It associates an array of associations with a commodity. Successful messaging and branding makes it about you, the customer.
An excellent and not-so-excellent example of branding happened during this past year.
Donald Trump understands its power.
Hillary Clinton did not.
The reason.
Trump’s brand messaging was focused solely on “Make America Great Again!” a take action phrase first used by the Reagan campaign in 1980. It was simple, memorable and understandable. He messaged his brand in terms folks could easily repeat, remember, take ownership of and take pride in. His brand message was of an outsider that was doing it for YOU, America, the country, the underdogs. He branded himself as “for the people.”
Hillary’s overall message? “I’m With Her.”
“Stronger Together and “Love Trumps Hate” were out there as well, but the first message became the focus – and ultimately the brand message.
Unless you’re a well-read policy wonk, the benefit of standing with the candidate is unclear. I understand what strategists were thinking. It would be great to brand this as a historic, progressive time and that America is ready for a battle-tested female president. I’m sure it spoke to her base, but it didn’t seem to contribute to growing her audience – to which good branding should aspire.
The problem.
Clinton’s campaign message didn’t appear to be about the people – it seemed to be about the candidate. Branding cannot afford to be myopic.
When brands connect, such as: Nike’s “Just do it,” “Inspiration and Innovation for Every Athlete in the World.”; Coca Cola’s “Taste the feeling!” “Red, White and You.” “I’d like to buy the world a coke…”; and even benefit branding served with humor “Save 15%…” by Geico, they make it about you, the customer, taking you into account, making you the center of the message.
Clinton’s campaign brand wasn’t about you, the country or people, instead placing the candidate at the center of attention. A much better branding approach for Clinton would have been (if we still needed to remind folks she was female), “She Stands for You” or a more generic “A Vote for Her is a Vote for America” style of branding and messaging. The list could go on – just anything but “I’m With Her.” Could you imagine a brand trying to define itself with, “I’m With Brand X” while still in the difficult process of convincing you that they are looking out for your best interests, and therefore your best choice? It’s a tad presumptuous.
The solution.
If you want to get people behind you, you need to make it about them, their choices, their ideologies, and their voice. It’s not about you.
Trump understood that and took it to the finish line. Will your brand?
With social media, “The audience has more control than anyone realizes.”
Well, except for those who spend their days with social. We see it all the time and most recently with Martin Shkreli, who backed down after pursuing a doomed and short-lived battle against the internet.
Although the below article is over a year old, it was a harbinger for traditional media, whose more entrenched practitioners still cling to the old notion that they can be the gatekeepers of the message, story, opinion, etc. No longer. The power has shifted to the audience, and the following article did a great job of explaining it.
The Travel Channel’s Adam Richman, last year at a charity event in Los Angeles, had his new show indefinitely postponed after telling a critic via social media to “grab a razor blade and draw a bath.”
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Entertainment
At first glance, Adam Richman and Anthony Cumia might not seem to have much in common.
True enough, they are media stars who took a hard fall thanks to untoward comments on social media. Richman, a host on the Travel Channel, saw the debut of his new show delayed indefinitely after an online spat led him to suggest one critic commit suicide.
Cumia, half of the infamous Opie & Anthony shock jock radio duo, was dumped by SiriusXM after using the c-word on Twitter to describe a black woman he said punched him. The shock jock said she objected to being included in pictures he was taking.
He then spent a lot of time on social media talking about “savage violent animal(s)” who “prey on white people,” noting “she’s lucky I was a white legal gun owner,” and that “there’s a deep seeded [sic] problem with violence in the black community.” Later, he insisted he was not saying anything racist; Gawker saved the posts so you can see for yourself (warning: It’s seriously NSFW).
For some, this is the story of how a Twitter fight can get out of control. But I say both Richman and Cumia were kneecapped by the new reality of modern media:
The audience has more control than anyone realizes.
When you think about how social media works, this makes perfect sense. Online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram take authority from the gatekeepers of media, which once controlled access to large audiences — newspapers, TV networks, cable channels and radio stations. Instead, that power is handed to anyone who can create compelling content.
