The best thing about social media marketing is that you don’t have to be the most popular, have the most followers, or be the most sophisticated, you just have to do a better job than all your direct competitors.

You don’t have to be the fastest, the biggest, or the strongest in order to win at social media, you just have to be faster than Mark. Who is Mark? Well, I am sure you’ve all heard the joke about outrunning a bear . . .

Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve starts putting on his tennis shoes. Mark says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” Steve says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear–I just have to outrun you!” (via Boy’s Life)

In social media, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your competitors — your real competitors, not your aspirational competition.

The problem with social media is that it removes all barriers to entry — meaning anyone and everyone can enter a globally competitive marketplace of brands, celebrity, popularity, and ideas; a marketplace where the competition is absolute and there is a global best and worst.

There are top-100 lists on Technorati, there is Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop lists, there’s the Top Twitter list — dominated by top global celebrities, actors, musicians, and sports figures — and the top social media influencer lists, including the enigmatic Power150 list from AdAge. It is all so intimidating and hopeless, right?

Well, no. Ashton Kutcher is probably not your direct competition, nor is Charlie Sheen. If you’re not a public figure or a national brand, you need to give yourself a break and just focus on outrunning Mark — outrunning the folks to your left and to your right; the folks who are realistically eating your lunch or taking market share from your bottom line. I mean, even I am always fighting my desire to chase social media celebrity.

For example, I used to consider Chris Brogan a competitor, of sorts. Truthfully, Chris is a bear — an awesome bear, a generous bear, but a bear none-the-less. He has 205,232 followers on Twitter and a Klout score of 77. In comparison, I “only” have 47,000 followers on Twitter and a Klout score of 66; Chris has a couple books under his belt and always ends up on the top-ten of every and all social media, marketing, and even web celebrity lists.

As an aside, I do realize that 47,000 is a lot of followers and 66 is a pretty good Klout score — please bear with me because we’re all comparing ourselves to other folks who are prettier, richer, skinnier, taller, smarter, and stronger — just realize that I don’t consider 47k or 66 to be good scores just like Chris probably wants 500k followers and a Klout score above 80 — it’s just how we all feel, right? Not just you.

Chris and I are old friends but were I to judge my success or failure based on the strength, power, and awesomeness of a bear like Chris Brogan or Guy Kawasaki I would be constantly frustrated by my progress, in the same way that folks who look to my relative success on social media as intimidating — it is all relative and it is all worthwhile.

What’s even more worthwhile is to aspire to become friends with the bears. Though I have “only” 47,000 followers on Twitter, I do know enough very big social media grizzlies through all of my hard work, sharing, participating, being present, generous, and consistently there as part of the conversation, that I can get help if I need it from bears who are much bigger, much smarter, and more powerful than I am, be they individual influencer powerhouses like Gary Vaynerchuk or even influential brands.

Let me close by sharing that it is indeed worthwhile to build your numbers and your size as a social media influencer — I will not take that back — but you really don’t have to be a lot bigger — you don’t have to be the biggest; however, all the time, energy, and dedication that you spend on building your core friends, followers, and likers will never go to waste because these connections are valuable — especially if you spend time and energy required to build and strengthen these tacit relationships into proper friendships.

First spend all the time and energy required to become faster than Mark — to become faster than your competition — and then, when you’re the fastest, strongest, and most influential member of your real competition group, then start actively becoming friends with the bears.

Let me change the joke a little bit: Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve just sits there. Mark says, “What are you doing? Aren’t you going to run?” Steve says, “I don’t have to run–the bear doesn’t want to eat me!”

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia.

And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada.

Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity. If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success. Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet. This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage. Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign. You need both quantity and quality of Likes. I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

To the right, you’ll see, scrolling down most of this article, a full-length screen capture of the SMNR we produced for a launch campaign that we did for the first iPad tablet-only daily newspaper, The Daily. I am using this SMNR because we’re particularly proud of it, and you can explore it In Real Life (IRL) over at thedaily-newsrelease.com.

As I am sure you will notice right away, this SMNR — and all of our SMNRs — is a flat-file, traditional Web page. You’ll also notice that it scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.

