I was part of the online promotion and response team for the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on Sci-Fi Channel back in the day, before they became SyFy.

The USENET Newsgroups (alt.battlestar-galactica for one) were pissed off. It was partly my job to circulate amongst the online communities, circa 2003, to convince a vocal online population of 40-something men that the Sci-Fi Channel interpretation was the last place that the Battlestar fans were ever going to get — the last opportunity — and that they would never get another go, unlike the Star Trek franchise, at reviving the campy 1978-1980 series with original cast.

Part of my argument with the online Original Battlestar Galactica influencers was that Sci-Fi had pushed through the reissuing of the original Battlestar Galactica series into DVD and by offering a Cylon box set.

Another part was that both Ronald D. Moore and David Eice were completely committed to the brand and that Sci-Fi was committed to a vision that may have been different in its interpretation but was, surely, as true in its ultimate morals and vision.

In the end, though, my argument came down to, “it has been 23-years since the series was canceled and it hasn’t been picked up by now? Well, you had better get behind this project because this is probably the last — your last — chance at reviving Battlestar — plus, did I mention the cool reissue and remastered Cylon box set?”

It was fascinating to be able to work around the community online, not only on USENET, but wherever the conversation was happening.  It was particularly challenging to appeal to the old guard over the sex change of Starbuck.

I even had authority to leak the fact that Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick were totally into hiring original cast members, including the fly-in-the-ointment-at-the-time Richard Hatch — none of it rang true, it was such a tough crowd.  Moore and Eick even promised to tip the hat all the time to the old gang, including cheeky references to the old theme, the old Cylons, and any number of playful homages (which they surely did in spades over the course of the series).

Instead of really embracing the idea of a darker, stranger, more brutal BSG, the only argument that rang true was that this Battlestar Galactica miniseries was the last opportunity that these true blue OBSG fans had to any of the above.  They homages would not have time to play out, the guest appearances would not come to pass, and if the miniseries never got picked up, it would be bad for everyone involved, especially Richard Hatch himself (who ended up rocking the role of Vice-President Tom Zarek, by the way!)

How did I end up on this memory lane?  Well, I was inspired by this exerpt of Augie Ray’s article, Can Influencers Be a Bad Influence?

I just wanted to mention that the Battlestar Galactica project was not just left to chance and to the passion of the project and the strength of the vision.  My team and I worked our asses off to make sure we turned the tide of disapproval online well before the airing date of the miniseries.  We stacked the deck, we worked on getting hearts and minds well before, and we at the very least made sure these true blue committed fans of the originale series gave the week-long miniseries a try — we kept up their curiosity and stoked the fire of their interest.

Can I call Viral and Buzz Marketing AKA Social Media Marketing circa 2003 the old days or the glory days?  Well, here the excerpt I spoke about above, Can Influencers Be a Bad Influence?:

Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick specifically set out to deconstruct [Battlestar Galactica]. Cylons looked like humans, capes and lasers were replaced with military uniforms and bullets, and Starbuck was turned into a woman. In the words of Bonnie Hammer, then the president of the SciFi Network, “It was no longer your father’s Battlestar Galactica. It was provocative, it was edgy, it was dark.”

But what if a certain group of influencers had gotten their way? As Entertainment Weekly reports, Moore got a rocky reception when he showed preview clips at Galacticon, a Battlestar Galactica fan convention. “The clips ended and they booed and they hissed,” he reports. Richard Hatch, star of the original series, agrees, “It was icy-cold in there. It was obvious that no one liked it.” In the end, a Galacticon attendee stood up and asked Moore, “Now that you’ve heard all of this, will you take a pledge now that if this show goes to series, you will make sure it’s more in keeping with what we would like to see?”

Moore could very well have treated the attendees of Galacticon as influencers; after all, this was a bunch of people so in love with the mythology of the show that 25 years later they still traveled across the country to gather. So what was the Executive Producer’s response to the fan’s question? Moore didn’t promise changes to appease the existing fan base. He didn’t even tell the Galacticon fans he’d give consideration to their concerns. Instead, Moore stood before the only group of consumers who gave a damn about the Battlestar Galactica franchise and said, “This is the show. You may not like the show, you don’t have to watch the show, but this is the show that we’re making.”

