Blogger Outreach

About Audience Machine

Audience Machine Inc. is a technology-enabled digital audience generation company.

Our firm provides social networking, community engagement practices, search engine optimization, online media planning and buying, application development, dialog monitoring, web analytics, and creative design services that connect the interests of individuals and organizations.

Our goal is to provide organizations interested in, or even intimidated by, digital media marketing with data and guidance designed to help them integrate this exciting strategy into their marketing and media plans.

Community Tools

Audience Machine is skilled at using both proprietary and open source tools that amplify dialogs to drive brand preference and ROI. It’s all about combining the power of community participation and social networking to drive business growth and customer satisfaction.

Current Projects

We’re putting the focus on viral distribution by using social networks and community sites as the central hubs to support awareness about this innovative video-based math tutoring service.

Interest, not acquaintance, drives dialogs. Identifying individuals who are sharing personal stories about what they like and linking those dialogs to support awareness and user registration is just the start for our Twitter integration project with this emerging social network.

Florida Island Vacation Destination + User Generated Content = Really Fun Project. But don’t tell anyone just yet. Creative and site development, localized business directory database, content management system, user generated content and local search optimization. Very exciting. Thanks to Google Maps for the image.

Client: Scholastic

Campaign Launch Date: March 2007

Campaign Duration: 5 months

CHALLENGE:

Use social media to reach out to Mom’s to drive awareness and viewership of the Maya & Miguel franchise.

ACTION:

An outreach effort was launched to engage mommy bloggers in early April. Bloggers whose posts centered around the soccer or the tournament, child education, Maya and Miguel as well as other relevant topics were aggregated for review.

The development of our outreach list was based on actual phrases used by bloggers in the title of posts, in blog categories and tags (words used to support indexing of a post in online directories and search engines that index blog posts). From these phrases, a number of clusters were created to help in the evaluation process, including:

Soccer tournaments
Youth soccer
PBS
Scholastic
Mommy bloggers
Home schooling
Child education resources
Maya & Miguel
Educational resources
Learning Spanish
State specific mentions where the tournament was being held

Approximately 3,000 sites for outreach consideration were reviewed. The initial site lists were developed using a proprietary software tool that crawls and indexes online conversations that are not behind a firewall or password protected. The review process also included assessing the number of links to a site, frequency of posting, external network relationships, and awards.

Using the comment field on an individual blog posts, a communication that included a disclosure about the relationship to Scholastic and an offer to receive a free DVD so that Scholastic could receive their feedback via a blog post review were included in each post. Prior to fulfillment, Scholastic would email the blogger to let them know that their DVD had been mailed.

RESULTS:

The mommy blogger pilot outreach program resulted in:

Bloggers Reached: 500
Number of Bloggers Requesting a DVD: 58
% of Bloggers Requesting a DVD: 11.60%
Number of Reviews: 13
Number of Comments: 55 (35% of comments included brand or franchise name in comment)
% of Receivers to Reviews: 22.4%

In addition to program performance figures, the pilot program has generated solid indexing and ranking across search engines that index blog-based content. In fact, user generated reviews from the Maya & Miguel blogger outreach program are ranking in the top positions on Google’s blog search for the phrase Maya & Miguel. Presently, 7 out of 10 positions on page 1 of Google’s blog search engine are the consumer reviews from the pilot program. The reviews occupy positions #2, #3, #4 spots as well as positions #6, #7, #8 and #10. Based on current ranking trends, these posts are likely to continue ranking well based on posted from early July and August still ranked in the top 10 positions in September. A screenshot of Google blog search results are provided in Image 1 below.

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