For Your Consideration: How To Get Nominated For An Award – Part 2
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The first part of this piece made the case that awards aren’t won democratically. Somewhere in the nominating/voting process there’s an more-equal-than-other elite that you should target to improve your odds.
In this article, using the Best App Ever award as an template, I start to lay out what I’d do I was trying to earn a nomination. Since half the nominations for the Best App Ever awards are put on the ballot by its 37 person nominating committee, my campaign would center on creating personalized pitches for those people. Emphasis on personalized.
A personalized pitch is succinct and confident, and built on knowing your prospect. And that starts with building dossiers:
Building Dossiers
Ultimately we’re going to need to match the pitch for our product to a specific committee member’s profile. Their profile is a composite that includes their biases, passions, interests, upbringing, race, religion, age, relationship/family status and more. So we need to know what they’re all about in these areas. Fortunately, we live in a happy-to-share culture where people gladly volunteer this information, albeit in dribs and drabs. We’ll collect the dribs and drabs in a dossier.
We’ll build the dossiers by collecting information people volunteer publicly about themselves. We cross no lines. The information people share about themselves online is the representation of themselves that they want other people to see. When we embrace that representation it’s gratifying to the recipient.
Address Book
OS-X’s Address Book works great as a place to collect these pieces. Plus it gets synced to your iPhone, so if you happen to run into them at the award ceremony you’ll have something to talk about. Creating an address book entry for each prospect.
Follow each prospect on Twitter. For the members of the Best App Ever Nominating Committee finding them is easy: their Twitter handles are listed with their names and avatars. While you’re at it, add their full-sized avatar photo to their address book entry — a picture is helpful when you’re writing to someone. Don’t instantly jump in with an @reply; it’s the dating-movie cliche about not calling the next day.
Additionally, I’d recommend using search.twitter.com to create an RSS feed with any @replies or mentions for each username. This way you’ll be able to see both sides of their conversations.
Flickr
Do a Flickr search on each prospect. For common names or poor search results try using Flickr’s advanced search and limiting results to Creative Commons licensed photos; most photos from conferences, barcamps and other community/dev events end up under CC-licenses, so this is a great way to see connections to those events.
RSS
Subscribe to anything they produce with an RSS feed.
Facebook/Linked-In
You don’t yet have a relationship with these folks, so don’t try to pair with them in a social network that requires reciprocity.
Connecting Yourself To Your Prospects
Starting To Build “Social Backlinks”
Once you’ve started to learn what your prospects are about you can start to build social backlinks. Social backlinks are the back-catalogue of references to and near-misses with the prospect.
Start by referencing things they’s said in your conversations on Twitter and in blogs. There’s a good chance that they have automated ego-surfing mechanisms e.g., RSS feeds of blog backlinks and twitter mentions. With or without those feeds, it’s fair game to let them know about your contributions to their brand.
Next, join in their conversations in a meaningful manner. Respond to their tweets and add comments to their blogs in a thoughtful way.
People/Companies/Events In Common
Friend-of-a-friend or fellow-traveler beats stranger. When the time comes, you’ll ideally want to be introduced to your prospect by a common friend or, lacking that, highlight a shared connection. Start looking for those connections. They might be companies or events. Look for people who follow you Twitter who are followed by your prospect. Search through LinkedIn and file away the results. Also look for shared events — e.g., you’re active in your barcamp, your prospect is active in his/her local barcamp.
Next Up: Crafting The Pitches
Getting to know your prospects and starting to connect yourself to them gets us set up for creating the actual pitches. I’ll cover that in the next part of this series.