Rather than listen to the fans of the campy 80s series, the SciFi Channel instead turned to other science fiction fans, many of whom appreciated darker and more serious fare such as the “Matrix” series and cult flick “Blade Runner.” In doing so, they rejected the easy and obvious choice for a group of influencers and instead found the ones that really mattered. At a subsequent Comic-Con convention, the stars of the new show were “pleasantly surprised at the positive fan response.”

Moore and his crew might have been tempted to take same course as the makers “Snakes on a Plane,” opting to involve the existing fan base, turning to them for scripts, and allowing the BSG fans to set a different direction. But they didn’t. Why? Bonnie Hammer summed it up best when she said that fans “can’t drive the creative process.”

Matt and I rushed this post tonight. I received the email three hours ago, IMed Matt, and we got it out now. I love blogging for this. I hope you enjoy this new post, Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads:

Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads
A close-up look at how the marketer is handling fallout from its controversial German ads

This week, PepsiCo got into hot water with more than a few folks after some suicide-themed ads many found offensive were brought to light. Here’s how they’re using social media to apologize to consumers—including me.

I received an email from B. Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, @boughb on Twitter, responding to my tweet about the recent post that Matt Creamer wrote a couple days ago, “Pepsi Opens a Vein of Controversy With New Suicide-Themed Ads”, about some ads that were run here in Germany in a lifestyle mag—ads Pepsi says it won’t run again after they received heavy criticism all over the web.

I’ll excerpt the first part of the email from Mr. Bough, who holds the title of director-social and emerging media and is based at Pepsi’s Purchase, N.Y. campus:

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me – @boughb or Huw – @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

Thanks, Bonin

I know you all think I am going to mock Bonin, but I won’t. I think this was a very bold and risky maneuver and worthy of praise rather than a tarring and feathering. And his outreach to me, a nobody, was accomplished within two days. When I replied to Bonin, asking if I might be allowed to post his email, he replied back that I could post his email but to try to “treat it kindly.” I hope I am.

I don’t think that Bonin knew that I blog for AdAge or that I know a bit about how the marketer is surprised about how well-traveled the ads have been. The old we-didn’t-think-anyone-here-would-see-it approach. Well, that’s the Internet for you. Someone passed along the scans of the PepsiMax ad, “One is a Very Very Lonely Calorie,” to the alert gang here at AdAge.

Within two days of tweeting, I received a note from @tweetmeme, a sure sign that my tweet had gone memetic (and that I had played at least a bit part in the mad traffic to the AdAge post as well as the resulting 40 comments.)

Here’s how fast and furious social media works. The article was posted on AdAge at 4:36 PM EST on December 2nd. I read it and Tweeted at 6:16 PM EST the same day. And then I received said email from Mr. Bough at 5:21 PM on December 4. The lesson here is that social media has eyes everywhere and the network to make sure that advertisers can no longer hide stuff in niche markets. There is a word in intelligence about just this thing, and it relates to messaging and propaganda: backwash. Social media makes backwash inevitable. Here’s another one from Intelligence: blowback. Backwash leads to blowback.

There’s no way to isolate this kind of advertisement. And there is an inverse proportion between how badly you want your ad to remain niche and the sensationalism surrounding its discovery. It’s a really obvious point, but one still clearly worth stating: The internet makes it impossible for any marketer to control which geographies and demographics see any particular communication. You can’t even really control what media it appears in. Think you’re creating an edgy print ad that will only be seen in a German magazine? Think again. In the blink of an eye, your ad is on the web. You know, the world wide one. And all kinds of people are pissed off.

What I like about what “Bough, Bonin {PEP}” did here is that he responded almost immediately, rather personally, and opened himself up to us social media mavens. Bravo! Full marks. Another thing I like about his apology is that there is a very good chance that I am being played, that Mr. Bough is playing reverse psychology on me. Yes, he readily approved my posting of this message when I asked, which leads me to believe that the very act of clicking on the post right now is just going to help PepsiCo with an amazingly-savvy viral marketing campaign for PepsiMax.

