this is a little case study of how I leveraged blogs as a press release mechanism, to generate some real PR with very little investment and a little time. I will also summarize my learnings at the end with some do's and don'ts
Background:
I own an advertising company that specializes providing regionally targeted advertising for service based businesses using search engines. Its a small company with a, ironically enough, very small advertising budget. When I started the company I made sure to start a blog as well that talked about topics my audience of small/medium businesses would be interested in. My target market is mostly small/medium businesses selling services or complex products that require regional customers. Customers include, car dealers, Doctors, lawyers, gyms, etc.
The Story:
On January 18th I saw a car commercial on TV for a pontiac, it was a typical car commercial, except at the end it said, "don't just take our word for it, google pontiac and discover for yourself". I decided this was a story worth writing about, and would be of interest to car dealers. So I spent half an hour writing a blog post, capturing a screenshot, and event recorded the video on my digital camera. I then posted it to my blog... now no one reads my blog yet, it's a couple of months old and not mainstream, so I had to generate some traffic.
Blog targeting:
Two groups of blogs would be interested in this story, blogs about cars and car industry, and blogs about search marketing and search engines. So I spent some time surfing and searching, and quickly found about 10 blogs that seemed seemed relevant, and well written. These included, autoblog.com, jalopnik.com, autoextremeist.com, and even a GM blog fastlane.gmblogs.com. I wrote about a dozen or so emails to any editors I could find on these sites, and some sites even had a submit story. I also posted to some messageboards about it, the only bad experience I had was with edmunds.com who told me off for "self promoting" and deleted my post, oh well. I also posted the story on digg.com, and got about 10 diggs, but that's a long way from the front page.
The Email:
I kept it short and sweet, and kept it about the story and not about me:
"Subject: GM says Google Pontiac
Thought this might be interesting for your blog.
The other day I saw a commercial for Pontiac that suggested people "Google Pontiac" at the end of the commercial. It represents a very interesting intersection between traditional and new media. Anyway, I wrote about it here and luckily through the magic of tivo captured the video of the ad.
http://localzing.com/blog/local-advertising/gm-says-google-p...I've also added it to digg:
http://digg.com/technology/GM_says_Google_PontiacAll the best,
Karl"
The Results:
The story was quickly picked up by autoblog.com, and it went on their front page, and progressively got picked up by a few more blogs. Before I posted this story, i got an average of 50 unique visitors a day, the next day I got 112, next 86, and then on Sunday 305. Late Sunday I got a phone call from a chap called Max Kalehoff who was planning on writing an article on the same GM advertisement from a different perspective, and wondered if i minded if they used my screenshot and mentioned my blog, then explaining that the article he was writing was going to be sent out to about 50,000 marketing executives. I was obviously thrilled.
Traffic steadily increased, reaching a peak of about 1,500 unique visitors on January 26th, making the total of unique visitors for january 4,500. Now these numbers are not huge if you're an ecommerce shop, or in entertainment, but i'm a service business who is fine with 40 or 50 clients so these are great numbers for me. Additionally at the end of this, technorati.com listed 28 sites linking back to my blog, which is "google gold" as far as I'm concerned, and worth the effort on its own.
Lessons Learned:
1. PR doesn't have to be about you, in fact ideally it should be about something that other people are interested in, which is probably not you
2. Digg.com can smell self promotion like a woman can smell you're single and desperate.
3. Keep emails to bloggers simple, spam free, and give them a headline they can use
4. Keep track of people linking back to you, and don't be afraid to tell people to use the right link text
5. Keep track of other people who pick up the story but don't link to you, and don't be afraid to contact them and offer some more context, they will probably then link to you
References:
Original article:
http://localzing.com/blog/local-advertising/gm-says-google-p...http://www.autoblog.com/2006/01/22/google-pontiac/Article by Max Kalehoff
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Artic...http://technorati.com/search/localzing.com%2Fblog%2F
