Tips For Working With Bloggers

Above: Showtime nails it by sending out these super creative weed bouquets to media agencies promoting the premiere of Season 3 of their hit series Weeds. This is the kind of thinking that needs to go into blogger pitches!

Working with bloggers is an area I concentrate on, and one thing I perpetually hear from bloggers is that companies and agencies often put little to no effort into their pitches. This is an area that marketers need to drastically improve upon. Most of the bloggers that are receiving these pitches are getting tons of requests from others, and they understand how valuable their blog coverage is so they’re not just gonna write a review for a company that doesn’t know their name or just fires them a poorly thought out email.

Common Examples:

1. Company X sends a package to a bunch of bloggers with a letter that reads “Dear Blogger” instead of taking the extra time to address them personally. Sure they sent the blogger some swag, but where’s the love?!
2. A mass email goes out to a harvested list of top bloggers, again no personalization… And nothing tangible to see or touch, no press release, no marketing material, just a “hey – would you like to review our product? because it’s awesome”…. Yeah… No it really isn’t. And opening an email that says “Dear First Name” is a major SNAFU.
3. X agency sends a personalized email to a blogger and blows sunshine up their ass with a load of crap about how great their blog is and what a good fit it is for their regional promotion in Toronto… Problem is, blogger is in Iowa. Duh!

So those are just 3 examples of major mistakes that happen all the time. I could rhyme off a dozen others, but the point here is not to point out stupidity, but more to help prevent it.

If you are planning on pitching a blogger, take some advice from a blogger and marketer.

• Take 5-10 minutes to read a few posts on their blog. Where are they from? What is their blog about? You know… Things you should probably know if you are gonna ask them to review your product.

• If you are going to send them an email, send them more than a standard mass email about how great your product is. Tell them WHY your product is a good fit for their blog.

• If you have a product – send it to them! I know this sounds stupid and obvious… But you’d be surprised!

• Don’t stalk them about whether they’ve made a decision, or when the post will be up. Instead include flexible date parameters in your pitch and trust that their post will fall between those dates.

• And finally, the MOST important one of all… Don’t try to influence their review!! Your opinion is BIAS, you think your product is great because you get paid to think that. Let the blogger express their own opinions and views about it. If they say something negative, don’t sweat it. Consider it market intelligence!

Remember bloggers are creative, opinionated, and intelligent people. They appreciate a little bit of thought and originality, and it could mean the difference between them being happy to review your product on their blog and them totally flaming you for your horrible etiquette.

Have fun out there!

Burlington Tweet Up

I’m very excited to announce that there is FINALLY a Tweet Up outside of Toronto. Yes that’s right. The wonderful folks at Twest of To are hosting Burlington’s first ever Tweet Up! The event is scheduled for Thursday May 7th at the Queens Head Pub downtown Burlington from 7pm – 11pm. They have managed to secure some great sponsors and will have plenty of surprises and giveaways in store! Better yet, Twest of TO has joined forces with 12for12K and all proceeds from the event go to the Hospice of Peel to support families battling with life-threating or terminal diseases.

So if you’re a blogger, twithead, facebooker, blipper, tech nerd, net geek, designer or social media evangelist… Get your booty on out to the first ever burlington Tweet Up! If you’re gonna tweet about it, don’t forget to use the #twestofTO hashtag!

Here’s the official invite:http://www.twestofto.org/

See You There!

@selinajane

Inspired by Human Emotion

Okay, so I am addicted to TED Talks… And I came across this one that talks about a website/app called We Feel Fine. The site is an almost real time collective of human feelings that are collected from a number of blogs and displayed in a variety of ways. The engine scours the web every ten minutes and looks for the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” in the content, then saves the full sentence in the database. Each feeling is colour coded and referenced against a pre-existing list. If an image is found in the post, the image is also saved into the database.

You can navigate by image; clicking the image to discover the associated emotion attributed to that image, or by clicking little coloured microbe looking dots, that each reflect a thought or feeling. The amazing thing about this is that you can actually navigate through to these people’s blogs and connect with them.

I am so inspired by this. It has been a while since I have seen a website that impresses me as much as this one has. If you have a few minutes, seriously… Check it out. It is totally worth it.

Here are some interesting stats taken from their sit:

11,482,671 = TOTAL FEELINGS COLLECTED

2,122,893 = TOTAL UNIQUE PEOPLE

08.26.2005 = FIRST FEELING COLLECTED

150 Million Active Users & Climbing

Congratulations to Facebook for reaching an amazing milestone of 150 million active users around the world! I learned (reading their blog post) that Facebook is available in more than 35 languages and 170 countries and territories.

Since their interface changed (and despite the protest from the change-resistent folks) the platform has become a lot better. I have personally noticed that I am not being as inundated with application requests and other silly little games and chatchke that I’m not really that interested in. It begs the question though, have application developers felt the burn since they changed their platform? Have people become less-engaged in the apps & has the novelty worn off?I’d be interesting in hearing from developers about whether they’ve noticed a change at all since the switch. My guess would be yes, but that is based on my own engagement. Now that my apps are in a neat little box out of the way of my profile, I often forget about them. I can’t remember the last time I sent a piece of flair or drew some graffiti.

