When I real­ized that I could down­load the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a con­tact list of over 900 of the top adver­tis­ing, mar­ket­ing, PR, and SEO blog­gers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been sched­ul­ing calls with all of the folks I have been admir­ing on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hop­kins, “one of Australia’s lead­ing thinkers on com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy in an online envi­ron­ment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s lead­ing thinkers on com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy in an online envi­ron­ment.  We had a great chat — and amaz­ing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the con­ver­sa­tion and I jumped at the oppor­tu­nity and late last night Lee pub­lished Is email mar­ket­ing still rel­e­vant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most com­plete descrip­tion of what we at Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a bet­ter, more com­pre­hen­sive, way than I could even con­ceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and sub­scribe to) Bet­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

Is email mar­ket­ing still rel­e­vant in a 2.0 world?

G’day — thanks for return­ing!

I just fin­ished a fan­tas­tic con­ver­sa­tion with Chris Abra­ham, the Pres­i­dent and COO of Abra­hamHar­ri­son.

If you’ve been around the inter­net for a while, espe­cially in the ‘mar­coms’ (mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions) space, you would cer­tainly have heard of Chris; if not of the man him­self then cer­tainly of one of his mar­ket­ing and out­reach programs.

Chris is one of those select few online mar­keters who’s text doesn’t read like a tra­di­tional online direct mail piece – you know, with LOTS OF CAPITALS and heaps of bold text and yel­low high­light­ing and ital­ics and

• bul­let
• points
• a–
• plenty

and tes­ti­mo­ni­als by the kazillion…

I could point you to a zil­lion of those sites – which is not to say that the style of mar­ket­ing they use is not suc­cess­ful; it is, oth­er­wise they wouldn’t keep doing it. But you know as soon as you see the huge, bold, bright red and often in CAPS head­line what to expect for the rest of the (very) long toi­let roll of a page.

Chris takes a much softer approach, always has done, and it seems to work for him and his style of copywriting.

Video, the radio star and plain ol’ band­wagon idjuts

With the advent of Web2.0/Social Media there were many ill-informed and just plain ‘band­wagon’ pun­dits who hailed the death of tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools such as email, web1.0 sites and – gasp – news­pa­per, mag­a­zine, radio and television.

Much as tele­vi­sion didn’t kill radio as force it to rethink its place and find its niche, so too with Social Media. Every new tech­nol­ogy plat­form or soci­etal change brings with it a change in how all that came before it must view them­selves and con­tinue to offer relevancy.

Radio didn’t die, news­pa­pers haven’t been killed off, I can still pick up plenty of mag­a­zines that appeal to all demo­graph­ics and both gen­ders from my local newsagent, and email hasn’t dis­ap­peared off the radar (if my bulging inbox every morn­ing is any­thing to go by).

So it was fan­tas­tic to finally chat with some­one who, like me, believes that email is STILL a fun­da­men­tal part of the mar­ket­ing toolkit.

In talk­ing with Chris today, he was gen­uinely flat­tered that a fel­low copy­writer would find his mate­r­ial engag­ing; I thought it was bril­liant read­ing and his deploy­ment strate­gies for his clients bril­liantly executed.

You see, Chris, like me, believes that email won’t go away, but WILL have to change in order to sur­vive in the new com­mu­ni­ca­tion land­scape. Our shared view is that it will have to evolve in a cou­ple of ways:

1. Shorter emails will be the best way of get­ting people’s attention
2. Long-form emails are best saved for newslet­ters; try­ing to ‘sell’ via email will become even harder to excel at.

If you’ve ever received one of Chris’ emails, you will be stunned by sev­eral things:

1. They are short – only 2–3 paragraphs
2. They link off to a SMNR (Social Media News Release) that gives a far more in-depth level of infor­ma­tion (and all the mate­r­ial you might need to help you spread the word or get involved)
3. If you email Chris or any­one of his team back you WILL get a response, usu­ally within 24 hours (Chris says they try to get back within the hour, but time zones can some­time defeat them)
4. The emails ‘read’ like they were writ­ten by a human being, not by a ‘PR’ flack or a ex-journalist hack; they aren’t full of ‘me, me, me’ stuff telling you how won­der­ful I (the com­pany) am, but nei­ther do they ‘strip-tease tan­ta­lise’ you so that when you do click on the link you end up feel­ing cheated
5. You get the very real feel­ing that there’s some­one real at the end of the email.