I have been trying to record some of the sessions at PodCampOhio but since my lovely Nokia N95 8GB isn’t working with 3G (thanks, AT&T 3G for breaking on me), I have been doing my best using Qik with EDGE, which sucks.  The good news is that I was able to record quite a little bit of Jennifer Laycock‘s session on how to get your podcast to go viral and how to do online promotion and blogger outreach.  Jennifer is a guru and an expert and I am damned glad to know her!  The session below was called “Orchestrating a Viral Explosion.”

Everyone wants the benefits of a viral campaign, but few people really understand how to put the pieces together to create the best chance for success. Find out the most common mistakes companies make when aiming to go viral and how a little bit of brainstorming can set you up for success. Jennifer Laycock will walk you through the actual brainstorming process she uses with clients to help you gather information needed to put things together. She’ll also help you learn to identify “key influencers” within your industry and will offer concrete tips on the best way to approach them with your campaign.

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

Advanced Blogging

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

Description

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

Instructor

· Chris Abraham, Founding Partner, Abraham Harrison LLC

o www.abrahaharrison.com

o cabraham@chrisabraham.com

o +1 202-657-403

· Blogging since 1999 www.chrisabraham.com

Short Review of Blogs and Blogging

· Ease of publishing.

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

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

· Linkability (All posts should have permalinks)

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

· Commentability (All posts should welcome comments)

· Okay to be subjective and opinionated (encouraged!)

· Blogs can influence culture and mainstream media

· CGM, citizen journalism, citizen marketing, new PR

Blogging Best Practices

· Short, pithy, entries

· Constantly updated

· Only one long work a week

· Shameless, assertive, opinionated, unapologetic

· Shows respect, dignity, reciprocity

· Give more than you take

· Join the conversation and community

· Assumes good intent

Reputation as a blogger

· Techniques for building prestige and influence

o Reciprocal links and linking

o Blogroll and blogrolling

o Citations

o Comments

o Pinging ping-servers

o Press releases

o Email requests

o IM and email relationships

o Drinks, dinner, lunch, or coffee

Introduction to Viral Marketing

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

· Authentic, transparent, conversational, honest

· Ask for what you need, give what others need

· Tell people who you are and why you are there

· “Astroturfing” is not worth the short term benefit

· The blogosphere is conversational

· Message, client message, messaging

· Network of weak blogs generally win over a powerful media

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Online Brand Promotion

· Blogger advocacy and outreach – top-down,

· Develop a list of blogs appropriate to your campaign

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

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

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

· Develop general message (called a message model)

· Send an bespoke email of introduction and message

· Always give more than you take: gift is key

· Keep record of all blogs and bloggers who respond well

· Delete (remove) bloggers who request it

· Make explicit opt-in request from friendly bloggers

· Don’t assume they want your message

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

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

Introduction to Online Brand Protection

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

Important reading

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

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

· Applied Blogging Workshop www.appliedblogging.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas of Chris Abraham & Abraham Harrison LLC

That is basically wherein I give the entire shop away!

Cheers for the review!

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

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

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

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

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

Description

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

Instructor

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

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

What is a blog?

· An online journal (as in “periodical”)

· A web application (as in “program”)

· Easy to use (as easy as webmail)

· Communicative

o Syndicated (RSS, ATOM)

o Link aware (Trackback)

o Comments

o The “search engine advantage”

· Okay to be subjective and opinionated

· Blogs can influence culture and mainstream media

What isn’t a blog?

· A blog is not “just a website”

· A blog doesn’t require editing or oversight

· A blog does not offer privacy

o True anonymity is a myth

· A blog is not a great American novel

o Be brief and to-the-point

o Keep each post to a single topic

Why is a blog different than a website?