The profiles were starting to look a bit MySpacey and tacky before they changed to the new layout, so I commend Facebook for noticing this and making the change quickly to avoid looking as awful as MySpace and keeping the content organized!

Over 300 Examples of Social Media

I was over at Radical Trust and noticed that Collin is hosting a 5 Gems Meme for Social Media to expose campaigns that deserve a bit more attention, are worthy of sharing, or are just so clever that they have to be shared. The idea was spawned from this post by Peter Kim, which is a crowdsourced list of social media marketing examples. I followed Collin’s link and was absolutely floored when I saw this massive list. It represents such wonderful diversity in Social Media and is a great tool for any nay sayer that says Social Media isn’t for everyone!

Make it Remarkable

Seth Godin, my favourite marketing guru and agent of change states that in order for advertising to work and be successful in today’s market, it must be remarkable. And by that he means, that it must be both amazing and initiate “remarks”, thus creating dialogue.

This is the one thing that I constantly struggle with. So often, clients are afraid to take a risk, afraid to try something different out of fear of failure. They may be worried about stocks and share holders, they may be worried about taking on something new and experimental before it’s been tested to death (by which time it will probably be dead) and they just don’t want to try.

Well… isn’t doing something “average” failure in itself? Isn’t doing something the same way you’ve always done it, in a sense a failure? A failure to innovate, a failure to change, and a failure to create really great content that is mandatory for survival on the social web.

Doing something “good” is not okay. Doing something the same way you did it last year, because it seemed to go well, is not okay. Where’s the innovation in that? The market is different than it was last year.

Social Media has changed the way we view and perceive advertising. The whole approach has changed, and yes, even in a year! There are companies out there who are not afraid to change, who are not afraid to innovate and who are taking risks in Social Media that other companies are simply too slow or too fearful of taking. These are the companies that will succeed.

The one thing you can count on is change, so why resist it?!

The Reason Why Marketers Have the Hardest Jobs

Check out this video I “stumbled” upon. It is absolutely mind-blowing and really puts things into perspective in terms of the warp speed that we are evolving at technologically and just as a species. It’s no wonder that marketers heads are spinning trying to keep up with the changes happening in our society. They are happening so fast that by the time they figure it out, something else has come along and everything is different. I really enjoyed this. Hopefully you will too.

Selina

The Problem (?) with Social Bookmarking

Having major success with social bookmarking & sharing sites is definitely not easy. And unfortunately (for marketers), there is no trick, strategy, or tactic that will see their content rise to the top page bringing in traffic in the millions.

The ONLY way to ensure your content gets spread, shared, dugg, stumbled, and bookmarked… is to CREATE GREAT CONTENT!! That’s right folks… Great content. Not a boring press release, a new product page, or the equivelent of you standing on your soap box shouting through a megaphone.

Forget the Ps of marketing, it’s all about the Es now. Experience, Engage, Everyplace, Exchange and Evangalism. Burn these into your mind, because nothing else matters. Nothing will get shared on Social bookmarking platforms unless its WORTHY of sharing. What does worthy of sharing mean? Unfortunately for marketers it means un-biased, useful, non-branded, content that people are happy and proud to discover and share. The only time this changes, is if you are a large consumer brand. Then, there is a bit more luck with product launches, company news, and other content being shared among social bookmarking users.

Another thing marketers need to be weary of. You must be engaged in a community in order to post content there and have anyone see it. If any random spammer could just come along and blast crap into the filters of these platforms, they wouldn’t be as popular as they are. The content at the top is there for a reason.

So what all this means at the end of the day, is that us marketers have to think more like humans and less like sales people, we must think about human connection and values because in the end it is these traits that will triumph.

The Future of Browsing in Chrome

Google announced the public trial of Chrome, a new web browser that lets users run many applications that once worked only when installed on local PCs, executives said on Tuesday. The software is designed to handle text, graphics and more complex computer programs.

Should be interesting in the next few months to see how well received the browser is and whether or not people feel comfortable with the switch and the change in behaviour.

Doesn’t look like anything is being released for Mac yet (boo), but hopefully that will come soon. The interface actually sort of reminds me of the OSX Spaces app that lets you toggle back and forth between work spaces, obviously much simpler than Chrome, but similar in style.

The Impressive Growth of Kijiji

By now, you should definitely have heard of Kijiji, the regional classifieds website(s) where you can buy almost anything, post free ads, find a job, or discover community events and happenings. The name Kijiji which means “village” in Swahili has caught on in more than 20 world markets and over 300 cities, with more than 4 million unique visitors per month in the U.S.

It’s hard not to compare the website to that of Craigslist or eBay, but Kijiji in many ways is stronger and has more growth potential. People seem to enjoy the user experience a little bit more and have an easier time getting around.

Ask me what my eBay password is… I don’t remember. I know they sent me something in the mail (a PIN number or something like that) and then I was supposed to enter it in, the whole process just seemed archaic for an online marketplace.

Craigslist which is probably the most like Kijiji really doesn’t share the same user experience, and isn’t quite as flexible.

What are your experiences with Kijiji? Are you a fan?