Here’s an exam­ple (taken from my post about the Fresh Air Fund):

Hello again, Lee

On Sun­day I asked if you would kindly help me spread the word about 200 inner-city chil­dren I have yet to place with host fam­i­lies in August. I apol­o­gize for fol­low­ing up so soon, but time is of the essence and you know how funny email can be. To make things sim­ple, every­thing is col­lected into an online resource page http://freshair.smnr.us

This appeal comes straight from the top, so please do not hes­i­tate to con­tact me directly.

Yours sin­cerely,

Sara

–
Sara Wil­son
Fresh Air Fund
sara@freshair.org
www.freshair.org

Sara is a real per­son, not a ‘fake’ char­ac­ter. I sent her an email yes­ter­day, won­der­ing if her ears were burn­ing, because Chris and I were talk­ing about her:

G’day Sara,
Just fin­ished the phone call with Chris — oh boy! Were your ears burn­ing? They should have been!!!
Kindests,
Lee

From: Sara Wil­son [mailto:swilson@abrahamharrison.com]
Sent: Tues­day, 24 Feb­ru­ary 2009 2:02 AM
To: Lee@leehopkins.com
Sub­ject: Re: Fel­low Power 150 blogger

Hello Lee,
Just a quick note to re-confirm that Chris will be call­ing you at 10 am, your time, tomor­row (Tues­day).
No need to reply unless some­thing has come up on your end, oth­er­wise he will speak to you in about 7.5 hours!
Best,
Sara

In reply, Sara said,

Lee,
And I thought it was just hot where I was last night … 
It’s very kind of you to men­tion it, thanks.   Chris is a great guy to work for, and gen­er­ous with com­pli­ments, but it’s always nice to know that some­one appre­ci­ates you, isn’t it?
Cheers,
Sara

Con­tro­versy

Because Chris and his team start any cam­paign with an email-based blog­ger out­reach, some of the ‘holier than thou’ social media purists occa­sion­ally give him ‘stick’, or snicker behind his back and call him a ‘spam­mer’. Not true – the team are very hot on ensur­ing only a good taste remains in the mouth of any blog­ger they con­tact, and of only offer­ing blog­gers some­thing of actual value to the blog­ger.

Which is a behav­iour totally unlike the hap­less, clue­less and insult­ing PR flacks who reg­u­larly show up on The Bad Pitch Blog and who attempt to fill my inbox with mate­r­ial about elec­tron­ics, or san­i­tary nap­kins, or (ahem) exten­sion kits, or phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals shipped from Canada. Thank good­ness I have Spa­mAr­rest to fil­ter them out before they hit my inbox!

Chris and his team have painstak­ingly built up a list of nearly 35,000 blog­gers across sev­eral dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ics and topic areas of inter­est. Vis­it­ing their blogs, they har­vest their email address. They then politely email them once to offer them some­thing of inter­est – if the blog­ger likes it, they very often blog about it; it they don’t then they don’t. What is fas­ci­nat­ing is the response rate Chris gets for his clients.

Word of mouth and gossip-sharing amongst inter­net mar­keters has the aver­age rate of sales of any­thing (be it a blog post or an ebook or a ‘course you can­not live with­out’) as around 0.01–0.05% from an ini­tial mail­ing, with the follow-up mail­ings increas­ing that to, per­haps, 1.0–2.0%…

Chris and his team reg­u­larly get a takeup in the order of 5%, which is phe­nom­e­nal. In addi­tion, once you start devel­op­ing an email rela­tion­ship with any­one in their team (as I have with Sara Wil­son) then all future mail­ings will receive much more atten­tion than would oth­er­wise be the case. A case in point is my own, later, post on the ille­gal clus­ter bomb­ing being car­ried out in South Osse­tia and The Sur­vivor Corps run by activist and author of the very pow­er­ful book,  I Will Not Be Bro­ken, Jerry White. It is only because Sara had taken the time to develop a rela­tion­ship with me over pre­vi­ous months that I read and responded to the mate­r­ial from Jerry White. With­out that rela­tion­ship I would never have both­ered with a topic out­side of my nor­mal areas of interest.

It is the clas­sic ‘rela­tion­ship mar­ket­ing’ that Social Media Mar­ket­ing pun­dits claim to aim for but rarely achieve.

Good­ness, if I could have a dol­lar for every new ‘expert’ that’s popped up in the Social Media space I would retire a very rich tril­lion­aire (and at the same time won­der­ing how you could be a tril­lion­aire and not be very rich – I guess if you were liv­ing in Zim­babwe you wouldn’t be…).