No, we didn’t do this because we’re not good coders and don’t understand database-backed web applications like WordPress or Drupal. I have been developing Web applications since they were Perl CGI scripts, into PHP, then into Python-based Zope, and even Ruby on Rails.

We’re building our SMNRs on flat-file, scrollable, single-page Web pages because of human nature: people tend to click away from where we want them to be. We want them to be on-topic, on-target, and really considering the act of blogging on behalf of our clients. In this case, The Daily.

We use old-fashioned HTML standbys such as HTML anchors, allowing us to link within the same page. We don’t want people to miss anything and we don’t want people to get lost in a maze of pages.

We also use flat-file HTML on an Linux-variant Apache install because we tend to reach out to thousands of bloggers at a time — upwards of 8,000 — and we don’t want a database-backed website to get bogged down by a potentially heavy, all-at-once stampede of traffic. Flat-file pages tend to serve faster and more reliably because they’re generally much less resource-intensive.

What we did for The Daily, section by section

Let me go through the SMNR we created for The Daily, section by section, so that I can explain. Long story short:

If we can’t get someone we send an email-based blogger pitch to to post something within five-minutes of opening our email, then we’ve lost him. If it isn’t as easy as pie and as clear as crystal, then we might get nothing. If it looks like it’ll take six minutes instead of five, we’re lucky if we get a tweet or a post to a Facebook Wall. More about that later.

The banner

The banner is simply a quick, attractive “splash.” It’s always above the fold and needs to convey, in a single glance, what’s up and why we didn’t, in fact, waste the blogger’s time. The banner is useless but essential. It allows the client to clearly, as though in summary or abstract, convey the entire message of the campaign both visually and textually. Carefully selected choice slogans, logos, screen shots, and photos go in the banner. However, since it isn’t really possible to “steal” anything from the banner, all the content found in the banner should be replicated somewhere else deeper in the SMNR.

The banner may just seem like bling or flair but it’s is really the single opportunity the PR professional or publicist has to sink the hook, to build the resonance and excitement and to activate the passion required to encourage bloggers to spend their valuable time and finite energy on doing something for me and my clients for free.

One caveat, however, is to make sure the banner isn’t too tall that it blocks out the QuickLinks, below, or seems just like an advert or splash page instead of what it is, a multimedia press release rife with important, objective blog fodder.

The QuickLinks

OK, that’s rather hard to see, so I will make it a bit larger below so that you can see what I am talking about.

That’s better. Well, the QuickLink row is essential because it might be the only interactive part of the SMNR that’s above the fold for some viewers, especially those who are still running 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 screens. (Don’t roll your eyes about the small screen size — there are still millions of folks worldwide who are running small monitors, large font sizes, and also dial-up modems, not your big 2560 x 1440 resolution, double-screened 27″ LCD computer displays. You should work with and understand everyone and design to your lowest common-technology denominator.

So, the QuickLinks are a short-cut to what the blogger wants. These links don’t go anywhere off-page, but, rather, just link down to somewhere much further down on the single page.

And like I said, if we don’t do everything to make it as easy as possible to allow the blogger to search, discover, collect, and report on what we’re pitching, then we’re risking losing them.

The video introduction and the social network sharing

This is a two-parter. Obviously, the commercial that goes with the introduction of the then newly launched iPad-only daily news site, The Daily, is the main thing we wanted to promote. A no-brainer.

More importantly is what I circled in red, the “Share This” embed with the easy-to-share-to-Twitter-Facebook-Yahoo!-Etc. buttons. We never used to add this to our Social Media News Releases. Why? Well, we were afraid that if we did, bloggers would share on social media and social network and with either their Facebook or Twitter friends and followers instead of posting it on their blogs.

The truth is, the SMNR is all about making everything as easy for the blogger as they need it to be. Folks who feel the need to feed the maw of their always-hungry 24/7/365 blog, will always blog (and often then tweet and Facebook their post), and the folks who are interested enough but don’t have the time or interest in the topic or promotion or don’t feel like their blog is the right place for the news we’re pitching won’t blog no matter how much we may well disagree.

