While the Economist is calling what I do “my spiel,”

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Let me explain: my agency is not banking on a shift of power from mainstream media to bloggers and social media.  I have little or no interest in any particular blogger’s or tweeter’s personal influence, though my strategies are not typical. I am interested in all of their voices equally.  There is power in numbers.  I am egalitarian and am not interested in becoming a King-maker online.

In fact, we embrace the chaos!  Nobody in my agency feels like we’re the boss of anybody online. We also understand how scared mainstream media like The Economist are — they don’t really like the shift of control, can’t handle the fact that you really should not — cannot — herd cats.  We have just mastered the art of making a can-opener sound loud and compelling enough to attract kitties from all over the neighborhood!

Abraham Harrison is banking on the disruption of the mainstream online, though not only online. Both worlds bleed together through the mediasphere.  We’re banking on the dilution of the power once held by a handful of journalists, reporters, and anchormen.  At least I see that there is a new and fecund seedbed that is so very fertile and so powerful that even mainstream media tends to follow the lead.

Mainstream media is picking stars from YouTube and they’re picking more and more stories right out of the trending topics on Twitter.  We’re not banking that the social-mediasphere or the blogosphere will usurp the New York Times or the Economist, we’re banking — and experiencing — the WikiLeaks effect.

What is the WikiLeaks effect?  Well, we’re watching the irrational exuberance of newspaper publishers in one giant feeding frenzy over Julian Assange‘s leaked content on his terms.  Influencing hundreds or thousands or millions of bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers en masse to school around a message, an issue, product, an event, or a passion can spur political and news decisions.

Actually, it can change the direction of the conversation. It can change the world. Seriously, this is not hyperbole.

I know this is yesterday’s news but it still hasn’t changed: each one of you — of us — has more access to tools that can expedite, influence, effect, and harness change than ever before. Justin Beiber and Charice Pempengco are the highest-profile example of going from nowhere to King and Queen of pop, but there are an infinity of examples. Perez Hilton, for example.  And no, that land grab is not over.  New titles are awarded every day. Blogging is not dead, it is hard. People giving up because something is too hard is not the same as something dying.  All those tweeters and bloggers who have ceased blogging and tweeting are not reading blogs and tweets.  They’re committed lurkers.  They’re readership.  Yes, even you PR and Ad men, you too.

In mainstream media’s desire to keep up and keep relevant, they have become indiscriminate and frenzied.  There is a lot of opportunity there.  Now is the most empowering time to actively participate in the conversation that is happening now online, happening every day on message boards, forums, Twitter, Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Second Life, irc, Ecommerce sites, blogs, email lists, and whatnot.

My agency and I are not depending on the voice of one blogger or tweeter, we’re depending on their choir of voices in concert.  That’s what The Economist missed.  The new media and social media war is not the war of the flanking Redcoats (MSM), it is the Revolutionary war: the mainstream media Redcoats against the social media Rebels.  Not conventional war.

Mind you, Abraham Harrison offers earned media services, meaning that our messaging and outreaches aim to inspire folks online to seriously consider what we’re proposing with the goal of writing, tweeting, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, sharing and/or Facebooking it.

Not one front directly opposed to another across trenches.

The mainstream media, including The Economist, is physically unable to see what is before them.  They’re unable to even recognize what is going on even now.  They’re not even completely clear that they have been reporting on news, content, events, and political action that has been influenced, steered, instigated, catalyzed, and propagated by communications shops the world over, from crisis shops to public affairs, from promotional agencies to social media marketing teams; from PACs to lobbyists — every day.

Personally, I’ve been herding cats by opening cans of cat food and planting catnip online professionally since 2003. Sorry, Economist, too little too late.

Rise of the image men PR Man has conquered the world. He still isn’t satisfied

AS THEY prepared to face their second big strike in four years, America’s coal-mining bosses knew they had to do something about the newspapers. It was 1906—a time of rising resentment against robber-baron capitalism and the heyday of muckraking “yellow journalism”. During the previous strike the trade unions had fostered good relations with newspapermen and won themselves a sympathetic press. To help put their side of the story, the mining bosses turned to a former journalist, Ivy Lee.

It was already fairly common for big companies and public figures to employ publicists and press agents to represent them and rebut criticism. But these men did not conduct extended campaigns to influence public opinion. And many prominent folk engaged with the mass media as little as possible. As Stuart Ewen notes in “PR! A Social History of Spin”, the standard businessman’s attitude towards the public was one of “hardened arrogance”. Lee was to pioneer new methods—and, in the process, create a new industry.

Lee observed that the rise of national newspaper chains and syndicated journalism in America since the 1880s, combined with the extension of the franchise, had profoundly changed society. Now, for the first time, there was something that could accurately be called “public opinion”, a shared consciousness and conversation across the country—and it was to be feared. Lee noted how the emerging mass media were acting as the conduit for the anti-capitalist message of Progressivism, the liberalising reform movement that peaked in America in the early 20th century. He realised not only that it was essential for businesses to counter this message, but that the same conduit could be used to spread pro-business sentiment.

His idea, blindingly obvious now but a novelty then, was to send newsdesks a stream of statements putting the mining bosses’ case and rebutting allegations against them. These, as well as the statements he put out the same year on behalf of a railway following a train crash, are now sometimes described (with a bit of spin) as the first press releases. The immediate result was perhaps the earliest recorded whinges from journalists about being bombarded with tendentious bumf.

Lee’s response to such complaints was a bombastic “Declaration of Principles”. He snorted that “This is not an advertising agency…our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.” No doubt the hacks scoffed at his pomposity. Lee’s tactics nonetheless worked: the mining bosses’ side of the story was given a fairer hearing henceforth. The public-relations consultant had been born.

Of course, spin and image-making have been around for as long as history has been recorded. The earliest historians were often the PR men for the winners of battles and dynastic squabbles. In 18th-century London, the political spin-doctor was already at work, in the form of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who conducted a ruthless publicity campaign on behalf of the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, in between posing for Gainsborough and Reynolds.

