Buzzgain » Blogger Relations

The 3 step guide to explaining Social Media Monitoring to a 7 year old

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:38:11 +0000

My daughter came back from school all excited about the next week. “It’s only a couple of days until summer break”. Nice, I thought, now I have to stress about what’ going to keep her busy for the next couple of months. “Dad”, she continued, “can you come next Monday and explain what you do to my class?” I was elated. Glad my daughter thought I was doing something interesting enough for her to want me to come and share with her eager class of 7 year olds.

“I told them you spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter” she continued, adding “my teacher said that’s not a job, its what you do for fun”. I ought to speak to her teacher I thought. First, I had to explain to my daughter what I did though. This query made me realize that my 7-year-olds inquisitiveness ran deeper than merely cracking the meaning of social media monitoring! Skipping the inanity, I plunged straight into giving into 3 main points.

First what is it? – “Just like the way a teacher monitors the class and keep tabs on each student’s performance, social media monitoring tools can help you track and keep you informed about what the world is thinking on a particular issue/topic matter a product (in this case read her toy).
Second why do it? Brian explains it best. Its because its what customers are doing now. They are talking about products, brands, what they like, what they don’t. Ahh she says – like we all talk about the new teacher during lunch”. “Something like that” I countered, “So if you like the teacher, she will tell others, and if there’s something you think she needs to change it will help her do that”.
Finally how do you do it? Blog, twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. are where people are talking about companies, so you should monitor them and find out what they are saying.

A newly established company ought to make social media monitoring an essential part of their overall communication strategy. The traditional media tools will no wonder help them announce their arrival to the outside world but if the company needs to connect or ‘make conversations’ with his key influencers- a blog, twitter or Facebook can do the trick. Applications such as ours which transcend beyond the traditional media tools will help you connect with your target audience in a much more effective way.

Why dont technology startups leverage PR even if its more effective?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:32:00 +0000

Our good friend Todd posted a very good piece on how PR helps raise venture capital. In it, he quotes a survey from BIGfrontier Communications that has the following statistics:

Startup companies that engage in PR campaigns are 30% more successful in getting funding within one to three months than those that don’t.

Forty-four percent of the respondents who used PR outreach received funding in the one-to-three-month time period versus 14% of those that did not.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents who said PR helped in their funding efforts are planning to use some of their VC dollars for additional PR.

Ironically, the survey also found that only 18% of the 300 startups surveyed had a PR program in place during the funding process.

So it begs the question why dont startups employ PR as a marketing strategy early as they can? Or why dont they hire a PR agency quicker?

Running a startup myself and having a background in Marketing, I can tell you my main reasons are the following:

1. PR is not easy. Putting an ad campaign on Google for paid adwords is dead simple. Buying a target email list is relatively easy. Putting together an email campaign (or a poorly conceived spam campaign) is easier. Attending a trade show and putting together a booth to attract customers is easier than having to build relationships with reporters and bloggers. PR depends on people. Other marketing forms are dependent on money and processes. Entrepreneurs who have a background in technology prefer working with things that are predictable (since everything else about the startup is unpredictable).

2. PR takes time. That’s the one thing entrepreneurs and smaller companies dont have enough of. Yes, everything takes time and there’s a return on time (ROT, not ROI) and PR does provide a great return on time. Only if you have done it before can you navigate the landscape. Most first time entrepreneurs have not.

3. Hiring a PR agency is “expensive”. The average quote from any good PR agency you’d get for even a 2-5 person startup is $10,000 a month in Silicon Valley. I can do a Google ad words campaign with less than $100 budget per month. Here’s the funny part: If that becomes $300 budget daily, that’s as much as PR. But its in bite-sized chunks.

4. PR requires specialists. The first marketing hire is paid to “put together a website, manage a trade show booth”. There are not enough qualified PR individual consultants to help smaller companies with smaller budgets.

5. PR is not tied to the lead generation process or the board level agenda. PR generates awareness and that’s not easily accountable. In my board meeting every month, I get asked about my lead generation funnel. Never have I been asked to show the recent press clips about the company.

Finally, making your mark through the noisy world right now is tough. There are innumerable startups in any given field and there’s way too much noise with multiple companies providing the same message and solutions. Given that reality, how is spending on PR justified if you are going to be yet another startup in the crowd?

Having identfied the reasons why entrepreneurs dont invest in PR, we’ll follow this up with possible solutions for how the PR world can adapt to the challenge in a future post.

The Moral and Ethical dilemma of blogger relations: Email Addresses

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:04:49 +0000

Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media – journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks – Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and lovehaving their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers – These are the mostly one person industry experts – Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services – e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitchesand get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?