1. Ease of publishing

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

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

4. Linkability (All posts should have permalinks)

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

6. Commentability (All posts should welcome comments)

Types of blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular blogging fields

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

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

· Advocacy – Boing Boing, Lifehacker, Treehugger,

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

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

Variations on the blog

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

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

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

Where can I blog?

· Free blogging services

o Blogger www.blogger.com

o WordPress www.wordpress.com

o Friendster www.friendster.com

o MySpace www.myspace.com

o LiveJournal www.livejournal.com

o Vox www.vox.com

· Subscription blogging services

o TypePad www.typepad.com

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

· Install your own blog software (requires web host)

o WordPress www.wordpress.org

o Movable Type www.movabletype.org

Who is a blogger?

· Everyone!

Why blog?

· Zero barrier to entry

o Technology is no longer a restriction to entry

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

o Any type of blog host makes you a blogger

· Participate in global conversation

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

What is a good blog?

· Short, pithy, entries

· Constantly updated

· Only one long work a week

· Shameless, assertive, opinionated, unapologetic

· Give more than it takes

Reputation as a blogger

· Techniques for building prestige and influence

o Reciprocal links and linking

o Blogroll and blogrolling

o Citations

o Comments

o Pinging ping-servers

o Press releases

o Email requests

Important reading

· Naked Conversations by by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble

o redcouch.typepad.com

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

o redcouch.typepad.com

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

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

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

o www.appliedblogging.org

In response to Do PR Execs and Lawyers Have the Same Bad Rep?, Amanda Chapel responded, “Your logic is flawed at the outset (with all due respect) . . .”

The key word is ‘neutrality.’ We sell belief in things we do NOT necessarily believe in or are even believable. By definition, that’s a lie. Good people doing an honest days work promoting lies… does not make it true. You not knowing the difference between right and wrong doesn’t make stealing a car okay.”

I replied, “When you are a neutral solution, you don’t lie, you just pass through client message. That is like saying that it is the amp that is tone deaf and not the singer! It is like saying that the defense attorney is guilty and not the alleged perp, and it like saying that one should blame the soldier and not the war.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the comment from Charles Edward Frith in full:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger Ethics Coverage:

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

Caveat Emptor et Lector Repost

Bloggers Can Ignore Basic Journalism Ethics

Bloggers do not Aspire to be Journalists

Pay Per Post Coverage:

Vanity Advertising on PayPerPost is Addicting

Edelman Ethics Coverage:

In Defense of Edelman over Bribery Charges

Not a Bribe with Disclosure and Transparency

BL Ochman Gets the Vista Edelman AMD Bribery Scandal

I Think I May Have Jinxed Edelman PR

Andy Sernovitz of WOMMA Blames the Victims in Edelman Controversy

What I Would Have Done if I Were Edelman Me2Revolution

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

Microsoft Did Not Bribe Bloggers Reports Microsoft

Journalism Gods Agree with Me on The Bribe

Come on, Interference CEO Sam Travis Ewen, this is just lame. Where is the walk behind the edgy, cool, hip, and shamelessness with which you and your firm, Interference, Inc, talk?

If the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show Aqua Teen Hunger Force is going to use a promo that obvious gives us a collective digital bird, you need to make sure that the entire campaign not only talks the talk but also walks the walk. The above statement is fine, but you really shouldn’t hide behind a closed office and “no comment.” This is the price of having balls. Do you have balls?

Now, you and your company, Interference, Inc, just seems sleazy, opaque, and stealth. What you did was cool. It was hip. Now, it is your response to this fiasco that will sully viral and guerrilla marketing, not that fact that you got cool kids place cool assets in funky cool places. Come on, stop hiding, it just makes you look ashamed and guilty.

Via BL Ochman’s post, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Promo – A Really Bad Hair Day in Boston, “Interference CEO Sam Travis Ewen stayed out of sight for a second day yesterday and could not be located for comment.” Interference, Inc, “did not return calls seeking comment and its offices were closed Thursday.” Sam Travis Ewen is handling this all wrong.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for greatness and could make Sam Travis Ewen if he handled it right. I am a proponent of extreme publicity. Interference, Inc, is now in my mind and so is Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I will see Aqua Teen Hunger Force and so shall all my friends. You will, too, probably.