But only since the early 20th century, and Lee’s campaigns for the coal and rail bosses, has there been a recognisable PR industry dedicated to shaping the representation of clients in the media. That industry has since grown to enormous (indeed, perhaps excessive) size and global reach. Ever since Lee’s first spats with cynical hacks, public-relations officers have been locked in an antagonistic, symbiotic relationship with journalists, with mutual contempt tempered by mutual dependency. They have also fought for influence within big corporations against their great rivals in the marketing and advertising departments. Yet, after a century of spinning, PR Man remains uncertain of his proper role. Is he a master manipulator? Is he the devil’s advocate (as long as Satan pays his fees)? Or is he a benign bridge-builder between the corporate world and the public?

The dark arts
Despite representing big businesses, Lee at first bought in to two of Progressivism’s main ideas: that the excesses of capitalism must be curbed; and that ordinary people were rational and responded best to facts and figures. He presented an “honest broker” vision of public relations that, to this day, is the one that most of the industry’s leaders reflexively proffer. As Lee put it, PR is a “two-way street”. He put forward sincere, factually based explanations on behalf of his clients, listened attentively to the public’s response, then conveyed it back to his masters, helping them to understand better how to meet people’s expectations.

This principled version of PR did not long withstand pressure from clients to take a more forceful stance. In 1914 perhaps the most unpopular capitalist barons of all, the Rockefellers, were facing a storm of popular anger over a massacre of striking miners and their families by the paid thugs of a Rockefeller mining company in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee was hired on the strength of his performance in the previous decade’s mining strike. But instead of delivering honest truths, as he had promised in his “declaration”, he spread egregious lies about the strikers and the cause of their deaths. One of his press releases accused Mother Jones, an elderly union organiser, of being a prostitute and brothel-keeper.

Testifying to a congressional inquiry afterwards, Lee was startlingly honest about his dishonesty. “What is a fact?” he asked. “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to give you my interpretation of the facts.” In other words, it was perfectly OK to bamboozle the public with plausible-sounding factoids. Verisimilitude mattered more than veracity. His testimony earned Ivy Lee the nickname “Poison Ivy”. He had committed what is still seen as a grave error for a PR man: becoming the story.

Freudian analysis
Even when Lee was claiming to be an honest broker there were some who doubted that the public responded best to rational argument. The rise of radicalism in the years preceding the Russian revolution worried elites everywhere. And there was growing interest in what the emerging field of psychology had to say about the irrationality of the human mind, and in particular that of the masses. Among the curious was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the other main contender for the title of PR’s founding father. He turned others’ theoretical musings on ordinary people’s openness to images and emotional appeals into a series of handbooks explaining how to manipulate the public mind in pursuit of corporate or political goals.

Like Lee, Bernays had started out as a journalist, editing medical magazines. But he discovered the power of persuasion when, in 1913, he promoted a play about the spread of syphilis in a family, breaking a taboo against mentioning sexual diseases. The success of his efforts persuaded him to become a publicist, representing some of the great performers of the day, from Vaslav Nijinsky to Enrico Caruso.

Bernays’s greatest opportunity came with the outbreak of the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson realised the government needed to bring on board the many doubters who saw it as a capitalists’ war that their country should shun. Bernays and other leading PR men were recruited to a new Committee on Public Information (CPI), a vast propaganda operation. They were to put into practice one of Bernays’s main findings from the studies of mass psychology by Uncle Sigmund and others: that the public’s first impulse is usually to follow a trusted leader rather than consider the facts for itself.

In small towns across the country the CPI recruited bank managers and other local authority-figures as “four-minute men”. They gave brief, supposedly impromptu, speeches in cinemas and other public places. Many made the bogus claims that antiwar sentiment was being fomented by German agents, and that America risked being overrun by Prussians.

So successful was the CPI in shaping public opinion that it encouraged the early PR men, Bernays especially, to puff themselves up to new heights of grandeur. No longer would they be mere lackeys of the robber barons; they were now the Great Manipulators, shapers of public opinion for the public’s own good. Bernays went so far as to proclaim that, since the public was so irrational, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” The alternative to manipulation, he argued, was chaos. Illustrating the extent of his, and the PR business’s, exuberance at this time, one of Bernays’s manuals boasted: “When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’ he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s work.”

Edward Bernays maintained that the alternative to manipulation was chaos
Unlike Napoleon the PR industry has never known retreat. It has spent the past century advancing, from its origins in America and Britain, across the globe and into all areas of corporate and public life. In “A Century of Spin”, another history of the industry, David Miller and William Dinan note how PR conquered China in the 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. In 1984 the first state firm set up an internal PR department, followed a year later by the country’s first PR agency, a joint venture between Burson-Marsteller (a big American firm) and the Xinhua news agency. These days PR enjoys as heady a growth rate as any other industry in China.

All sorts of outfits have discovered the power of persuasion. Charities, trade unions, protest groups and other anti-corporate organisations create stunts and “facts” as powerful, and sometimes as dubious, as those staged by Bernays’s minions. A masterful recent example is a Greenpeace video in which an office worker opens a KitKat and finds an orangutan’s finger inside—the intention being to press Nestlé, the chocolate bar’s maker, to stop buying palm oil from places where the ape’s native forests are being cut down. Such anti-corporate PR often goes curiously unnoticed by historians of the industry, but it is at least as manipulative as what companies get up to.

Indeed, a revolving door has opened between the PR operations of companies and their critics. In 1997 Greenpeace, seeking a new communications chief, turned to Jonathan Wootliff, formerly of two of America’s biggest providers of corporate PR advice, Hill & Knowlton and Fleishman-Hillard. And where is Mr Wootliff nowadays? Back on the corporate side. He works for Reputation Partners, advising big firms (from BP to an Indonesian pulp firm) how to build “productive relationships” with NGOs and activists. The public-relations men recognise that PR is PR, whichever side it is conducted for.

Washes whiter than white
Since the 1960s, when both sides in the brutal secessionist war in Nigeria’s Biafra region hired foreign PR men to try to get the world on their side, the agencies have found a growing sideline in what their critics call “reputation laundering”. Hardly any regime has been too nasty to be represented, from Argentina’s bloody military regime to Suharto’s brutal kleptocracy in Indonesia. Justifying their image-making on behalf of such unappealing clients, PR men have developed another version of what their industry is for—an alternative to the well-established “honest broker” and “great manipulator” models—in which they portray themselves as defence lawyers in the court of public opinion. By analogy with the criminal courts, where even murderers are entitled to a defence, they argue that they are simply serving justice.

