Image by Gauravonomics via Flickr

[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

Abraham Harrison. LLC: True experts in online PR, not just old-media PR doing an add-on
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 very different world, a totally different culture, and an entirely different approach. It’s not easy, and there are lots of potential pitfalls, but it is extremely effective when done correctly and with enough commitment.

Results by True Online Experts
We’re 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. That is why we are willing to give away the shop in this proposal, and willing to provide even more detail to anyone who asks for it – indeed, we publish all this openly on our website.

Securing you Trust, Endorsements, Top Search Results Ranking, and Ubiquitous Presence of Message
We can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach. We can drive your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We’re happy to help you connect to the online influencers who are speaking to the communities you’d like to reach, and whose posts will further bolster SEO and the presence of your brand in the search results.

Mark Harrison, CEO & Chris Abraham, President and COO, Abraham Harrison, LLC Via Abraham Harrison

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment.  We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world?

G’day – thanks for returning!

I just finished a fantastic conversation with Chris Abraham, the President and COO of AbrahamHarrison.

If you’ve been around the internet for a while, especially in the ‘marcoms’ (marketing communications) space, you would certainly have heard of Chris; if not of the man himself then certainly of one of his marketing and outreach programs.

Chris is one of those select few online marketers who’s text doesn’t read like a traditional online direct mail piece – you know, with LOTS OF CAPITALS and heaps of bold text and yellow highlighting and italics and

• bullet
• points
• a-
• plenty

and testimonials by the kazillion…

I could point you to a zillion of those sites – which is not to say that the style of marketing they use is not successful; it is, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it. But you know as soon as you see the huge, bold, bright red and often in CAPS headline what to expect for the rest of the (very) long toilet roll of a page.

Chris takes a much softer approach, always has done, and it seems to work for him and his style of copywriting.

Video, the radio star and plain ol’ bandwagon idjuts

With the advent of Web2.0/Social Media there were many ill-informed and just plain ‘bandwagon’ pundits who hailed the death of traditional communication tools such as email, web1.0 sites and – gasp – newspaper, magazine, radio and television.

Much as television didn’t kill radio as force it to rethink its place and find its niche, so too with Social Media. Every new technology platform or societal change brings with it a change in how all that came before it must view themselves and continue to offer relevancy.

Radio didn’t die, newspapers haven’t been killed off, I can still pick up plenty of magazines that appeal to all demographics and both genders from my local newsagent, and email hasn’t disappeared off the radar (if my bulging inbox every morning is anything to go by).

So it was fantastic to finally chat with someone who, like me, believes that email is STILL a fundamental part of the marketing toolkit.

In talking with Chris today, he was genuinely flattered that a fellow copywriter would find his material engaging; I thought it was brilliant reading and his deployment strategies for his clients brilliantly executed.

You see, Chris, like me, believes that email won’t go away, but WILL have to change in order to survive in the new communication landscape. Our shared view is that it will have to evolve in a couple of ways:

1. Shorter emails will be the best way of getting people’s attention
2. Long-form emails are best saved for newsletters; trying to ‘sell’ via email will become even harder to excel at.

If you’ve ever received one of Chris’ emails, you will be stunned by several things:

1. They are short – only 2-3 paragraphs
2. They link off to a SMNR (Social Media News Release) that gives a far more in-depth level of information (and all the material you might need to help you spread the word or get involved)
3. If you email Chris or anyone of his team back you WILL get a response, usually within 24 hours (Chris says they try to get back within the hour, but time zones can sometime defeat them)
4. The emails ‘read’ like they were written by a human being, not by a ‘PR’ flack or a ex-journalist hack; they aren’t full of ‘me, me, me’ stuff telling you how wonderful I (the company) am, but neither do they ‘strip-tease tantalise’ you so that when you do click on the link you end up feeling cheated
5. You get the very real feeling that there’s someone real at the end of the email.

