Chris Abraham » Blogger

Choose live people over Robot Armies and Zombie Hordes

Chris Abraham — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:56:11 +0000

Last week, I talked about using the long tail of blogger outreach — the idea that you can’t pin your hopes for most public relations efforts on only the A-list bloggers.

For each outreach, there are hundreds and often thousands of bloggers that are not well-known but have influence on the very people that your PR campaign is trying to reach.

I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work on an ongoing basis, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible.

You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like.

We need to be clear in our email that we want a post and the pitch to be shared with the readers of the blog. In our social media news releases, we need to make sure that everything can be copied and pasted as-is, that images are the correct size, that the links are already embedded, that copy and text is simple to copy and block-quote and that any and all banner ads or videos have a handy and easy to find embed code right there.

One cannot assume any technical proficiency, one cannot assume any PR or communications experience, one cannot assume that any blogger knows any PR-speak or knows how to deal with an embargo. One cannot assume that anyone knows what a press release is, or a social media release or what PRWeb is or, heaven forbid, how to keep an embargoed message holy. Long story short, if the message in any way seems more complicated or time-consuming than each blogger fancies it’s worth, then you’ve lost them.

Authenticity vs. robot armies rife with affiliate links

I get why folks have spent many millions of dollars creating a robot army of sites and links and posts that emulate a passionate blogosphere. A robot army rife with affiliate links is really much more manageable to control freaks who need to make sure they can predict ROI based on investment. This is probably the direct result of VC-funding. Those guys love seeing money in and money out. But it isn’t authentic and it isn’t real and these castles of cards are also vulnerable as we have been recently seeing as Google goes through revisions of its search algorithm, oftentimes removing or de-prioritizing entire portions of the Internet that have been produced at great expense to emulate the vigorous and organic, self-organizing, engaged citizenry.

I won’t lie to you, having hundreds of earned media mentions as the result of a very real digital PR long-tail blogger outreach to thousands of bloggers can be SEO gold. Some clients retain us yearly and we can turn those hundreds of posts to thousands of posts per year. The powerful secondary effect of the earnest PR earned-media campaign is SEO link juice, something we didn’t sort out until we were doing this for a couple of years.

Having hundreds of thousands of prepared keyword strings and copy and images and videos pointing back to our clients results in a white-hat link-farm effect, if you will, with one caveat: It is real. We don’t pay these bloggers to write. None of these bloggers are on the same server or the same node or the same cloud or in the same network. The vigilant army of real live Google site investigators can scrutinize these hundreds of posts with a fine tooth comb and there’s no harm and no foul.

Down the Long Tail, there are loads of bloggers who have never been kissed, never been pitched by a noted brand, never been engaged by a social media team or PR agent. At the end of the day, we’re not creating a fallacy world of content used to drive revenue much like an elaborate marketing theme park. What we’re trying to do is play the game of “olly olly oxen free” with the denizens of the Internet. We’re ringing the dinner gong. We’re giving lots and lots of people who have a worthy platform for self-expression an opportunity to write about something if, and only if, our email pitch resonates with them or, to be honest, they’re impressed that our client has taken the time to reach out to them directly, asking them for a favor.

When it comes to the empowered and powerful A-listers, they’ve been pitched a million times by the world’s top brands. In fact, companies and their agencies are falling all over themselves to appeal to these powerful few. Not much further along the tail, there are loads of blogs and bloggers who have never been kissed at all, never been pitched by a noted brand, never been engaged by a social media team or PR agent, have never received an offer to pass on to their readers or received a book to review, have never received super-super concierge service and follow up.

In so many cases, we’re their first. We’re their very first PR kiss and, as you know, nobody forgets their first (Image at top by friendlydrag0n on Flickr) via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

Related articles

Real bloggers and real blogs always trump Robot Armies (socialmedia.biz)
Do you appreciate your blogger network? (biznology.com)
Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
The A-list is not a good path to real Americans online (chrisabraham.com)
How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
Sometimes I get excited by something I post (chrisabraham.com)
The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach (biznology.com)
Spinn’s PR Links – October 18, 2011 (doktorspinn.com)
We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
Inbound Marketing the Way God Intended (biznology.com)

How to make friends and influence bloggers

Chris Abraham — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:00:39 +0000

Last week I told you how not to pitch a blogger in your PR outreach, so it raises the pregnant question of what exactly should you do?

For about five years now we’ve seen an extraordinary number of clients and potential clients who have frankly been afraid of blogger outreach because of the poor practices of companies and brands that have stumbled in their attempts to engage the blogosphere. So today I wanted to walk through our process to show you how it’s done. Just how do you pitch a blogger?

First off, we see if we already know anyone. We know folks at the top tech blogs, so we give them first bite. By the time that shakes out, we’ll have a couple-few-thousand blogs to QA and sort out. While we’re seeing how the A-listers pan out, we develop a message model that is inclusive enough to not alienate any single blogger but specific enough that each blogger is completely clear as to who our client is and what we want from them (a post, a tweet, an embedded video, a review, etc).

Then, we send out the first outreach and send four or five online analysts to man the inbox so that potentially a thousand replies can be triaged and responded to, like in a hospital emergency room. Who is spitting mad? Who needs more information? Who needs a little prodding or convincing?

Time should be a primary consideration

More conversions have been made with charming, patient, quick emails than have ever been made through just the pitch

Time is of the essence. More conversions have been made with charming, patient, friendly and quick emails than have ever been made through just the pitch. Why is time ticking? If someone is a little pissed when they get the email and hit reply, they’ll be a lot more pissed and maybe drop an unhappy tweet if they’re ignored for a few hours. If they’re ignored for a day, they will amplify their displeasure by posting it onto their blog, effectively making it very sure they’re heard.

It has less to do with bloggers being vindictive or making their fame on your client’s good name but has way more to do with stepping up displeasure. “I want to be heard, I need to be heard, I have a grievance, and I will be heard no matter what.” To be honest with you, that never happens to us any more because we’re endlessly kind, patient, giving, indulgent, compliant, respectful and super-quick.

Super-quick is the biggest, most important thing. Latency is always punished. And have a system, because it is inexcusable to allow any of these thousands of “nobody” bloggers to ever get less than exquisite service. Don’t play favorites. Triaging the responses has nothing to do with the bank balance or Rolodex or fame or celebrity or reach of the blogger. It has to do with whether a blogger is

willing to post gladly
willing to post but needs more information
willing to post but leery of legitimacy
maybe willing to post but generally conflicted or confused
how did you find my blog and get my email?
unwilling to post but maybe willing to tweet
unwilling to post
unwilling to post and please remove my name
who the hell are you and how did you get my email address or find my blog
wrong topic, I don’t care about this
you’ve insulted me and I will seek vengeance

Honestly, even #11 is fine as long as you don’t meet that blogger with the same anger and menace as is being shared. Remember our mantra: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Walking into a drama that’s in progress

I always like to say, when I am speaking at conferences and on panels, that my online team never knows what they’re walking into but that responses like rage and frustration are almost never the direct result of our simple, minimal, friendly email pitch. In a majority of the cases, we’re walking into a drama that is already in progress. Sort of like when a beat cop responds to a domestic 911 call.

Cops hate responding to a domestic disturbance because nobody’s more likely to shoot someone than when they feel like their life is imploding and the only thing that can make someone that crazy is love. Too many cops have been shot as the direct result of unknowingly stepping into someone else’s personal or collective hell. So my team is trained to at least emulate endless patience, love, acceptance and generosity, though my colleague Leslie Quiros tells me that she really sometimes needs to stop, think and breathe, before responding online sometimes. God bless her.

Even more, after we collect and log all of these positive, negative and neutral responses, we wait a week and do it all again, but reaching out only to the bloggers who have not responded at all. While a few of these folks might be ignoring us by not responding, we have concluded that the vast majority of folks who don’t reply during the first outreach just don’t see it or missed it or, more likely, either intend to later but forget or simply don’t know who we are at first and just assume the pitch isn’t for real.