For example, in August, when the Guardian wrote about his company’s image-making for the government of Sri Lanka and others with poor human-rights records, Tim Bell, one of British PR’s leading figures (and a former image-maker to Margaret Thatcher) responded: “I am not an international ethics body. We do communications work. If people want to communicate their argument we take the view that they are allowed to do so.” Lord Bell nonetheless says he would not force his staff to work for a client they found unpalatable. Some were recently excused from working on a brief to represent the Norwegian government in calling for a resumption of whaling, for example.

Although it has been debating the issue for decades, the PR industry is no closer to agreeing where the limits of such advocacy should lie, says Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Its professional bodies have codes of practice that ban outright lying on clients’ behalf. But there are so many agencies fighting for business that such rules are often honoured in the breach. The industry “goes round and round” the same ethical issues “like wheels spinning in the mud”, she laments.

What people in the industry are certain about, and have been since the days of Lee and Bernays, is their burning desire to be more than just press-release peddlers and excuse-makers. PR folk want to be at the strategic heart of organisations, helping to make big decisions. Some cite firms such as IBM and Diageo (a drinks giant) where PR men have won seats at the executive top table. Such optimists—the industry is full of them, of course—now spy a rare opportunity to steal a march on the Mad Men of advertising and the flipchart-wielders of marketing. In the chaotic online world of social networking, they argue, their talents are much more relevant than their rivals’.

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Anyone with a laptop can quickly become a company’s most trenchant critic
It is true that anyone with a laptop or smartphone can go online and quickly become a company’s most trenchant and visible critic. Look at the attention (and the near-200,000 followers) grabbed by BPGlobalPR, a Twitter feed set up to attack BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In this world, PR firms expect that their clients will need more help in mopping up publicity slicks and, ideally, in preventing image blowouts before they occur. Ray Kotcher, the boss of Ketchum, one of America’s biggest agencies, predicts there will be “more demand for reputation-defending than ever”. As a result, PR is bound to become more vital, he reckons.

It is not difficult to stick pins in the PR men’s inflated hopes of being the lords of online chaos. For a start, ad men can also distribute their hard-sell branding campaigns on social networks. Nike shows its television ads—the same ones it pays to have broadcast—on its Facebook page, to which over 3m people have signed up as “likers”. Ms Gregory has seen few cases where PR firms have created true social-media-only campaigns: all that is happening is that social-media elements are being added to traditional marketing plans.

As for reaching those new social media “influencers”, most of these still get their basic information from old-fashioned news providers, as do most powerful and influential people. Lord Bell is sceptical, too, pointing out that PR men have talked of rising to the top of big firms for years.

But even if the PR men are in danger of believing their own spin about the opportunities the online world will bring, at least they are showing signs of adapting to it and finding ways to use technological change to further their business. They may not achieve the power and glory they have ached for since the industry’s early days. But it is clear that another century of spin, perhaps greater than the one gone by, is in prospect.

This Fall there will be an important Energy Bill up for vote by Congress, a Bill that will take relatively aggressive steps towards reducing our reliance on foreign oil and foreign governments while increasing our dependence on renewable energy, such as wind power and solar power. Please sign the petition to help give your member of Congress a little incentive to pass the more aggressive version of the Energy Bill legislation, undiluted by the auto or the oil industry and their lobbyists. The following post was written by Lorna Li over at her blog. Via Chris Abraham Online and Memes.org.

Why CAFE and RES Matter for 2007 New Energy Bill

Currently, Congress is debating, behind closed doors, the adoption of 2 provisions to the 2007 Energy Bill that can greatly impact our ability to make America more energy independent, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce pollution, save consumers money, create jobs and spark economic growth.

The first is the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) Standard of 35 mpg for cars and trucks by 2020. The second is the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which calls for 15% of the nation’s electricity to be generated by renewable resources by 2020.

Why support the Renewable Electricity Standard?According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, renewable energy solutions are both sustainable environmentally and economically. The RES provision has the potential to jump-start new clean energy economy and create tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs in things like wind and solar manufacturing and installation. For this reason, it has the strong support of the United Steelworkers.

RES will create thousands of megawatts of new clean renewable electricity generation, decreasing the amount of natural gas we use—lowering prices for consumers on their home heating bills and also benefiting industrial users.

Furthermore, RES is doable – two dozen states that have already put their own Renewable Electricity Standard into place. In fact, many states have moved to establish standards of 30 percent or more—demonstrating that the 15 percent plan proposed in this bill is an achievable compromise that all states can meet.

Why is supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard important?

Supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard will help us curb our addition to a fossil-fuel based source that is increasingly expensive, causes pollution, and is also from highly volatile areas such as the Persian Gulf. This dependence is both unstable and unsustainable.

Furthermore, improving CAFE standards to 35 mpg by 2020 – 13 years from now – will give us better gas mileage, thus, more bang for the buck. This way we can keep more money in our wallets, drive cleaner cars, and thus become less dependent on war and pollution causing oil.

According to the UCS study on Clean Vehicles and Fuel Economy, far from destroying auto jobs, CAFE would create 22,300 jobs in the auto industry alone by 2020—and a total of 170,800 jobs by 2020. The CAFE provision would also save consumers nearly $25 billion at the pump in 2020, according to UCS.

Auto-Industry Lies – Et Tu Toyota?

The Big Three automakers and Toyota are lobbying to kill the Senate version and replace it with a loophole-laden compromise called the Hill-Terry bill that calls for 32 to 35 m.p.g. by 2022. Rather than innovate their fleets to become more fuel efficient, they would rather spend $ millions in advertising to convince the public that attaining the 35 mpg standard is bad for consumers and the environment, and that CAFE kills.

While the auto industry has argued for years that fuel-efficiency would compromise public safety due to the need to build smaller, lighter vehicles, according to an October 2007 article in Scientific American, new engine and transmission technologies could enable manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency without significantly cutting vehicle weights.

In spite of the fact that Toyota currently has the technology to make cars that achieve 55 mpg, Toyota’s refusal to step up to the plate and support the 35 mpg CAFE standard has evoked the wrath of environmentalist groups like the NRDC who now question “How Green is Toyota?” That the maker of the Prius could support the Hill-Terry compromise, which according to UCS, would actually cause us to use 700,000 more barrels each day, feels like sheer betrayal.

Is the auto industry genuinely concerned about the economic well-being of American consumers and our ability to get around as cheaply as possible? Hmmm.