Here’s an example (taken from my post about the Fresh Air Fund):

Hello again, Lee

On Sunday I asked if you would kindly help me spread the word about 200 inner-city children I have yet to place with host families in August. I apologize for following up so soon, but time is of the essence and you know how funny email can be. To make things simple, everything is collected into an online resource page http://freshair.smnr.us

This appeal comes straight from the top, so please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Yours sincerely,

Sara

–
Sara Wilson
Fresh Air Fund
sara@freshair.org
www.freshair.org

Sara is a real person, not a ‘fake’ character. I sent her an email yesterday, wondering if her ears were burning, because Chris and I were talking about her:

G’day Sara,
Just finished the phone call with Chris — oh boy! Were your ears burning? They should have been!!!
Kindests,
Lee

From: Sara Wilson [mailto:swilson@chrisabraham.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 24 February 2009 2:02 AM
To: Lee@leehopkins.com
Subject: Re: Fellow Power 150 blogger

Hello Lee,
Just a quick note to re-confirm that Chris will be calling you at 10 am, your time, tomorrow (Tuesday).
No need to reply unless something has come up on your end, otherwise he will speak to you in about 7.5 hours!
Best,
Sara

In reply, Sara said,

Lee,
And I thought it was just hot where I was last night … 
It’s very kind of you to mention it, thanks.   Chris is a great guy to work for, and generous with compliments, but it’s always nice to know that someone appreciates you, isn’t it?
Cheers,
Sara

Controversy

Because Chris and his team start any campaign with an email-based blogger outreach, some of the ‘holier than thou’ social media purists occasionally give him ‘stick’, or snicker behind his back and call him a ‘spammer’. Not true – the team are very hot on ensuring only a good taste remains in the mouth of any blogger they contact, and of only offering bloggers something of actual value to the blogger.

Which is a behaviour totally unlike the hapless, clueless and insulting PR flacks who regularly show up on The Bad Pitch Blog and who attempt to fill my inbox with material about electronics, or sanitary napkins, or (ahem) extension kits, or pharmaceuticals shipped from Canada. Thank goodness I have SpamArrest to filter them out before they hit my inbox!

Chris and his team have painstakingly built up a list of nearly 35,000 bloggers across several different demographics and topic areas of interest. Visiting their blogs, they harvest their email address. They then politely email them once to offer them something of interest – if the blogger likes it, they very often blog about it; it they don’t then they don’t. What is fascinating is the response rate Chris gets for his clients.

Word of mouth and gossip-sharing amongst internet marketers has the average rate of sales of anything (be it a blog post or an ebook or a ‘course you cannot live without’) as around 0.01-0.05% from an initial mailing, with the follow-up mailings increasing that to, perhaps, 1.0-2.0%…

Chris and his team regularly get a takeup in the order of 5%, which is phenomenal. In addition, once you start developing an email relationship with anyone in their team (as I have with Sara Wilson) then all future mailings will receive much more attention than would otherwise be the case. A case in point is my own, later, post on the illegal cluster bombing being carried out in South Ossetia and The Survivor Corps run by activist and author of the very powerful book,  I Will Not Be Broken, Jerry White. It is only because Sara had taken the time to develop a relationship with me over previous months that I read and responded to the material from Jerry White. Without that relationship I would never have bothered with a topic outside of my normal areas of interest.

It is the classic ‘relationship marketing’ that Social Media Marketing pundits claim to aim for but rarely achieve.

Goodness, if I could have a dollar for every new ‘expert’ that’s popped up in the Social Media space I would retire a very rich trillionaire (and at the same time wondering how you could be a trillionaire and not be very rich – I guess if you were living in Zimbabwe you wouldn’t be…).

You wouldn’t believe the number of ‘leading social networking and social media marketing experts’ who have suddenly come out of the woodwork and set up communities in places like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. Curiously, I’ve never heard of these folks before. Most of them don’t even have blogs, or if they do those blogs have only been around for less than a year. Curious, hey?

But Chris, on the other hand, has been around for a long time, has figured out what works and what doesn’t, and as evidence offers the following case studies:

• Energy Bill 2007 Case Study
• Financial Services Reputation Defense Case Study
• Firebrand TV Case Study
• Fresh Air Fund Case Study
• International Medical Corps Case Study
• Movie Producer Reputation Defense Case Study
• Snapple Antioxidant Water Case Study
• Survivor Corps Book Promotion Case Study

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

• Thank You Operation Survivor Bloggers
• Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!
• Thank You Again Survivor Corps Bloggers
• Thank You International Medical Corps Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers
• Thank You Fresh Air Fund Camp Counselor Bloggers!
• The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach
• Happy Thanksgiving from Abraham Harrison

Here are some examples of client SMNRs from Chris and his team that I especially like:

• http://anamigo.smnr.us
• http://freshair.smnr.us
• http://banclusterbombs.smnr.us
• http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us
• http://survivorcorps.smnr.us
• http://iwillnotbebroken.smnr.us
• http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us

So what???

The whole point of this post is NOT to fawn at the feet of someone who clearly knows what he is doing.