I found this out when I tweeted a message about the music CBS This Morning played toward the end of a segment on Nelson Mandela’s death. I posted a quick jibe about the use of Toto’s hit “Africa” as a brief observation. But the Twitterverse decided it meant more, sparking enough stories in places like Slate and The Huffington Post that a co-founder of the band eventually weighed in (in my favor, I might add).
In the old media days, an individual’s impact was limited, unless they could get the gatekeepers involved — get a story on the local news, a letter in the newspaper or a call into the local radio station. No more.
When Richman began responding to critics who said his hashtag #thinspiration referenced a phrase popular with anorexics, he eventually suggested one “grab a razor blade and draw a bath. I doubt anyone will miss you.” Amid the controversy, Travel Channel executives delayed the planned debut of his new show, Man Finds Food,which in turn put a crimp in Richman’s plans to showcase his return to TV hosting after losing more than 70 pounds. (He has since released an apology calling his remarks “inexcusable.”)
This isn’t so much about hurt feelings as it is about marketing and branding. The real value of a media personality like Richman or Cumia is the fan loyalty they inspire, which can then be transferred onto other TV shows or products. So when the host’s brand gets damaged in the public space, their value drops.
Anthony Cumia, at an April event commemorating 20 years of The Opie & AnthonyShow, was fired after a series of racially charged tweets.
Cindy Ord/Getty Images Entertainment
Shock jock Cumia faces a different media issue. Radio personalities in his line of work walk a thin line: pushing boundaries enough to satisfy their audience, but facing the risk of widespread public rejection if their offensive shtick becomes widely known by too many people outside the fan circle.
Cumia forgot that his way of talking about such stuff might be acceptable to his regular fans — people inside the closed loop of his satellite radio show and regular Twitter followers. But once his words spilled out into the general public, he found another reaction (just ask Don Imus how painful that can be).
One other thing both Cumia and Richman have in common: Both their social media meltdowns occurred outside their regular jobs. This, of course, is something even the Kardashians learned long ago: Celebrity is a brand that reaches beyond whatever you do for a living into the rest of your life.
And since social media turns everyone into a brand anyway, every interaction there affects a star’s brand — and their possible employment — regardless of whether it happens on the clock or not.
Evidence of the audience’s new power ranges beyond Cumia and Richman. Successful Kickstarter campaigns for the Veronica Mars movie and Reading Rainbow kids TV series have given fans the ability to vote with their wallets to save dead shows. Moves by Netflix and Yahoo to resurrect Fox’s Arrested Development and NBC’s Communityalso shows the power of a vocal niche audience to push programmers into action.
My hunch is that both men will be fine. Travel Channel is probably just waiting for the dust to settle before launching Richman’s new show. More than 21,000 people already have signed a Change.org petition to get Cumia his job back as he plans a new show from his home. In fact, there’s a drive to cancel Sirius subscriptions in support of Cumia that’s building — where else? — on Twitter.
Still, everyone in this new media universe should learn from Cumia and Richman’s example.
Power is shifting to the audience. Stars who ignore that change do so at their own peril.
Shout out to kissmetrics for this handy dandy resource list. If you’ve been interested in expanding or starting your blogger outreach, here you go!
If you want to increase exposure for your business (beyond optimizing your website for search and growing your social media audience), then guest blogging and blogger outreach are avenues you may wish to explore. When you connect with bloggers in your industry, you are given platforms for communicating with your potential customers like never before.
The following are 35 resources to help your guest blogging and blogger outreach — including networks specifically created to help you connect with bloggers, guides for guest blogging and blogger outreach, and guest post opportunities for marketers.
Guest Blogging and Blogger Outreach Networks
The following networks will help your business connect with the right bloggers in your industry for guest blogging and blogger outreach.
MyBlogGuest – My Blog Guest is a free community that connects guest bloggers to blog owners. Join for free and start getting exposure from guest posting.