In 1922, General Motors dismantled mass transit across the U.S., bought up trolley systems through its subsidiary National City lines, gutted them and tore up all the tracks. GM joined tire manufacturers, construction companies, and oil companies to lobby for Congress for development of a national highway system, which has defined urban development over the last 90 years. It helped that GM’s president Charles Wilson became secretary of defense and Frances DuPont became the federal highway administrator. Thus America became a oil-addicted, nation of drivers.

With Bush and his Big Oil cohorts in power threatening veto, ordinary Americans may be up for another round of seriously getting screwed. Therefore, it’s up to us to take action and DEMAND a clean, energy future NOW.

Take Action and Support a Strong, Clean Energy Bill for 2007

Instead of making the richest companies in the world richer, this energy bill will benefit consumers and working Americans, make us less dependent on foreign oil and better global citizens. Here are simple actions you can take to lobby Congress for a cleaner, greener future:

1. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Sign this petition and pass it on: Energy Bill 2007
2. Meet other clean energy activists online: Energy Bill 2007 Group on Facebook
3. Tell Toyota, “Shame On You” and get your friends to tell Toyota to support 35 mpg now.

By lobbying Congress to adopt strong energy efficiency measures in the 2007 Energy Bill, we can lower emissions and use less energy in the years to come —saving governments, businesses, schools, and consumers money. Energy efficiency is an energy resource just like anything else and is much cheaper than even coal-fired power generation. We must look to energy efficiency as another solution for our energy needs, while at the same time ramping up the amount of electricity we get from renewables. This is our only way we can guarantee a clean, green future for ourselves and future generations.

Technorati Tags: new energy bill, energy bill 2007, cafe, cafe standard, corporate average fuel economy, renewable electricity standard, res, hill-terry, clean tech, fuel efficiency, fuel economy, global warming

“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

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 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

If you want to become a better bloggers, monetize your blog, and create and build your personal brand then I recommend attending the PostieCon ’07 in Orlando, Florida, on June 1 & 2, 2007. Register now because PostieCon ’07 is cheap at $199.95, but only until May 18th. Even without PostieCon ’07, Orlando is cool, inexpensive, warm, sunny, and seriously entertaining. There is no way this Con is going to be either lame or geeky. It’ll be rock star.

PostieCon ’07 promises to be a fun, informative, educational, and important event, and if you register early, you can save money. So, what are you waiting for? A pop-up window?

PostieCon ’07 is a two-day event that will be held from June 1-2, 2007 in Orlando, Florida. By registering, not only will you be getting to take a mini-vacation to one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, you will receive:

* VIP access to all conference sessions, workshops, and extra-curricular events
* Breakfast (with eggs) Lunch, Drinks and Snacks on Friday and Saturday
* Saturday early evening open bar with hot and cold appetizers
* Sit down dinner with open bar at the award banquet on Saturday evening
* Cool swag to take home

Registration Special: If you register today, you will receive your “backstage pass” for the low, low cost of $199.95. Act soon, because after May 18, 2007, registration costs go up to $249.95.

PostieCon ’07 attendees will get something that no one can put a price on, namely the networking opportunities, blogging tips, business tips, and time spent with some of the best and brightest in the business to bounce ideas around.

I have been blogging since 1999 over at “Because the Medium is the Message“, http://www.chrisabraham.com. Part of what has always been tough for me is figuring out how to take something I am passionate about, blogging and social media, and actually make a bit of a living from it. I have done an appalling job of it and have made all the mistakes. Only now am I finally at the point where my blogging basically pays my car payments. My goal is to help the new kids get their voices out there with fewer and fewer boundaries. I want to make sure my mistakes benefit them.

The second event is called PostieCon ’07 http://www.postiecon.com. It’s a blogger convention down in Orlando, Florida, on June 1 & 2. I want to draw your attention to it in the hopes that maybe you’ll consider speaking at it, or spread just spread the word with your readers

I think PostieCon ’07 is cool because it is for the rest of us bloggers who have yet to ascend to top-200. While TED and SXSW and VON are super-cool, they’re also super PhD-level. PostieCon ’07 is all about the training up the bush league.

As I see it there are three reasons (probably many more) why your readers should know about this Con, and perhaps attend:

a) Let super-serious B-, C-, D-List bloggers meet each other, put a name to a face, conspire on ways to get better, and trade war stories and

b) Let some serious experts and A-Listers, like us, share their experience, hope, and joy as well as leading them by the hand to monetization strategies, how to build brand, how to attract readership and traffic, and all the stuff you need to do (and seems obvious to use) in order to go from D- to C- to B- to A-List!

c) To quote the site: “Why should you attend PostieCon ’07 ’07? Two words: Rock Star.”

That said, I hope you consider speaking at PostieCon. Your voice would be very welcome. If you can’t make it, I was hoping that you might share the love with your readers (as attendees) or other folks who might be really into speaking at PostieCon. And, as you know, I am not asking for any particular coverage. You are free to say or do anything you like with this email and the content herein. That’s the way things work. So, just consider this an official love note.

Why Should I Attend PostieCon ’07?

Why should you attend PostieCon ’07 ? Two words: Rock Star. Bloggers and Internet personalities are the Rock Stars of the information age. Bloggers reach millions of dedicated fans on a day to day basis, it’s easy to see why today’s humble blogger could potentially be tomorrow’s Rock Star. That’s why PostieCon ’07 ‘s theme is “You’re A Rock Star”. We are here to educate bloggers on how to build traffic and readership, and use your notoriety and unique brand to create value and monetize your voice. It’s not all about money and fame, our conference is designed to help you become a better blogger. We have invited some of the world’s biggest bloggers to share their knowledge, perspective and experience with PostieCon ’07 Attendees. We provide the peeps and the knowledge, you use it to better yourself and build your blog.

Want to be a Speaker?

PostieCon ’07 will, have numerous opportunities for speakers. From individual presentations to group discussions, the event is open to speakers who represent the diversity of our bloggers. PostieCon ’07 ‘s theme is You’re A Rock Star, and its goal is to introduce bloggers to methods of making their blogs better, more known, and more profitable. This event is open to all bloggers from anywhere and everywhere, from the most seasoned to the greenest of the greenhorns. (For rookie bloggers, we have a special featured event: Blogger Boot Camp.)

Currently, PostieCon ’07 is searching for the best speakers to share their knowledge with the attendees of this exciting, one-of-a-kind event. So, who are we looking for?