When we reach out one week later and then again a week after that, they’ve seen the email a couple of times and give it a try and are pleased to see that it’s authentic and that there are friendly online analysts more than happy to be friendly and kind at the other end.

It’s not about fooling the bloggers, it’s about authenticity

People are funny and I quite love my species — and I think that attitude is our secret AH sauce: We don’t consider the people we pitch to be the enemy that must be fooled into helping our clients. Quite the opposite. I started my company because I believe that there are lots and lots of vocal proponents on any topic under the sun who just have not been activated yet. Who don’t realize that their voice is important and that agencies like mine and clients like mine find that their choice to create their publishing empire, no matter how modest though it may be, is very exciting, very useful, and very cool to us and to our clients, to be sure!

And, unlike the simulated world of the elaborately constructed inbound link sellosphere, shilloshere, linkosphere, or whatever it is, blogger outreach is authentic. When we send out two-thousand emails pitched to two-thousand bloggers, the 400 bloggers who post over the course of a month don’t have to. We don’t pay them, we don’t trade horses, and we don’t make empty promises.

Not all 2,000 post, only the 400 for whom the message resonates. It is earned media. It is real, even if the blogger simply embeds a video or quotes the pitch email verbatim or copy-and-pastes the social media news release full-text, it’s up to each blogger. No matter what they say, no matter how editorialized, or matter how off message their interpretation may well be (and when it is, it is generally our fault for not being clear enough). It is a thing of beauty and it is ceaselessly amazing that folks online are so endlessly generous and active.

But it all starts with the right attitude–putting the blogger first is the secret of how to pitch a blogger.

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
Blogger outreach is scary (biznology.com)
How not to treat bloggers and how not to pitch blogs (socialmedia.biz)
Why are you so afraid of engaging bloggers? (socialmedia.biz)
Seven Tips for Presenting Guest-post Ideas to Bloggers (donbeehler.wordpress.com)
How Not to Pitch to a Blogger (blogworld.com)
How NOT to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
Mutiny on the Versatile Blogger ship (tritetales.com)

The Blog is Dead — Now’s the Best Time to Start Blogging!

Chris Abraham — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 19:47:34 +0000

2011 might be the best year to start a blog with one caveat. Ed Lee agrees in Blogging – Alive and Kicking:

I’ve seen a few posts from the Pew survey talking about the decline of blogging and the rise of Twitter. Boyd has the best link here but my first thought was:
Isn’t Twitter a form of blogging? RSS feed? Reverse chronological order? Comments? Blog roll (of sorts)?
Last I saw there were 200m blogs being tracked by Technorati – of which 10m or so are probably legitimate (not spam) and active. There are 160m Twitter microblogs and about 6m tumblr accounts – also blogs.
So like RSS, where the act of subscribing to a feed may be on the decline but the use of RSS is still alive and kicking as the backbone of the Internet, blogging as an expression of longform content may be waning – but blogs as a technology and trend is very much alive and kicking.

I actually have more to add to this:

There is less competition for any particular topic
While there may be a number of professional blogs out there blogging on your topic, the relative number of blog-curious and casual bloggers has decreased. It is impossible to be a successful casual blogger and blogging is hard, so the blogging “middle class” has thinned out.

Therefore, most of the people who are saying that blogging is dead or who have given up their blog for Twitter or a Facebook Page actually just don’t have the heart, passion, talent, or commitment. They’re the same people who tell you to forget about writing a book because books are dead. No, books are not dead and neither are blogs — they’re just hard!

Most of the remaining blogs out there are ghost towns on life support
Now there are just aggregation blogs and spam blogs in the ghetto and there are the professional and advanced amateur blogs in the elite. Since blogging is so hard and requires so much commitment and talent resources, all you need to do is commit time, talent, and long-term budget and you should be dominating your space in no time — well, as long as you consider “no time” to be between 6-18 months.

What that means is a minimum of four short posts and one long post a week, each and every week until forever. Yes, forever. Until your company closes or you sell it — and even then, you might want to keep the blog as it will help you leverage yourself into you next thing.

A blog is like an African Gray Parrot in that it is a long-term investment requiring that you build it into your estate planning. In the past, businesses really didn’t think long-term about their social media and blogging strategy and their plan often didn’t outlive their Summer Intern.

If you plan to honor your employer, your company, or yourself, you need to be willing to not just maintain your blog on life-support just by paying for hosting and renewing your domain name but you really need to invest.

Success begets success in blogging and with your blog
Case in point is Marketing Conversation, Abraham Harrison’s corporate blog. Until 6 months ago, I was really the only person writing for it. Then Phillip Rhoades got the passion, and now we have made it a priority to hire bloggers to fill out the daily posting requirement. In just a couple months, our ranking on AdAge Power 150 went from almost 300 to 130.

While I had never let Marketing Conversation become a ghost town, it wasn’t a priority of the company as a while. I didn’t have enough buy-in from the 34 other members of the team. Now, everyone’s committed. And success begets success — and success makes it much easier to assure that I will have the budget of talent and money I need to make sure MC keeps improving and growing, including budget for a design and template make-over.

I hate to say it but people really so love a winner.

Blogging technology and blogging platforms have gotten easier, simpler, and more convenient
With Tumblr and Posterous as well as Twitter, Facebook Pages, and old reliables such as Blogger and WordPress.com, it couldn’t be cheaper, simpler or more convenient.

Even Moveable Type, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other blogging and content platforms have gotten less complex — and even hosting companies have started to meet their clients half or all the way to installing blogs.

One click and your software is updates, one click and you’ve installed a new plugin, one click and you have installed WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla from your Web Hosting administration control panel dashboad like cPanel, Webmin, SirectAdmin, Fantastico, etc.

Plus, it is easier to get a pretty nice template for free or for just a little bit of money. I am not proud but I use the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes for both Marketing Conversation and for Chris Abraham — Because the Medium is the Message. I plan to upgrade them both, but for now it is essential that I just make everything as simple, easy-to-read, and SEO-friendly as possible as Thesis meets all of those needs for me for now.

Blogging courses, blog platform developers, and blog template designers are easier-to-find and afford
Back when I started blogging back in 1999, it was all me. Even 5-years ago, it was tough to find s Drupal guy or a WordPress guy — it was even tougher finding a quality (and also affordable) designer who did more than create a design in Photoship, slice it up, and dump it on me to shoehorn and hack it into a proper Drupal or WordPress template.

Now, awesome programmers, developers, plugin developers, Drupal and WordPress programmers, and designers and shops that are able to go from initial branding brainstorming through blog and site design, through to user experience and content, through designing and approval, all the way to a final product: an easy to install, widget and plug-in compatible, theme template. What’s more, they’re able to add all the bells and whistles, too, as well as develop and program any particular bespoke plugin that can really make your blog or social media web 2.0 website hum.

These folks were almost impossible to find and when you did, back in 2006, 2007, 2008, even 2009, they were not what they purported to be or they were over-booked, too expensive, or unresponsive. In 2010 and 2011, with the economy as it is and since most of the deepest pockets already are wired for sound, these coder rockstars are willing to work with you to make sure that everyone comes out feeling like they’re a winner.

Bloggers, community managers, content curators, and comment moderators are well-trained and plentiful
If you decide that you want a blog but can’t really commit to more than one post a week or one post a month; or if you’re considering turning off the comments on your blog; or, if you’re keeping away from committing to Twitter or Facebook Pages; or your current blog, Twitter profile, or Facebook Page is a ghost town, then you really need to hire a dedicated blogger, a blogger who understands that writing is only 1/4 of the job.

Another 1/4 needs to be spent on engaging with the social mediasphere and blogosphere, moderating comments, responding to questions and comments, and the like.

