Marketing Sherpa’s Popular Media Study, reporting on their study of social media use by US consumers, looks at a group they’re calling Max Connectors - people with more than 500 social connections.

Max Connectors are especially valuable targets for online marketing activity because they can spread a positive brand or product experience so widely.  A great example of a Max Connector is blogger and technical evangelist Robert Scoble, who has over 111,000 followers on twitter.  Not bad for a self proclaimed geek.

Persuading these Connectors to engage with brands and companies through social media channels means giving them something for their trouble, something that they can in turn share with their own connections.  This might mean exclusive access, perhaps in terms of online content, sneak peaks at new features or products or the opportunity to contribute to product or service development.

A while ago I contributed to Neil Perkin’s excellent ‘a presentation about the community, by the community’ crowdsourced presentation.  Neil suggests that every online community has Super Users; high authority, highly active people (Max Connectors by another name).  But my point was that community has layers – and you should respect them all:

Although Super Users or Max Connectors are undoubtedly valuable targets for social media activity, the Sidekicks, who might write niche blogs with limited reach or have a smaller circle of connections can be really important if you want to access their particular specialist niche target audience (like, say, anesthetists).  So size isn’t everything!

posted by gemmaT

Blogger relationships and blogger outreach has always been an intrinsic part of any online PR or reputation management strategy.

The blogosphere is over 130 million strong, but it is thought that 95% of blogs are dormant, abandoned and unloved.  That still leaves about 6.5 million active blogs worldwide. 

The challenge for online PR practitioners is to decide whether you are going for a blogger contact strategy of quality or quantity (in effect the long tail versus the short tail) and exactly which blogs are the best fit for your message.

Like any communications channel, you can have niche blogs with limited reach that are really important if you want to access their particular specialist target audience (like, say account planners).  Then there are other blogs that might not have a very impressive reach but their audience is made up almost entirely of influential Alpha Consumers, the first to know, the first to try and the first to buy.

Which means that understanding exactly which blogs are delivering the target audience for your particular campaign is what differentiates sharp shooting online PR professionals from the scattergun approach of less skilled practitioners.

The OnVisible team work with our own data and cutting edge online tools that allow us to target the most appropriate blogs with content that is relevant, timely and interesting.  More than that though we’re bloggers ourselves – we’re part of the community and understand that blogger outreach should be tailored, timely and about creating dialogue.  We track the coverage achieved on our target blogs but whenever our clients are mentioned or discussed on blogs, websites or even twitter, we know about it and we respond.  Acknowledging our blogging colleagues and linking to their site is essential to develop a true partnership.

So yes it’s about sharp-shooting but it’s also about understanding, dialogue and community.  After all, there’s no point in firing if you don’t know how the gun works or whether you hit the bull’s-eye.

posted by gemmaT / Deborah C