Blog Relations Part 1 — Long Live the Blogroll BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:40:00 +0000

Blog Relations Part 1 — Long Live the Blogroll

“Can you roll a blog for me daddy?” asked trisha quite out of the blue! I reckon she must have overheard my conversation with my colleague about the importance of blogroll! “Well Trisha, I can certainly explain to you what a blogroll is, but I cant physically roll a blog for you?” “Dad, I am not that naïve to think that blogs are something that can be touched or felt? I am just keen to know how does a blog roll on the computer?” Realizing that I may have hit a nerve, I meekly started my explanation.

“Tell me something Trisha, last summer, you prepared several cane baskets at home as part of your hobby class activity. Weren’t you keen that your friends and relatives use the cane basket in their home? So every time, they look at the cane basket, they appreciate your talent and creativity? In the same way, if somebody likes my blog, they have the option of giving a link to my blog on their blogroll, so that people who visit their blog can link into my blog too.

In my blog , I have blogroll divided according to my topic of interest. For eg. I write extensively on social media monitoring, so I have different categories like Do-it-Yourself PR, media maps, links to blogs on social media. A blogroll is something that I control and is entirely based on my personal preference, which gives me the liberty to update it as often as I want. Here are the 3 main points of a blogroll:

Traffic booster- If my blog is listed on several blogs, the chances of readers clicking on my link and visiting my blog increases swiftly. Additionally, blogs with many incoming links (particularly those from high quality blogs as rated by Google page rank or Technorati authority) are usually ranked higher by search engines, which can bring additional traffic to your blog.
Blogroll=complement – If my blog gets listed on certain blogrolls, I definitely consider it as a great compliment and infact its very flattering to see my blogs listed on someone’s else blogroll. I am sure Brian must indeed be a proud person as most of the serious bloggers make a mention of his blogs in their blogroll. It just goes on to show, that people out there take you seriously and are appreciating your work.

As a form of etiquette, I can reciprocate by putting that blogger link in my blog roll. I say this with a silent prayer hoping that brain reads this post soon!

3. Blog-blogger relation- In the blogging world, it’s often seen that a blogroll paves way to the genesis of a mutually beneficial relationship especially for business bloggers! Cross promotion and link building alliance with other like-minded bloggers can reap benefits.

If you make your blogs interesting, informative and if it continues to provide certain value to your readers, I am sure you can see your blogs being listed on several blogrolls! So long live the blogroll!

Akismet spam trends can tell you the zeitgeist

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:31:53 +0000

“Zeitgeist” refers to the ethos of an identified group of people, that expresses a particular world view which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

There are multiple tools to find the current hot trends, topics and discussions on the web including Techmeme, Google Trends and Twitter Search.

There’s one that’s closer to home (your Wordpress blog) and something that’s more of a economic indicator of 3 important items:

1. Your blog’s popularity: More popular your blog the more spam comments are blocked by Akismet. This should be a simple number and a graph. Your mileage may wary, but what I found is that the pageview and unique visitors graphs on your blog is a direct correlation to your askismet spam graph over time.

2. The difference between the time that spam appears on your post from the time you actually posted your blog entry reduces. As your blog gets more popular and your overall number of comments increases, what we found is a reduction in the time between posting and spam appearing.

3. The type and content of your spam comments. This trend is on topics that tell you the state of the market. Over the last few weeks we have noticed a remarkable increase in number of spam related comments in the topic of overall healthcare, medicare bill management and education loans – indicative of the Obama health plan and budget as opposed to your standard Viarga spam ads.

What type of spam comments are you getting? What’s your Akismet catching that’s a trend you have to consider?

5 top categories of ideas / topics to blog about

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:19:08 +0000

If you have a corporate blog and are getting stuck trying to figure out what to write, we have have some suggestions from the experts, and also a set of them on our own:

First the experts:

1. Chris Brogan: 100 Blog topics to write about and 50 blog topic ideas.

2. Lois Kelly. 17 blog worthy topics

3. 101 great posting ideas.

4. Performancing: 10 ideas for your next blog post.

5. RSS blog specifications 10 places to get blog post ides.

6. Pay Doyle. 23 ideas for blog posts.

So what are the top 5 categories of posts that are useful for corporate blogs:

1. Exclusive Interviews with news makers. Either within your company or other industry experts. Almost everyone loves

2. Industry trends and information: This includes new ideas, challenging problems still facing the industry as a whole and other related topics to your industry.

3. Tools and technology reviews: Always one for the tech savvy folks in your audience.

4. Content and Event reviews – A review of books, new whitepaper, etc. Or a review of conferences, seminars and industry events is always a good draw for folks that did not attend the show.

