Th3 Core

In general, bloggers need either a tangible benefit (cash, freebie) or to feel valued. Making them feel valued can be time consuming - I treat it like any PR exercise - get your list, order them by value. Pull out the ones who you think will respond to cash or pressies and hit them with either a simple business deal or an email offering a product to review with no strings, whichever seems appropriate. Those are the easy ones although some then require more info and sometimes an interview.

The ones who need to be looked after are really important to grade so you don't spend too long targetting ones who will only send you 3 visitors and a nofollow.

It is a load of work and, in my experience at least, most don't respond to being pinged with a press release. It does get easier over time because you learn who you want to build relationships with and then get to the point where you can just ping them an opportunity for an exclusive etc and they'll run with it, but its almost better to send something out on PRWire and get it picked up than mail individually and offend them by not personalising it!

I haven't got there yet but my aim with some sets of bloggers for some clients is to setup 'panels' who are our go to guys for getting things out there. Invite them to London occasionally and put them in a hotel for a night, ask their opinions, request feedback, give them goodie packs and give them 24 hours advance notice on big news. That should take most of the pain out of the ongoing work, but except for a few ones who stand out identifying which blogs we want this to be is quite tricky.

Thx, boys, you reconfirmed my thoughts. Especially that bit about giving each a 1-5 star rating and spending the appropriate amount of effort on each. I did that before too.

Lemme ask a few more questions then...

When searching you always find 2 types of sites: blogs about the subject and general blogs that nailed an article dead on your target. This second variety always seems to make me jealous wishing they wrote about my widget eventhough the date of the article is before I actually made mine. What do you do about these?  I always think they should do a followup article or they might just find mine more interesting, but have never asked...

Also, what do you think about not only pushing to get in blogs end users read, but since we are talking Facebook apps making use of their newest 'places' API and paypals Adaptive Payments API, trying to go after tech bloggers makes sense too, since just about anyone could use it.

Downside is I can't protect the idea so once the cat is out of the bag I need to run as fast as I can, because my competition in that space will use my blueprint and have the 'second mover advantage' of duplication with an existing userbase.

But I think pros outweigh the cons.

In retrospect there is one funny thing that happened on the night.  An MP came up to me and said "I'm glad you are not in my constituency" - I said "funnily enough, I don't live in Edinburgh - I live in New York - there's no landlocked barriers - also there is nothing on the blog which is inaccurate - so what are you scared of - who are you shagging?"

That MP is now the Deputy Prime Minister.

Am I missing something but Nick Clegg is MP for Sheffield Hallam... 

DB - there are a couple of great interviews with Tim Ferris on how he went from unknown, unpublished author to mega-bestseller. There's one on Mixergy, but there's even a better one about exactly how he targeted bloggers and how this propelled him to the NYT bestseller list. He was probably the first author to ever use this as a strategy, so it's perhaps harder now.

The main points that I recall were

- he looked for the least crowded channel and decided that it was bloggers (most authors at the time were going after radio and print journalists).
- he ponied up $10,000 for marketing and this went into attending conferences where he thought bloggers from his target audience would be, just trying to meet them and get to know them. If they seemed uninterested in him or didn't ask about what he was doing or, asking that, didn't seem interested in the book, he moved on. If they did seem interested, he simply asked them "If you don't mind, can I send you a free copy of the book when it comes out?" If they said yes, he put them on the list.
- when the review copies were ready, he sent them to everyone on the list and said "If you like it and think your readers would be interested, it would great if you could mention this on your blog."

He argues that he thinks meeting these people in person and getting to know them as friends was what made this work so well.

His funny story is trying to meet Robert Scoble. He went to a conference and Scoble was surrounded by groupies, so he realized he was never going to make a connection. So he looked around for anyone who looked like an interesting person. He saw some woman on the fringes and went up and started talking to her. Was having a great talk and they really hit it off. Turned out to be Scoble's wife and he got the Robert Scoble review in then end anyway.

The key point is that he said (paraphrasing obviously): "Bloggers didn't end up reviewing my book because they liked it. They ended up reviewing my book because they liked me."

...ergophobe, very cool

>Do you have any firm plans or ideas on reaching out to the bloggers
yes, it's definitely a vein I'm going to run down, although I'm putting out about 20 fires a day right now, so I shelved this for the time being with plans of picking it up in a few weeks in earnest.  But I also got a new partner that has a say in all this now: our very own Lovely Leona:) Surprise! So we are going to tackle this soon... maybe we can all wrap our heads around this and come up with something actionable for our specific cases, based on what has been said here.

awesome, I want social media lessons from Leona 

Will one of you give us a running commentary?