This is not to say that we don’t ever do A-list outreach.  We do. But oftentimes we start with our long-tail blogger outreach, reaching out to upwards of 2,000 bloggers at a time.  When we’re done with the outreach, we’ll probably have 5 A-list bloggers and a big win with a TechCrunch post but, we’ll also make sure we have a couple hundred “additional” posts, creating a reach that goes “long” down the list of influencers and “wide” in the sense that it cuts across lots of territory in the blogosphere.

So, using our team of researchers and tools like Alterian SM2 and eCairn, we identify blogger communities and assess their interests, collect their contact info and their names, and then reach out to all of the bloggers we can find that match your demographic.  We tell our researchers that if they can’t find the name and email of the blogger easily within 5 minutes then the blogger probably doesn’t want to be found.  We do not let our lists and universes of blogs ever go stale. Even if we already have topic-appropriate universes for a client, we always “refresh” that universe to make sure that we remove all the abandoned blogs and add all the blogs that have, subsequent to the creation of that original universe, come online.

Once we have started collecting the universes — in the case of the HAI Watch campaign it consisted of medical professionals, patient advocates, and those writing about eldercare, as well as people writing specifically about infection and infection prevention –we start working on messaging and putting together and building up the campaign’s social media news release (SMNR).

Since I am an A-list PR and social media blogger myself, the team and I are incessantly on the receiving end of pitch after pitch.  From our experience, even top PR companies are sending their pitches to bloggers, as inline email posts or as Word Doc or PDF attachments.  Not only are these messages encumbered with attachments but they’re often also heavy with graphics, images, and tracking code.

Our messages consist of a simple, three-paragraph email with one link, to our online SMNR, in the form of a plaintext email.  We send it as plaintext, resisting the urge to embed branding or tracking code since the only sign of success when reaching out to blogs is a post or a tweet, and keep it as simple and as short as possible, as you will see below in an example of our email outreach, along with the variables.

Subject: This is International Infection Prevention Week

Hi <<First Name>>

Since this is International Infection Prevention Week, I thought the readers of <<blog name>> would be interested to know that Kimberly-Clark Health Care is on the forefront of protecting patients from Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) and has put together a campaign dedicated to that prevention called HAI Watch: Not on My Watch.

We’ve created a site that has information for both healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers. If you decide to share this with your readers, please use any of the images, logos, videos, etc:

http://haiwatchnews.com

Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to post, I’d really appreciate it if you’d send me the link.

Thank you,

Barbara
–
Barbara Dunn
barbara@haiwatchnews.com
www.haiwatch.com

The email is all about brevity. It is also all about being clear with why we’re emailing and what we want: it is International Infection Prevention Week and we want you to blog about Healthcare Associated Infection prevention. Short and sweet. We need to have them at hello. If they’re interested, they can either hit “reply” and ask questions and do a “Turing” test — to see if we’re awake at the wheel, this happens a lot — or they can click through to http://haiwatchnews.com to see what we’re on about.

If you take a look at the SMNR, you’ll notice that while we never attempt to force feed a specific message to the blogger, we do prepare the copy on the SMNR pre-linked and pre-written in such a way that all a blogger has to do is select, copy, and paste into their blog composition window — and then easily add whatever else it is they want to say about the information. We realize bloggers are busy, so we try not to create any unnecessary hoops they have to jump through. When a PR professional posts their press release inline in the email or as an attachment, getting any photos, logos, images, links, or videos from that email to the blog posts is just more trouble than it’s worth for most bloggers and breaks the 5-minute rule by two or three times — and really tries the commitment of the blogger. [Originally posted on Agencyside.net, part 2 of 3. Read part 1]