GuestBlogIt – Guest Blog It intends to be the ultimate guest blogging resource. Submit your content or find content for your blog for free. Gain high quality relevant back links.
BloggerLinkUp – Join the BloggerLinkUp list and you will get an email each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. These emails will list bloggers looking for expert sources, requests for guest posts, bloggers and web masters offering guest posts, and PR reps and others seeking reviews of products. When you see a request that you can fulfill, just respond directly to the requester.
BlogSynergy – BlogSynergy is essentially a social network for the blogging community. Bloggers use BlogSynergy to follow, connect and share guest blogging opportunities with one another.
Guest Blog Genius – Guest Blog Genius is an outsourced guest blogging service for SEOs and website owners looking to accumulate high quality links from authoritative blogs within their niche.
Guestr – Website owners can find guest posters; bloggers can find guest blogging opportunities and promote their blogs. Browse hundreds of sites.
GroupHigh – GroupHigh provides software that helps public relations, seo and social media professionals reach out to bloggers.
BlogDash – Find, engage and pitch to bloggers – all in one place. Filter through 109,847 bloggers by keywords, categories, Klout score, gender, location, and much more.
PostJoint – PostJoint is a smart new platform that connects advertisers and bloggers to make content marketing more productive and targeted than ever before. Advertisers produce quality content and bloggers offer to publish their guest posts. PostJoint matches up the audiences and takes care of quality control.
Copy for Bylines – The mission of Copy for Bylines is to bridge the gap between writers and online publishers and to work simultaneously with these creative individuals to produce better content online. They believe that because of the glut of worthless information available over the Internet, web content needs to be revolutionized — it should be quicker, personalized and beneficial to the online community.
Guest Blogging Guides
Need some motivation to get excited about guest blogging or some pointers on how to get started? Be sure to read the following guest blogging guides.
The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging – This article looks at exactly how you can get guest blogging opportunities and make the most out of them.
21 Reasons You Should Write Guest Posts – As Penguin and Panda (the latest Google updates) have shown us – times are changing in SEO. Fortunately, there is an easy way to bridge the gap between great people-pleasing content and the necessary elements of SEO: guest posts.
Why You Ought to Build an Online Brand Through Guest Blogging and Not Just Chase SEO Tricks – In general, content marketing is a great way to build your brand and guest posting is the content marketing tactic you want to use. Ask any online celebrity how they got the success that they have and they will likely tell you that they built up their brand by guest posting.
How to Write a Viral Guest Post for an A-List Blog – Want to write a guest post for an A-list blog? This article will teach you not only how to do that, but how to increase your chances of going viral.
How to Evaluate Guest Post Opportunities – As smart content marketers, we all need to make sure we’re standing out with our outreach and keeping a keen eye on our quality radars when we are out placing guest posts on the web.
The Ultimate Guide to Successful Guest Blogging – Though guest posts can be a great way to expand your blogging presence, it takes a pretty large chunk of time to do it, especially when you first start out. To help you make the most of awesome guest posting opportunities, this article sets out five steps you should follow.
How and Why You Should be Guest Blogging [With Case Study] – Guest blogging can grow your online efforts into something sought-after, authoritative, and even profitable. But what is it? And where do you begin? This article looks at the basics of guest blogging and considers some ways to get a mutually beneficial community started around what it is you already write.
The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging – This article is intended to be a complete guide with the best and most practical information for guest blogging.
Putting Guest Post Outreach Theories to the Test [With Some Real World Data]– A business that systemizes a great deal and monitors a lot of processes puts some of its data to use to try to prove/disprove any commonly held theories about outreach, based on a sample of 400 guest posts they placed for clients over a three month period.
Blogger Outreach Guides
Blogger outreach – when done correctly – can bring a lot of great traffic and visibility to your brand. See the following guides on how to do blogger outreach the right way.
The Five Stages of Blogger Outreach: Attraction, Ambivalence, Commitment,Intimacy, and Proposal – A five-part series about building and sustaining relationships with bloggers and the outreach process, in general, based on the “five stages of dating.”
