The Maltese Pitch – Blogger Outreach for Book about Blogger Outreach
December 20, 2007 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
They come from Malta. Pink envelopes laced with cheap perfume.
They’re pitching something you probably don’t need, but hopefully your readers will lap up their product.
In a clever ploy to get attention, Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo are sharing their blogger outreach techniques to publicize their e-book Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook.
The highly targeted pitches include hand-written notes in perfume-scented pink envelopes sent to some top bloggers. They have created a personal web page for each of their targeted bloggers, with a unique video clip addressed to that blogger.
When you’re selling something, it helps if you demonstrate it in action, which is what these two Vancouver ex-pats are doing well.
Their quick video message to Robert Scoble is below.
Link via Steve Rubel’s shared links.
Tags: online, blogger outreach, blogger relations, malta, darren barefoot, ebook, pitches, pitching, targeted, one-to-one
Thanks for the write-up! Indeed, social media-savvy types like yourself won’t reap much benefit from the book. There are some case studies you haven’t read before, and it does feature a movie quote from “Dirty Dancing”, but we’re really targeting ‘average’ marketers and small business owners. They might have a blog or get the basics of RSS, but don’t get all this social media stuff.
I can see it now: Next summer’s big e-book pitch will be a case study of their eariler e-book promotion on blogger outreach.
There’s something very incestuous and wrong about it all, even if they are doing it rather brilliantly.
How about me and you get together and beat them to the case study punch and write it before they can?! That’d be funny.
That’d be awesome. Then I could write an article about blogger backlash, and we could include the article about backlash against promoting the book in the next version of the book.
It’s turtles all the way down. Or yak shaving, I forget which.
Oh, I’m quite certain it’s yak shaving.