Seeding the blogosphere and generating conversations
Seeding the blogosphere and generating conversations
When I was given the responsibility to manage the digital PR campaign for CCA’s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition, the first thing that came to my mind was that trying to get people excited about a website dealing with issues they already are passionate about is really one of the best possible assignments.
My plan was relatively simple: I basically spent countless hours researching the Web for any blog or website whose editors would be interested in the kind of guerrilla-style urban interventions the exhibition was featuring. Designers, Architects, Anarchists, Greens, Urban designers: all of them fit my profile and I gathered a list of several hundred ‘targets’. I contacted each and everyone of them with a (mostly) personalized message explaining who I was, why I was bothering them and why they should take 15 minutes off their busy day to check the link I was sending them and write an article about it.
The positive response rate was much greater than I had hoped for. Bloggers from around the world told me how great the Tools for Actions microsite was and many of them gladly shared their discovery with their readers. I even had to dig through my high school Spanish notes to deal with bloggers from Spain and Latin America (unfortunately, I had to resort to good old English with those from Estonia, Serbia or Brazil.
The end result proved to bring unprecedented exposure for the CCA and its ‘Actions’ exhibition, and the client even became addicted to my weekly seeding reports, as much as we both were every time Google Analytics showed a peak in traffic on the Actions microsite (as it happened many times during the campaign.