So, popping that little “Share This” array of buttons has quadrupled the number of earned media mentions that we get from folks who wouldn’t have blogged our stuff, our news, our clients, anyway — they are just interested enough to throw us a bone and share the Daily with their followers and friends.

The news

The news section is the most important part of the SMNR. Because there’s lots of great stuff to steal. Consider our Social Media News Releases to be one-page versions of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — which is to say that once we have appealed to a blogger enough that she has opened our email, read our pitch, maybe emailed us, clicked through to the SMNR, scrolled past the banner, the QuickLinks, and ignored the Share This buttons, we want the blogger to have to do as little additional work as humanly possible.

We also post as many photos, illustrations, screen shots, and logos as we can into each SMNR, inline, so that a blogger can easily copy-and-paste each image into the blog post and not need to download and then upload. We act as the host, happy to sponsor the image hosting to the SMNR. As many of these as we can because we never know which one resonates with each blogger.

So, we pre-link all the items in the bullet-list with text links to the daily. We link the phrase The Daily any and every time it comes up in the list. This will appall SEO gurus who think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know Search. I am an expert in search and my SMNRs are not Google-bait, they’re blogger-bait. We actually do not want our SMNRs to start competing with our clients’ sites — and they used to — but if we mess up all the delicate Google balance, then hopefully our SMNRs will not show up in the top-ten on Google, which is often quite challenging since most sites are absolutely terrible.

Actually, recently, we have had clients who have wanted to optimize their SMNR for search, but then you put the onus of linking, textually, on the shoulders of the bloggers, many of whom are not experts in search or HTML. So, we make sure that almost every single link has one linked textual on The Daily, just to make sure that every potential news item that a blogger might want to copy-and-paste onto his blog includes a link.

We never know what the blogger will or won’t steal, we don’t know how much or how little the blogger will copy, paste, then blockquote into their blog. Some bloggers go full-text, blockquoted, and then wrap the copy that we wrote in a bit of introduction and a parting shot into a blog-post sandwich where the copy, exactly as we wrote it, is the meat.

OK, you may have noticed that the page is pretty long. It requires quite a lot of scrolling, right? Well, remember how brief, concise, and minimal the blogger email pitch was? Well, the pitch might be laser-focused but the SMNR is everything but the kitchen sink. As many diverse and random and seemingly extraneous content and assets as we can find and collect we put into the SMNRs.

Those of you who have ever spoken to me about this before might want to jump ahead. I have an analogy for you. If you think of the Sunday paper and all those coupons, think of our email blogger pitch as a coupon for a big-screen TV at hhgregg.

If we can get that person who’s browsing the Sunday Post to cut out the coupon — already a huge task, to say nothing of even buying a paper, reading the paper, and braving the coupon section — and then pocket the coupon, get in the car, and drive to the store, once that guy gets to the store, he’s generally committed to doing something. While we’re pitching the TV, we’re just happy if that consumer ends up spending an equal sum on something — anything — else, just so long as it’s with hhgregg.

Same thing with an SMNR. The email pitch is the coupon selling a particular thing — the launch of the iPad app — and the SMNR is the big box store offering loads of other things, including bios, and other content. In the case of the Daily SMNR, a blogger may well come in to look at the offer to download and use the iPad app or to share the video with the readers of her blog but may report, instead, on Daily Editor in Chief, Jesse Angelo, who left the New York Post for a position with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

To me, it really doesn’t matter what news from the SMNR the blogger reports, it just matter that the blogger takes time out of her busy, busy, day to spend some time writing about our clients, for free. We really always remember that we’re not entitled to anybody’s time, especially if we’re not paying for it. No matter what, every mention is a gracious courtesy.

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

I always tell everybody that only 1% of all bloggers have media, communications, or public relations experience. Full stop. Even fewer of them are HTML gurus. Nothing can be assumed. I am not recommending pablum. I am not saying that we have to dumb down for the bloggers, it’s just that they speak a different language from ours in PR. We don’t share lingua francas. So, we always go out of our way to make sure everything is as simple and self-explanatory as possible without ever insulting the blogger.