Until now, only freaks and geeks watched Adult Swim. Now, everyone is going to check Aqua Teen Hunger Force out, en masse!

I spent nearly three-years living the life if an “NMSer.” It is where I got trained up in the art of new media strategy and new media marketing. I had an amazing experience working there and I am also happy to share the latest post-Meredith purchase in the form of a very nice article, Tracking Who’s Saying What About Whom: New Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients, by Kim Hart, on the Washington Post. Simply put, co-founders Pete Snyder and Aaron Earls are truly visionaries, deserving of their notable success.

Tracking Who’s Saying What About WhomNew Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients

By Kim Hart

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2007; Page D01

Moira Curran starts her day at the office by skimming several dozen blogs, occasionally firing off instant messages to her co-workers with links to juicy bits of celebrity gossip.

Then she listens to podcasters chatting about the latest episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Lost.” In the afternoon, she keeps an eye on soap operas on the television set that hangs above her desk.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

About 70 colleagues, scattered across two floors of an Arlington high-rise, spend eight hours a day doing much of the same. Some of them are also playing video games, watching movies and cruising around MySpace.

That’s exactly what the clients of New Media Strategies, an online marketing company, pay the employees to do. Companies ranging from movie studios and television networks to automakers and burger chains hire these professional Web surfers to scour the Internet for any mention of their brands. Over the past few years, the “online analysts” have helped the companies track their reputations, found ways to get their products noticed and joined online conversations to help steer them the way clients want them to go.

More recently, as the explosion of blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites has driven big companies to recognize the role of Internet image in protecting their bottom lines, traditional media companies and private investors are seeking to buy Web-savvy start-ups that have a toehold in cyberspace.

That’s what happened to New Media Strategies this month, when it was acquired — with two Los Angeles-based online marketing firms — by Meredith Corp., a Des Moines-based media company known for its sturdy lineup of traditional magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal.

“I see the Internet as the world’s largest focus group,” said Pete Snyder, a former media consultant and political pollster who started the company out of his Capitol Hill apartment eight years ago. He had received a few casual offers to buy the company, but interest spiked in the past year. “So many companies have been so deeply entrenched in old media. . . . Now they’re looking to plow into the Web 2.0 world.”

Evidence of that world abounds in the Arlington office, brightly painted in red, orange and yellow. A podcast studio occupies a corner office, and conference rooms are named “.com,” “.net,” “.gov” and “.org.”

Posters from the movies the company has helped promote line the walls — so many that passersby sometimes ask if the office doubles as a theater. Framed albums from Black Sabbath and several seasons of “American Idol” hang next to a flat-screen television reserved for “product viewing.”

Many of the online analysts wear headphones all day and chat with bloggers via instant messages. Their job is to be the clients’ eyes and ears online, said Clay Dunn, 28, a brand manager who monitors what is said about video games and movies.

He watches for rumors and alerts his Hollywood clients if online coverage goes awry. Once, for example, backstage photos from a movie set surfaced and spoiled a sneak preview already in the works.

Curran, another brand manager who trolls the Web on behalf of television clients, corrects errors published in blogs. If rumors spread that someone’s been fired from the cast of HBO’s “Entourage,” for example, she’s there to set the record straight. If an angry viewer bashes a network for a violent scene in a prime-time show, she’s there to post a rebuttal. She watches soap operas so she’ll be able to chat knowledgably with the rest of the online audience.

“Every day, I’m an absolute sponge,” said Curran, 25.

Curran said she is careful to acknowledge her connection to clients when it’s required. All online marketers have to walk a fine line when they work the blogosphere. Federal Trade Commission rules require them to identify their roles when they’re making a point on behalf of a client, but if they’re gossiping about the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” they can legally be as anonymous as anyone else.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

The New Media Strategies employees are young, self-identified tech geeks whose goal is to know the Internet inside and out — an increasingly daunting task as hundreds of new blogs and Web sites crop up every day. They try to stay a few strides ahead of online developments — or at least only a step or two behind.

