We have had two different companies use BloggerBridge recently to plan a press trip for bloggers and other influencers and I thought that explaining what they did and how they did it could be useful for other destinations or companies.
There are a number of things to think about when you are planning a press trip and we have discussed some of them before here on the blog:
But today letâs look at the critical question of who to invite. Anyone who has run a press or blogger trip can tell you stories if you are not already convinced that the right people can both make for a great trip and help you meet your goals for the trip. And every PR who has worked with traditional journalists or bloggers probably has at least one story about the person they will never invite again.
Finding the Right People – BloggerBridge Premium
One way to use BloggerBridge for your press trip is to use a Premium account and the search features to look for bloggers in the niches and locations you care about. Find people who blog in the right language, who might be in the area and who have the audience you want. One example of this we saw recently was the recent White House Travel Blogger Summit.
âWhen I was tasked with finding the top 100 bloggers for the White House Travel Blogger Summit on Study Abroad and Global Citizenship, one of the first places I went was BloggerBridge. The system makes it easy to see bloggers’ reach and examples of their work, so it saved me a lot of hassle in identifying attendees with the right fit.â
Netanya Trimboli – Communications and PR Manager at Hostelling International USA
Let the Right People Find You – BloggerBridge Lite
A very different way to find the right people is to put out the word that you are doing a press trip and let bloggers apply. You can do that with a BloggerBridge Premium account but you can also do so with the new BloggerBridge Lite account which is what AirBerlin did for a press trip to carnival in DĂźsseldorf, Germany.
Madeleine from Air Berlin posted an opportunity that publicized this trip to the BloggerBridge community and received 220 âapplicationsâ in about a week. But these âapplicationsâ were delivered as a sortable list of users that she could use to quickly sort bloggers by their audience or their social following. She did not have to have spreadsheets of bloggers and their numbers and didnât have to ask for printouts of their google analytics.
One change we had to make after this experience was change the button that bloggerâs click from âApplyâ to âOne Click Applyâ because the application was too simple so they didnât know they had done it. We already know all the kind of information that an application normally asks if they had finished filling out their BloggerBridge profile.
“Blogger Bridge has been an amazing tool and has simplified the selection process for filling our press trips. We received an overwhelming response to our trip posting, so happy with the results”
Madeleine Vogelsang – Communications Manager at Air Berlin Americas
Your Next Press Trip
Based on this experience we recommend:
1) Be very clear what you are looking for. At first the opportunity did not say that the blogger needed to be able to fly from one of these specific Air Berlin cities. If you have information like that make it public to filter out candidates that are not applicable.
2) Require specific characteristics. If you know you need at least a certain number of page views on Google Analytics or a certain number of instagram followers or a specific niche you can add a User Filter on the opportunity so that the opportunity only shows up to people who meet those qualifications.
3) We have launched a new newsletter for the BloggerBridge community so be sure to let us know when you are offering something as cool as riding on a float in carnival and we can help you get more visibility from thousands of bloggers.
4) After the press trip, write reviews for all the bloggers who attended in BloggerBridge.com.