I've been conducting an experiment over the last week to test how blogging can supplement a mini-marketing blitz directed at a specialized target audience.
Within 4 working days, I was able to contact the moderator of a Sundance Docs & Blogs panel discussion, contact and receive a response from all of the panelists, and receive an e-mail response from the editor-in-chief of indieWIRE who had just commented on his blog that "there is so much going on that the competition for attention is fierce."
Below are some more reflections and insights over the following experiment:
Known: A Sundance panel on Docs, Blogs & The Changing Politics of America" takes place at 4 p.m. on Saturday, January 22, 2004.
Given: The name of the panel moderator is Andy Bowers from NPR and Slate.com
Find: Get the names of all of the panelists, and then gather evidence to show that the combination of blogging, calling people up and e-mailing unsolicited blog press releases could be a successful direct marketing technique.
Over the last week, I've been able to talk to 5 out of the 7 panelists who are going to be speaking on the Sundance panel -- and I received e-mail responses from the other two.
I primarily used the basic journalistic tool of a telephone, but the blogging medium also helped me reflect on why my first attempts were ignored so that I could improve my tactics and ultimately succeed in contacting all of the panelists.
I was able to contact the panel moderator last Friday and give him a quick pitch of the project, but my follow-up e-mail response only included a number of links to blog entries without any larger context to who I am or what I am doing.
I am able to keep tabs on the referring links of visitors to my website, and so I could tell that the panel moderator probably had not clicked through to EchoChamberProject.com.
I e-mailed him a reminder to pass along a list of the other panelists three days later, but he still didn't respond to my message.
His lack of response was holding up the goal of contacting all of the panelists -- I couldn't contact anyone if I didn't know who they were.
I tried sending out some messages to other bloggers hoping to get a mention for additional some leverage -- But no one else responded to my messages either.
I came across an Atrios post called "You Link It, You Own It" which made me realize that no one is going to listen to me or take me seriously because I don't have any established institutional credibility. The Echo Chamber Project blog isn't on anyone's radar screen yet because I haven't done any mass marketing and I haven't climbed up any of the food chain rungs of the blogospheric ladder.
How does a blogger handle the fact that he doesn't have any established credibility? Write a blog post on the four steps required to establish institutional credibility, and then honestly assess it's evolutionary progress.
Then write a blog press release that incorporates the following aspects:
* A wire service news writing style -- as if an objective-fact based reporter had written it.
* A lot of hypertext links to any relevant supplementary blog posts that support fact-based assertions.
* An honest assessment of established institutional credibility.
* The steps required to achieve larger credibility.
I wrote a press release that included all of these aspects and e-mailed it to the panel moderator. He responded this time and passed along a list of names.
From this point, it was a matter of Googling down contact information so that I could make phone calls and e-mail unsolicited press releases. After two full days, I was able to contact and hear back from all of the panelists that included 4 documentary filmmakers, 1 blogger, 1 political action committee representative and 1 journalist.
As I was contacting everyone, I wrote a blog entry that included the names of the Sundance panelists -- the first time it was published anywhere on the Internet.
I also gave my initial impression of the panel with some of the perspective of some of the panelists, and I responded to some of the points likely to come up by mentioning how The Echo Chamber documentary plans on addressing the issue of partisan polarization and how the combination of investigative documentary filmmaking with collaborative open source journalism could potentially change the "fundamental dynamics of media and politics."
I sent this follow-up blog posting to all of the panelists and to Eugene Hernandez, editor-in-chief of indieWIRE, with an e-mail subject of "Blogger reports on List of Sundance Docs & Blogs Panelists."
Hernandez had just written on his blog,"Some publicists are madly hyping new films, innundating writers with pitches and talking up their projects hoping to book interviews before we have even had a chance to see the actual movies."
Obviously Hernandez was swamped with e-mails from hundreds of other people vying for his attention, and he read my e-mail and actually took the time to respond.
The panel moderator also responded to me and said that The Echo Chamber would likely come up at some point during the Sundance panel -- There could potentially be a lot of journalists, film industry people and other filmmakers who hear about this project for the first time.
But even if none of the panelists mention The Echo Chamber or how I'm integrating the filmmaking and Internet mediums, then I was still able to demonstrate how a little persistence and technological ingenuity can propel a targeted communications strategy above all of the other noise.