- Does your blog or new media site lead the industry?

- Does your traffic make your friends and competitors frothing-at-the-mouth jealous?

- Does your expertise in this competitive industry earn you a good income?

- Is your format the envy of your friends, peers, and competitors?

- Have you come to the realization that in the new media universe, your content is king?

- Are you the owner of a unique, compelling success story?

- Are you at the forefront of the blogging/new media industry?

- Are you an advertiser looking to reach out to bloggers?

If your answer to any or all of these questions is “yes,” then you’re exactly the kind of person we’re looking for. Our attendees deserve to hear from the best, and sometimes the best person for the job isn’t the most famous or well-known. We need to hear from you, so don’t be shy — we don’t byte.

If you’re an advertiser with a product you feel would be useful to our target audience, and wish to get your product in the hands of tomorrow’s notables of the blogging scene, this is an excellent opportunity for you as well. Please contact us and explain to us what makes your product or service essential for our industry’s niche needs.

For more information or to become a speaker contact our Event Coordinator Britt Gustafson

Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is number 9 on Forbes Top 25 Web Celebrities. Scoble is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble, and has a son, Patrick, from a previous marriage. He and his wife currently work at PodTech.net, a video-podcast startup. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.

* Session: Living in a Google World

David Ponce

David Ponce is a 26 year old web entrepreneur who took up blogging as a hobby over three years ago. Quickly realizing the potential of the niche-marketed micro publishing business, he quit his full time job as a computer salesman to devote to full time blogging. His articles, written on OhGizmo.com, have been linked to from a plethora of sites, including Gizmodo, Engadget, Yahoo’s The 9, Slashdot, Digg and BoingBoing. David himself has been interviewed by several mainstream publications, such as PC World Magazine and SmartMoney Magazine. He currently serves as Executive Editor of the site, managing a small team of 5 rotating writers, and has plans for launching several other sites to form a network.

* Session: Turning Visits into Cash

Michelle Madhok

Michelle Madhok is Founder of SheFinds.com and SheFindsMom.com, online publications distributed via e-mail and blogs that help busy women everywhere shop the web for the latest beauty and style finds.

A widely regarded expert in online shopping, Michelle is also the style columnist for and a contributing editor for MSN Shopping, Cotton Incorporated and the American Heart Association. Her style and shopping tips have been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, radio and television interviews, including Metro newspapers in New York and Boston,Women’s Wear Daily, The Tyra Banks show, NBC, Investor’s Business Daily, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, and the Washington Post.

Prior to launching SheFinds, Michelle enjoyed a career in new media. First, she was the Director of Entertainment Marketing for CBS Broadcasting New Media and then she was the Group Director of Editorial Products for women and oversaw all content for women at AOL. Michelle has a BS in Communications from UC Berkeley and a MS in Marketing from Northwestern University. She currently resides in New York City with her husband, Michael Palka.

* Session: Turning Your Passion Into Dollars

Nancy Shenker

Marketing Guru, Blogger, and Former Hippy Girl Nancy A. Shenker is Founder & Principal of theONswitch, a firm specializing in start-ups, business transformations, and non-traditional growth solutions. She frequently consults on “smart” marketing spending, PR, and branding and has written several “how to” guides for business owners. Her “business blog” is “The ONblog” (http://theonswitch.typepad.com/theonblog/) and her newest blog, about the ways in which communication and life have changed (and yet stayed the same) is “Hippy to Wiki” (http://theonswitch.typepad.com/hippytowiki/). “I encourage all PostieCon ’07 attendees to get in touch with me before June and tell me what they want to hear about when I speak!”

* Session: Hippy to Wiki: How Blogs and “Traditional” Communication Can Live in Peace (and make $$)

Sherry Heyl

Recently nominated for Women in Technology “Woman of the Year” Sherry Heyl is the CEO and Idealist for What a Concept! Her responsibilities include business development and inspiring ideas and communication strategies. Sherry has been involved in the technology industry since 1998 when she developed her own curriculum at FSU to study ecommerce. Currently she creates strategic plans for integrating streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS, and virtual worlds into communication plans for B2B, B2C, Non-profit and Higher Education organizations. Sherry has been a guest speaker and keynote speaker for the Project Management Institute (PMI), a panelist for the 400 Technology Connector, TechLINKS, and Customer Relationship Management Association (CRMA), and is on the board of directors for the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum (AECF) as the programs director and has participated in putting programs together for the Atlanta Media Bloggers Group and AeA and is a member of the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) and the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association. Sherry is a graduate of Florida State University with undergraduate degrees in Marketing and Creative Writing.

* Session: Why Live Life Online?

Jim Kukral

Jim is a veteran online marketing expert and award-winning blogger who focuses on helping businesses, or bloggers, make money or find publicity online through creative marketing ideas and strategies. Jim has been blogging since 2001 and has participated and worked on over 30 blogs since that time and has written thousands of blog entries. He is the publisher of ReveNews.com, the leading online revenue group blog that focuses on the billion dollar industry of Internet revenue. Jim is also the founder of BlogKits, a blog advertising network that focuses on helping bloggers find creative ways to generate revenue.

* Session: The Secrets To Long-Term Blog Success & Profitability

Lena West

Lena L. West is the CEO & Chief Strategist at xynoMedia Technology. Affectionately known as the “geek with speak”, Lena understands complex technology concepts and distills them into easy-to- understand strategies. xynoMedia helps mid-market companies make sense of their place in the online world by developing customized, progressive Internet strategies that consistently increase thought leadership, online revenues and visibility. West communicates her expertise about social media, web 2.0 and online technologies through regular writing for Jupitermedia, her InfoWorld.com blog and her Entrepreneur.com column and blog. She is also on the BlogHer Business Advisory Board and a member of the Women’s Presidents’ Organization, TENG-NY and the Downtown Women’s Club. Currently, West is conducting research for a book she’s authoring about the role of women in technology. xynoMedia’s mission is to help 10,000 mid-sized businesses grow 25-50% by 2010.

