finding you on the Internet. If you don’t add the exact, literal titles, subjects, hashtags, and keywords that people are using to find you and your valuable services, then you won’t be found at all. Continue reading →

November 29, 2011

Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

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. Continue reading →

September 15, 2011

Why are you so afraid of engaging bloggers?

Tips for how your agency or firm should do outreach the right way

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2010

Forex Trading & social media: A case study of easy-forex

From easy-forex’s fantasy team campaign

We began working with easy-forex to combine their forex trading and social media activity back in February 2010. We knew right away that teaming easy-forex’s expertise, vibrancy, and fresh approach to FX with our knowledge of the nuts and bolts of social media would invariably produce a winning combination.

When we first took stock of easy-forex’s social media efforts, it was clear they had already recognized the value of social profiles and had already laid the groundwork for us on Twitter and YouTube. We knew too, though, that easy-forex’s full potential was only beginning to be actualized, and so we set out to create a home for their traders, a place where they could come and chat with one another regarding their trading habits, methods, tips and strategies — basically, anything and everything related to forex. Continue reading →