(* Source: Susan Payton *)

She is the blogger behind The Marketing Eggspert. Download her free white paper, The Importance of Connecting Brands with Bloggers.

Susan says...

With so many different marketing, advertising and PR channels out there, it’s hard to be heard above the din. One relatively new approach is blogger outreach. The opinions of bloggers are heard and respected by thousands, but many companies still ignore their reach. It’s new, unknown, and they don’t understand how to track ROI. Essentially, it’s not like “old school” marketing, so they don’t like it.

That’s a shame, because while those companies are clinging to print ads and TV commercials, other brands like Cover Girl and UbiSoft are building lasting relationships with bloggers that are getting some serious attention.

By targeting and building relationships with bloggers that address your audience, you can garner effective, unbiased reviews of your products. Their readers will be introduced to your brand, get interested in it, visit your site, and hopefully buy.

Why Blogger Outreach?

If it’s not reason enough that your competitors are already doing it, here are some other benefits of blogger outreach:

• People trust consumers (i.e. bloggers) more than they trust advertising (Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey 2009).
• It’s cost effective.
• ROI is measurable if you know what to look for (more on this below).
• It has the potential to go viral. People tweet and share good blog posts, and may do that with a blog review of your brand.

The old methods of marketing simply aren’t cutting it anymore. The landscape is changing. With sharing, community and conversation being today’s keywords, shoving a television commercial down consumers’ throats isn’t the way to create brand evangelists anymore.

How it Works

There’s not a lot of instruction out there on how to do blogger outreach (we PR types like to closely guard our secrets), but Monica O’Brien notes that you should be looking for bloggers who reach the same audience you do with your products.

Start out by doing some research. Search Google (), check out Alltop, and browse blog directories. Search for keywords to find blogs that discuss the area you’re looking for. If you sell onesies, mom blogs (but only those with babies) are a good fit. If you have a social media book, look for marketing or entrepreneur bloggers who reach the readers you’re looking for.

Make a spreadsheet of all the blogs you find. I suggest having some criteria, such as a decent PageRank (I use three as my cutoff) or good web traffic. If they don’t make the grade, skip them. I also pay attention to whether a blogger has posted lately. If they haven’t posted in over a year, don’t waste your time reaching out. Also, be sure to actually read the blog. Doing so may reveal that the blogger isn’t a good fit at all.

Next, it’s important to make an initial connection on the blogger’s own turf. The more you can interact with the blog and blogger, the better your subsequent pitch will be received. Leave comments (relevant ones only) and connect with them on Facebook (), Twitter (), etc.

Once you have enough blogs on your list (I tend to do batches of 15 or 30 a month, depending on how many bloggers there are in a particular niche), move on to your pitch. I know to many, “pitch” is a bad word, but let’s be honest; that’s what it is.

Keep it short, sweet, and customized. You can include some of the basics (what your product/service is), but the rest should be tailored to the recipient. You want to show you’ve paid attention to their work. I like to refer back to a particular post that caught my eye. You need to explain why they and their readers will care about your brand. It’s the “what’s in it for me” thing. They will not waste their time writing a blog post about your brand unless they find it compelling.

If you can offer something, such as a sneak peek at a new product, or free membership, do so. The more exclusive the offer, the better. I was part of a group of mom bloggers in Orlando who were invited to go to Sea World and just experience the park. We were all so pleased to have been noticed, we wrote great reviews of our experience. Giving bloggers access to something they wouldn’t normally have is a great way to get them writing about your brand.

Do not:

• Copy and paste a press release with no intro or other customized information.
• Send a press release at all. You can offer that if they are interested or link to it.
• Send attachments. They won’t be opened.
• Address e-mail to “Dear blogger.” They hate that.
• Send without proofing or making sure you spelled the name and blog correctly.
• Demand or ask for only positive coverage.

Follow up a week later to make sure they got your e-mail and to see if they’re interested. I get far more replies to my second e-mail than my first. If they’re not interested, thank them for their time, and make a note in your spreadsheet of why they weren’t interested. They might be better for a different product down the road, or maybe they don’t want to be pitched at all.

What to Know

Product Types: I find that physical products do best with bloggers. They want something tangible they can touch and use. Services are a harder sell. But it really depends on the blogger and the niche — your mileage may vary.

Measuring ROI: People have been arguing for years that you simply can’t measure ROI on social media. I like Brian Solis’ idea that maybe we’re not looking for return on investment so much as return on engagement, attention, participation or involvement.  Here are a few tips in that department:

Before you begin contacting bloggers, decide what your goals are.

