Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Taking Magic Cleaners to the Blogging Masses

Taking Magic Cleaners to the Blogging Masses

Today, I got an extremely personalized pitch because of my other blog, Unvarnished. The pitch came from Hass MS&L—a PR firm that’s really on top of the whole blogging phenomenon. They wrote:

Hi, Travis (or do we call you Nep?) I’m writing to you because you blogged (favorably) about Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. This is not spam! I wanted to let you know that Mr. Clean is sponsoring a charity drive and wondered if you’d like to blog about it. How it works is that for every person that visits this site and submits an idea about how they use Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Mr. Clean will donate $1 to the Hands On Network, a growing charity that helps volunteers keep communities clean. Some of its affiliates are working on Katrina-related projects right now.

Thanks for your time.

My post had been a short post in my link blog about people with kids liking the product.

Why was this a good pitch? First of all, they get that you have to be personal when approaching bloggers. The guy took the time to see what my name really was, it wasn’t a press release. Second, they tie it into a charity thing—bloggers are for some reason extremely focused on donations and fund raising and community, witness everything from the Howard Dean’s presidential compaign to the tsunami and Katrina hurricane fund raising efforts. Third, it’s an extremely soft sell—they tell me about the event and “wonder if I’d like to blog about it.” Lastly, it’s not that expensive—time spent to contact bloggers, plus they put a $15,000 cap on the total donation (they didn’t mention that. ) If by some chance, and you never know, this gets passed around too much, they’ve limited their financial exposure.

It doesn’t matter that they’re trying to sell cleaning supplies, for whom bloggers are hardly a key demographic. Smart moves, Hass folk.

Posted by Travis Smith on 09/30 at 04:53 PM • Blogs -- Marketing

Comments

Yup, I must agree--that was a good note. Bloggers don’t expect people to pretend they don’t want anything; they just need to know you’ve paid attention and know their work well enough. Another thing that’s a bit much--overfawning. There are tiers of knowledge, of knowing things in the b-sphere. And while PR folks can’t be expected to know all of the skinny, just being real and having something truly interesting to tout does the trick. Hell, I could always use more material to write about!

Posted by Jory Des Jardins on 10/05 at 02:36 PM
I would have to agree about that. I was in the business of acquiring advertising for two websites before and the challenge was always coming up with a cordial and natural message that would work and wouldn’t offend the blogger. I guess this is what you call linkbait? Am I right? It takes a certain amount of creativity to come up with great ways to acquire links or posts. I work in blog marketing primarily and I just stumbled upon your blog. Thanks for all the great information . Check out my blog too, I just started it - viral marketing is one of the major topics.

I will be downloading your powerpoint slides. Thanks again!

Posted by Wonder Abby on 04/15 at 11:39 AM
They should have offered you some money for saying nice things about their product ;x

Posted by Barry on 07/28 at 04:17 PM