Bril­liant inven­tions are usu­ally both sim­ple and ele­gant. Cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing a daily spon­sored email newslet­ter that reaches influ­en­tial movers and shak­ers is noth­ing new — it has com­fort­ably existed since the early 90s. What Peter Shankman did, in cre­at­ing Help a Reporter Out (HARO), was some­thing supremely sim­ple, grace­ful and gen­er­ous, meet­ing a need that nobody even knew was so lack­ing in an envi­ron­ment where busi­ness as usual wasn’t work­ing any­more.  Just add HARO, where work­ing jour­nal­ists are con­nected with experts in a num­ber of fields to the tune of almost 100,000 sub­scribers and growing.

I spoke to Mr. Shankman recently over the phone. “Hey Peter, do you know any­body who knows about X, does Y, or has had Z expe­ri­ence?” HARO was the easy solu­tion to some­thing that he had been field­ing all by him­self for years and years.  Because Mr. Shankman is the connector’s con­nec­tor, he already knew a hell of a lot of peo­ple, but even he met his lim­its over time.  Who wanted to know? Reporters. As reporters and jour­nal­ists fever­ishly feed the hun­gry maw of the 24-hour news cycle, they need to find inter­views, quotes and opin­ions from just about every­one under the sun.  And because a major­ity of these sto­ries don’t allow any sem­blance of exper­tise or research to be cul­ti­vated before they’re due to be filed, it is essen­tial that reporters can find reli­able sources at a moment’s notice.  I have been a baby Shankman at points in my life. Often­times I get calls from my reporter friends who want the scoop on who’s the best in Social Media met­rics or the top man in Social Media in pol­i­tics — and they don’t ask because of some sort of jour­nal­is­tic “can’t men­tion friends” ethics thing.  Some­times I am just the guy peo­ple go to, per­haps because I have been on CNN and BBC, and quoted in papers and online.

When Peter Shankman started get­ting ques­tions that were well out­side his expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge, he searched for an answer that would allow him to ‘help a reporter out’ and facil­i­tate lots of peo­ple with quite a diver­sity of tal­ents and expe­ri­ences.  So, this all hap­pened back in Octo­ber 2007 in the form of a Face­book Group, until it exceeded 1,200 mem­bers. 1,200 was the cap that Face­book used to have on “email all mem­bers” (it is now 5,000) so Shankman needed to evolve into some­thing that could scale like crazy.  They then moved to an email mail­ing list plat­form in March 2008. I just joined up again, and it looks like they’re cur­rently using AWe­ber.  And scale they did — 10,000 in the first three months and 25,000 in the first six. It has come all the way to 110,000 mem­bers today and is still grow­ing, along with around 80,000 sources with the single-minded goal of help­ing not just one reporter, but over 30,000 of them.  I never asked if this was a global phe­nom­e­non, but I know that Shankman has now even out­grown AWe­ber.  With 30,000 reporters and 80,000 sources, there are 3,000 queries-per-month that result in 7 mil­lion pitched facil­i­tated and a con­sis­tent open rate of 75–80%.  Accord­ing to Shankman, peo­ple have started call­ing HARO “email crack.”

While altru­ism is at the very root of HARO as a phe­nom­e­non, HARO is also a busi­ness.  In its life as a mail­ing list, HARO has become more than just a valu­able plat­form to the facil­i­ta­tion of information-exchange between sources and jour­nal­ists but it is also an amaz­ing brand-building and even sales-channel for small busi­nesses — and large busi­nesses such as Amer­i­can Apparel — who are look­ing to reach the eye­balls of a very rar­efied cross sec­tion of soci­ety: 110k+ jour­nal­ists, PR pro­fes­sion­als, small busi­ness own­ers, and gen­er­ally inter­ested par­ties (AKA sources) who are curi­ous and con­nected enough to actu­ally proac­tively join a list like HARO.  It is rare or impos­si­ble to get this sort of access and so the inven­tory of HARO email spon­sor­ship is spo­ken for until Jan­u­ary, 2010.  There have been 1,250 brands pro­moted through HARO so far to the tune of $1M annual revenue.

So, with growth comes respon­si­bil­ity and the list has started to become too much of a good thing and folks are com­plain­ing that the list has become too gen­eral, that the just isn’t any way to spec­ify spe­cial­ized top­ics such as tech, fash­ion, busi­ness, finance, and any num­ber of other top­ics. In much the same way that the AdAge email list is set up, where you can check one or more newslet­ter update, be it AdAge Daily News, AdAge Dig­i­tal, or Break­ing News, you will be able to check one or more of the HARO top­ics.  You can — and are encour­aged to — receive them all, of course, but you don’t have to.   The vision is to go from the three emails cur­rently being sent today — morn­ing, news, and night — to 10–15 emails-per-day.  This expan­sion of emails would, of course, also increase the inven­tory of spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties and pos­si­bly make spon­sor­ships more afford­able and also allow the spon­sor­ship adver­tis­ing to much more targeted.

So, right now, Peter Shankman has the goal of expand­ing this plat­form, which at its heart is really about help­ing a reporter out, still, to be able to han­dle what he really wants and needs: more peo­ple.  To quote Metcalfe’s law, “the value of a net­work is pro­por­tional to the square of the num­ber of con­nected users of the sys­tem.”  This means that the value of HARO net­work to reporter increases as the num­ber of sources increase.  When there are 1,000,000 sub­scribers to the HARO list a reporter might poten­tially be able to ask for just about any­thing and be able to find a source for a quote.

Just in case you won­der if the HARO list might have jumped the shark in light of Twit­ter, HARO has adopted twit­ter @helpareporter with 8,830
fol­low­ers. HARO also has a Face­book Page with  6,052 fans. Shankman also told me that they’re devel­op­ing other ways to keep in touch via RSS, iPhone, Black­berry (and Android if any­one asks — and I ask — I have a G1).Chris 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.

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