Scale Outreach Using Pareto’s Law – This article tells how to identify influencers vs. lower level targets and scale outreach accordingly, focusing on strategies for the low and mid-level bloggers.
Outreach Specialist’s Bible – Whether you are doing blogger outreach, guest posting, or old fashioned public relations, you need to know where to start and how to pitch, as well as some tools to help you scale your efforts efficiently. The goal is to give you a source of information you can use to train your team to expand your connection creation efforts.
Blogger Outreach: 9 Tips You Need to Succeed – If you haven’t used blogger outreach, it’s a great tool to add to your marketing toolbox. This article describes 3 reasons to use blogger outreach, 4 ways to use blogger outreach effectively, and 9 steps to develop a successful blogger outreach program.
Required Research for Better Blogger Outreach Pitches – Successful blogger outreach starts way before you send a pitch. Learn the 4 research stages that will help you provide a mutual benefit and place your content.
35+ Tips and Tools to Help You Find the RIGHT Contact Info – Improving your ability to find essential contacts in the blogger outreach process can give you a significant competitive advantage over others who are trying to get their content published.
9 Essential Tips for Warm Blogger Outreach Pitches – While there are many ways bloggers and brands are working together, there are a few best practices that have been set along the way to make those working relationships win-win. This post shows 9 ways to prepare pitches that will benefit both you and the blogger.
How To Contact Bloggers – Get the guide to blogger outreach free. Learn how you can drive real traction for your brand or product through blogger outreach.
Great Guest Blogging Opportunities for Marketers
Last but not least, if you’re in the online marketing niche, the following are some great guest blogging opportunities to check out.
KISSmetrics – If you’re interested in submitting a guest post for KISSmetrics, please read on and we’ll let you know what we are looking for and how the process works.
HubSpot – The award-winning HubSpot Inbound Marketing Blog has over 100,000 subscribers and attracts more than 800,000 monthly visits, so if you have exceptional blogging skills and would like to share your internet marketing expertise with a large audience of marketers and business owners, consider becoming a guest blogger.
ProBlogger – ProBlogger provides guidelines and suggestions to help you with your writing in order to increase the chances of the site being able to use your post and to help it get your post ready for publishing.
Copyblogger – Writing content for Copyblogger is hard. But it’s not hard like climbing Everest or launching eBay. Copyblogger lets you know what makes a great Copyblogger guest post.
202 Internet Marketing PR3 – PR8 Blogs That Accept Guest Posts – This is a list of 202+ high quality Internet marketing / social media / make money online / affiliate marketing / blogging tips / WordPress / SEO blogs with a Google Pagerank of 3 and above (at the time of the writing of the post) that are active and looking for high quality guest posts.
There you have it! Be sure to read the best practices for both guest blogging and blogger outreach, try out the various networks to connect with bloggers in your industry, and start measuring your success!
Two things. One, I don’t know about the ethics of posting an article from HBR that allows you to read 5 free articles and then has a paywall in place [I ALWAYS link back to OC, but please let me know your thoughts on this – I do appreciate knowing if I’ve pissed somebody off]. I also didn’t like the original title of, Get People to Listen to You When You’re Not Seen as an Expert. It sounds a tad manipulative to me. Two, what I’ve found that really helps in growing any reputation and business is time and honesty. OK, let’s throw reliability in there as well. Now, I’m not saying that good old fashioned networking and self-promotion are a bad thing, but it takes time for people who decide their marketing spend to get to know you. There is also a wrinkle in this field as we fight to convince folks digital is overtaking traditional in the fight for eyeballs. Many of the the decision makers -or, HiPPOs – need to be familiar with your reputation and opinion of your peers before they even agree to hear your pitch, let alone that their traditional efforts may not be working as well as they did in the past. AND, let alone why they should reapportion some of that spend to the digital realm.
