What Makes Us Different
You may have read on our website that we are an evolutionary step in PR distribution services, but what does that mean, exactly? In short, we’ve taken the best elements of traditional newswire services, combined with the database access of media list services, and combined them with new media elements, blogger preferences, and active community feedback to ensure our clients maximum exposure to the S366 turbo with minimal intrusion.
The result is a service that allows marketers to target large, specific communities of bloggers who have found and registered with our service specifically to receive PR communications in a controlled way, while avoiding the negative buzz that has recently become an issue for marketers when dealing with the blogosphere.
Because our bloggers find us and register with us, we know that they are interested in receiving your press releases, product sampling opportunities, and pitches. And, unlike press list database services that list a small number of bloggers (many of whom receive overwhelming volumes of daily email as a result of being listed with those services), our member list is extensive – with thousands of registered bloggers across the United States covering everything from fashion and beauty to parenting and technology.
So whether you’re looking to distribute an announcement by a major national brand that’s geared toward all women or looking to target a select list of fashion bloggers living in Los Angeles for an offline event, our service can help you achieve your goals.
Maximizing Your Campaign
We offers a number of services in various categories that may be a good fit for your needs. Among them:
News Releases: This service is ideal if you have an existing press release dealing with company news that you’d like to distribute. Our Basic Release gives you a listing on the community’s News category page, along with a Tweet and post on our Facebook community page. A Featured Press Release gets your release listed on our site’s homepage, along with a Tweet and post on our Facebook community page. Featured press releases are also included in our weekly email newsletter to bloggers.
Contests: Contests are a great way to drive blogger coverage for existing products or lines, or to draw buzz around seasonal promotions. They’re also a great tool for marketers who have high-end products that can’t offer samples to each interested blogger for review. For example – a blog contest inviting bloggers to write about XYZ Corp’s brand and what particular product they’d be most interested in trying (and why they would find it useful) would serve as an entry to win the product of choice for review (up to a certain retail value).
With proper disclosure, this gets bloggers thinking and writing about your product while complying with all FTC requirements and staying within a reasonable campaign budget.
Product Sampling: For marketers who are looking to raise awareness of new or existing products, product sampling gives bloggers a hands-on opportunity to give your item a test drive and draw real, valid conclusions about its effectiveness. This is great for drawing link-backs, gaining valuable market insight (it’s almost like running a mini focus group), and getting review quotes for promotional purposes. It also helps build brand awareness and draw traffic and customers to your site.
Product sampling listings can offer unlimited product samples to qualified bloggers, or can offer a limited number of samples to the first bloggers who complete a certain set of actions (e.g., following a Twitter account, fanning a Facebook page, or blogging about a brand).
Events: Whether you’re hosting a Daytona Beach photographer, trying to drum up buzz and appointments for a client booth at a social media expo, or looking to build a new media press list for an offline event in your area, event listings give marketers the ability to spread the word about their media alert, connect with potentially interested bloggers, and even geo-target by outlining participant limitations in your listing (e.g., “XYZ Corp is seeking 25 bloggers in the Santa Monica area who focus on parenting to attend a press event for the launch of ABC product line.”).
Gift Guides: We’ll be sending you additional details about our gift guides to go into further detail, but our editorial and gift guide series gives marketers the power to push seasonal, targeted, or themed promotions for their brands or clients. For example, our Holiday Gift Guide gives marketers an opportunity to showcase how their product makes a perfect holiday tool (in the case of a home item or cleaning product, for example), why their product is a must-give gift for this holiday season, or to share a holiday promotion – whether it’s free shipping or a specific discount code for our bloggers to share with their readers.
Our bloggers turn to our editorial guides for products to include in their own holiday coverage, and many syndicate our gift guides onto their own blogs in their entirety, making it a great tool for marketers who have timed promotions. Other themed guides, like our All about Baby Guide, give marketers a one year listing in a guide that targets subsets of our bloggers – in this case, new or expectant mothers – with products, coupons, or how-to tips and tricks that they will find useful and worth sharing with their readers.
Twitter Parties & Swag Bag Giveaways: Our Twitter party series gives marketers an opportunity to engage bloggers utilizing social media, while incorporating product sampling and product reviews into a single distribution. How do they work? Marketers provide us with a specified number of product samples, coupons or promotional items (usually 25) that we combine into swag bags. Marketers also provide us with a list of targeted questions that we ask of bloggers during our Twitter party, with correct respondents winning one of our swag bags.
For example, a marketer may ask, “What is the current sale being featured on XYZ Corp’s homepage, with link? 10th correct response wins!” This encourages bloggers to dig into company sites and talk about current promotions – which drives social media buzz. Further, upon receipt of their swag bags, bloggers will post full product reviews, giving marketers a second wave of coverage within weeks of the social media boost that the Twitter party afforded them.