* Session: Building Blog Value

Shirley Frazier

Shirley George Frazier is an excavator who digs up smart marketing solutions for individuals and business owners looking to increase their revenue through effective promotions and collaborations on and off the Web. She’s president of Sweet Survival®, owner of three popular blogs, and author of two best-selling niche industry books. Shirley has more than 16 years of experience conducting seminars on business topics and consulting with a range of clients from home-based professionals to Macy’s. She has appeared on CNBC, The Food Network, and The Discovery Channel, and her expert opinion and articles have been featured in Entrepreneur, Business Start-Ups, Black Enterprise, and Opportunity Magazine.

* Session: Building Your Niche Blog

Kristie Tamsevicius

Kristie Tamsevicius turns authors and speakers into the lavishly paid in-demand experts in their field. She is the host of Speaker Success Talk Radio, the founder of Webmomz.com, a community for work at home moms, president of Branding on the Net and author of several books including, I Love My Life: A Mom’s Guide to Working from Home. A sought-after branding expert, Kristie creates branded websites that position you as a mini celebrity so you increase sales, book more presentations and become headline news.

* Session: Building Your Niche Blog

Dan Rua

Dan is an experienced early-stage venture capital investor with a technology foundation and product design, development and management experience. Inflexion Fund is his third early-stage venture capital fund. Prior to Inflexion, Dan was a Partner with Draper Atlantic, the east coast fund of Silicon Valley’s highly successful early-stage venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Dan has participated in funding and building thirty-two companies and managed funds totaling over $140 million.

* Session: Blogging for Business

The Blog Squad

Known as The Blog Squad, Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D., are authorities in helping independent professionals and small businesses to grow and prosper through optimizing their blogs. Between them, they have 10 blogs they post to on a regular basis covering topics like Internet marketing, business blogging, ezine marketing, writing and marketing books with a blog, plus several private blogs for clients and programs they teach. The Blog Squad are co-authors of “Build a Better Blog: The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your Business with a Professional Blog” and “Confessions of a Reluctant Blogger: From Boring to Brilliant in 30 Days”, and keepers of the blog site “Build a Better Blog.” They also host a weekly Internet radio show, “Blogging and Beyond.”

* Session: Blogging for Business

Jim Turner

Jim Turner began blogging in early 2004, and began posting about life as a father and husband. He became one of the top Daddy bloggers, and used his expertise to found One By One Media, LLC, a social media consulting firm. While consulting companies on using the new social media for their marketing and advertising needs, Jim then founded Bloggers For Hire, a company that provides professional bloggers to companies. Jim continues to be a well respected professional blogger and has mentored many bloggers to become professionals, and has lead companies to be successful in their online campaigns. Jim is a contributor to Business Blog Consulting, and also writes his personal blog at Genuineblog.com, and is the founder of the The Best of Blog Awards. When he is not blogging, Jim is busy being a husband and father of 4 kids 7 years old and younger.

* Session: Blogging for Business

Paul Lewis

With more than 20 years experience in marketing and information technology, Paul Lewis has gained recognition as a leading visionary and author in the field of modern marketing strategy. Through his expertise, Paul has served on the Advisory Board for the Direct Marketing Association and spoken at numerous marketing conferences worldwide such as DM Days, the Power of eMarketing and UFI Open Summer Seminar in Finland, presenting on topics including Generation Y and the digital generation, cross-media campaigning and relationship marketing. He is currently the co-author of the upcoming publication Y: Outside the Polls and Inside the Minds of the Millennials and is the President/CEO of Interactive Agency MindComet.

* Session: Connecting with Advertisers

I am amazed by Bronwen, my Twitter friend, who founded PerthNorg. She is teaching me what a Norg is and I want to help her pimp her very important and wonderful meme, Norg… Here is the sort answer as to what a Norg is, “norg is short for news organization. But not the corporate, MSM news organizations we have come to know – this is a new organization run by the people. It’s putting all the new media theories into practice.”

From Twitter and email:

chrisabraham “d bronwen I want you to show me a definition of Norg in more than 140 words… I can blog…”

bronwen: @chrisabraham: On it, sending you an email in a minute

Here is Bronwen’s email:

“Bit of info – use what you want. Ok well “norg” is short for news organisation. But not the corporate, MSM news organisations we have come to know – this is a new organisation run by the people. It’s putting all the new media theories into practice.

A Norg is a community news blog – people can link to news they think is important, write a news story, embed a video story, create a podcast or upload original photos. And comment .

Everyone who joins becomes a journalist – or Cit J as we call them.

I created the concept and developed it from scratch some time last year.

My company Norg Media hopes to launch other norgs very soon (currently getting funding together – spread the word).

I used the word Norg because it best described what I was trying to create. The word come from a conference held in Philly, see here:

http://norgdom.perthnorg.com.au/2006/08/24/about-those-norgs/

This is how we describe PN on the site: PerthNorg is a news site with a twist – you are in control. By becoming a Cit J you can link, write, record or take a photograph of the stories that matter to you.

You then vote for the stories you feel are important. It is your news, your views. So, join the media evolution now.

I await more questions if you have them ;)

Bronwen”

“Tonight I am teaching Advanced Blogging for the Writer’s Center at Glen Echo tonight. To follow is the syllabus.” Via Applied Blogging Workshop

Shel Holz is smart and insightful in his response to the bad rap that PR gets these days: “The lying profession? Please. … And who, in this era of like-it-or-not transparency, believes they can get away with a lie anyway?” Via Strumpette. My response? I feel the same way about the reputation of the defense attorney as I do about PR. Defense attorneys have appalling reps. “How the hell can you represent him? He’s a murderer! He’s a rapist! He’s a scum!”

Well, the problem is is that since the PR profession is, in a lot of ways, a neutral solution, PR tends to begin to pick up the tastes, the coloring, and the aroma of the additive, the client.

Most attorneys wish that they could “cherry pick” their clients and so do most advertisers and PR professionals. I hear, all the time, that taking on so-and-so a client would be bad for brand and I am appalled by that.

My friends over a TickleKitty, a sex shop, need New Media Marketing and WOM PR as well, but lots of folks are either too uptight, too puritanical, or too judgmental (or too attached and afraid so as to have lost some requisites: shamelessness and fearlessness, a competitive advantage in an industry that is afraid of its collective shadow).

What I love about Edelman and their respective practice heads and VPs+ is that they’re pretty shameless (though they don’t quite have fearless under control and their hubris and arrogance is off the charts).