The third quart needs to be spent monitoring what people are saying online to make sure you remain on top of what people are saying as well as searching for opportunities to engage in questions and conversations online, on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs, and on message boards.

Finally, the last quarter needs to be spent on marketing and promoting the blog and your brand online. Making sure you remain part of the conversation. Reading other peoples’ blogs, keeping on top of your industry and the other blogs in your space, and seeing if you can connect to them and become part of their community.

In the past, finding someone like this was almost impossible. It is still tough but easier. And there are so many people looking to get into this sort of work that the fees are reasonable.

Don’t expect your community management to be found all in one person, however. Your social media team requirements might require several people. Be sure to try out Odesk and Elance as we have found some excellent staff there. Also, be sure to check out Craigslist, though I highly recommend not making “must be in the same city as the company” a requirement as the best people are often not in your city or even in your country.

The real-time web is alive and blog content is hotter than ever before, just ask Google
In the past, Google treated every page on the Internet with just about as much attention. Since the resources allocated to Google was finite, it did tend to give more attention to online content that was updated regularly, but blogs were no different than newspapers or any other active content. However, in recent years, Google has felt the heat from the real-time web, its biggest dog being Twitter. Search.twitter.com as well as Facebook search have replaced Google in many situations in the past when Google wasn’t able to keep up with tasks such as monitoring. In response, however, Google has caught up. Now, any blog that is not a spam blog is considered to be just about holy.

Google now has a dedicated blog index, Blog Search, and makes a point of indexing blog content immediately. If you sign up for Google Alerts, you will see your blog content come into your inbox just seconds after you commit to Publish or Post — if you’re blogging on a daily basis, Google will allocate more than your fair share of Robots to indexing your blog.

Blogs are inherently better at search engine optimization because search engines still prize text above all things
A blog is written in text and search engines are expert at indexing and finding content online based on literal strings of search text. While the future does hold fuzzy-logic searches that use synonymic and logical search results, for now, literal text is still king. If that string isn’t on your corporate website, your site won’t come up.

Blogs, on the other hand, are a culmination of hundreds or thousands of articles written by and commented on by lots of different people in different situations and a sundry of contexts, therefore, there is a prodigious amount of messy copy — lots and lots of similar string of content that mean something close to what your company does and offers and sells but not exactly what you would say or how you you say it.

That’s a good thing.

It is called keyword diversity and keyword diversity is good because unlike your behavior when your do a vanity search on your company or your company keywords, you can never be sure how your prospective clients will find you.

For example, when I started in 2003, what I did was new media and I was an expert in new media strategies and new media marketing. Then it was emarketing and ePR, then digital PR, social media marketing, and all these other things. Blogging allows me to keep up every day as opposed to the once or twice a year when I edit and update the Abraham Harrison corporate website — if that.

So, there is lots and lots of keyword diversity, lots and lots of natural keyword density — not stilted like is often found on a professionally search optimized website — and there are links, hyperlinked keyword phrases, and lots and lots of pages with copy and text by the barrel-full.

What’s more, each page of a WordPress or Drupal blog has a user-readable URL, such as http://ahpr.us/case-studies instead of http://ahpr.us/node/196 — which is something you see all the time and not very pretty.

Finally, while your corporate website probably had dozens of pages updated periodically, blogs have thousands of pages, each of which can be seen any number of ways: via post, category, tag, year, month, week, day, etc. This means that, in aggregate, you can have 5x-10x the number of “pages” for search that you actually have posts for.

If you’ll notice, though, that I put all these SEO incentives at the end of this post. If you write a blog based only on its SEO prowess, then your blog is going to really suck. You will write your blog into that ghetto I talk about.

All modern blogging platforms have RSS built in, making sharing with Facebook and Twitter effortless
Each and every blog post has its own unique page and each of those pages has a unique URL. That URL represents not a static page but a record in your blogging platform’s relational database. While that URL represents a page, your blog can render that content in other way. For example, as an RSS feed. Blog posts with their unique, user-readable links and their RSS feeds are super-easy to share as well as index as well as reference as well as link to — much easier than a lot of companies make it with their Adobe Flash-based sites that don’t have “permalinks” or “anchor links” built in.

Twitter and Facebook thrives on content links. If you run a blog and install “digg this,” “share this,” “tweet this,” “like this,” “reddit this,” and “Facebook this”to make sure sharing your content is as convenient as humanely possible — and write compelling, timely, and popular content — then you too can be part of feeding the giant maw of the 24/7/365 Twitter, Facebook, and social media monster that lives and thrives on content like yours.

That’s it for now — and sorry to hit you with this firehose! Merry Christmas!

Who We Are And What We Do at Abraham Harrison LLC

Chris Abraham — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:40:48 +0000

At Abraham Harrison, online social media PR is what we do all day, every day, and have been doing for years. We’re not an old-media PR shop trying to quickly jump on the new-school bandwagon, hoping we can figure it out (and making all the mistakes on your dime). We are a well-practiced team of 40+ professionals who work exclusively in the social media world. We’re very pleased to put our skills and experience at your service to deliver the extraordinary impact new media operations can have when practiced by true online experts.

We’re completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who wish to leverage online social media – we know our way around this space like few others. We secure you trust, endorsements, top search results ranking, and ubiquitous presence of message — we can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach, driving your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We do all of this by finding the people you need and mobilizing them to support your aims, be it connecting to decision-makers or activating mass support, we can help you identify, connect with, and mobilize the people you need to be supporting you on the issues that affect you. We can reach out directly to the people you need to be in contact with or connect with entire demographics in the places they live online.

Abraham Harrison helps you manage your reputation online and protect you online in times of crisis. With the Internet, with its forced transparency and free, instant flow of information, communication and reputation crises can crop up overnight – and with the search engines, even a very old blemish can taint your or your organization’s image years later and on into the future. We can help you manage crises, steering communications effectively in the free, open, uncontrollable online medium and we can help you regain and maintain control of your reputation and image in the search engine results.

Via Abraham Harrison LLC

Glover’s Mistake by Nick Laird

Chris Abraham — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:36:41 +0000

I rarely get a book recommendation like this. My Berlin-based buddy Martin popped me a note telling me about this book that his girlfriend just read and reviewed for Vogue, Glover’s Mistake, by Nick Laird, which is apparently quite good. This is Laird’s second novel and takes place in London. Sounds to me like a rather “meta” PoMo book that crosses between the virtual, the real, the creative, and the bloggy. Seems to me that we’re all required to support any novel of high caste if it includes references to the blogerati, the technorati, the Twitterati, or suggests that blogs and bloggers are madly influential (comme moi!). I surely hope that the author or the publisher see this and fancy me worthy enough to read the book and write a proper review. Now, please read on an enjoy Megan O’Grady’s review, Books: Nick Laird on Glover’s Mistake:

