How to get other bloggers to pay attention?

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The blogosphere is fascinating - on the one-hand it is an open environment of people sharing interesting ideas between micro-mediums of influence, and on the other blog-based business are making bloggers increasingly more political in how they interact with others.

The best analogy for blogging I have heard is that its no different to a dinner party where all the guests were knowledgeable on a particular topic. Throughout the evening conversations, comments, retorts, statements, stories & lessons would be traded. As the night wore on it would become evident to all those present that the knowledge base and more importantly the ability to articulate this knowledge was not equal across all participants. In fact it would be most probable that one or two of the parties at the table will have established themselves as unrivaled authorities on certain subject matter.

Blogging is, in my view, a very large dinner party that spans the world and it never ends.

So if you have an event you’d like to promote, what is the best way to get other bloggers and influencers to engage into a conversation with you about it? You have to be in a conversation in order to be considered an authoritarian contributor to it, right?

Here’s a few tips:

- Dont be anonymous to a blogger - get to know them. Bloggers dont like being used as a promotion tool. You cant make that as a premise of knowing them. Most bloggers write because they want to meet interesting people and share ideas with them, they too are looking for conversations with other bloggers who can challenge them and their views. So to begin with try to establish a relationship with bloggers you respect by participating as a commenter and also otherwise.

- Make it easy for the blogger to research you. Bloggers have a lot of demand on their attention from people trying to get in touch with them. They will try to make very quick decisions on whether or not they want to get to know you. So make sure you are active enough in social media that it is easy to discover who you really are. Consistency in your online activities will help other bloggers form quick opinions on who you are and if they want to enter into a conversation with you or not. Remember, cream always rises to the top if it’s in the bottle.

- Request, dont ask. Even if you know a blogger well, dont ask or expect them to talk about your event or product. What you want to focus on is just talking to your friend, the blogger, and talking about your new product to that friend alone. Whether that person chooses to share it onwards with his friends or community is entirely his or her choice.

- Make life easy for the blogger. Again, bloggers have very limited attention to give to your product, so if there is a set-up time involved in them getting into your product (for example, maybe people need to sign up and set up their profiles to use it) try to spend the time to do that for them. Other bloggers will appreciate that and then pay a little more attention to what actually matters.

- Refer to interesting incidents from the blog. Each blog has interesting incidents happening in it - E.g. maybe they wrote about something that was controversial and there was a big debate on the topic in the comments. Only people who follow that blog would actually remember such things, and if you can refer to one of those incidents (maybe to show which side of the fence you stand) the blogger would appreciate that and understand that you are not just an anonymous one-time visitor.

- Refer to the bloggers thesis. Every blogger talks about a particular subject, and every blogger has a core set of beliefs related to that subject. Maybe that bloggers has a particular definition of conversational marketing. Maybe he or she has invented terms they use frequently in posts. Only people who follow a blog frequently would understand this. When you are communicating with another blogger, make sure you touch on those important parts and give your position on them. This would also help him or her treat you like a regular reader.

- Feel free to polarize, but make sure you can. If you also have a blog, feel free to take something that another blogger wrote and polarize yourself against it by arguing a point against his argument. But do this only if you really have something to say, because doing this will not only give you a critical eye from that blogger, but also his or her audience. If you survive their critical analysis of your counter-argument, though, you will win to earn their respect in future interactions.

Most importantly, though, remember that the aim is for all your interactions in the social media space to create additional value to the overall sharing of thought. Dont be evil, and play fair, and people will be fair to you when you need them to be.


| Social Marketing, Social media

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