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[Originally posted over at the Biznology blog] I must admit right away that I am a disciple of the seminal book on the Internet revolution and what it means for business, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The main premise of the manifesto is that markets are conversations and that no matter how ardent and impassioned the man at the lectern may be, the audience now has the power, through the Internet, to compare notes real-time, to heckle and critique without being shushed. When this was written, there was neither Twitter nor Facebook—and the blog was still in its infancy. I have been collecting all sort of quotes that I have been wanting to address and believe that I can write 95 posts just based on the Cluetrain’s 95 Theses, but for today I will just focus on number 83: We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

I returned to the book and read through it until it resonated with me as a social media marketer and digital PR executive. Here’s the theme of this post:

But, of course, the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They understand that they aren’t censors, they’re the company’s best conversationalists. Their job—their craft—is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

I have benefited from all of this chaos. I am not a PR type at all, having received my degree in literature and having an early career in web application development and Linux sys admin. I am not a PR type at all and yet here I am, in social media PR and marketing.

What I know that most PR execs can’t accept is that there are 50 million and not just 50 people who write about products, services, experiences, videos, movies, television, music, and politics. Every day I see traditional PR execs re-brand themselves as digital PR execs by simply transferring the old model of reaching out, personally, to just the right reporter with a press release and favor.

Over the last decade, this model has worked in the blogosphere just as long as publicists were able to discover and groom a small cadre of highly-successful and popular bloggers to become the new journalists. These new journalists are professionals, well-versed in how PR works, and fluent in the lingua franca of public relations. Companies such as AllTop, Klout, Compete, Traackr and eCairn specialize in identifying the most influential 25-50 top bloggers and tweeters—catering to this traditional PR model that has yet to be revolutionized away from its obsession with engaging only the top influencers and recognizing that in 2011, there are 50 million potential influentials and not just 50.

In the next post, I will go into specifics as to how this is even possible. And it isn’t. It isn’t possible to engage 50 million bloggers online, but it is surely essential to try—for many reasons.

The first reason why it is essential to move past the top-50 bloggers in your industry is churn. Every 18 months, a blog dies. Blogs are hard. The A-list blogs are like athletes—they’re only eligible or viable for a little while and it is essential to scout community centers, high schools, and colleges to find the next Michael Oher well before anyone else does. Every 6-18 months a blog dies, the A-list changes, the long tail reorganizes, and the blogger you had invested in heavily suddenly decides to stop blogging. It happens all the time. Read on.

The second reason to dig deep into the long tail instead of sticking with your A-list is accessibility. A-listers are hard to access. Recently, Audi apparently gave an A8 automobile to everyone who had a Klout score above a 70. Other A-listers demand Morton steaks or nights out on the town, sponsored trips, and even payola from Izea. A-list bloggers are busy and their attention is being spent on national and international brands and agencies such as Edelman and Ogilvy. Most A-list bloggers these days are advanced amateurs; more and more are semi-pro and professional, making a lot of their living from their blogging. The reason it is such a competitive place is because these bloggers are the kings and queens of their high school and you had better be gorgeous and rich and smart and have blue eyes if you want to to gain access. Remember: it is like bidding for keywords on Google or investing like Warren Buffett: buy low, sell high; everyone’s fighting over the same keywords on Google AdWords, the same stocks on Wall Street, and the same bloggers online. If you spend some time looking a little harder, you can really find some amazing content that hasn’t been discovered yet; and, if you’re smart, you’ll help that blogger and that blog take it to the next step. And guess what? You’ll end up being the hero in that scenario. You’ll have 50 million to choose from.

The third reason to spend more time exploring the smaller, newer, less popular blogs is availability. Most bloggers start their blogs out of passion. Others, because they were hoping to get some swag. Still others started it as a way to get a job, to push their agenda forward, to make a little extra cash from Google AdSense and Amazon Associates (good luck on that), to start working towards a future as a journalist, because they hate their jobs, because they’re expressing some pent-up creativity, or because if they don’t get stuff off of their chest they’ll burst. There are a million reasons. The one thing that most of these bloggers winsomely dream is that they’ll be discovered some day. Every day, my agency discovers bloggers. Every campaign we discover several thousand and reach out to them on behalf of high-profile clients and that is generally the very first time that most of them have ever been pitched by an agency—the first time they, as a blogger, have ever been kissed.