And we won’t even go into the difficulties a new graduate, or someone who’s switched careers at any age will experience [This will be definitely be another post, as I’ve experienced both firsthand]. Again, time, honesty and reliability will win out. I cannot stress enough the reliability part. I am regularly surprised by how hard it is to find reliable folks to help with a project in a freelance/consultant (or even salaried) capacity.
That said, I will repost the article that started this thought below, with links to the original article on Harvard Business Review. Enjoy!
Get People to Listen to You When You’re Not Seen as an Expert
Being new to your field can be difficult
One of the most powerful forms of influence, according to psychologist Robert Cialdini’s famous analysis, is authority — often derived from perceived expertise. When a doctor advises us to exercise more, or a Nobel Laureate raises questions about a certain economic policy, we’re likely to pay much more attention than if a random person offered the same counsel. In our professional lives, this principle can be a boon: if you have a Ph.D. in a subject, or have worked in the industry for 20 years, or are seen to be an expert because you write for a certain publication, you have an increased ability to influence others.
But what if you don’t have those credentials? As I describe in my new bookStand Out, when you’re just starting out in a field, or lack blue-chip affiliations, it may be hard to persuade others to listen to your ideas, even if they’re groundbreaking and valuable. Here are four strategies to help you overcome your perceived lack of expertise and ensure you can make an impact.
The first step, if you aren’t yet seen as an expert in your own right, is to borrow others’ expertise. If you’re a thoughtful curator of the best ideas in your field, even if you’re not developing them yourself, others will start turning to you for guidance. “Originality can be overrated,” says Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. He cited Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Goleman (of Emotional Intelligence fame) as examples of thought leaders who are actually “synthesizers” of information. Says Dearlove, “These guys bring communication skills and an ability to bring complex ideas and make something out of them, but it’s not their [original] research.”
Another strategy to gain more influence for your ideas is finding commonality with your audience, a technique that makes them far more receptive to hearing from you. In Stand Out, I profile Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant who earned her MBA from Stanford and, as an active alumni volunteer, now derives more than half of her business from her fellow graduates. “The reason it’s good for your business is that you’re able to form genuine relationships with like-minded people very quickly, and to me, that’s the definition of good networking,” she says. “There’s a kind of trust: I know what you went through because I went through it, too.”
It’s also important to be strategic about how and where you’re applying your persuasion techniques. In my previous career as a presidential campaign spokesperson, we frequently created powermaps, which identified who the relevant decision maker was on an issue, who she listened to for advice, and how close we were to those advisers. The goal was to create an “echo chamber” effect, in which – even if we couldn’t reach the target directly – we could ensure she would hear about our position favorably from a variety of sources. Powermapping is a highly targeted form of influence that can enable you to bypass objections about your own level of expertise on the subject.
Finally, the best antidote if you’re lacking an expert reputation now is to start creating one ASAP. Creating original content is the single most effective way to develop an expert reputation. Though the best channel will vary (photographers and chefs should double down on Instagram, while it’s less helpful for attorneys and insurance brokers), blogging is a good bet for most professionals. In just an hour or two a week, you can begin to demonstrate how you think about the issues facing your field and sharing your unique point of view. Your content creation sparks a virtuous circle: because reporters looking for comment almost always start their articles with an online search, if your name keeps coming up as someone writing about the issues, they’re likely to contact you, reinforcing your expert reputation with third-party validation.
If you’re not yet considered an expert, it’s harder to get your ideas noticed — but not impossible. With these strategies, you can begin to overcome others’ resistance and make sure your voice is heard.
Again!” a take action phrase first used by the Reagan campaign in 1980. It was simple, memorable and understandable. He messaged his brand in terms folks could easily repeat, remember, take ownership of and 
take pride in. His brand message was of an outsider that was doing it for YOU, America, the country, the underdogs. He branded himself as “for the people.”
Unless you’re a well-read policy wonk, the benefit of standing with the candidate is unclear. I understand what strategists were thinking. It would be great to brand this as a historic, progressive time and that America is ready for a battle-tested female president. I’m sure it spoke to her base, but it didn’t seem to contribute to growing her audience – to which good branding should aspire.