On a sunny afternoon in New York’s Chelsea gallery district, I spoke with the poet and author Nick Laird about his second novel, Glover’s Mistake (Viking), one of summer’s darker pleasures. Set on the periphery of London’s art world, it follows the misadventures of 35-year-old David Pinner, a socially thwarted English teacher who has cultivated a more assured identity with his Web site, The Damp Review, on which he savages other people’s creative work. When he learns that a former professor, an American artist named Ruth Marks, is in town for an exhibition, he sees an opportunity for entrée to a shinier world (and possibly more). But much to David’s dismay, it’s his less sophisticated but far more attractive flatmate, James Glover, who captures Ruth’s attention—and affections. The 47-year-old, thrice-divorced Ruth is as glamorous and world-weary as the 23-year-old Glover is jejune, and what unfolds, in a series of ebulliently droll set pieces, examines the collision of innocence with experience, and of one of the oldest of human emotions—jealousy—with a most contemporary form of expression: the blog.
“Certainly I was interested in relationships with older women when I was a younger man,” says Laird, now 33 and married to the writer Zadie Smith. “It’s a dynamic that couldn’t have been easily written about 20 or 30 years ago, because it’s only recently that women have really had independent wealth. And so I took a classic setup—a love triangle—and gave it a twist. From there, the book took on a life of its own.”
Title notwithstanding, it’s David who becomes the novel’s focus as he maneuvers against Ruth and Glover’s deepening attachment. An Iago with a laptop and a penchant for ham sandwiches, he’s more pitiable than craven, a man who has difficulty connecting meaningfully to another person without a digitized filter. In other words, he’s a fitting antihero for our times.
Through David, the Northern Ireland–born, Cambridge-educated Laird parses the pretensions and status distinctions of intellectual circles with a wry grace, finding moments of poetic truth amid the misanthrope’s self-consciously clever mental chatter. On the seductive nature of art: “[It] was addictive, he realized, because analogy was a technique of integration, and thus gave endless, untrue hope for reconciling everything.” And on the negligible boundary between love and hate: “Real emotions were not distinct. They were like colors, they ran into each other. When does the day become the night? The neck the shoulder?”
The real antagonist of the novel—and indeed, of perhaps nearly every writer of Laird’s generation: unlimited Internet access. “I’ll be watching a movie with friends or with my wife, and at some point one of us is online looking up one of the actors, and the next thing you’re on Facebook. No experience is pure anymore; it’s all adulterated. You hardly read a book cover to cover anymore without first reading about it online. The Internet has become very pervasive and addictive. So I wanted to play with how far it could go into someone’s life.” Glover’s Mistake is among the first novels to probe not the metaphysical implications of our obsession but the interpersonal ones. What does it mean for romance when the object of our affections can be Googled? Love in the time of the blog-era, Laird suggests, risks becoming as brittle and transparent as the heart Ruth sculpts out of glass.
And so, exactly how did he manage to go offline and finish the novel? “I cut through the Internet cable with a pair of nail scissors.”
—Megan O’Grady

Our Big List of Prospected Blogs and Bloggers

Chris Abraham — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:40:03 +0000

Since the inception of Abraham Harrison LLC, we have been focused on blogger relations and blogger outreach. Social media is our bread and butter, not just something we tacked on. Over the last several years, we have prospected over 40,000 bloggers across a wide-variety of topics (see below) and over a growing number of languages, including Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and Russian-speaking blogs wordwide.

Please scroll down and explore some of the blogger-types we have collected and engage on a daily-basis. Of course, when a client needs something new — such as our upcoming engagement with Russian and Polish bloggers — we’re very efficient and experienced in researching, locating, and harvesting the most appropriate bloggers. (Via Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversation)

A-list Bloggers
Academic Bloggers
Activist Bloggers
Africa Bloggers
African-American Bloggers
Alumni Bloggers
Animal Bloggers
Anti-Facebook Bloggers
Asia English Speaking Bloggers
Baseball Bloggers
Big Brothers/Sisters Bloggers
Cancer Survivor’s Bloggers
College Students Bloggers
Colorado Bloggers
Combined Top & Marketing Bloggers
Contest Aggregation Bloggers
Corporate Social Responsibility Bloggers
Craigslist/Online Auction Bloggers
Daddy Bloggers
Deaf Community Bloggers
Democrats Bloggers
eBay User Bloggers
Education Bloggers
Environmental Bloggers
Ex-Patriate Bloggers
ExPatriate Health Insurance Bloggers
Food Bloggers
Foster Family / Adoption Bloggers
General Political Bloggers
Grandparents Bloggers
Green Bloggers
Health Bloggers
Hearing Impaired
Illinois Bloggers
India (english speaking) Bloggers
Investment Bloggers
Job Seeker Bloggers
Lawyer Blogs / Blawgs and Blawgers
Liberal Bloggers
Marketing Bloggers
Military Bloggers
Moderate Bloggers
Mommy Bloggers
New Education Bloggers
New Mexico Bloggers
Newest Marketing Bloggers
NY Area Bloggers
Ohio Bloggers
Online Dating Bloggers
Pennsylvania Bloggers
Photography Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking College Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Daddy Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Job Seekers Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Mommy Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Real Estate Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Saving Money Bloggers
Portuguese Speaking Tech Bloggers
Real Estate Bloggers
Real Estate Brokers /NYC Bloggers – TriState Area
Rebate and Coupon Sites Bloggers
Recent College Grads Bloggers
Reconnectors Bloggers
Running/Jogging/Marathon Bloggers
Russian Mommy Bloggers
Russian Tech Bloggers
Saving Money Bloggers
Social Networks Bloggers
Spanish Language Job Seeker Bloggers
Spanish Language Saving Money Bloggers
Spanish Language Speaking College Bloggers
Spanish Language Speaking Mommy Bloggers
Spanish Language Speaking Real Estate Bloggers
Spanish Language Speaking Tech Bloggers
Spirituality Bloggers
Sustainers Bloggers
Tech Bloggers
Teen Lifestyle Influencers/Teen Bloggers
Top Blog Bloggers
Top Environmental Bloggers
Top Liberal Bloggers
USA: North-East State Bloggers
Video Sharing Sites Bloggers
Washington DC Bloggers
Women’s Lifestyle Bloggers
Women’s Self Help Bloggers
World Food Day Bloggers
Yoga/Soccer/Martial Arts & Sports Nutrition Bloggers
Young Volunteer Bloggers

Jörn Wants Me to Remove the Hitler Condom Ad

Chris Abraham — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:03:33 +0000

I just received an email from a guy named Jörn, from Grey Germany, who popped me an email in response to my blog post, Eugenics Ads are Never Ever Funny.

Hi there,
I’m a creative director on the Doc Morris Pharmacies ads, you show on your side. Please delete the three ads (Mao Tze-Tung, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden) immediately from your side, because they are creating lots of offense. This is really urgent.
Thanks, Jörn

Jörn really didn’t look at my blog post because he is asking me to remove the three ads and not the one I had posted, which I will be damned if I remove. I might have done, but there is zero apology, zero appeal, just a demand for me to delete them “because they are creating lots of offense. This is really urgent.”

Position your key staff as experts in their field online

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:22:26 +0000

If you Google the name of our President and COO, “Chris Abraham“, you will see what it means to dominate the search engine results and own a position as an expert in a field. We can do the same for your key staff.

Methods: Blogs — Yours & Others: Dominating the Online Space as an Expert & Generous Contributor. We will get your blog infrastructure and your content production policy established. This involves installation, set-up, and design of the blog software. To drive SEO it is important to get the relevant social bookmarking, ping server, etc. accounts and plug-ins set up and installed.

To further drive SEO, a powerful additional methodology is to mirror your blog content across multiple other blogs on highly-ranked blog hosting sites like blogspot, wordpress.com, etc., or under additional aggregation blogs you may set up under your own domain names. This process will be automated at the outset and run without human effort thereafter.

Blog Content Creation Policy
We will help your team get the blogging policy right, following best practices in line with the informational guidelines of your company. There is a clear culture of blogging and respecting and adhering to its norms and expectations will make the difference between you being welcomed as a respected contributor and being mocked as a soulless corporate shill (or an embarrassment and danger to your company).

It is essential to have a clear policy for your company’s bloggers, particularly in terms of outlining and reserving their freedoms as writers. With a clear understanding by the blogger and by the company of what freedoms are allowed, you avoid cramping, overly-careful, stuffy-sounding, self-censoring while also avoiding cringe-inducing embarrassments of inappropriate disclosure and language.

Blog Content Creation System
The best system of content creation is to have the key staff members whose reputations are to be built writing the blog content themselves — that leads to the most honest, transparent, and bi-directionally informative information exchange. However, sometimes those key staff members simply don’t have the time, inclination, or writing talent to create that content. In that case a content creation system and methodology must be put in place:

Hiring or assigning professional bloggers or staffers with good writing abilities to produce the content under their names or
Establishing a ghost-writing system where topics are suggested (by the writer or the key staffer), concept outline given by key staffer, posting written by the professional writer, posting edited and approved by key staffer, posting proofed by editor (optional), and article posted.