You wouldn’t believe the num­ber of ‘lead­ing social net­work­ing and social media mar­ket­ing experts’ who have sud­denly come out of the wood­work and set up com­mu­ni­ties in places like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Face­book, etc. Curi­ously, I’ve never heard of these folks before. Most of them don’t even have blogs, or if they do those blogs have only been around for less than a year. Curi­ous, hey?

But Chris, on the other hand, has been around for a long time, has fig­ured out what works and what doesn’t, and as evi­dence offers the fol­low­ing case studies:

• Energy Bill 2007 Case Study
• Finan­cial Ser­vices Rep­u­ta­tion Defense Case Study
• Fire­brand TV Case Study
• Fresh Air Fund Case Study
• Inter­na­tional Med­ical Corps Case Study
• Movie Pro­ducer Rep­u­ta­tion Defense Case Study
• Snap­ple Antiox­i­dant Water Case Study
• Sur­vivor Corps Book Pro­mo­tion Case Study

If you want to see the sort of posts that are asso­ci­ated with Chris’ kind of blog­ger PR pitch out­reach, here are some examples:

• Thank You Oper­a­tion Sur­vivor Bloggers
• Thank You All Who Sup­ported Inter­na­tional Med­ical Corps!
• Thank You Again Sur­vivor Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Inter­na­tional Med­ical Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Hol­i­day Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Camp Coun­selor Bloggers!
• The Pow­er­ful SEO Ben­e­fits of Blog­ger PR Outreach
• Happy Thanks­giv­ing from Abra­ham Harrison

Here are some exam­ples of client SMNRs from Chris and his team that I espe­cially like:

• http://anamigo.smnr.us
• http://freshair.smnr.us
• http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us
• http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us
• http://survivorcorps.smnr.us
• http://iwillnotbebroken.smnr.us
• http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us

So what???

The whole point of this post is NOT to fawn at the feet of some­one who clearly knows what he is doing.

The whole point IS to let you know that you don’t need to throw out your baby with the bath­wa­ter:

• Don’t jump on the Social Media band­wagon with­out edu­cated advice
• Don’t take advice from a pim­ply 17 year old fresh out of high school
• Don’t take advice from a less-pimply 23 year old fresh out of university
• Don’t ditch all of your under­stand­ing of how ‘peo­ple’ and net­works work
• Don’t take advice from some­one who doesn’t even blog them­selves, or Twit­ter, or Face­book… (see my post about Social Media Gurus)
• Don’t take advice from some­one who has been blog­ging less than 24 months

Instead:

1. Down­load Todd Defren’s absolutely superb ‘Brink’ guide to Social Media and Richard Meyer’s great pre­sen­ta­tion, ‘Social Media : What you’re afraid to admit you didn’t know’ (he also has a great pharma and biotech-focused pdf pre­sen­ta­tion). Down­load and read Trevor Cook’s and my ‘Social Media Report’.
2. Talk to some­one who actu­ally knows what they are doing – in Aus­tralia that means folks like Stephen Collins, Lau­rel Pap­worth, Trevor Cook, Dar­ren Rowse, Gavin Heaton and, humbly, yours truly. If WE can’t help you, we can cer­tainly put you in touch with some­one who can. Unlike the USA, where there seems to be a spirit of “You’ll prize my rolodex out of my frozen dead fin­gers!”, there is no fierce spirit of com­pe­ti­tion here in Aus­tralia – we have  ‘co-opertition’ wherein we all help each other out if the ‘fit’ seems bet­ter for the client.
3. Stick to read­ing the sea­soned ‘pros’ of the online mar­ket­ing and/or busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion space: you can­not go wrong if you start at folks like any of the above, or Shel Holtz, Neville Hob­son, Chris Bro­gan, Dar­ren Rowse, Mitch Joel, Joe Jaffe , Laura Fit­ton and Chris Abra­ham him­self; see who they link to. Fol­low your nose from them – all the way along the path you will be read­ing ‘the good oil’ as we say here in Australia
4. Exam­ine Chris’ exam­ples above and see for your­self how sim­ple but effec­tive your online mar­ket­ing can be if you do it with the right inten­tion – of help­ing out the blog­ger, not flog­ging stuff for your client. Get the rela­tion­ship right and you will flog stuff for your client any­way, trust me!

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Cur­rently lis­ten­ing to ‘Next’ by The Necks from the album ‘Next’. Superb jazz funk from one of Australia’s great cult bands.

Via Mar­ket­ing Con­ver­sa­tion,  Chris Abra­ham & Lee Hop­kinsChris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.