So, since PR is itself so neutral — some call it shape-shifting or chameleon-like (there is no there there) then we take a lot of the brunt for the actions of the client. We suffer for the sins of the father…

I responded in-depth to a question from Charles Edward Frith that was asked over at Strumpette, in response to my long comment,

“a huge portion of the population that are social media averse; gadget allergic even. How do you propose to get your message to this group?” I misunderstood his question and replied as though he asked, “a huge portion of the PR, advertising, and marketing population…” as opposed to the “general” population, and so my response is based on that misunderstanding and premise… “You really can’t — the main reason that I only lasted at Edelman for 90-days is because they never used me for my expertise in Linux, RSS, SEO, geek culture, geek cred… they really just wanted someone else who “got blogs” Blogs are also the Web 2.0 platform, too. The gulf between Communication School and the MIT Media Lab is too deep.”

Here is the comment from Charles Edward Frith in full:

“I’m not sure if you’re responding to me Chris. It is OK to address people directly in orums; we call it the conversation. If you are, I am saying that there is a huge portion of the population that are social media averse; gadget allergic even. How do you propose to get your message to this group?

And here is my long, ranting, and misdirected response:

“You really can’t — the main reason that I only lasted at Edelman for 90-days is because they never used me for my expertise in Linux, RSS, SEO, geek culture, geek cred… they really just wanted someone else who “got blogs” Blogs are also the Web 2.0 platform, too. The gulf between Communication School and the MIT Media Lab is too deep.

They didn’t even see what I was, which was a geek first, a marketer second. I don’t know if I can share this here, but here are some of my ideas on the subject… http://www.cabraham.com/ideas — to me, it is really about both the community and also the platform.

One needs to blog — message — at both the people in the blogosphere but also to the semantic web. When I realised that www.edelman.com was anti-SEO-optimized (it didn’t care at all about search engine optimization at all!), and really didn’t care (and they were afraid of upsetting IT and the people who ran the site) I was pretty sure I had made a terrible decision.

New Marketing needs to understand ping servers, online communities, cirtual worlds, RSS, RSS2, ATOM, GData, tags, labels, Google juice, the semantic web, gadgetization, what “slashdotted” is, why del.icio.us and digg and reddit and Newsvine and Stumbleupon are important. They need to grok Revver and Vox and Facebook and they need to know what “WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Xoops, Joomla, phpBB, etc” are.

This isn’t just “how to IM Kos” — this is about Internet Forensics and fisking and unintended consequences and blowback and counter-messaging.

There is a lot more going on than just “activating email lists” and “creating a blog.”

And we have not even talked about Prediction Markets, we have not talked about message boards, we have not talked about YouTube (it is a community, not a video site, at its heart), or Flickr (same thing, it is a community and it is not Photobucket).

New Media Marketing and New PR needs to know what Web 2.0 is, not as a buzz word or as hocus pocus. It is a platform, it is an emergence, it is a honey pot. It is “build it and they will come,” but only if it is cool and and compelling, and always in beta, and never loses focus of the users’ needs.

Actually, Yahoo and AOL are getting their game on again. Google gets it in its source code. Why are PR and marketing firms so risk averse? Why, to quote you, Mr, Charles Edward Frith, why is there a “huge portion of the population that are social media averse; gadget allergic even?”

And when I say that, I am talking about Edelman, I am talking about NMS, I am talking about Ogilvy. It is our responsibility as media professionals to be so expert in the technology, the protocol, the culture, and the passion (called passion chamber, as another term for the blogosphere’s echo chamber — and I own www.passionachamber.com, actually) so that this population doesn’t have to.

A population that universally adopts iPods, Plasma HDTVs, and DirecTV with TiVO is not gadget allergic.

What Old PR and Old Media might be really great at is taking an ubergeek like me and working with me to translate all of this cool stuff to the 7th grade reading ease so that new media and web 2.0 can better connect. This will be more and more important.

Unfortunately, when it comes to influencing the influencer, that person is not the “population” — that is a person who thinks that “salesmen” and “PR executives” and “advertising folks” are a bunch of wankers who don’t get it, wouldn’t know cool if it hit ‘em in the face, who are too focused on what people think about them to ever allow people to get to know them, to be authentic, and to be open.

The bad PR that PR has felt for years: snake oil salesmen, hustlers, pretty boys, spin-doctors, and inauthentic, opportunistic liars is exacerbated in the rarefied web where all of these things are not tolerated at all — and to be honest, nobody has to.

Lots of PR people I know tell me that they have to be risk-averse and they have to pull punches because the PR world is incestuous and to be honest, burning bridges is a death blow to one’s career. I am told the same thing by folks in the Valley who are afraid of insulting the silicon Gods.

Coming from a place of fear is just plain unacceptable. At the end of the day, I am a Linux SA who loves to hack PHP and MySQL and so really, I am neither a Valley wag nor am I am PR lifer. Most of my consulting deals with my niche of genius and I don’t see myself as ever getting too tarred or feathered — never to the point where people will cease hiring my counsel… even if it is on the down low after my name is mud.

So, I am not really tolerant when it comes to this PR sycophantism. The Internet and the bloggers and the people who matter now don’t play that. I know reporters and they do surely covet and protect and are jealous of their career arcs. And this fear for career and for immortality is easy to coerce and control.

Web 2.0 is not about control. The X factor in new marketing is that people really have no career arc, people online really cannot be kept in the kind of sycophantic blackmail that is common on Capitol Hill, on Madison Avenue, on K Street, and also in Silicon Valley.

When Edelman has to block Strumpette from 2,000 laptops and desktops held in their worldwide network, then maybe Edelman and the like aren’t as new media and new public relations as they would like to preach.

You can’t have it both ways. The only two things that the Internet doesn’t suffer: fear and hypocrisy. And from what I have been seeing, there seems to be a lot of both of them, both in Old PR and Marketing as well as in “new marketing” and “new media PR.”

Anyway, I am ranting. I have a call soon so I am going to stop now and click on “Submit Comment.” Thanks in advance for indulging me. I am going to rewrite this a little and post it on my blog… cheers for making me thing and making write! I have been way too busy to take the time to really download.”

I teach blogging workshops for the Writer’s Center and four of them are coming up. They all have spots still available. On Thursday, March 1, I teach Blogging Basics at Glen Echo from 7:30PM-10PM; Blogging Basics at Arlington Arts Center on March 6 from 11AM-1PM; Advanced Blogging at the Arlington Arts Center on March 13 from 11AM-1PM; and Advanced Blogging at Glen Echo on March 15 from 7:30PM-10PM. Come join me.

