Late last year I was lucky enough to be asked to join 10 other bloggers on a sojourn to
Bright, a picturesque hamlet nestled amongst mountains in regional Victoria.In the PR biz, this activity is known as 'blogger outreach' - done properly, it's the art of building relationships with bloggers for mutual benefit.Bloggers tend to seek the 'experience' versus the 'news', which brings us to this interview with Bright resident
Kim Abbate, who runs a web design and social media business in addition to writing two blogs -
365 Things To Do In Bright and
Working Women Australia.Kim came up with the idea of the Bright blogger outreach program, which was given the title of '
BrightDelight' (later morphing into the Twitter hashtag #brightdelight).
PICTURED: Kim Abbate, 365 Things to do in BrightThe goal was to bring 11 bloggers to Bright and get them to experience what the township (and immediate area) had to offer - the wineries, restaurants, attractions (such as Patrizia Simone's
Country Cooking School) and views (via
helicopter).In this interview Kim takes us behind-the-scenes of the #brightdelight blogger outreach program - why and how she came up with the idea; how she got it off the ground; what worked (and lessons learned) plus highlights of the program.Kim reveals she was hoping the initiative would garner 100,000-200,000 potential impressions on Twitter, but that according to a report from
TweetReach, this figure reached as high as 1.2 million.
MORE: Video interview on PR Warrior Blog