In the above case, we always make sure that embed codes are included whenever any video is included — if we ever want to see it embedded inline in a blog post. We had an embed code in the first video at the top of the SMNR but it was deleted by the client. Even if our blogger knows how to find the embed code himself, we really don’t want him to leave the site to go hunt it down over at YouTube, as I explained earlier. We don’t want people to ever click away.

So, we include all embed code at a height and width that is optimal for most blogs, in this case 480 pixels wide. If the blogger is sophisticated enough to want a 853 x 480 video, he can go get that, we’re just making it as easy as possible to make the entire process take less than five minutes from the opening of the email to the clicking on Publish.

Social media and tags

The “Share This” buttons at the top of the SMNR are promotional. They don’t reference the client-owned Social Media properties. It is essential to make sure that we offer up everything and anything to the blogger’s consideration.

Finally, to make it as easy as humanly possible for everyone, we include a string of comma-separated topical keywords that each blogger can easily copy-and-paste into the “post tags” portion of your blogging platform.

Yes, I know. this SMNR has everything including the kitchen sink. Not true. It gets worse. If you explore the SMNR for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day the SMNR we did for the US Olympic Committee we made for the Winter Olympics in Canada, or one of the SMNRs for the Fresh Air Fund, you’ll see that there are all sort of other things such as banners with embed codes and additional videos and all sorts of other assets — really the kitchen sink, in many cases.

Favicon, header title, and meta description

One last thing that I want to discuss before we end this helluva long post is about fit and finish. Too often “single use” sites like this just don’t get the love they deserve. Make sure you take some time to create a nice “Favicon” aka favorites icon, shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon and bookmark icon. Also, please take the time required to create a strong and descriptive Metatag Title and Description tag as well.

<title>Introducing The Daily - Facts and Resources</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Daily facts and resources page. Introducing The Daily The first digital daily news publication built from scratch for the iPad by some of the best in the business to bring you information that's smart, attractive, and entertaining.">
<meta name="keywords" content="the daily facts, the daily resources, the daily facts and resources, the daily, thedaily.com, rupert murdoch, news corp, apple, mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone 3gs, iphone 4, steve jobs, macbook, macintosh, mackbook air, ipod nano, new iphone, ipod touch, apps, ipad apps, iphone apps, mac rumors, ipad reviews, apple technology, apple news, ipad news, iphone news, tech, technology, geek, geek news, gadgets, new gadgets, new technology">

Why? Why is it even worth the extra time to go back into the engine room and tool with the Meta Data? Well, the HTML Title tag directly contributes to what people see when they either bookmark your page, what they see in a browser tab, or what they see in the Title Bar. Easy-peasy. A real no-brainer. Also, despite what anyone at SEOMoz thinks, meta tags are still important and here’s why:

You’ll notice that all the text in the search result that comes up when your search serves up thedaily-newsrelease.com as a result is content that Google didn’t so much have to find or scrap; rather, it simply serves up the text directly from the Title we wrote and also the Meta Description we also wrote in the form of the search result headline and description.

I hope the previous 2,500 words have done a pretty good job of explaining why we at Abraham Harrison insist on producing a proper, well-produced, well-branded Social Media News Release (SMNR) — both philosophically, practically, and psychologically.

And because I really don’t know everything, please feel free to comment, contribute, share, and ask any questions you may well still have about the process, the evolution, and any technical details you might be unclear about or I have failed to cover. Thank you for your amazing attention span! Via Marketing Conversation via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz.

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My colleague Mike Moran over at Biznology is offering a complimentary 30-minute webinar, Organizational Social Media for Financial Services: How to Start from Within, on November 15 from 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST. Registration is freeand it promises to help the financial services industry make social work for their financial services business:

• How ready is your organization for social media?
• Do your employees know the rules of the road and how to comply with them?
• How do you turn the vast amount of data from social media into insights?
• How do you get the social expertise on board?
• How do you constantly measure and evaluate your efforts?