If this route is taken, there are workflow blog softwares that can be put in place and set up to manage this process.

Appearing on Others’ Blogs
By generously contributing to the community via bloggers in your spaces, you can get broad coverage and enjoy the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of these influencers. We would help you get these content contribution requests by executing a Blogger Outreach. This is done by:

Giving of yourself in the form of interviews, etc.
Interviews are excellent relationship-builders that give you direct, personal access to the bloggers and builds up a connection for the future. Interviews can be given via:
- Email
- Chat
- Phone
- Podcast (voice)
- Vlog (video — either onsite or via video VOIP)

This list is by order of “live-ness” of the interview with email being very asynchronous, allowing time to reflect and gather info and Vlog interviews being very live.

Guest blogging by the key staff
Guest blogging is very warmly welcomed since it gives bloggers good content that they don’t have to write themselves, and it makes them look good because they are being honored as a valued platform.

Being a guest blogger gives you coverage on another site, increasing the number of locations you are appearing while giving you total control over your message and while driving your SEO by adding link-backs. Additionally, you get the implicit (or explicit) endorsement of the blogger in front of his readership.

It is important to be writing interesting, engaging content as a guest blogger and avoid presenting something that sounds like a callow pitch.

If the key staff member is not interested or capable of doing the guest blogging, then the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed

Podcasting and Vlogging (video blogging)
Podcasting is very much like blogging, but in audio format. While it is not as SEO-friendly as text-based blogging, it has a stronger “star-quality” effect, as the listeners develop a stronger human connection to the podcaster. The lower SEO-friendliness can be counteracted by posting transcripts of the podcast along with the podcast itself.

It can be done very simply, but generally it is good to have quality raw audio, a polished intro and outro, and good tone balancing so that the podcast sounds somewhat professional and is auditorily a pleasure to listen to.

We can guide your staff in setting up the recording mechanisms, get your intro/outro composed, and have the raw audio balanced and cut into a finished podcast.

It is also good to have clear, interesting concepts to speak about and an effective style of delivery. It’s easy to be boring or irritating.

While the ghostwriting approach outlined above can be followed, much more responsibility lies on the key staff member who is recording, since it is a very “live” experience — you cannot read a pre-written article and come across as a compelling Podcaster.

The staff of Abraham Harrison, LLC, can get the transcripts written and assist in the posting of the podcasts and the maintenance of the podcast blog website.

Vlogging follows the same rules as podcasting in regards to production and quality, but the pressure on the “star” is that much more intense.

Abraham Harrison’s staff can guide your staff in getting the recording and production infrastructure set up.

An advantage of vlogging is that it has the even higher “star” effect upon the key staff member doing the vlogging, and the videos can be posted on all the video-sharing sites (dozens) to get more coverage and dominate search results.

We at Abraham Harrison can handle the video asset distribution for you, or train your team in the method.

Contact Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

Blogger and Journalist Outreaches for Earned Media Coverage

Chris Abraham — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:59:43 +0000

In Abraham Harrison‘s outreach campaigns to bloggers and press, we regularly get 50 to 200 articles published for a client per 6-8 week outreach cycle – this is generally an order of magnitude more articles than most PR shops get their clients.

Through our many campaigns for clients over the years, we maintain a correspondence with upwards of 30,000 bloggers and journalists and can establish friendly personal contact with brand new demographics of bloggers and journalists within a few weeks through our polished, professional, and personable outreach methods.

The coverage we get is earned, not paid media — honest, enthusiastic, real coverage from influencers into their communities, not only reaching and influencing their immediate readership, but dominating the search results with the large numbers of articles, and driving your sites’ SEO through all the organic, honest link-backs.

Unlike paid ads, these articles stay up online forever, appearing in searches, improving your sites’ SEO, and driving traffic ad infinitum.

Email Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, for more information

Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers!

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:46:30 +0000

In December, we at Abraham Harrison helped the Fresh Air Fund reach out to bloggers and folks online in order to remind the online Fresh Air Fund friends and family that they both need donations during this time of year as well as needing families to host children for the summer. Since the holidays, over ninety bloggers have responded to Fresh Air Fund’s call to action with the placement of banners, with tweets, and with blog posts. We are much obliged to you, Fresh Air Fund bloggers! (via Marketing Conversation)

My Top 91 Social Media Blog Posts

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:30:11 +0000

I am not willing or able to say that the following 91 blog posts about social media, blogging, new media, social networking, etc, are the definite top-91 posts because I didn’t have the time or attention to go through all of my 5,437 blog posts:

The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach

Chris Abraham — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:06:05 +0000

When I sell Abraham Harrison‘s blogger outreach and blogger PR services I tend to focus on the initial promotional and profile benefits associated with having hundreds of highly targeted organic earned media blog posts show up almost overnight on behalf of our clients. If you would like to know what this sort of campaign looks like, check out our case studies.

That’s not it, there’s more. As I have mentioned before, unlike SEM, these blog posts, reviews, and mentions are permenant and not ephemeral.

Finally, there is the issue of the powerful and amazing SEO benefits associated with having over 100 bloggers choose to write about your brand, product, campaign, or service.

Unlike pay-for-play services like Review Me, PayPerPost, or IZEA, the blog posts written by the bloggers we reach out to are not pay per post, they are earned media. When my team and I reach out to our A-Z list bloggers along dozens of verticals targets, it is up to each blogger to choose to accept our message and decide that what we’re offering is worthwhile to post or Twitter.

There is real power associated with this sort of thing. Like any journalistic or consumer-generated promotional pitching, results are not guaranteed; however, we have done this for over two yearsd and our penetration, success, and results have improved over time.

If you want to see the sort of posts that are associated with this kind of blogger PR pitch outreach, here are some examples:

I am always to allow these things to be as transparent as possible. What’s more, linking back to all of the fine blog posts that bloggers have shoehorned into their busy days is sort of a link love thank you.

And, to be honest, Google thinks were the bees knees because the content that our messaging drives real content. In all cases, we’re at the mercy of the blogger — if we’re not smart, generous, engaging, charming, positive, responsive, and even supportive, we’ll get tarred and feathered, and so will out client.

We’re better than that.

With each blogger outreach that results in a hundred or more organic earned media, highly-textual, brand-centric, keyword-dense and diverse, and often times almost completely based on the Social Media News Releases (SMNRs) we create for the client, the level of powerful Google, Live.com, Technorati, Ask.com, and Yahoo! love is not only formidable, but, over time, and much sooner than you think, both our social media new releases as well as our blogged content can challenge our clients for top-spot, which is OK because we’re not their competitor.

Here are some examples of client SMNRs we especially like, feel free to check them out:

I have almost ten-years of SEO experience and have always done things the right way, and Social Media and Blogger PR is the right way. None of us coerce any of our bloggers into blogging, we’re just able to figure out how to appeal, how to give, how to engage, how to message, and how to ask for what we want from our long tail list of upwards of 500 A-list blogger and 30,000 B-Z list bloggers.

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more or getting on a call with my Director, Dan, my CEO, Mark, and/or me, pop me an email and we’ll sort it out.

(Via Marketing Conversation)

Can You Nail a Cold Pitch to A-List Bloggers?