• How many blog posts are you aiming for?
• How many readers in total would you like to read these posts?
• How much interaction do you want (comments on blog, retweets, social bookmarking, etc.)?

On the other end, see where your results stand compared to your goals. If you had posts on 10 sites, with traffic totaling 70,000, that’s great. If you had posts on 100 smaller sites with the same traffic, that could be good too, depending on what your goals are. Many companies, like POM Wonderful for example, aim to develop close relationships with a few key bloggers at a time.

Tie it Together

Like all social media, blogger outreach can be interwoven with your wider marketing strategy. Any time you have a new post on someone’s blog, tweet it, put it on your Facebook Page, share it on bookmarking sites and link to it on your company blog.  That will solidify the relationship for further partnerships.

It may be a hard sell to your boss, but tell him that with 126 million blogs and growing, blogger outreach is something he simply can’t afford to ignore any longer.

Posted by brian tiong at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: three billion *)

Content is king. Actually, content is the king, queen and all the heirs apparent.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Micro-blogging is getting micro-payments. Tinker, the micro-blogging topic tracker from Glam Media which we covered in depth last night, is now live. The service tracks specific topics on both Twitter and Facebook, and allows these “event” streams to be republished as standalone widgets on blogs and other sites across the Web. I’ve embedded an example below showing the subsequent Tweets about our original article.

With the launch, Glam Media is also creating a professional micro-blogging network for journalists and bloggers who want to sign up to cover specific events or topics via Twitter or Facebook. It will be called the Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network. This will be a vetted subset of Tinker users who are advertiser-friendly. Glam is working on a micro-payments system to share revenues with approved micro-bloggers from ads in their associated widgets and Tinker streams.

All existing Glam Media publishers are automatically part of the Tinker Micro-Blogging Network. Glam also hopes to attract professional bloggers and journalists, who are pre-qualified (including any bloggers who are part of other blog advertising networks such as Federated Media, BlogHer, and TotalBeauty). Others can apply to be part of the network as well.

In order to make advertisers more comfortable with the concept of associating their brands with these micro-conversations, Tinker will offer a “safe” mode so that ads never appear near obscenities or specified keywords. Event moderators can also use the filters to block specific keywords or people from appearing in their curated stream.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Brian Solis *)

Depending on which numbers you source or believe, all reports agree that the blogosphere continues to expand globally.

As the leading blog directory and search engine, Technorati maintains a coveted Authority Index which is considered amongst bloggers as the benchmark for measuring their rank and selling their position within the blogosphere. (At least until recently). Authority in the index is defined as the number of blogs linking to a website within the last six months. The higher the number, the greater the level of Authority a blog earns.

However, a disruptive trend is already at play. While blogs are increasing in quantity, their authority–as currently measured by Technorati–is collectively losing influence. For instance, just last November, Technorati counted 32,493 links towards gadget blog Engadget’s “authority.” Today, it counts half that amount (16,326). Even TechCrunch’s link authority as measured by Technorati is down by several thousand links, yet its relative position in the overall ranking (No. 3) hasn’t moved.

In its annual state of the blogosphere last year, Technorati revealed that it had indexed 133 million blog records since 2002. In March 2008, Universal McCann published a report that indicated 184 million blogs worldwide were created, with 346 million people reading blogs globally.

So why do I believe that blog authority is losing its authority? 

 Read more here

Posted by brian tiong at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

People generally love sharing things, and Twitter has made broadcasting updates to anyone who cares to care on what you’re doing, wearing, reading, commenting on, eating, using, etc. a breeze; in 140 characters or less, even. It’s only natural to see so many users also share which music they are listening to at any given moment on Twitter, as this has been a fairly popular use of status feeds on other social networking and communication services for years (Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger leap to mind).

Here’s a number of ways to use Twitter for just about anything related to music:

* Blip.fm - dubbed the “Twitter for Music” when we first reviewed the service, it got its own API in late 2008. Blip.fm enables anyone to start their own music station and broadcast tunes to Twitter and other status sharing services where people can interact with the choice of music.

* Twiturm does much of the same - upload music and share it with all your Twitter followers in a heartbeat. Intended for artists who want to share their own music, hence the name (”Twitter Ur Music”).

* Twisten.fm - Escape Media Group linked its music discovery service Grooveshark and its URL shortening service TinySong with an application that crawls Twitter for messages about music (and “then you listen to them”).

* Twt.fm (anyone see a naming pattern here?) - type in an artist, track, and your twitter username. Twt.fm will then generate a track page for you using your twitter page design and you’ll be able to tweet it to your followers.

