When it comes to your direct mail campaigns, you’ve probably over-farmed your land.

You’ve been emailing and snail mailing the same donors you have done for a decade. It is time to leave the land fallow and let the lists rest. You have probably responded to lower donations and attention by relinquishing too much power to your direct marketing firm and they have been much more aggressive than you’re comfortable with, sending out many more snail mail and email donation requests than ever before. You used to blame the economy for decreased giving but you’re starting to believe it has more to do with the fertility of the donor list than it does with the economic collapse of 2008–or a lot less than you’ve been led to believe. You realize that the nonprofit space is ever more competitive, but your brand is strong and respected and comes up well in Charity Navigator, so what gives?

Well, in agriculture, it is possible to over-farm your land.  Indeed, it is probable, in a couple ways:

Ultimately, you need to do one or more of a couple things: allow the land to rest, either ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially, though this is impossible if you’re tending only one plot of land; enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides with the expectation that you will be able to increase your yield; rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil that has been depleted by your main crop, naturally returning your field to a cycle of fertility; or you can expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land, reaching into a greater diversity of quality of land, essentially hedging your bets over land of varying quality, durability, fertility, and health, resulting in a more consistent crop that is less dependent on any particular geographic focal point.

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Last week I asked my management team if what we do at Abraham Harrison is inbound marketing. Sara Wilson, my COO, told me yes, that our digital PR strategy of identifying thousands of topical blogs and then pitching them on behalf of our clients with the goal of securing hundreds of earned media mentions is surely the definition of inbound marketing–and maybe even the way that God intended. Or at least the deities who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, where markets are conversations.

Earned media is hard.  How do you get loads and loads of unpaid citizen journalists to make a gift of their valuable time and platform? It must be just short of impossible. Far from it, and we have been doing it again and again, week after week, since the Fall of 2006, about a half-decade ago.

This commonly-held belief, that earned inbound marketing is well-nigh impossible, has caused “fickle and unreliable” bloggers and influencers to be avoided in place of predictable but artificial inbound marketing.  This new version uses technology and SEO, fake review sites, fake blog sites, fake news sites, affiliate marketing, monetary incentives, text-link-ads, link trading. and entire “informational” sites similar to Wikipedia, distributed globally, on many different servers and under many different domains and sub-domains to emulate its “impossible” counterpart.

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Sean Parker at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday (photo by JD Lasica)

Sean Parker, CEOs of Salesforce & eBay highlight day 1 of Web 2.0 Summit

The one conference I try to make every year is the venerable Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I've now been to seven out of the eight annual gatherings of entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley luminaries and tech-savvy business people.

Here are some highlights from day one of the three-day conference, which you can follow live on Livestream. And here's my photo set of the conference speakers on Flickr.

Highlights of Web 2.0 Summit 2011

Sean Parker, who was immortalized on screen by Justin Timberlake as a brilliant, rich party boy in "The Social Network," was captivating when questioned by host John Battelle:

• On Facebook: "The problem isn't privacy but the glut of information available to power users" who prop up the network.

• There was an interesting exchange when Mashable co-editor Ben Parr asked Parker about his Wikipedia entry, which says: "Sources are inconsistent as to whether he was a co-founder or early employee of Napster." Parker said flatly that he was a co-founder and provided Napster with its first big infusion of cash. About 30 seconds later, someone in the audience updated his entry to reflect that — but editors reverted the entry back. Even the subject of a Wikipedia entry isn't authoritative if it's not in a published source somewhere. Besides, as one of my Twitter friends told me: "John Fanning was source of initial funding; he had online games company, Sean Fanning worked for him, Parker came later."

• Would it kill Wikipedia to include photo credits for photos of living individuals? I'm willing to contribute one of my photos of Parker to the public domain but have too much on my plate to do so as an anonymous donor.

• Parker on Google Plus's threat to Facebook: The advantage of first movers is high in the social sphere. Switching costs are high for the end user, and Facebook must falter for Google Plus to take over a good chunk of Facebook's users.

• More Parker: "One of the big mistakes we made at Napster was going completely peer to peer without even talking to the record labels."

• John Battelle likes his Wikipedia entry because he's 3 years younger there than in real life.

• Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a pioneer in the tech sector, says he loves the music service Spotify, which Parker is an investor in. "It's all I use for music now."

• Benioff: "Facebook is becoming a vision of what the next-generation consumer operating system will be."

• Benioff sees three main forces driving the tech sector: the cloud, mobility and social. "These forces are creating a revolutoin in our industry." At Salesforce's recent Dreamforce conference, the overarching theme was: "It's a Social Revolution."

• Benioff: "We didn't see protesters in Egypt and Tunisia carrying signs that said, 'Thank you Microsoft' or 'Thank you IBM.' These social networks represent a democratizing force and a fundamental shift in how people organize."

• Benioff said the auto industry is missing out on an opportunity to capitalize on the social wave. "CEOs should be thinking about what a social car looks like. Toyota should name its next car the Toyota Friend."