People ask me what I think about “full disclosure” and “blogger ethics.” My answer always is, there is no obligation for any blogger to follow the ethical standards of journalists or public officials. Bloggers are bloggers because of the true freedom of speech. Freedom of speech doesn’t demand truth. But, if bloggers want to keep the trust they’ve been given by their readers, then they had better be open, honest, authentic, and transparent.

That said, the trust relationship bloggers have built and enjoy with their readers is quite a powerful feedback. That relationship is the market force that keeps bloggers honest, not ethical standards or requirements. Ultimately, I demand rigorous reader discernment — caveat lector, let the reader beware — and do not suffer morons gladly.

Here are some previous articles that I have written about the topic:

Blogger Ethics Coverage:

The New York Times Code of Ethics is Mandatory for Journalists Not Bloggers

Caveat Emptor et Lector Repost

Bloggers Can Ignore Basic Journalism Ethics

Bloggers do not Aspire to be Journalists

Pay Per Post Coverage:

Vanity Advertising on PayPerPost is Addicting

Edelman Ethics Coverage:

In Defense of Edelman over Bribery Charges

Not a Bribe with Disclosure and Transparency

BL Ochman Gets the Vista Edelman AMD Bribery Scandal

I Think I May Have Jinxed Edelman PR

Andy Sernovitz of WOMMA Blames the Victims in Edelman Controversy

What I Would Have Done if I Were Edelman Me2Revolution

Paul Mooney on and the New York Times’ Silence about the Edelman Bribe

Microsoft Did Not Bribe Bloggers Reports Microsoft

Journalism Gods Agree with Me on The Bribe

In addition to my 90-minute TypePad video tutorial, TypePad has a list of the ten simple steps that you can follow to get the most out of your TypePad blog.

1. Get started in private. While you’re customizing your design and writing your first few posts, you might want to protect it from prying eyes.
2. Customize your design. Your blog’s design should reflect who you are, and TypePad makes it easy to customize the look and feel of your blog.
3. Point your own domain to your blog. Whlie many bloggers love having typepad.com in their URL, we make it easy to point your own domain to your blog.
4. Draft a simple blogging policy. Not everyone will need one, but if your business has several blogs, or several authors contributing to one blog, you might want to draft even a simple blogging policy.
5. Set your feedback preferences. Blogs are great ways to hold conversations with your readers, and TypePad gives you powerful tools to manage that conversation.
6. Let the world know about your blog. Once you’re ready, it’s time to let the world know your blog exists. And TypePad makes it easy to get your blog noticed.
7. Post early, post often. The number one way to grow your audience is to post frequently. Blogging has an inertia to it — the more you blog, the more you find occasions and reasons to blog.
8. Spice it up with photos. A common misconception is that you have to be a great writer to have a great blog. With TypePad’s integrated photo management, you can let your photos do the talking.
9. Get rich with audio and video. Being an amateur (or even semi-professional) video or radio star is easier than ever, and TypePad’s the perfect place to bring your rich content to your readers.
10. Track your success. Once you’re up and running, you’re going to want to know just how many people your blog is reaching, and what they think about it.

Edelman and the Flogging of America by DIGITAL STREET JOURNAL is the finest analysis of the Edelman-Wal-Mart joint that resulted in the Wal-Marting Across America fiasco.

If you don’t have time to read the article, here is your take-away warning,

“This is not about public relations. This is about public affairs. There’s a difference. Public affairs is decidedly more political and comes with a different set of standards and values.”

Military-grade fisking — ruthlessly detailed point-by-point criticism that highlights errors, disputes the analysis of presented facts, or highlights other problems in a statement, article, or essay — is generally only aimed at public affair campaigns.

In the current political climate, Wal-Mart is political, which is why the Wal-Mart campaign is run out of Edelman’s Public Affairs office in DC and not in New York or Chicago.

To help you a little more with how things work and to help you get up to speed before you attend my Writer’s Center blogging classes, I have created free step-by-step online video tutorials for blogging on Blogger, WordPress.com, VOX, and TypePad. I hope these are useful to you.

Blogger Tutorial – Joining and Blogging Step-by-Step Video Workshop

WordPress.com Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Blog Using WordPress.com

VOX Tutorial – How To Join and Blog on Vox.com

TypePad Tutorial – How to Blog using the TypePad Blogging Service

Via The Applied Blogging Workshop

BizHack posted a response to a blog post I posted and then deleted (oops) from the main page of my blog.

I didn’t delete the page, though, and John Keotsier nailed me, “Talk about good timing – Chris Abraham jumped ship from Edelman just before the proverbial sh*t hit the proverbial fan … Reputation is hard to gain, easy to lose. Good timing!”

Well, I didn’t jump ship so much as walked the plank. I mean, the blog post was Out of the Firing and into the Frying Pan, after all. Full transparency!

The Internet may have a latency of 24-hours but the Blogosphere is realtime.

I have been on VOX since its launch but only last week did they open it up to anyone who wants to join.

So, watch my VOX step-by-step online video tutorial and then go ahead and join VOX and get involved. My VOX address is chrisabraham.vox.com — come say hello.

“The reason bloggers have more fun is simple: we don’t have editors, we can tell you what we think instead of pretending we don’t have opinions, most of us can work in our pajamas if we want to, and we don’t have to worry about being politically correct.” Via B.L. Ochman

Mike Signer lives an exemplary life. I was not surprised when he published an article on American Exemplarism, A City on a Hill, “Exemplarism would value both strength and international prestige equally, seeing them not as mutually exclusive but rather as mutually reinforcing.”

“America’s economic, political, and military strength, when deployed wisely, enhances our prestige around the world; that prestige, in turn, allows us to expand our influence and power by engendering the willing followership of other countries.”

Exemplarism places “the United States in a community, but as its leader.” America has a tradition of exceptionalism, but Signer sees modern American exceptionalism as vulgar, framing “the United States as an exception to the world, rather than as an exceptional–meaning excellent–nation within it” which “undermines our ability to translate our uniqueness into global leadership.”

I am still reading the article, but I wanted to share it now because I will surely need to read it a couple times before I grab Mike for a couple beers and a heady conversation about the article.

Well worth registering for free to Democracy A Journal of Ideas in order to read the full article.