Registration is free and there promises to be a lot of great stuff in there. Folks in heavily-regulated industries such as finance and pharmaceuticals are afraid of their own social media shadow, rightfully so, and Mike’s the man to show them the way. Here’s some more information about the Organizational Social Media for Financial Services: How to Start from Withinwebinar:

Just because you know how to use social media doesn’t mean that you know how to make it work in an organization. Organizations must understand their social media goals and know how to encourage and measure them, and nowhere is that more true than for financial services companies. With the economic meltdown of recent years, mortgage crisis and uncertain outlook, banking on relationships and the business of social networking has never been more critical. But achieving this starts from within your organization. Financial services companies must decide what they want to improve using social media–brand reputation, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer service, or even new product development? While adoption has been slower, financial services companies that successfully listen to both their customers and the public can discover new measures of customer engagement. Mike Moran is the Founder of the Biznology blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and Chief Strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for eight years, retiring from IBM in 2008 as a Distinguished Engineer.

I just registered because I have yet to be able to convince the financial services industry to explore social media so I can’t wait to learn. And, to disclose my association, I blog weekly for the Mike Moran’s Biznology blog and my company, Abraham Harrison, is a sponsor along with American Banker, American Banker Magazine, Bank Technology News, and Marketing Pilgrim.

Related articles

• Voice of Russia Google+ Radio Interview with Mike Moran and Me (chrisabraham.com)
• How you can break into digital marketing (biznology.com)

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

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

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

You are not too late to enjoy the benefits of social media — you will never be too late — because the spoils in social media marketing go to the company that can maintain its social media participation over the long haul over the long term. Start now, start later, and I guarantee that if you’re a lion-hearted social media marathoner, you’ll probably best your competition.  Anyway, Joseph Ratliff did a brilliant job getting you motivated in How The Social Media Promotes Your Business:

The great thing about social media marketing is it offers a place to talk about your business in a new setting that is a lot less threatening than many other types of advertising. Social media is not about the hard sell. Instead, it focuses on creating relationships with people. Social media allows business people to share some of their personal lives with others. This helps to overcome any fear or reservations connected to buying from people online.

If you’ve started a blog for your business, you already have your foot in the water. The next logical step is to begin commenting on other blogs related to your business. Spend some time searching for a few blogs that you enjoy and subscribe to them via an RSS feeder to manage your time. This will allow you to follow several blogs without having to go to each one every day. When you find a post you can contribute a useful comment to, go to the site and offer your thoughts. Leave a link, if you can, so the audience can link to your own blog. Make this a part of routine at least three times a week.

Next, choose one or two social media communities to join. There are dozens and dozens out there, so do not try to become visible everywhere. Two of the most popular social media communities for business networking are Twitter and Facebook. Both of these are effective sites to increase your relationship building skills with prospects. Combine some personal tidbits with some business information until you discover the perfect mix of both. Do not just focus on building big numbers of friends or followers. It isn’t all about the numbers. Instead, build a little slower and spend your time interacting with the people you meet.

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

Here’s a smashing list from Lee Odden over on Online Marketing Blog, Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing:

• Start with a plan, not tactics.  Research and build a Social Media Roadmap involving:  Audience, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Tools/Technology and Metrics.

• “Give to get” – Successful social media marketing programs involve listening and participation. That participation centers around giving value before expecting anything in return. This is not “sales” as you know it. But companies can definitely increase sales as a result.

• Commit resources & time to be successful or you may very well fail. It’s important to forecast labor hours, who, what, when, how and where with the intention of succeeding, not just experimenting. If a social media effort is successful, scalability will be an even bigger issue if you don’t plan for it.  Hiring a community manager for example, may not be justified when a social media monitoring program is started or with a new company, but a job req and understanding of the role should be ready in case it’s called for.

• Be transparent with intentions & your identity or you may alienate the very audiences you’re trying to connect with.  Objectives, strategy and doing your homework about a community should make it pretty obvious what types of commercial messages are appropriate.  Being transparent about intentions might come in the form of stating a purpose:  ”Brand XYZ has created this Facebook page to help consumers make better choices about Topic XYZ”.  It’s fine if goals are to increase sales, but participation should be focused on providing the kind of value that facilitates sales – not attempting to make sales directly. When is the last time you purchased something other than a virtual cupcake on Facebook?