5. Tips, tricks and how to: If you figured something out remember its worth writing about since there are at least 40% of the folks in the industry (more likely 60-80%) who will benefit from your learning.

What do you think?

image: Real Estate Tomato

5 simple tips for hosting a great blogger event

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:52:11 +0000

Robert pointed me to 19 things to consider when planning a blogger launch event by the Mobile industry review. I read through it left with very mixed feelings. On one hand it was pretty open and clear about things they like or dont like. On the other hand they seemed like a bunch of prima donna’s asking for free handsets, asking hosts to pay attention to food. Anyway it got me thinking about the blogger events we have hosted and what we learned from them.

When we hosted blogger outreach events at my previous company the question always comes up about a) What are the best things to do and b) how do you measure the success of such an event. So I thought I’d take a stab at 5 simple tips to being a great host for a blogger event.

1. Figure out the level of your bloggers and cater to their specific need: Tech bloggers like to actually play with the products, see demos, etc. The last thing you want to do with this crowd is to put 30 min PowerPoint slides upfront about your company, culture, market etc. If the bloggers are more strategic in their thinking and not the hands-on type, it makes more sense to provide access to C-level executives who can provide their opinions on the market, stategy, etc.

2. Location and time matter a lot: This is an obivious one, but where you host your event tells a lot about the importance you place to the event. I would highly recommend hosting your blogger event at your company. Pick a relatively large sized room and keep the number of attendees from your company to about 1/2 the number of bloggers invited. With respect to time, most full-time bloggers prefer lunch or late evening (early pizza) times, but dont attempt breakfast blogger sessions. Having tried 3 I can tell you they always start late, end late and mess up the rest of the day.

3. Giveaways: Highly recommend keeping them consistent with the brand and theme of your product / company. We hosted 2 blogger events and had a nice table top logo bean plant giveaway and a flash drive with the press release, latest whitepaper and product details pre loaded on them.

4. Measurement of effectiveness: The only measurement we did was to learn how many of the 21 bloggers invited to the first event showed up, how many blogged about the event and what the general sentiment was. The bloggers collectively had an audience of about 35,000 unique visitors and the cost of the event was about $1500. The total number of bloggers that wrote about the event was 11 (18 of the 21 invited showed up). The collective audience of the ones that did write about the event was about 8900. Treat it as any other press event. There were other benefits we got from the event – good will, some link love, but those were more difficult to measure.

5. The right people attending and available to answer questions. Believe me, most bloggers are there more for learning and sharing than for the food. The best thing you can provide to them is access to the right people in the company that will be able to build that connection with them so they can understand more about the company, the culture and products. Depending on the type and level of audience, make the right folks from your company available to discuss with them.

3 tips on how to get a mention on Fortune, Forbes and Business Week

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:43:45 +0000

The top 3 business publications in the US are Business Week, Fortune and Forbes.

A quick comparison of their circulation, unique visitors, online revenue and editorial staff is below. The interesting question raised by 247Wall Street is when do these publication die? Their models seem doomed if you consider cost of printing, editorial payroll costs and the steep decline in advertising.

Leaving aside whether they survive for a minute, lets focus on how you as a business can get a mention or get written up in these publications.

1. Pick the right reporter based on topic of interest: Notice the editorial staff on each of these publications. You can use BuzzGain to get the exact writer / reporter / journalist to cover your story or you can go to their editorial pages and get the entire editorial staff and contact them directly. The important thing is there are over 200 to 400+ reporters on staff. Just because they are a business magazine does not mean everyone cares about startups in the Web 2.0 space.

2. Focus on obtaining an online mention versus a print mention: Clearly the total circulation of these publications is individually about a million and readership about 2-3 million. Compare that to the total number of unique visitors on a monthly basis which is anywhere between 3-5 million. Why is this important? An online mention is more easily actionable – they can search and visit your website. In addition if the article provides a link to your website your chances of Search Engine Optimization improves.

3. Learn more about the reporters past writing style, story angle and suggest follow up pieces to previously written articles. The total number of links to articles written by other writers in this publication compared to the number of outgoing links is very high. This means most business reporters are linking to their own pieces instead of referring to other blogs, web sources. The more you can “link” stories they have previously written about to the story you are trying to pitch them, the better chance you have of getting your story written.

What’s worked for you with business press? Have you got a mention? What tip would you suggest?

	Circulation	Editorial Staff	Pageviews	Unique Visitors	Owner	Ad Page Decline	Online Rev
Business Week	900,000	220	18,000,000	3,300,000	McGraw Hill	38%	19,000,000
Fortune	1,020,000	320	61,000,000	4,900,000	Time Warner	38%	40,000,000
Forbes	900,000	460	66,000,000	5,600,000	Private