* Tweetj - include a #tweetj tag in your tweets when you’re listening to music and it’ll be posted to a public playlist. The playlist allows you to discover new music and immediately purchase tracks on Amazon.

* A similar service is WiiZZZ (yes, that’s the actual name) - it allows you to listen to entirely random songs that have been posted and shared by Twitter users on any given day.

* Play Twitter - allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on Twitter or Identi.ca. MP3 links will automatically become playable right on the page.

* Tra.kz - this “URL shortener for all things music” was cooked up by MixMatchMusic and does exactly what you suspect it would do and therefore competes with the above mentioned TinySong and alternatives like Song.ly.

* TwittyTunes - Firefox extension that comes with another Firefox extension, Yahoo’s FoxyTunes, and allows you to instantly post your currently playing songs to Twitter with just a click.

* LastTweet - enables you to embed a widget with your latest tweets into your Last.fm profile

Also worth checking out, even if not directly related to Twitter: Nabbit (”connects your cellphone to your radio”), MuseBin (music news and reviews in 140 characters, like Blippr but music only) and Twones (the “social music feed”).

Did I miss any other apps, tools and websites worth noting?

Share them in the comments and I’ll be happy to update the post.

Update: it’s not Twitter-specific, but you can use Favtape to put together your own playlists / online mixtapes and share them on Twitter.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.

So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.

Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years - it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.

And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0″ doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.

Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered - relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time - gives an even better overview:

Posted by brian tiong at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

Redanyway is a young startup out of India that aims to provide an alternate way to manage your ‘centralized me’ where your personal website or blog is your profile page outside of any walled gardens. The founders dubbed the application a ‘distributed social network’, but I look at it more like MyBlogLog on steroids, since it’s basically a way to get to know and interact more with your readers.

Signing up is invitation-only for now, but we’ve got some invite codes for the first 1000 TechCrunch readers that register for beta testing the application. You don’t need to comment on this post to get an invite, simply use ‘techcrunch’ upon registering or click here for a shortcut.

The essential idea behind Redanyway is that it should be easier for content publishers to build a social network around blog posts, photos, videos etc. and also enable users to follow / befriend on this centralized location, enhancing traffic, interactivity and reader engagement. In a sense, it also acts like a feed reader, by aggregating content from various sources and bringing it together in a single feed in the Redanyway dashboard. In a blog post, co-founder Kuldeep Kapade says they want to cut out RSS as the middle-man for subscribing to online content. If they’d add tabs and futher categorization capabilities, it would be even more useful, I think.

The setup is a bit tedious, though, as publishers are required to install a plugin / widget on their personal blog or website, which is still quite a challenge for many mainstream bloggers (i.e. Redanyway’s target audience). The startup integrated Gigya to make the whole process a bit less complicated, but I still feel this might be a hindrance for the company’s growth. I’m also having trouble looking at it from a different perspective than recent initiatives like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. Furthermore, I ran into a couple of bugs when adding contacts in the initial setup process, and someone should really take a look at the design and usability of the application as well.

That said, Redanyway is still in private beta and has only been going for a couple of months, so maybe we’ll see some improvements in the future. All in all, I’m not really impressed, but maybe I’m missing something here. The startup was short-listed for the Techstars Summer program out of hundreds of applications, even though they eventually didn’t participate due to external circumstances.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick *)

How it Compares

We're in shock that Google Blogsearch has actually updated. It's cleaner and less spammy than Technorati, it's more transparent than Yahoo Buzz, it's more inclusive than Six Apart's new Blogs.com and to the big question will be whether it's faster than Techmeme. (Techmeme caught this story far faster than the new Google Blogsearch!) That's our concern as a tech site. This has to be entirely new for bloggers who write about television, video games or business. Those sectors have got to be excited.

A Techmeme Killer?

Even in tech, though we may love Techmeme - it's audience is more influential than it is large. The new Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic.

Techmeme indexes a limited number of tech blogs, primarily blogs linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed. Google Blogsearch, on the other hand, indexes all blog posts faster than anyone else on the web.

Techmeme is a great site and founder Gabe Rivera works hard to update its machinery and functionality regularly. The same iteration strategy can't be assumed for the new Google Blogsearch, in fact it appears that the Google News algorithm has just been applied to blogs. All this may or may not be significant. Rivera offered no response when we contacted him asking for one.

We're excited about the new Google Blogsearch. What do you think? Can you imagine yourself visiting it now?

Posted by brian tiong at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Dean Takahashi *)

Technorati has searched through its own search index of the world’s blogs and released new data on the state of the blogosphere in 17 months. And my, there are a lot of us bloggers out there. It’s time for some serious navel gazing.