“The Internet used to be our oyster,” Curran said of the days just a few years ago when there were only chat rooms and message boards to monitor. “It still is, but we have to reassess the things we pay the most attention to.”

New Media Strategies’ entertainment practice was the first to take off; Hollywood has long been willing to spend money to influence the online world. Over the past few years, Coca-Cola, Burger King, AT&T, Dodge and Ford joined the client roster. Most recently, public affairs has become the fastest-growing area for the company.

“Before, we could barely get a politician to spend money on a Web site, let alone a massive Web campaign,” Snyder said from his Arlington office. “The world across the river is waking up to this.”

So are buyers and investors. Media companies are starting to show strong interest in adding interactive firms to their portfolios, said Seth R. Alpert, managing director of AdMedia Partners, a New York investment bank that facilitates deals between advertising and marketing companies. AdMedia represented New Media Strategies in its recent acquisition.

“Serving advertisers is now seen as being more broad than putting ink on paper or building Web sites,” Alpert said.

British marketing giant WPP Group, which includes established advertising firms Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam, has acquired several interactive-media firms. Nielsen Media Research combined three online-research companies to create Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which analyzes online markets.

In the Washington area, private investors recently put money into another start-up — Clarabridge, a Reston company whose software crawls Web sites, recording what people say about specific products or brands and tabulating the occurrence of positive or negative words to help clients assess their cyberspace images. For example, it tracks recommendations and criticisms about certain airlines on travel sites.

The company calls the process “online intelligence.” It is currently working for pharmaceutical companies to get a sense of how consumers feel about the drugs the clients make.

“This can shape how they spend that million dollars to launch a product,” said Sid Banerjee, co-founder and chief executive of Clarabridge. “There are enough mainstream consumers making decisions on the Internet that they represent a meaningful sample of the market.”

Last week, the company took in $7.2 million in venture capital funding from Intersouth Partners, based in Durham, N.C., and Reston, bringing its total financing to $10 million since it started in 2005.

Cymfony, a Boston interactive-media firm and a competitor of New Media Strategies and Clarabridge, has received $24 million in venture capital cash in the past seven years.

Cymfony got its start doing research for intelligence agencies but decided to use its text-mining software to monitor the consumer-generated Web. Its business has doubled as advertisers take to the Internet, said chief executive Andrew Bernstein.

“There’s too much media online and no one knows where to turn,” he said. “So they turn to us.”

“Pete Snyder, Founder and CEO, New Media Strategies, Inc.: Pete is the Founder and CEO of New Media Strategies, the industry pioneer and market leader in online intelligence, brand promotion and brand protection, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Drawing on his background as a pollster and media consultant, Pete founded New Media Strategies in 1999, establishing a new industry in market research, brand marketing and communications. New Media Strategies uses technology to tap into the power of the Internet and the blogosphere, helping leading corporations and causes, including some of the biggest Hollywood brands, to promote and protect their brands and bottom lines, online. As CEO, Pete has guided New Media Strategies’ success and rapid organic growth. Over the past six years, New Media Strategies has built a blue-chip client base that features some of the best known brands and corporations in the world, including among others: ABC, AOL Time Warner, Atari, Boston Beer Company, Burger King Corporation, Dodge, Disney, EA, Elektra Records, HBO, Levi’s, McDonald’s, Monster, Northwest Airlines, Paramount Pictures, RCA Records, Red Bull, Reebok, Revlon, Sci-Fi Channel, Sony, USA Network, and Wyeth. Pete was recently honored as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, and New Media Strategies was recently recognized on the “Inc. 500″ listing of the Fastest Growing Companies in America. Proving that a company can focus on fast growth, profitability, and fun, New Media Strategies has been recognized by Washingtonian Magazine as one of “50 Great Places to Work” in Washington, and the Washington Business Journal recently honored New Media Strategies as one of Washington’s Best Places to Work. A former political media consultant and a pollster to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Pete regularly appears as a commentator on the Fox News Channel and has served as a marketing and political expert on CNBC, The News with Brian Williams, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hannity and Colmes and Fox and Friends. New Media Strategies has appeared in national media publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Hollywood Reporter.”

