It’s essential for brands to have access to and a relationship with their current customers and clients as well with their fans, natural allies, their topical neighborhood, and their prospective and future clients. In a post-Internet world, this is best handled online, for efficiency’s sake.
No matter how obscure your product, service, book, business, or project, there are surely thousands and thousands of online denizens who may not yet know of you but who would be as pleased as punch if you were to reach out. Outreach marketing, formerly known as blogger outreach, is a powerful tool with almost zero barrier to entry — just your time and attention.
If you’re seeing this post on the morning of Tuesday, April 8, you’ve got a treat if you can make the time. GroupHigh is presenting a free day-long event called the Outreach Marketing Virtual Summit today on April 8th, 2014, between 10AM and 7PM Eastern Standard Time. It’s free and online so register!
Be sure to clear your calendar and spend the day with Bill Brennan, Bryan Kramer, Crosby Noricks, Bridget Duffey, Sam Zivot, Robin Carey, Phil Butler, Stephanie Scott, Andy Sernovitz, Lee Odden, John Hendricks, Danica Kombol, Katie Paine, David Meerman Scott, Lynette Young, Tracey Parsons, Laura Fitton, Travis Wright, Mary Eitel, Zoe Waldrom, Andy Theimer, Maddie Grant, Katie Greenlaw, Shelley Kramer, Heather Whaling, Kristen Matthews, and me. I’ll be presenting between 2:20 and 2:40 PM EST, 11:20-11:40 PST, and 19:20 BST for you gang in the UK.
But since the presentations are pre-recorded, each of us presenters can spend our twenty-minute presentation times responding live to tweets, chats, and questions. I think it’s a brilliant idea because whenever I am participating live in a webinar or QA session, I don’t have the personal bandwidth to answer questions and queries as they come in. Just for the record, tomorrow’s hash tag is #outreachmarketing and my personal Twitter handle is @chrisabraham — I hope to see you there.
I have done blogger outreach campaigns for the Alzheimer’s Association, Greenpeace, Habitat for Humanity, HSN, Kimberly-Clark, Sage 50, Mitsubishi Motors, Sharp, Snapple, Snuggle, Levi’s, CliquMe, Stever Robbins, City Creek Center, Miznuno Runnning, and others.
Every one of these companies, organizations, and non-profits could easily find an enormous pool of friends, followers, allies, and brand ambassadors with whom to engage and for whom news about each brand introduced through a pitch resulted in powerful earned media mentions, buzz, conversational volume, tweets, retweets, Likes, and posts on Pinterest, Tumblr, blogs, Facebook, and Google+.
It’s not rocket science but it requires that you get over yourself and start treating all of those Likes, followers, subscribers, and Pinners with a heck of a lot more respect than you probably do right now.
Remember, each and every one of the billions of real social media profiles around the world represents one or more human souls. Real people with real hopes, dreams, passions, wants, and needs. Discovering and engaging with the magic hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands who are already passionate about you is a start — and a great first step — but then going further to find those magic tens of thousands who don’t know you yet? Now that’s when the magic starts happening.
And, because there’s effectively zero barrier to entry, I would love to tell you everything I know about how I do it in a brief 20-minute Slideshare and PowerPoint presentation. In preparation of my session, How to Engage Bloggers Down the Long Tail, I have both uploaded the presentation deck up to Slideshare and the pre-recorded presentation to YouTube — so, you’ll be prepared to ask me any and all questions you may have about the presentation, my process, and even questions you may have about things that are going on with you in your business.
Feel free to email me at chris@gerr.is or call me at +1 202-351-1235
Learn more about Chris Abraham at Gerris digital.
