Kindness opens many doors online

There are a lot of assholes online, though very few of them are dyed-in-the-wool.

They’re simply exceptionally guarded, armored against all the other assholes online. It’s a vicious cycle.

We’ve all been hurt before, but it’s a Mexican standoff.

Reddit, right?

Facebook, right?

Twitter? Oy!

“Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.” –C. S. Lewis

A third of my practice at Gerris Corp is devoted to earned media influencer marketing (which I naïvely still call blogger outreach) and guess what I’ve discovered over the past linear decade?

While everyone might lead with being an asshole online, the very act of pursuing the life of a blogger, an influencer, a writer, a reviewer, an entertainer, or a storyteller suggests that you’re probably both an optimist (what’re the chances of actually becoming an internet sensation?) and attention-seeking.

You want to be loved and appreciated. Kindness in the form of love and appreciation are the only keys to your heart, they’re the only things that can truly make you bloom!

While you might lead with money, a price card, a menu of fees, and the link to your “how to engage with me” page, what you really need more than money is a reminder as to why you even started blogging in the fist place!

Kindness opens many doors online, though it’s not always easy. There’s nobody online taken more for granted than bloggers. And, with the advent of  (too) easy-to-access and (too) easy-to-use influencer marketing tools offered by Ninja Outreach, Cision, GroupHigh, Little Bird, and Traackr, the potential for abuse is high; even more, blogger outreach started out under the auspices of public relations. PR gets people and understands the value of keeping love alive.

Now, however, they call it influencer marketing, though it’s really become mostly sponsored advertising. Apparently, if you pay for it, you don’t have to be very kind, and that’s made things even worse. But even ad agencies have vision, narrative, and the support of a creative team. It’s gotten worse: paying for links.

Yes, SEO has jumped on the bandwagon and turned an art form into the sullied commodification of money for “DoFollow” keyword text links.  That’s it. No review, no editorial. “Just make sure it looks organic to Google,” they plead.

I’ve spoken a lot about the challenges of earned media influencer PR and how you can still, circa 2016, have quite a lot of success with earned media influencer marketing if you’re lucky enough to only take clients who are game, generous, and who have exceptionally desirable services and products, very much like my friends at Skinny & Company coconut oil.

Well, while it’s absolutely essential that your client be exceptionally game, generous, and have desirable products, all the magic happens in the inbox and the secret sauce of any successful blogger PR campaign is kindness.

And it’s rarely easy. Bloggers have a lot of baggage. They’ve been abused, they’ve been abandoned. They’ve been used for the links, they’ve been used for the advertorial, and they’ve even done things with the promise of working together in the future.

You must be unflappable.

There’s quite a lot of bitterness and a modicum of resentment you’ll have to endure while never skipping a kindness step of losing your kindness stride.

You must remain unflappable!

One thing that has been consistent over the last decade across AbrahamPR, Abraham Harrison, and now Gerris Corp: a quote actually written by Ian Maclaren and not Plato, is our mantra, “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Also, hugs not horns.