The whole point IS to let you know that you don’t need to throw out your baby with the bathwater:

• Don’t jump on the Social Media bandwagon without educated advice
• Don’t take advice from a pimply 17 year old fresh out of high school
• Don’t take advice from a less-pimply 23 year old fresh out of university
• Don’t ditch all of your understanding of how ‘people’ and networks work
• Don’t take advice from someone who doesn’t even blog themselves, or Twitter, or Facebook… (see my post about Social Media Gurus)
• Don’t take advice from someone who has been blogging less than 24 months

Instead:

1. Download Todd Defren’s absolutely superb ‘Brink’ guide to Social Media and Richard Meyer’s great presentation, ‘Social Media : What you’re afraid to admit you didn’t know’ (he also has a great pharma and biotech-focused pdf presentation). Download and read Trevor Cook’s and my ‘Social Media Report’.
2. Talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing – in Australia that means folks like Stephen Collins, Laurel Papworth, Trevor Cook, Darren Rowse, Gavin Heaton and, humbly, yours truly. If WE can’t help you, we can certainly put you in touch with someone who can. Unlike the USA, where there seems to be a spirit of “You’ll prize my rolodex out of my frozen dead fingers!”, there is no fierce spirit of competition here in Australia – we have  ‘co-opertition’ wherein we all help each other out if the ‘fit’ seems better for the client.
3. Stick to reading the seasoned ‘pros’ of the online marketing and/or business communication space: you cannot go wrong if you start at folks like any of the above, or Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Mitch Joel, Joe Jaffe , Laura Fitton and Chris Abraham himself; see who they link to. Follow your nose from them – all the way along the path you will be reading ‘the good oil’ as we say here in Australia
4. Examine Chris’ examples above and see for yourself how simple but effective your online marketing can be if you do it with the right intention – of helping out the blogger, not flogging stuff for your client. Get the relationship right and you will flog stuff for your client anyway, trust me!

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Technorati Tags: chris abraham, laura fitton, joe jaffe, mitch joel, darren rowse, chris brogan, neville hobson, shel holtz, gavin heaton, trevor cook, laurel papworth, stephen collins, richard meyer, todd defren, sara wilson, fresh air fund, chrisabraham, bad pitch blog, social media, blogger relations, social marketing, email marketing, email, spam, spam arrest, spamarrest, business communication

Currently listening to ‘Next’ by The Necks from the album ‘Next’. Superb jazz funk from one of Australia’s great cult bands.

At Abraham Harrison, we have three practices: 1) online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing 2) social media and SEO consulting 3) online reputation management. Read the below excerpt from Danny Flamberg, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession? — whoops! 

Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics – online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing –  are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.

Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet “social” marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.

Oh well, this is a very insightful and well-thought-out article with a lot of truth and some very important insights. Since I have over a decase of information architecture and SEO experience, I know that #2 is going to get a lot more of my attention in 2009 — thanks very much for the benefit of your experience, Mr. Flamberg, and remember that there is much more to the article, so please explore the rest, What Tactics Work Best in a Recession?

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

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

• there was no personal connection in the email to me about why the story may be of interest to me and my readers
• they did not give me anything of value to bring to my readers – no inside scoop so to speak or an offer of speaking to me to answer any questions
• they made me click through to read the article in the press – many bloggers won’t take that extra click – and what’s more the article in the press was at best boring and certainly not newsworthy.

Busy blogger’s are like journalists – they want an inside and unique story that is going to be of value to their readers and they don’t have time to have to go into hours of research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Krishna De’s BizGrowthNews

I just discovered another very interesting article written by Jennifer Mattern over at RedFly Marketing, Online PR vs. Internet Marketing — here’s an excerpt:

Internet Marketing Tactics:

• Paid advertising (banner ads, text link ads, etc.)
• Link exchanges, free Web directory submissions, blog comments (link-building activities)
• Affiliates
• Sales letters (and other sales copy)
• Article marketing (to drive affiliate sales, traffic, or backlinks)
• Search engine marketing (paid search placements)
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking sites
• Social networks
• Podcasts / Internet radio shows
• Sales, coupons, or other discounts
• E-books
• Reports / white papers
• Direct mail campaigns via email (for promotional purposes)

Online PR Tactics:

• Press releases / news releases
• Op-eds / letters to the editor (for online publications)
• Online newsrooms and media kits
• SEO (to build awareness through organic search engine placements)
• Interviews
• Blogs
• Articles (used to build exposure and expert status more than directly pushing sales or traffic)
• Podcasts / Internet radio shows (if not purely or mostly promotional)
• Reports / white papers
• Email newsletters
• Social networks