My good friend George Brett sent me to read Long Tail PR: how to do publicity without a press release (or the press) and I have to admit that the article is an excellent question but there is no there there. In fact, the article might just opening Pandora’s box. I have some answers . . .

“What do you do? Stick with the world you know, and continue calling and emailing releases to the traditional press (trying not to notice that their ranks are shrinking and influence waning)? Start spamming bloggers, too, and hope for the best? Or just treat alpha bloggers like traditional press and shower them with love, while ignoring the rest?” asks Chris Anderson.

A Step-By-Step Guide to Online Brand Promotion AKA Long Tail PR AKA New Media Marketing by Chris Abraham

Firstly, do not abandon traditional methods. Even in a world of virtual online communities, the telephone, the IM, the Press Release, and the email still have their place.

Secondly, There are two methods for locating Topical Online Communities, a Top-Down Approach and a Bottom-Up Approach. Generally, a hybrid approach is most effective, but many promoters prefer one over the other.

The Top-down Approach

The Top-Down approach assumes that the influential conversations happen in online communities with a focused purpose and stated topic. For example, if you want to reach travelers you should first focus your outreach on travel blogs, travel wikis, travel portals, in travel newsgroups, and travel bloggers. This strategy is an essential part of online marketing.

Finding online communities using the Top-Down Approach is easy. Several sites can aid in helping you find topical online communities. Here’s how to do it:

Go to Google and search for your topic. Be sure to place your topic phrase into quotes to limit your results. For example, “travel blogs,??? “travel Wiki,??? “travel forums,??? “travel podcasts,??? Google uses algorithms that help the tops sites show up at the top of the listings, generally favoring blogs, communities, message boards, wikis, and portals.

Go to Technorati and use the above topic phrases to search for topical blogs in the directory, http://technorati.com/blogs/; try the same phrases by searching in tags, http://technorati.com/tag.

Go to BlogPulse and explore their list of top blogs, http://www.blogpulse.com/06_09_18/topWeblogGroup.html, for on-topic blogs
Go to Technorati and take a look at their list of top popular blogs, http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/ with an eye to finding blogs with topical content that jibes with the mission of the online marketing campaign.

Visit Truth Laid Bear’s Ecosystem, http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php, to explore the top blogs and scroll for blogs that are on-topic.

Visit Share Your OPML to see what the most popular sites are, http://share.opml.org/: Top feeds, http://share.opml.org/rankings/, Top podcasts, http://share.opml.org/toppodcasts/, and top subscribers (I am currently 34th), http://share.opml.org/prolificsubscribers/. There is a loose correlation between top subscribers and most influential bloggers.

Get ready to bookmark the sites you find compelling as you will need them later. Go through the listing and take note of the sites you find that are interactive online communities, including blogs, message boards, forums, wikis, and so forth.

The most influential blogs, forums, and wikis are also the most difficult to influence. The owners, bloggers, moderators, and administrators are busy and used to being contacted. Many of these sites are corporate-owned and unlikely to be receptive to messaging. In the few cases when they are receptive to messaging, they would be even more receptive to messaging were that message to be perceived as popular and organic.

In other words, the most influential blogs are loud, busy, noisy, and fully-funded. They have defined roles, queues, workflows, and advertising packages. They’re also interested in being perceived as being editorial, objective, and discerning.

It is entirely possible to build a relationship with a major player, a major influencer, over time, but I recommend that until a online brand promoter gets some experience, some hours in the cockpit, and starts building real, organic, and intimate relationships online (like getting them in your address book and on your IM list where you feeling comfortable emailing or IMing them) then there are better ways to get your message into delivered into online communities, specifically, the Bottom-Up Approach.