Chris Abraham — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:10:43 +0000

In an effort to really get to know the folks who are “in my space” and in the space of my firm, Abraham Harrison, I downloaded the AdAge Power 150 OPML and hacked it into a spreadsheet. Then, I had my team look up the names and emails behind the 781 blogs of the Power 150. Then, I reached out to all of them, looking to see if we could maybe do something together, may be get to know each other a little bit better. I offered the list I collected for free and offered to help put together some sort of community. Well, who knows if these things ever work or not; however, we at Abraham Harrison LLC have had a lot of practice at reaching out to bloggers via email on behalf of our clients and earning hundreds of supportive and awesome “earned media” blog posts. Jon Burg’s Future Vision agrees in his article The difficult art of cold pitching – Chris Abraham’s pitch to the AdAge Power 150. Thanks, man — I really appreciate the kudos!

the difficult art of cold pitching – Chris Abraham’s pitch to the AdAge Power 150
Call it ePR, blogger outreach/relationship management, networking, social media activation or social marketing… at it’s heart, this is the practice of speaking with the community; enlisting bloggers and the community at large, to speak about your efforts and on behalf of your brand.

If you have a relationship with a blogger, you can leverage this relationship to drive your brand/client.
If you do not yet have a relationship, you have to start building one.
If you need something done today, and don’t have a relationship, you need to resort to the daunting cold pitch: pitching your product or service without any prior interaction.

Chris Abraham, a noted blogger and popular twitterer, recently sent out a private email message to many of the bloggers on the Ad Age Power 150 list, asking them to register their contact information.
His note was personal, personable and extremely well written. It felt like he was really speaking to me. No, he didn’t mention any of my previous posts. And yes, there is a strong likelihood that this letter was a form letter. Nevertheless, this letter feels somewhat warm, an incredible accomplishment for a cold pitch.
The Pitch

Hi there Jon
I wanted to reach out to you since you’re a current fellow member of the AdAge Power 150 with Future Visions. Please excuse the form email but there are over 780 current Power 150 members. I am popping you this note for two reasons: first, I would like your help to do something with this list; second, I just want to update you as to what I am up to.
To create this list, I collected the OPML file free off of the Power 150 page on Adage and expanded it into a list with names and emails. I would love to share the list with you so please pop me an email if you would like a copy. I was hoping we might figure out a way to keep in better touch as a group of marketing, PR, and advertising bloggers. Please shoot me any ideas you have. I was thinking we could create a community group to share news, ideas, and opportunities to work together. On that note, I am the president and COO of Abraham Harrison LLC, a firm specializing in social media PR, blogger outreach, online engagement, and online reputation management. I would love to schedule a call so that we can explore possibilities to collaborate.
On a personal note, I have started blogging for AdAge and have had so much fun with that that I am looking to find as many opportunities to blog as I can. Please let me know if you know of anything or if you would like me to guest blog. Also, if you’re in the DC area I would love to get together. To be honest, I would love to meet you the next time I am in your neck of the woods.
Thanks so much and I appreciate your time and attention. I wish you a very fine 2009 with much luck and success.
Cheers,
Chris

So what do we think? Is this a cold pitch done right?
Note: After reading this letter, I’m still unsure of what will be done with my contact information. Is this being gathered as a closed list/community for AdAge? Is this a contact list for his firm? Will my contact information be shared with anyone outside of this community?

Three Mistakes PR Folks Make Pitching Bloggers

Chris Abraham — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:22:22 +0000

Krishna De just wrote an article called How Not To Pitch A Blogger and it is brilliant and useful — “here are three of the many mistakes they made in the pitch:”

there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers
they did not give me anything of value to bring to my readers – no inside scoop so to speak or an offer of speaking to me to answer any questions
they made me click through to read the article in the press – many bloggers won’t take that extra click – and what’s more the article in the press was at best boring and certainly not newsworthy.
Busy blogger’s are like journalists – they want an inside and unique story that is going to be of value to their readers and they don’t have time to have to go into hours of research.

I personally don’t agree with the third bullet point if what Krishna is saying is that the entire pitch has to be inline. We find that all of our most successful pitches are as long as three brief paragraphs and as brief as one, with an “extra click” in the form of a Social Media News Release (SMNR). Here are some examples we have for I Will Not Be Broken, Survivor Corps, and Life Changing Box, for example. When it comes to email pitches, you have to have the blogger “at hello” and the trouble with big, annoying, inline content (inline in the body of the email or, egad, offered as an attachment) is that it is stuck in the INBOX and isn’t readily available to the blog — inline graphics can’t be copied and pasted to a blog post, but if you copy and paste something from a web page, it easily posts.

Offering content in an attachment or an inline pitch makes it impossible for simple posting — images and graphics break because they’re often locally hosted and not available online.

If you off-link to an SMNR, the blogger can readily copy and paste the content and also, in the copy-and-paste, include the inline graphics, images, and links in the blog post itself.

When we create a pitch and then link off the blogger pitch to an SMNR, we try to KISS — every extra link and extra paragraph and extra “rich text element” such as HTML and inline graphics that a pitch includes increases the change — the probability — that the pitch isn’t even going to get to the blogger and will end up either in the SPAM box or, even worse, stuck in the maw of the ISP itself.

The more brief and plaintext the pitch is, the better. We absolutely refuse to include more than one link from our pitches, even killing all hot links from the signature or anything else.

If you don’t have the blogger at hello, you’re done for, no matter how you do it: inline or linked-out.

Via Krishna De’s BizGrowthNews

Stevie Wilson on The Swag Culture of LA

Chris Abraham — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:13:29 +0000

I just posted an article onto Marketing Conversation called Gifting Bloggers Doesn’t Mean Pushing Swag and within minutes Stevie Wilson of LA-Story wrote the most amazing comment on the culture of swag that is commonplace in Los Angeles, California… (via Marketing Conversation)

Swag is the name of the game in Los Angeles– in a city that lives and dies by celebrities getting swag and quite frankly are the least needy for that – because they have the $$ to pay for anything given to them.
Swag has a bad connotation because it smacks of pandering and quite frankly payola. However when it comes to blogging– depending on the topic of course–one can hardly blog about a skincare line if one hasn’t tried it — or has tried it for only one week and doesn’t own up to the fact.
Gifting is somewhat different. Sometimes it’s a holiday or birthday gift that really is a “gift” between a corporate entity and the blogger for the support (if there has been support and I don’t mean Perez Hilton type support that has been advertised) that the blogger may have given. Or it can be something that the corporate entity has done to gain the attention to the brand in such an unusual and interesting way that it definitely gains the immediate attention and enthusiasm of the blogger– like a video iPod that has videos of fashion shows or make-up tips from NY Fashion Week .
In LA there is a gifting process that is quid pro quo but typically for the more visible press— which means stylists who bring in celebrities to a suite whose promoter gives them a trip or a great big fat goody bag of stuff (the same goody bag given to the celebrities)
However that being said, even the stylists get shunned despite bringing or sending in celebrity friends, clients or contacts.
Some PR and brands don’t think that bloggers count. Trust me– we can reach people faster if you are kind, polite and friendly.
Agreeing with Chris here that offering me some worthy information is well worth it — whether it’s to be written about or giving me some heads up on a trend or event that’s about to launch.
I have PR people who slip me the 411 on celebrity clients wearing the brands they represent before anyone else has it. You can bet I run that information and pronto!! Others tell me about new things just because they know I can help support that when it launches– because I can “plan” for blogs around it.
It all depends on how and what you value. I have yet to see anyone gift me something so amazing that I would jump .. Been promised things (cars to come get me and other trinkets), but they never come through– suddenly bloggers are persona not so grata.