• Understand, you do not control the message.  Old habits die hard and there’s a tendency to want to treat social media participation like advertising where the ability to control messaging is the norm. Once information or media is available on the social web, people will inevitably mash it up, stretch it, pull it and reshape it according to their interests. Brands need to protect their identities, copyright and intellectual property for sure, but rather than “controlling the message” marketers should encourage the mashup and creativity.

• Welcome participation, feedback and co-creation. As comfort levels rise with social web participation, companies will see opportunties to encourage participation with communications, especially with brand evangelists. Developing relationships and community within social communities on the web can facilitate buy in, provide invaluable feedback and crowdsourcing opportunities.

• Metrics should roll up to objectives and objectives should be relevant to the channel.  More than a few companies see evidence of other social media efforts ranging from Superbowl commercials on YouTube to social participation during and after President Obama’s campaign, and “want that too”.  Direct marketing is the lens through which many social media efforts are first viewed, with a tendency to focus on action “A” resulting in “B” outcome. Social media marketing is more like public relations than direct marketing. It’s more like providing resource “A” results in “action “B” that influences outcome “C”. Metrics for success need to consider the pre-goal performance indicators like number of “friends”, comments, links, etc as well as commercial outcomes influenced by social media participation.

Check out his worst practices as well over at: Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing.

(By Lauren Cook) Never has the power of Twitter been more evident than in the last few weeks and months. Once known only by “techies” and early adopters, this micro-blogging site is now slowly infiltrating into the mainstream and more importantly, affecting the way many of us communicate, listen, and learn.

For those not familiar with Twitter, here’s a quick introduction: Twitter is a free social networking service that allows users to send and read each other’s updates (known as “tweets”) that are limited to 140 characters in length (think two sentences at most). At its inception in 2006, Twitter (then known as “Obvious”) was originally created as a tool to be used internally by the podcasting company, Odeo. Two years later, over 3 million individuals worldwide have Twitter accounts and the rate in which news spreads has shortened to, well, 140 characters.

Initially, the goal of Twitter was to allow users to share with their “followers” exactly what they were doing at that moment (ie: “It’s Monday morning and I’m having Cheerios for breakfast”). A common misconception among those who aren’t familiar with Twitter believe this is still the case with the micro-blogging site. In fact, Twitter has grown and expanded and its capabilities have far surpassed solely communicating the mundane details of everyday life.

For instance, take the recent Mumbai attacks in November, 2008. During the three-day battle that left more than 100 dead, social-networking services such as Twitter and Flickr were flooded with news, rumors and pictures of the tragedy by what is now termed as “citizen journalists” — users on Twitter that were tweeting breaking news faster than mainstream media could pick up the same information on the news wires. Many people now describe the situation in Mumbai as “Twitter’s moment.” As a result, major media outlets now uses Twitter to help communicate the real-time public sentiment on various issues, such as Presidential elections, natural disasters, and current events.

Abraham & Harrison has been at the forefront of the Twitter phenomenon since its public offering, sucessfully leveraging the power of micro-blogging for many of its clients. One only has to take a quick look at Abraham & Harrison’s President and COO, Chris Abraham, who is known as one of the top Twitterers of Social Media news, having over 2,700 followers, to understand Abraham & Harrison’s extensive knowledge of cutting edge social media tools.

A fantastic example of Abraham & Harrison’s knowledge of Twitter is illustrated by our work with the client, The Fresh Air Fund, a non-profit agency providing free summer vacations in the country to more than 1.7 million New York City children from disadvantaged communities.

With Abraham & Harrison’s help, The Fresh Air Fund created a Twitter profile to communicate with other NPOs, current volunteers, potential families interested in The Fresh Air Fund, and donors. In just three months of tweeting, The Fresh Air Fund Twitter profile has over 600 followers and has reached thousands of individuals who they otherwise would never have been in contact with. Not only does Abraham & Harrison help guide

The Fresh Air Fund on how to best utilize Twitter in a respectful and value-driven way, Chris Abraham is also eager to help “retweet” The Fresh Air Fund’s Twitter content, meaning that over 3,000 users are seeing this non-profit’s messaging, creating a critical relationship with The Fresh Air Fund that results in support of the NPO. Even more impressive, The Fresh Air Fund was recently nominated to be a part of the “Top Ten List of Twitterers Who Will Change The World” — a fantastic feat for an NPO who has only been a part of the Twittosphere for three months.