Technorati has indexed more than 133 million blogs since 2002. The last report was posted in April 2007. At that point, Technorati reported there were more than 70 million blogs, with 120,000 being created every day. But the creation of new blogs hasn’t necessarily slowed. Rather, Technorati has become better at weeding out inactive or spam blogs and deleted tens of millions of them.

Under Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, the company had been tracking the blogosphere every six months or so since 2004, when there were less than 2 million. Under new chief executive Richard Jalichandra, the company has taken longer to come up with a new report that documents the state of the blogosphere. And now it has done a formal survey with bloggers for the first time.

“It’s much more interesting to define the active blogosphere now than it is to count the total number of blogs,” Jalichandra said in an interview. “At this point, it’s hard to define what a blog is, given things like Twitter and MySpace blogs.”

Those platforms as well as Facebook blogs aren’t counted in Technorati’s current definition of blogs, but they could be in the future, Jalichandra said.
Technorati is now focused on the activity level and growing influence of blogs. For evidence of the latter, consider that four of the top ten entertainment sites on the web are blogs: OMG, TMZ, Asylum and PerezHilton. Blogs are represented in the top ten web sites across all key media categories.

“Blogs are media,” Jalichandra said. “That is the difference now. They are as relevant as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The blogger with 5,000 readers may be just as credible a source of information for those 5,000 people as anyone else.”

The “active blogosphere” is an ecosystem of interconnected bloggers and readers, where journalism and conversation converge. The company collected the data for this year’s report by taking a random sample survey of the more than 1.2 million bloggers registered with Technorati. The survey, conducted by a third party, received 1,300 responses. That’s a statistically random sample, but it’s definitely skewed to serious bloggers, or people who care enough about their blogs to register them with Technorati.

In this latest report, the number of blogs that have updated in the past 30 days drops to 3.5 million. Those who posted in the last week amount to 1.5 million. In the month of June, the number of blogs with an authority rating of 50 or more was 76,000. (The authority rating — a measure of influence– refers to the number of other blogs that have linked to them during the last six months. Nearly half of active blogs have some authority.)

Newspaper journalists are no longer looking down on blogs. About 95 of the top 100 newspapers now have reporter blogs. On average, bloggers cover an average of five different topics within each blog. They use an average of five techniques to drive traffic to their blog and seven different publishing tools.

Technorati indexes just about every blog post that gets published in real time. But it has as good a handle on the state of blogging as any big search company. The report is mostly about ordinary bloggers such as Lori Stewart, a 45-year-old blogger who started a nonprofit group, Toys for Troops, which has sent 10,000 beanie babies to soldiers in Iraq.

During the month of June, Technorati noted that there were always more than 600,000 blog posts each day, with a couple of days surpassing the million-blog mark. On average, bloggers have been writing for about three years. Half of bloggers are on their second blog.

Based on the blogger survey, two-thirds of bloggers are male. About 50 percent are ages 18 to 34. They are more affluent and educated than the general population; about half earn more than $75,000 a year in the U.S. The mean annual revenue from blogging is $6,000. That’s not bad, considering the average investment is only $1,800. And bloggers are earning CPMs (clicks per mil, a measure of ad revenue) that are comparable to large publishers, which earn $3 to $6 CPMs.

Jalichandra considers the profitability of blogging as a whole to be an indicator of the strength of the medium. While many pundits have been predicting an over-abundance of blogs, a shake-out, or the collapse of ad revenues, Jalichandra foresees only a growth in blogging as a revenue-generating platform. He notes that a lot of bloggers consider themselves to be professional, but only 28 percent are using display ads. That suggests considerable room for growth in revenues ahead, Jalichandra said.

The profession is becoming more international. Technorati tracked 81 languages and bloggers from 66 countries in June. About 43 percent of those polled were in the U.S., and 72 percent publish in English. About 27 percent blogged in Europe, while 14 percent were in Asia and 7 percent in South America. About 3 percent were in Australia and 1 percent in Africa. They spend 3.5 times as much time on the Internet as they do watching TV.

Among the benefits of blogging: bloggers report high personal satisfaction, career advancement, and receiving publishing or speaking opportunities. About 69 percent of corporate bloggers also identified themselves as personal bloggers, while 65 percent called themselves professional bloggers, the latter meaning they blog about the industry but not as an official spokesperson for the company.

As for brands in the blogosphere, about four out of five bloggers post brand or product reviews. About 37 percent of them do so frequently. About 60 percent blog about company information or gossip that they hear. And about a third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.

More here

Posted by brian tiong at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)