In the past 2 weeks, two companies/organizations have emailed me to 1/review their concept and 2/be a regular resource. After a quick chuckle of "Me? Who gives a crap what I think about anything!", I was flattered, intriguied and yes, you guessed it, receptive to the message - precisely what they were hoping for.

In each case, NoPhoneTrees.com (interesting concept, do take a look) and Freelancers Union (the traffic from this post must have gotten someone’s attention) emailed me with a simple, respectful, blissfully spin-free.

If you’ve been wondering out exactly how to go about putting your toe into the whole social media marketing thing, here are a few suggestions from Scott Baradell at the Media Orchard’s blog, Idea Grove:

• Monitor blog mentions with Technorati and Google Alerts.
• Sprinkle social media "fairy dust" on your news release distributions.
• Make company news releases available by RSS.
• Begin distributing and pitching to blogs (but carefully!).

Carefully being the operative term. Here’s the text from Freelancers Union (reprinted here with permission):

Hi Roberta,
We recently noticed that you’ve mentioned
Freelancers Union on your blog.  Thanks!  If you’re interested, we’d
love to send you periodic news that you might want to write about.

For
example, we just launched our 2007 survey, Past Due: How Freelancers
Handle Not Getting Paid, and we’re trying to spread the word so that we
can collect data that will be convincing to the media and policy
makers. We also might send an announcement if we’re introducing a new
service for freelancers.

If you decide you want to hear from us,
you can just let me know by replying to this email. We promise we
won’t inundate you with stuff, and you can leave the list at any time.

Well, how could I possibly say no to that? This is a great template for how to pitch a blogger just right. Yours for the taking!

Maven’s Maxim
Leave the hard-hitting hyperbole at home when marketing yourself to authority bloggers. Remember what your mom said about old-fashioned courtesy and kindness. They work especially well in the post-modern blog universe.