The fifth reason to reach out to many more than just the top 50-150 bloggers is impact. No matter how successful an A-list outreach, the total number of blog posts even possible is 50-150. And we all know that even the shiniest of golden PR children don’t do 100%, so we’re talking a fraction of that. Closer to maybe 10-25, tops. When you include everyone—as many of the 50 million as possible who are germane to the campaign—you’re talking between 1,000-5,000 blogs in a typical long-tail blogger outreach, resulting in 50-400 earned media mentions—and I am only going as low as 50 because my Director of Client Services keeps on telling me we need to under-promise and over-perform. We routinely get 200-300 posts and tweets.

The sixth reason why pitching, engaging, and responding to blogs and bloggers nobody has every heard of is to be their first—and this first contact with a brand can be the experience that encourages them to continue blogging. I always use Tina Fey as my analogy because I love her. She’s amazing. But I am pretty sure she’ll never come meet me for coffee. However, if we were chums Freshman year at UVA when she was all frizzy hair, brocade vests, and bolo ties, just getting into comedy—insecure and unsure—and if I was her number one fan, helped get her gigs and exposure, and then kept encouraging her in her passion, then she would indeed be someone who might meet me for a quick joe and a muffin in the morning before work while I’m in town. Same thing with long tail bloggers. Getting pitched by a PR company early on might turn that blogger all Sally Field, “You like me, you really like me!”

The seventh reason is because hundreds of earned media blog posts effect Google differently than a couple dozen. While delivering client message to as many bloggers as possible in order to garner as many earned mentions as possible as quickly and as numerously as possible—for the impact—is always my number-one goal, I have also noticed that the secondary effect of having hundreds of independent, real, true, B-Z-list bloggers suddenly carry my clients’ news is the most powerful organic SEO benefit you can ever imagine, almost over night. White hat link-farming, if you will—primarily because none of these hundreds of posts are scripted, are paid for, are demanded, are aggregated, are blogged, or are mashed up from RSS feeds, search results, or a hive of link-farmers doing black-hatted sort of things. I mean, in order for any of this to work, the narrative needs to work, the pitch needs to work, the gift and ask need to be compelling. There’s no way to cheat on this—the outreach campaign needs to be absolutely solid, compelling, and generous for it to work, but at the end of the day, hundreds of legit blogs linking a client’s products and services and do the sort of magic that used to be merely the thing of legend.

And finally, the eighth and top reason why a long-tail blogger outreach is so worthwhile and is the future of PR: the power of the Internet is that everyone can participate and that there is zero barrier to entry. Actively ignoring everyone and only putting your attention and time and money and resources on the same old someone—journalists, celebrities, broadcasters, and A-listers—really misses the point of what The Cluetrain Manifesto has to tell us about this new thing. We were—and are currently—able to see the effect that everyone, connected and engaged, had on the the government and leadership of Tunis, Egypt, and the Middle East—and this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you think that it is amazing how a Facebook Page, a flurry of tweets, and the bravery of passionate and dedicated people can take down a 30-year dictator, think what it can do to equalize the business playing field. To be honest, The Cluetrain Manifesto was at least a decade ahead of its time.

There we have it—the nuts and bolt as to how to start this long-tail revolution are in the next installment. Thank you for being patient and for spending some time seeing why I am so passionate about the Cluetrain theory of everyone. Let me know if you would like me to spend more time in a future post discussing some of the other 94 of 95 theses.

Via the Biznology blog

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

There is a misconception among many old-media PR shops that online PR is pretty much like the old-school stuff, just in a different place.  This could not be further from the truth.  New media online PR is a completely different world, a totally different culture, and an entirely different approach.  It’s not easy, or anything for amateurs, but it is very effective when done correctly and with enough commitment.

Results by True Online Experts
We at Abraham Harrison are completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who are willing to commit the resources and focus to online efforts — we know our way around this space like few others.  We also know that there is far more to being a surgeon than reading how an operation is done, far more to being an engineer than having the blueprints in your hands, far more to being a chef than being able to read a cookbook.

