Seth Godin’s blog receives over a quarter of a million hits every month. The Gawker blog network is valued over $300 million. I Has Cheezburger has nearly 2 million users. Chris Brogan tweets to over 130,000 Twitter followers. These are among the many digital influencers Mashable’s Community and Marketing Manager Tamar Weinberg reached out to and essentially asked, “how can I get your attention?” An overwhelming number of them responded and here are the highlights:
1. Spend the time to get to know my interests and speak to them — Chris Brogan
Chris Brogan is a blogger and president of New Marketing Labs. He is also the author of Trust Agents and Social Media 101.
“The way people get my attention is simple, and yet so few do it well. They start by telling me all about what they need from me. They start by telling me all about their wants, their angles, their client, etc. By contrast, the people who get my time, and who keep my time, actually have read my blog enough to know what I cover and what I don’t. (For instance, I rarely talk about software.) They know that I look for the “human business” angle for most of my stories. They know that I actually care about my community and that they’re not an audience. They understand brevity. And they understand that promoting others is every bit as important as promoting themselves.”
2. Develop a clear and concise message with impact. — Pete Cashmore
Pete Cashmore is the twenty-something founder and CEO of Mashable and is also a CNN columnist. Mashable currently boasts over 20 million pageviews per month.
“I think keeping it short and to the point is most likely to get a response — having a clear message or request that gets the idea across in a couple sentences. Everybody is short on time these days, and the more succinctly you can express yourself, the better.”
3. Be an active community participant — Anita Campbell
Anita Campbell is the Editor of Small Business Trends and an expert in everything small business.
“Participate in my site’s community. Leave comments; tweet “with” me; share information that is valuable to readers (not self-promotional stuff, but something that gives freely of your expertise to others).
Also, while I appreciate requests to do guest posts, I strongly prefer those who have shown a propensity to contribute to the community on an ongoing basis. “Hit and run” guest posts are of little interest to us, for two reasons: (1) there’s a certain amount of work involved in getting someone set up as a new author and showing them the ropes; and (2) the community responds much much better to those they get to know and converse with regularly.”
4. Be loud, controversial, interesting. But back it up with facts. — Brian Lam
Brian Lam is the Assistant Managing Director at Gawker Media and Editorial Director at Gizmodo.
“Make noise, but backed up by fact!”
5. Express genuine passion for your unique initiative — Adam Pash
Adam Pash is the Editor-in-Chief of the highly popular blog, Lifehacker. He has also authored How to Do Everything With Your iPhone.
“It’s about a lot of dos and don’ts for me.
Don’t send me what’s clearly a form note.
Do be direct.
Don’t try impress me with your funding or whatever industry related things you think you do really well. My eyes glaze over at the site of industry jargon.
Do make it easy for me to understand what your thing does, and what’s interesting or awesome about it (and do it as quickly as possible).
Don’t make me read a press release to figure out what’s special about whatever you’re trying to highlight.
…and so on.
Honestly, the best way to get my attention is to make something cool and show it to me. I love talking with developers about things they’re clearly and genuinely passionate about.”
To read all influencer responses, go to Techipedia.
Image by Svilen Milev from Stock.Xchng