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Last week, I talked about using the long tail of blogger outreach -- the idea that you can’t pin your hopes for most public relations efforts on only the A-list bloggers. For each outreach, there are hundreds and often thousands of bloggers that are not well-known but have influence on the very people that your PR campaign is trying to reach.

I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work on an ongoing basis, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible.

You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like.

We need to be clear in our email that we want a post and the pitch to be shared with the readers of the blog. In our social media news releases, we need to make sure that everything can be copied and pasted as-is, that images are the correct size, that the links are already embedded, that copy and text is simple to copy and block-quote and that any and all banner ads or videos have a handy and easy to find embed code right there.

One cannot assume any technical proficiency, one cannot assume any PR or communications experience, one cannot assume that any blogger knows any PR-speak or knows how to deal with an embargo. One cannot assume that anyone knows what a press release is, or a social media release or what PRWeb is or, heaven forbid, how to keep an embargoed message holy. Long story short, if the message in any way seems more complicated or time-consuming than each blogger fancies it’s worth, then you’ve lost them.

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I had breakfast with John Bell of Ogilvy a number of years ago. He didn't see the value of investing limited budget, time and resources on the long tail when those treasures would better be used to woo the high-fliers, professionals, top-cows and A-listers. That's fair enough, and surely a common question, and a question we must address close to the beginning of every sales call we make at our agency when we propose blogger outreach to a prospective client.

The value comes from penetration, permanence, perseverance and persistence. There are only a finite number of members of every organization's email list. Mashable and TechCrunch have a sizable but vertical (narrow) audience. When we reach out and pitch to thousands of bloggers, however small or niche, if they're within maybe one but generally a handful of loosely defined topics, we always reach well outside of the echo chamber of a conversation that tends to get contained within the walls of a tech blog or mommy blog.

By reaching out ever further, we don't assume that anyone outside of the five major urban centers are obsessed with the top five major papers or the top five major blogs. Doing so makes the critical mistake that if you get covered by the FT, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you've got the world covered. In fact, I will use a newspaper analogy to try to illustrate my point.

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Google VP Marissa Mayer from a past Web 2.0 Summit (photo by J.D. Lasica).

Guide to events & conferences for the coming month

WITI, Web 2.0 Expo New York, Web 2.0 Summit, Pivot and Pop!Tech are just a few of the events on tap for this month. Here's our roundup of social media, tech and marketing conferences and events for the month of October. Lots of interesting gatherings on tap.

For the full year, see our full Calendar of 2011 social media, tech and marketing conferences. And Socialbrite has our calendar of nonprofit and social change events for the month.

Hope to see you at some of these! If you know of other must-attend events, please share by posting the info in the comments at the bottom.

Conference	Date	Place
October
Direct Marketing Association	Oct. 1-6	Boston
DMA2011 helps progressive marketers to better engage customers and improve bottom-line results in all channels, including social, search, mobile, video and more.
WITI's Women and Technology Summit	Oct. 2-4	San Jose, Calif.
WITI (Women In Technology International), the world's leading professional organization for executive women in technology, will gather around the theme of "Collaboration, Strategy and Growth" through hands-on speaking engagements and panel discussions.
Android Open	Oct. 9-11	San Francisco
Android Open is the first conference to cover the entire Android ecosystem. Whether you're a developer, IT pro, business decision-maker or marketer, you'll find the latest and best information for maximizing the power of the Android platform. Android Open is a big-tent meeting ground for app and game developers, carriers, chip manufacturers, content creators, OEMs, researchers, entrepreneurs, VCs and business leaders to share best practices, tools, models and lessons learned.
Web 2.0 Expo NY	Oct. 10-13	New York
Web 2.0 Expo is a conference and trade show for everyone who cares about embracing and extending the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies.
International Professional Communication Conference	Oct. 17-19	Cincinnati
"Communicating Sustainablity" is the theme for the IPCC 2011 Conference. The theme refers to the many different ways in which communication plays a role in helping us conceptualize, analyze and solve the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
Digital Hollywood Fall	Oct. 17-20	Marina del Rey, Calif.
Digital Hollywood remains one of the nation's premier entertainment and technology conferences.
Pivot	Oct. 17-18	New York
Pivot is a new kind of marketing conference singularly focused on helping brand marketers and their agencies connect with the social consumer.
Web 2.0 Summit	Oct. 17-19	San Francisco
The Web 2.0 Summit brings together 1,000 senior executives from the worlds of technology, media, finance, telecommunications, entertainment,and the Internet. This year the theme is "The Data Frame," focusing on the impact of data in today's networked economy.
Pop!Tech	Oct. 19-22	Camden, Maine
Pop!Tech will mark its 15th annual gathering with more than 600 remarkable thinkers, leaders and innovators showcasing powerful ideas and projects that are changing the world. I attended one year — it's a great gathering.