I am traveling this week so I have decided to spend my blogging time aggregating some of my favorite Biznology blog posts. I have been writing for Biznology every Tuesday since January 18th, 2011, so there are quite a few posts that may well be useful for you now that you never had an opportunity to read before — before you knew about Biznology or me. So, here we go:
- Taking 50 million as seriously as one WSJ reporter — where I wax poetic about the power of the seminal digital PR book, Cluetrain Manifesto, and discuss how (much more) important direct access to your online community is compared to just having the ear of mainstream media reporters. Read more…
- Writing simply isn’t for bird brains — even though we need to write at a 6th grade reading level when we engage online, it’s not because people are ignorant, illiterate, morons, it’s because they’re too busy to allocate the same attention to us as they’re willing to spend on their tax forms; also, remember that we live in a global market and not everyone is a native English-speaker. Read more…
- Fire for effect when you can’t get a bead on your market — What I’ve learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him. I call this “fire for effect.” For example, I quickly realized that while doctors and scientists were not blogging and impossible to access directly; however, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, and public policy bloggers were – the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long! Read more…
- Blog so you can be taken completely out of context — In a world of excerpting, RSS–reading, sharing, retweeting, and sharing shares, simply all of the breadcrumbs required to bring a reader down the road back to you, your brand, and your sales channel needs to be contained not only in that blog post but also in that tweet, if possible. You need everything that you could possibly need to have your post make sense on the same page, within the same post. Read more…
- A great title is what gets your blog post read — Please be as descriptive as possible when titling your blog posts. In today’s decontextualized world of walls, feeds, RSS, e-mail, diggs, reddits, Stumbles, tweets, and retweets, you need to attract your potential reader based only on the appeal of your title and nothing else, especially if you’re new to blogging and don’t happen to be Seth Godin. Read more…
- Target Twitter followers using a theory of everyone — I put more trust in the value and impact of the online influencer long tail than I do in the impact of the couple-dozen top-influencers that most social media consultants and digital PR teams recommend. This is the Internet, an efficient platform allowing easy access to what’s called the network effect: the value of your social network is dependent on the number of others using it. While it may well be important to have the top-100 influencers on any particular topic following you on Twitter or Facebook, it is not essential. You can make up for it by attracting, retaining, and activating everyone else as well. This means I believe that anyone who shares her time, talent, and experience online is an important online influencer and potential brand ambassador for my clients. Read more…
- Twitter success demands both top influencers and everyone else — The Internet created something that not enough social media consultants and coaches support and advise: the ability to expand circles of influencers, to engage with anyone and everyone. Only recently has the Internet become ubiquitous and global in a real way. Previously, the digital divide was a barrier to not just many Americans but quite a few developing nations becoming part of the global conversation. The value of the Internet is proportional to the number of connected users. It’s also living proof of Rule 34. No matter how obscure, vertical, or arcane your material may be– there’s an audience for it. Someone will show it love and attention. Online social networks have made all of this even easier to the point where it is becoming less of a potential and more of a promise, an eventuality. In short, there is real value associated with connecting to as many followers and collecting as many “Likes” as is humanly possible. For real effect. Read more…
- Blogger outreach is scary — 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. Read more…
- How NOT to pitch a blogger — In the years that I’ve been reaching out to bloggers, I’ve learned just as much about how NOT to pitch as we’ve learned about the right ways. The main thing to keep in mind is how you feel when you are on the receiving end of a misguided PR pitch. If you just stick with that mindset, you’ll avoid the lion’s share of pitching mistakes. Read more…
- How to pitch a blogger — I know a thing or two about how to pitch bloggers. But because I see so many people who are afraid of blogger outreach, due to the scary situation that others have blundered into, I wanted to walk through our process to show you how it’s done. Just how do you pitch a blogger? Read more…
- The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach — The value of blogger outreach 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 very vertical audience, however sizable though it may well be. 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 farther, 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 Journal, and the Times, you’ve got the world covered. Read more…
- Do you appreciate your blogger network? — I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach, but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work, over and over, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible. You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like. Read more…
- Inbound Marketing the Way God Intended — What inbound marketing has become, in many instances, is a very elaborate and convincing hoax, a simulacrum, that aims to create an artificial world of viable content, at its cheapest and most shameless, to very useful content, at its best, but which has the single-minded goal of acting as a sales and conversion channel of commercial or political products or services. Yes, earned media outreach and engagement also has an agenda. Yes, when I engage online, I am not reaching out in order to just meet new friends, I am also interested in convincing citizen journalists and online content providers to report on what’s going on with my client on their own personal or collaborative blog to their precious readers. The most important difference between the simulacrum of entire virtual online content cities being formed intentionally by networks and affiliations to emulate as perfectly as possible the emergent and organic reviews, reporting, discussion, recommendation, and experience and true earned media is that only earned media is authentic. Read more…
- You’ve probably over-farmed your donors — When it comes to your direct mail campaigns, you’ve probably over-farmed your land. You’ve been emailing and snail mailing the same donors you have done for a decade. It is time to leave the land fallow and let the lists rest. You have probably responded to lower donations and attention by relinquishing too much power to your direct marketing firm and they have been much more aggressive than you’re comfortable with, sending out many more snail mail and email donation requests than ever before. You used to blame the economy for decreased giving but you’re starting to believe it has more to do with the fertility of the donor list than it does with the economic collapse of 2008–or a lot less than you’ve been led to believe. You realize that the nonprofit space is ever more competitive, but your brand is strong and respected and comes up well in Charity Navigator, so what gives? Well, in agriculture, it is possible to over-farm your land. Read more…
- Can social media be the new white hat SEO technique? — I have realized — now more than ever because of the disruption by Panda and Penguin — that the only way to make it to the top of Google search honestly is to engage your online community and ask them for their help — in much the same way many of us have asked for Yelp reviews from our email lists. In my case, blogger outreach, social media marketing, content marketing, and digital PR is the new SEO. Read more…
- Search is three-dimensional chess — to quote Christopher S Penn in Social media now directly influences search rankings, “If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters.” Read more…
- The synergy between social media and technical SEO — If for no other reason, jump on board with social media in a big way, if only for Google‘s benefit. Google Abhors a Vacuum. In the absence of a reliable content, Google will turn its algorithmic knobs and change the weighting to prioritize social media sources. Remember, Google needs to populate at least ten compelling results — make sure you own all of them. Social is a very handy way of dominating search. Read more…
- Google Adsense rewards super-quick page loads — Maybe the reason why you can’t even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you’re not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how you serve your Web pages, especially when your modern CMS is backed by a database. Read more…