Securing you Trust, Endorsements, Top Search Results Ranking, and Ubiquitous Presence of Message
The staff of Abraham Harrison can get your brands out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach.  We can make stars of your key staff members and position them as trusted experts before the world.

We can drive your search engine and general online visibility so that your brands are ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results — not only having your brands promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We’re happy to take you there.  Your future customers are waiting out there online for you.  We will help you find them, make sure they trust you, and establish you as the people they want to come to.  We’re looking forward to working with you!

Contact: Mark Harrison, CEO & Chris Abraham, President and COO, Abraham Harrison, LLC

I have been going through Google Docs and discovered an internal document I would like to share with you from back in the beginning of 2007. Taylor Donlan wrote it to explain to our new staff how best to reach out to and engage online on behalf of our clients and in general. I was inspired to share it based on this comment by Jonathan Crawford from the article What motivated you to learn about social media? Check it out and tell me what you think:

When we approach someone online, we need to approach in the same way we would in the real world. If our goal is to develop relationships, we cannot “go for the kill” instantly. Instead, we must engage in some small talk first. We must engage the blogger and his or her post first, well before any discussion of our client or their related services.

To use Chris’s metaphor, in a professional context, we want them to ask us for our business card. We want to get them so interested in whatever service or client we are touting that they are asking us for more information. This does not mean we air drop business cards everywhere or give one to every person on the street – those cards are thrown away. In the real world, it is much more effective to develop some kind of individual connection before exchanging business cards – they are much more likely to keep the cards, and remember you. In the future, they are more likely to be open to doing something for you.

For a more basic metaphor, imagine meeting someone in a bar. You don’t go right up to someone and jump into a conversation or ask them for favors. Instead you ease into conversation by engaging something that you notice about them or that stands out about your general surroundings. You need to build some rapport in terms that are common to both parties before you can get to any deeper level.

In the blog world, we are trying to do the same. When you make a comment on a post show that you have paid some attention to their post and add something meaningful – feel free to Google the subject matter and share some additional information or just share your general feelings on the subject matter. Then and only then is it acceptable to broach the subject of our client or their services.

Whenever possible, we pose our engagement campaigns in terms of offering “a gift” – usually a service or piece of information that will likely prove useful to the blogger and/or their readers at no cost. While this “free gift” approach reduces the appearance of any spam quality to our engagements, it is still necessary to ease into the gift offering. We are not in the business of spamming, and it will not be tolerated.

Another important point is that we believe in transparency. We are not interested in being deceitful. Admit proudly that you work for Abraham Harrison and whomever the client might be. Our engagement campaigns aim to offer a gift to bloggers, and there is no shame in our business.

My business partner and CEO, Mark Harrison, boiled our, Abraham Harrison’s, elevator speech down into bullet points.  Let me know what you think!

• Abraham Harrison, LLC is a Public Relations company dealing solely in online media
  • AHLLC has two practices: Promotional online PR, and Defensive online PR
    1. Promotional online PR is about getting the client’s message out
       1. Three methodologies:
          1. Top-down Online Influencer Outreach
             • Blogger and community gatekeeper outreach in order to get those influencers to be the mouthpieces for our clients.
               • We do the elite A-lister high-touch, personal relationship management
               • And B-Z lister “long-tail” outreach
          2. Social Networking Site (SNS) presence creation and management
             • Creation, development, and upkeep of profiles, groups, and friend relationships
          3. Bottom-up Online Conversation Engagement
             • Going to where the conversations are happening online (in forums, newsgroups, blog comments, etc.) and directly engaging the conversation that is happening online.
    2. Defensive online PR is essentially crisis management
       1. Two methodologies:
          1. Making bad stuff disappear: Online Reputation Clean-up/Search Results Cleansing
             • Establishing client’s hegemony over their search engine results and making the negative content a “needle in a haystack”
          2. Countering bad stuff too big to make disappear: Direct Misinformation Correction via Online Conversation Engagement
             • Finding negative conversation online and engaging it in order to bring the client’s message into the dialogue
             • Quiet and/or neutralize vitriol by bringing the detractors into positive relationship