To companies unfamiliar with the blogging landscape, bloggers may seem completely unreachable. There's no shortage of examples of companies and organizations that have made bad impressions on bloggers by trying to reach them on their terms, instead of the bloggers'.
But if your company wants to engage and interact with bloggers, the process can be surprisingly easy, even if the company doesn't itself have a blog.
This article will walk you through the process of launching a simple yet highly effective blogger outreach program in one day.
Getting Started and Creating a Timeline
First, let's assemble a couple of online search tools to help us find the bloggers who we want to reach out to:
- Google Blog Search—This one is pretty self-explanatory: Google's famous search engine, but for blogs.
- Technorati—This will let you search for blog posts as well as videos and other media created online.
There are dozens of other search tools available, but for this article we'll focus on these two.
Now let's set our timeline:
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM: By searching with these tools, make a list of up to 20 blog posts on different blogs where your company or organization has been mentioned within the last two weeks. If you can find more than 20 results, focus on bloggers who are evangelizing your company, but don't be afraid to include bloggers who are critical of you; reaching out to those bloggers is just as, if not more important than, connecting with bloggers who are pleased with you.
What you are looking for is bloggers who are posting positive and negative experiences that they have had with your business. If their posts are positive, you need to thank them, which will encourage this behavior in the future. If the bloggers have negative comments, then they've likely encountered a problem that you need to help them work through. This is also a great way to convert an angry customer into an evangelist!
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM: After you have your list of at least 20 bloggers who are talking about your company, go back to every blog and respond to the blog post where your company is mentioned. First, thank the blogger. Clearly identify yourself and your position with the company. Address only the topics presented, and provide any relevant information. Invite replies from readers. Finally, go back and email the blogger to say you appreciate the feedback and you are available via email or phone.
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM: Subscribe to the feeds from all the blogs that you commented on, as well as their comment feeds, if available. If your company has a blog, add links to any bloggers who are evangelizing your company on your company blog's sidebar. Doing so shows your fans that you are embracing them and gives them further incentive to continue to spread positive word-of-mouth about your company.
Also, make sure that you are subscribed through Google Blog Search for each term that you searched for at the start of the day. Search for your business name, your name, and any other relevant terms. You can subscribe to search terms by clicking "Blog Alerts," and then you'll get an email alerting you to bloggers who are blogging about the terms you've selected.
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Visit your list of blogs again, reading any new posts, and replying to any comments that were addressed to you and relevant comments that other readers have left. This is important, because companies that attempt to interact with bloggers via a post's comments often leave one comment and never come back. The initial comment excites readers and the blogger, often prompting them to leave additional comments to the company representative, which go unnoticed if the rep never returns to read them.
If you make an effort to continue interacting with readers in the comments, and invite them to contact you if they have more questions, it shows the blogger and blog readers that you are serious about wanting feedback and interacting with them. That alone could spark readers into writing about your willingness on their own blog.
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM: Answer any emails from bloggers, and if possible schedule times with interested bloggers to discuss their points further via phone interviews. This shows them that you are respecting their feedback; also, it's a chance for you to give better and more complete information for their posts.
For example, if a marketing blogger writes a post about your newest marketing campaign for one of your brands, it makes perfect sense for you to talk to that blogger to better inform them what your company's goals and objectives for the campaign and how it is structured.
Again, doing so helps convert bloggers into evangelists for your company, because it shows them that you respect their opinions, and want their feedback.
How Will This Blogger Outreach Benefit Your Company?
By following this timeline, in just a few hours you will have launched a blogger outreach program that will engage and excite bloggers. Here are five key benefits to your company from that outreach:
1. Greater awareness of you in the blogosphere
Even in 2008, examples of companies that make coordinated efforts to reach out to bloggers and solicit their feedback are few and too far between. By replying to bloggers and encouraging them leave you feedback, you are showing them that you respect and value their opinions. This will make an incredibly good impression on bloggers, and some bloggers may write about your company simply because they are so impressed with your taking the time to reach out to them.
2. Bloggers see that you are serious about starting a conversation with them
This is why you can't do this just once—you have to make it a habit to read blogs from your evangelists (and even detractors). Bloggers are naturally skeptical of the motives of marketers coming into their space. If you can show them that you are serious about creating and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with them, you win even more respect among bloggers.
3. Your social-media and marketing efforts will greatly improve
Simply talking to your customers and potential customers in their space, in the blogosphere, is a wonderful way to better understand them—but also to better understand how social media works.
It's one thing to hear about how quickly ideas spread in the blogosphere, it's quite another to spend a few hours talking to bloggers on their blogs and then see how quickly other bloggers link to your actions.
As you spend time interacting with bloggers in their space, you will better understand what motivates them, and you will better understand how to interact with bloggers you encounter on your own blog (if you have one).
4. You can more easily work with bloggers in the future to get exposure for your company
Companies often send pitches to bloggers hoping for coverage on their blogs. These pitches are usually very bad, and if the blogger has never interacted with the company he or she will have little incentive to blog about it.
But if a company has used a blogger-outreach program and has established a relationship with bloggers, bloggers are much more likely to write about them in the future.
You create your network before you need it, not after.
5. Bloggers will "get" that you "get it"
Bloggers are much more likely to pay attention to your company, and blog about you, your products, and marketing efforts if you've reached out to them. Which means that the network of bloggers who are talking about your company is further expanded. Which doesn't hurt your company's Google Juice, either.
And, again, don't be surprised if many bloggers whom you do not contact blog about how well you are interacting with bloggers on other blogs—thus opening the door for you to contact those bloggers to thank them for their feedback.
What If No Bloggers Are Talking About You?
If you are a smaller company or business, it is entirely possible that when you search with Technorati and Google Blog Search you find very little or no chatter about your company in the blogosphere. This can actually be a good thing, because not you know that you have an awareness problem with bloggers. They simply aren't aware of your company.
The good news is that your company can benefit from blogging. A well-run company blog is an excellent way to grow bloggers' awareness of you. If bloggers aren't talking about your company, then starting a company blog is a way for you to join the conversation around your company, as it is happening.
Also, make a point to run blog searches about your competitors. You may glean some valuable tips from your competition when studying their efforts to engage customers online. It's possible that some of your competitors already have a thriving blog that you weren't aware of.
Studying the competition is a great way to determine what might, or not, work in your case.
Learning to Connect With Your Customers
Above all else, this idea of reaching out to bloggers works best if you look at it as an ongoing process rather than a one-day project. Your company should use these guidelines to get in the habit of looking for and responding to feedback that bloggers leave for you on their blogs and others'.
And as you respond to existing feedback, it's more likely that bloggers will leave you even more feedback. The more feedback you receive from current and potential customers, the better you can position your marketing efforts to satisfy their wants and needs.
Finally, if you have a blog, or want to later start one, your outreach efforts will help grow your blog readers, because evangelists you've already created will promote your blog!
The more time you spend attempting to connect with and respond to bloggers, the greater the benefits to your company.