Where Chris Abraham Clarifies the Notion of Swag

Chris Abraham — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:07:03 +0000

Well, in the blogger-to-blogger dialog between Norman Birnbach and me, starting with How Do You Establish Metrics for a Blogging Initiative? Take a page from the campaign for Jerry White’s book then moving onto Guy Kawasaki on the impact of bloggers on PR and buzz, then Gifting Bloggers Doesn’t Mean Pushing Swag, Stevie Wilson on The Swag Culture of LA, finally onto To Swag or Not To Swag — Actually Chris Abraham Clarifies the Notion of Swag:

To Swag or Not To Swag — Actually Chris Abraham Clarifies the Notion of Swag
In response to my blog entry, Guy Kawasaki on the impact of bloggers on PR and buzz, Chris Abraham has provided additional perspective about swag in his post, “Gifting Bloggers Doesn’t Mean Pushing Swag.”
Check it out, but here’s some of what he said:
“Gifts don’t have to be free stuff — like books or iPods — gifts can be in the form of knowledge, intellectual property, insider access, or blogger exclusives; gifts can be informational, gifts can solve a community problem, or customer service issues.
“What a gift needs to be is super-valuable to the recipient — the value of a gift is based on perception. You need to be willing to give the gift that the blogger wants and not the gift you are prepared or want to give.
“What is not cool is half measures or crappy, throw-away gifts, the Internet version of key rings and a bowl of candy. Offering throttled, limited or restricted demos (without access to the full version when it is released); offering a single book chapter (without the whole book being an option); or granting “exclusive” access to something that is already released is just plain lame and will result in severe negative consequences.”
“It is pretty bad to not give a gift when you reach out to bloggers just because you feel entitled or represent a fancy client but it is worse to be stingy about the gift you do give. Make sure the gift is generous — give until it hurts.”
This is very useful. I’m sorry if I misrepresented what Chris was telling me about swag.

Thanks, Norman, I appreciate the follow-up post that better explains my methodology and the implemented strategy and best practices of Abraham Harrison.

Chris Abraham is Officially an A-List Blogger of Note

Chris Abraham — Sun, 20 May 2007 14:42:55 +0000

I just discovered that Because the Medium is the Message placed a distant second (to Technosailer) on The Buzz Bin’s Top 12 DC Area New Media, PR & Marketing Blogs list.

I was flattered very much by Geoff Livingston:

“Looking around Technorati, I found the top ranked new media/pr/marketing blogs in the Greater Washington region. These are ranked by Technorati’s very subjective authority system. We have an A-lister, Chris Abraham, and then a bunch of indies floating between 41-86.”

I am very proud, and hoping that this blog, Marketing Conversation, starts to rise in the ranks. I am proud to see my friend Alice Marshall‘s blog, Presto Vivace, on the list at number 7! Also, congrats to The Buzz Bin for making number 5.

“Top 12 DC Area New Media, PR & Marketing Blogs
- Technosailer – 874
- Chris Abraham – 191
- Technosight – 86
- Destination Creation – 67
- Buzz Bin – 59
- Alex Rudloff – 58

- Presto Vivace – 56
- Potomac Flacks – 53
- Four Labs – 49
- Maryland Media – 48
- Mike-O-Matic -48
- 21st Century Public Relations – 41″

Advanced Blogging Workshop in Bethesda Today

Chris Abraham — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:51:59 +0000

“Okay, you have a blog and consider yourself a blogger. The next step is how to build your prestige, your readership, and your reputation. This class will demystify the process of taking your personal blog and developing it into a popular resource. Being brilliant, funny, insightful, and inspired is just the beginning; learn how to help your hungry audience find you. 1 session,” Advanced Blogging Workshop

Advanced Blogging

Writer’s Center Workshop Bethesda, May 1^st, 2007

Description

Okay, you have a blog and consider yourself a blogger. The next step is how to build your prestige, your readership, and your reputation. This class will demystify the process of taking your personal blog and developing it into a popular resource. Being brilliant, funny, insightful, and inspired is just the beginning; learn how to help your hungry audience find you.

Instructor

· Chris Abraham, Founding Partner, Abraham Harrison LLC

o www.abrahaharrison.com

o cabraham@chrisabraham.com

o +1 202-657-403

· Blogging since 1999 www.chrisabraham.com

Short Review of Blogs and Blogging

· Ease of publishing.

· Discoverability (Pings weblogs.com or technorati or another ping server)

· Conversationality (Trackbacks or as-they-happen referer logs, or now being part of Technorati and other blog search engines)

· Linkability (All posts should have permalinks)

· Syndicatability (All content should be available in RSS feeds)

· Commentability (All posts should welcome comments)

· Okay to be subjective and opinionated (encouraged!)

· Blogs can influence culture and mainstream media

· CGM, citizen journalism, citizen marketing, new PR

Blogging Best Practices

· Short, pithy, entries

· Constantly updated

· Only one long work a week

· Shameless, assertive, opinionated, unapologetic

· Shows respect, dignity, reciprocity

· Give more than you take

· Join the conversation and community

· Assumes good intent

Reputation as a blogger

· Techniques for building prestige and influence

o Reciprocal links and linking

o Blogroll and blogrolling

o Citations

o Comments

o Pinging ping-servers

o Press releases

o Email requests

o IM and email relationships

o Drinks, dinner, lunch, or coffee

Introduction to Viral Marketing

· Word-of-mouth, buzz, viral, and grassroots

· Authentic, transparent, conversational, honest

· Ask for what you need, give what others need

· Tell people who you are and why you are there

· “Astroturfing” is not worth the short term benefit

· The blogosphere is conversational

· Message, client message, messaging

· Network of weak blogs generally win over a powerful media

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

· Google loves blogs (because Google loves text because it can “see” text)

· Google favors sites that are constantly updated (one a week at minimum)

· Make sure your blog pings: www.pingomatic.com/

· Make sure Google knows you: www.google.com/addurl

· Social bookmarking on Newsvine, Netscape, Digg, and Reddit

· Categories, tags, and tagging: del.icio.us, furl.net, spurl.net, reddit.com

· Be careful how you use pronouns (he, she, and it says nothing)

· Learn about Google Sitemap: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

· We aware of how you use keywords in your blog (density and diversity)

· Optimize your blog like a website (meta tags, alt tags, keywords)

Introduction to Online Brand Promotion

· Blogger advocacy and outreach – top-down,

· Develop a list of blogs appropriate to your campaign

· Mommy blogs, A-Lists blogs, marketing blogs, sports blogs

· Keep a spreadsheet of all the blogs you might want to contact

· Dig into each blog looking for their contact info (not easy at all)

· Develop general message (called a message model)

· Send an bespoke email of introduction and message

· Always give more than you take: gift is key

· Keep record of all blogs and bloggers who respond well

· Delete (remove) bloggers who request it

· Make explicit opt-in request from friendly bloggers

· Don’t assume they want your message

· Reputation is based on trust and fairness – never trifle or lie

Blog messaging and engagement – bottom-up, grassroots, organic
- Go to a blog search engine (Technorati, Ask.com, Blogsearch, etc)
- Type in a topical keyword, phrase, or topic
- Visit the blogs that are talking about your market, topic, or interest
- Where appropriate, leave a short note
- Come back tomorrow (or as often as you can) and do the same thing
- Make sure to message only where people might be interested
- Inform, don’t spam

Introduction to Online Brand Protection

User Google Alerts and other keyword email alerts to track online conversation
- Other tools exist, such as TruCast, TruView, Buzzlogic, and other tools
Reputation management should start long before any crisis needs management
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always an essential consideration online
The last word counts most (especially on blog search engines like Technorati)
Recent posts get indexed (the current conversation counts the most)
Everything lasts forever on Google (make sure your side of the story is on record)
Request – never demand – bloggers and blogs remove defamatory content

Important reading

· Naked Conversations by by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble www.redcouch.typepad.com

· Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

· Applied Blogging Workshop www.appliedblogging.org

· Abraham Harrison LLC Marketing Conversation www.chrisabraham.com/our-insights

Blogging Basics is a Very Basic Blogging Workshop

Chris Abraham — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:02:39 +0000

One of my students, Michele Capots, from last week’s class, Blogging Basics, did a review of her experience of the class that I was very interested in reading.

I just wanted to remind everyone that the Blogging Basics Workshop is super basic, such as “what is a blog” and “how to I join Blogger?”