Are you thinking about joining Twitter? One word of warning: You can’t become a Twitter sensation overnight. As Chris Abraham says, “Growing a social media profile is like growing a coral reef: after seeding the reef, there are so many things that need to happen before a reef blooms ‘in its own.’” With Twitter, time and commitment are key in order to position yourself as a valuable addition to the community. “You need to be generous — give more than you take — and you need to be committed to the long term,” Chris advises. And it’s not all about your follower numbers.

For instance, once could argue that Lance Armstrong isn’t a valuable member of the Twitter community given that he has over 23,000 followers, but is only following approximately 40 other Twitterers (an improvement since the last time I checked, when he was following a mere 2 users: his Livestrong organization, and one other member of the Livestrong Executive Team).

Twitter isn’t about just talking about yourself, accepting every follower, and never engaging in actual dialogue. Like every other social networking tool, it’s about forming relationships, providing valuable content, listening and (like Chris said), giving more than taking.

There’s an unspoken code of ethics followed by well-respected Twitterers, and a strategy that can help you reach your customers and supporters on Twitter while not opening yourself up to criticism and in extreme cases, retaliation (ever heard of the Motrin Mommies ?). The power of Twitter is increasing daily — do you know how to harness it? Let Abraham & Harrison show you how. (Via Marketing Conversation)

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too short-lived. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs, that is the moment it is either gone to the grave or becomes a patient existing on life support. Either you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots, or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs.

If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

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

My Director of Client Service, Daniel Krueger, wrote an insightful blog post over at Abraham Harrison’s PR and marketing blog, Marketing Conversation, called Marketing in the New Millenium. The story is in growing response to the fine article from Norman Birnback over at PR Backtalk, including Spread The Word: Blogs Matter We Just Can’t Measure It!!, Blogger Outreach is PR and Not Marketing and On Survivor Corps’ Blogger Outreach. Check it out:

TV & print are soooo 1900’s ;). Welcome to the new millennium. We’ve been here for some time now, but I think all of the social media and new initiatives for marketing – like blogger outreach and online campaigns – are really just starting to flourish.

I am currently managing a project for Abraham & Harrison for a non-profit company called Survivor Corps. The purpose of this campaign has been to promote the transition of the Landmine Survivors Network into Survivor Corps and to promote the book, ”I Will Not Be Broken,” written by Survivor Corps co-founder Jerry White. The book is a fascinating story of Jerry’s own personal tragedy of losing his leg in a freak accident and then the rebuilding of his life. Jerry has interviewed thousands of victims and in this book shares what he and they have learned about living and thriving after a tragic event.

The main way we have handled this campaign has been through an online blogger outreach to demographics we thought would be receptive to the message that Jerry and Survivor Corps are trying to spread. Each blogging demographic we reached out to, was crafted a message for that particular group. Norman Birnback wrote a very insightful post about the method we used for this campaign and I think he hit the nail right on the head. While his article was focused on how to establish metrics in a blogging initiative, he saw that we didn’t cookie cut a mass email, but crafted our message to the particular group we were reaching out to. Two other very important parts of this campaign were the creation of multiple social networking groups and presences along with the creation of two social media news releases which basically give a “who, what, why” in a neat and tidy format.

Some companies and agencies, like Survivor Corps, are starting to look outside the box at alternative methods of reaching targeted audiences. As the blogging communities continue to grow, outreaches like this one are essential to make sure that the the group you are targeting is aware of your campaign.

Via Marketing Conversation

“There is a legitimate difference between online marketing and Spam. Some people say the difference is Relevancy. Okay, this is close; but there needs to be another element involved: Value. Mmm – organically grown and very delicious Value.” Via Marketing Conversation