RAAK

We all know how important publicity is, especially for a new company without brand recognition.

But in the current media climate – do you know how to get it? Ah yes, bloggers are a sure fire way to get good targeted eyeballs. But have you tried approaching them?

RAAK built a social media ready SEO enhanced website for fashion brand WHERE (Full disclosure: Their designer Laura Villasenin is my partner). It’s a new fashion brand that needs all the exposure – awareness and word of mouth – it can get.

But we knew we wanted it to be featured in one of the huge fashion blogs. They can drive massive amounts of traffic, increase your Google Pagerank, and a blog recommendation carries a lot of weight.

A blog like Stylebubble would be perfect. But Susie of Stylebubble is a very busy lady these days.

But then we read Brian Solis’s piece on the so called magic middle bloggers:

The best communications strategies will encompass not only authorities in new and traditional media but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve, because they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly, in a true peer-to-peer approach. The Magic Middle is defined as the bloggers who have from 20-1,000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail, and its effects on the bottom line are measurable.

Brian made the point that the star bloggers of this world – are so busy, so famous – that they are no longer approachable. And even if they feature your product its often a once off. This is because they are also hard to build a relationship with. And building a relationship with a blogger can take you so much further. Especially if it’s a blogger on the up.

So we went for a magic middle blogger – and it worked big time.

Now I have to confess that RAAK actually did very little in this instance than provide some good advice. Laura did the rest herself. Here is how she got blogger relations spot on:

1. She did her research and found an up and coming fashion blogger – Katie that writes What Katie Wore.

   Katie’s blog is popular, she routinely gets 20 plus comments on each post – times that by at least 100 to get an idea of how many visitors she gets to a post. But she’s not in the league of Fashion Toast (yet).

2. She followed Katies’s blog and Twitter account – and listened.

   She liked what Katie did, and thought her sense of style was a good fit with her designs. she found out they lived around the corner from each other. Match!

3. She contacted Katie herself. There was no agent involved.

   Bloggers don’t want to be approached by marketing and PR types that are far removed from a brand. They want the real deal. If you’re a fashion company the designer is as good as it gets. If you’re a company like Hewlett Packard that make electronics goods, and you’re blogging about photocopiers – it’s probably the photocopier product manager that you want to speak to. Why? Bloggers want knowledgeable people that are close to a product or service. They wan’t a marketese free environment. This is supposed to be a conversation remember.

4. Laura had a good product which she sent to Katie to check out.

   A nice face and a great personality might get you far, but if your product is a lemon, don’t waste your time. This is word of mouth media, and the recommender’s (In this case Katie) reputation is on the line.

5. She had a website that could cater for the inevitable traffic rise that a blog would send, and we tried to maximise the viral effect – a social home base.

   The site had WordPress’s Super Cache installed, just in case it was hit my a Tsunami of crazed shoppers. And we installed Tweetmemes Tweet this button. Ride the social wave.

And hey presto, look at the result!