Anyone nearly as rock star as Michele Capots really needs to attend the Advanced Blogging Workshop or have your company hire me to come over and talk turkey, strategy, integration, promotion, marketing, outreach, SEO, optimization, social outreach, etc.

Otherwise, it is a simple introduction to blogging 101 for folks who still use quill pens and parchment. That said, I did post an amazingly defensive comment about which I am very ashamed.

So ashamed am I that I have included it below for your amusement! (Because I am shameless as well, of course!)

Blogging for Basics April 27th, 2007 by Michele Capots blogs

“Earlier this week I sat though Blogging for Basics, a course at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. Being a writer, I’ve taken many courses at the Writer’s Center over the years and was thrilled that they offered one on blogging. But what I learned is I’m not a beginner.

I’m not an expert by any means, but I knew Technorati. I knew some of the buzz words. The lingo. The class touted that I would learn how to leverage my own personal passion, my own personal artistic voice and my unique perception of the world into this online organ.

But I didn’t. I learned how to construct a blog. Literally, through WordPress. Step by step. I learned a blog should be short. And to write a lot. I could have found that out online. I didn’t learn about the words. The power of the medium. As a PR blogger, I didn’t learn what I should or shouldn’t say and the women who were there to launch a blog for their company didn’t learn how to do that either.

Apparently, I could have gone on instructor Chris Abraham’s blog and saved myself $65. All of the necessary tools are on there. And then some. There’s Bloggers Can Ignore Basic Journalism Ethics and Blogging Needs a Code of Honor, Not a Code of Conduct. This would have been helpful when I first started blogging. The class wasn’t.

He could have said, ‘so I want to be a blogger,’ ‘here’s how to do it, what to write, rules of writing,’ and finally ‘how to be successful at it.’ Personally, that would have been helpful to me and probably to the stay-at-home mom who wants to blog about her sick child and the traveling woman who wants to blog about her exquisite journey. Instead, he was all over the map.

There’s an intermediate class next month, but I think I’ll sit that one out. I’ve decided the only way to blog is to get out there and do it. Going to other blogs, seeing what they’re doing right will teach me more than a brick and mortar class. Although I will say, during the class, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scobel on corporate blogging. From the looks of it, I just might read that.”

My amazingly defensive response, worth of shame and lots of weeping:

“I agree with everything you say. And you’re far from being a beginner. And I would rather eat broken glass and dance to ABBA than teach a beginning class that literally slows down to “how do I set up a Blogger blog” but you have to admit that the Writer’s Center is not the bastion of the bleeding edge. So, here’s some advice: in a world of education and training, Blogging Basics does literally mean “blogging basics.” Yeah, it maps directly. And, unlike, a class called Writing Basics, I also have to talk about “what a blog is” and “what makes a blog” and “what are some blog tools” and “how do I sign up for a blog” and “can you walk us through joining Blogger and joining WordPress?”

That said, I also want you to check out some other free resources:

Ideas of Chris Abraham & Abraham Harrison LLC

That is basically wherein I give the entire shop away!

Cheers for the review!

If you have ever made a blog, know what a blog is, etc, I would recommend you attend only the Advanced Blogging class.

Also, although this is a gorgeous blog, I would recommend going to http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and consider changing your permalinks from “web URLs” to the “custom URL structure” which could change this article from http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/?p=252 to http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/2007/04/27/blogging-for-basics/ which might be longer but is a) easier to understand, URL-wise, as to its topic and it is also b) Google-nip. Also, you have lost an amazing opportunity to offer Meta tags (description, keywords, etc) and a number of other missing pieces.

Anyway, sorry to be showing off here but there is a lot more to blogging than learning how to blog and I would highly encourage you to consider attending the Advanced Blogging class.”

Blogging Basics Course Syllabus at Bethesda Writer’s Center

Chris Abraham — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:25:01 +0000

Blogging Basics One-Day Workshop: “Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicates and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that could change the world,” via The Writer’s Center

Blogging Basics Course at Bethesda
4/24/2007 Writer’s Center Workshop

Description

Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicated and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that very well could change the world!

Instructor

Chris Abraham, Founding Partner, Abraham Harrison LLC
Blogging since 1999 www.chrisabraham.com
cabraham@chrisabraham.com +1 202-657-4063

Blogging defined
A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual and are part of a wider network of social media

What is a blog?

· An online journal (as in “periodical”)

· A web application (as in “program”)

· Easy to use (as easy as webmail)

· Communicative

o Syndicated (RSS, ATOM)

o Link aware (Trackback)

o Comments

o The “search engine advantage”

· Okay to be subjective and opinionated

· Blogs can influence culture and mainstream media

What isn’t a blog?

· A blog is not “just a website”

· A blog doesn’t require editing or oversight

· A blog does not offer privacy

o True anonymity is a myth

· A blog is not a great American novel

o Be brief and to-the-point

o Keep each post to a single topic

Why is a blog different than a website?

1. Ease of publishing

2. Discoverability (Pings weblogs.com or technorati or another ping server)

3. Conversationality (Trackbacks or as-they-happen referer logs, or now being part of Technorati and other blog search engines)

4. Linkability (All posts should have permalinks)

5. Syndicatability (All content should be available in RSS feeds)

6. Commentability (All posts should welcome comments)

Types of blogging

· Web logs – provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries

· Collaborative blogs – A collaborative blog is a type of weblog which publishes posts written by multiple users. The majority of high profile collaborative blogs are based around a single uniting theme

· Corporate blogs – A corporate blog is a weblog published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

· Political blogs – A political blog is a common type of blog that comments on politics. In liberal democracies the right to criticize the government without interference is considered an important element of free speech

· Flogs – a marketing tool designed by a professional advertisement company to promote a product in a fashion one might find on a fan site or in regular blog entries

· Splogs – artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites

Popular blogging fields

· Political – Daily Kos, Red State, Instapundit, Wonkette, Michelle Malkin

· Gossip – Perez Hilton, Gawker, Wonkette, Defamer, Stereogum, Valleywag, TMZ

· Advocacy – Boing Boing, Lifehacker, Treehugger,

· Fashion – The Superficial, Go Fug Yourself, Manolo Blog

· Tech – Techcrunch, Ars Technica, Scobleizer, Joel on Software, Engadget, Gizmodo

Variations on the blog

· Photoblog – a form of photo sharing and publishing in the format of a blog, but differentiated by the predominant use of and focus on photographs rather than text

· Video blog (vlog or video podcast) – a blog that includes video. Regular entries are typically presented in reverse chronological order and often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata

· Audio blogs (Podcasts) – a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers

Where can I blog?

· Free blogging services

o Blogger www.blogger.com

o WordPress www.wordpress.com

o Friendster www.friendster.com

o MySpace www.myspace.com

o LiveJournal www.livejournal.com

o Vox www.vox.com

· Subscription blogging services

o TypePad www.typepad.com

o iWeb www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/features/blogging.html

· Install your own blog software (requires web host)

o WordPress www.wordpress.org

o Movable Type www.movabletype.org

Who is a blogger?

· Everyone!

Why blog?

· Zero barrier to entry

o Technology is no longer a restriction to entry

o Blogging is often free but is always “cheap.”

o Any type of blog host makes you a blogger

· Participate in global conversation

· “Jump the rails” to mainstream media (MSM)

What is a good blog?

· Short, pithy, entries

· Constantly updated

· Only one long work a week

· Shameless, assertive, opinionated, unapologetic

· Give more than it takes

Reputation as a blogger

· Techniques for building prestige and influence

o Reciprocal links and linking

o Blogroll and blogrolling

o Citations

o Comments

o Pinging ping-servers

o Press releases

o Email requests

Important reading

· Naked Conversations by by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble

o redcouch.typepad.com

· The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

o redcouch.typepad.com

· Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents by Reporters without Borders

o www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

· Applied Blogging Workshop is a collaborative blog for all of us

o www.appliedblogging.org