The Bottom-up Approach

The bottom-up approach can be started today. Yes, today. The bottom-up approach doesn’t care at all about who is talking or where they’re talking, just what they’re saying.

For general results, check Google, MSN, or Yahoo; for blogs check Technorati.com (http://www.technorati.com), Ask.com (www.ask.com/?o=333#subject:bls|pg:1), Google Blogsearch (blogsearch.google.com/), IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com), Feedster (http://www.feedster.com), or BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com)
Type in either a relevant topic phrase or search for sites that link to Your company.com (technorati.com/search/www.your company.com and www.ask.com/blogsearch?q=your company.com)

Go to the blogs that are talking about or linking to your topic or your company
Where appropriate, leave a short note about your take on their article or post in the comments field and maybe mention what you’re doing at your blog. Lead with comment and content — give the blogs the gift of your insight rather than go around promoting yourself… the latter is SPAM!

Record the URL of each comment in a spreadsheet in order to be able to return. Return to the comment the next day to see if there has been any response to your comment. If there has been, it is important to be responsive. Be conversational – a member of the community – and answer any and all questions or queries that may arise about your company, video blogging, or traveling.

Return daily to Technorati and Ask.com and do the same thing.

Please be considerate, and make sure to leave comments, content, and conversation only where people might be interested (i.e., “inform??? – don’t “spam???).

Collecting Online Communities

Whether you use the top-down approach or the bottom-up approach, your searches should be collected, organized, and aggregated into a master document. By far the most important and useful document you will create is your collection of online communities. The first time you build one, it will be a time-consuming pain the ass.

In the case of the Top-Down Approach, it will be easy to do, since these sites are generally focused on a single topic and easily categorized. With the Top-Up Approach, it is important to not add all of the sites you have recorded in your spreadsheet of comment URLs above. Be sure to only add sites to your universe that have proven to mention your general campaign topic more than once. For example, although my blog, Chris Abraham, http://www.chrisabraham.com, is a general blog, I have blogged a lot about automobiles, http://www.chrisabraham.com/automobiles; and, in the case of BMWs, I am devoted with http://www.chrisabraham.com/bmw/ and http://www.chrisabraham.com/e39_5series/. Even though my blog isn’t about either autos or BMWs, it is a safe bet that I, as a blogger, would be very open and receptive to automotive messaging. And in the case of GM, I have indeed been messaged, http://www.chrisabraham.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?tag=GM.

Choose your sites wisely, well, and selectively. It is okay to start off small and build out over time. Alternately, you can load every community and the kitchen sink into the document and then prune based on the effectiveness of the online messaging and outreach is on a per-site basis.

The document that you create will never be set in stone. It will be dynamic and always changing as online communities come and go every day. The document can be as simple as a notepad document or as complex as a database-backed application. I use Google Spreadsheets since it is an online service and I can share it with a client and access the spreadsheets anywhere.

They can be very simple documents and kept in one big lump or broken into separate documents based on the type of online community, such as Blog, Forum, Portal, Newsgroup, Social Network, or based on the topic of the online community (communities of interest, practice, action, circumstance, position, or purpose), such as travel, drinking, gaming, file sharing, or cars. I prefer to organize all of my communities into lumps based on interest or purpose (travel and tourism). My collections of topical online communities, or universes, live in spreadsheets, one-per-topical focus.

At this stage, you only need Name, URL, Type, and Focus. That said, spending extra time to figure out the full name and email address behind the blogger, message board, or Wiki, is worthwhile when you define online influencers or an online advocacy and outreach campaign.

Defining Online Influencers

It’s easy to figure out which blogs, portals, and forums are highly popular and highly influential; it’s harder to figure out which of these communities may be receptive to your marketing efforts. By looking at the Internet through the lens of the Top-Down Approach and the Bottom-Up Approach, you will start to formulate a realistic understanding of the online community landscape as it pertains to your company. You will also learn which communities and which bloggers consistently blog favorably about your company. Once you have this sorted out, you can start building a relationship that becomes personal and builds over time. Before long, they’ll be on your IM list, in your Address Book, and you’ll know all of their birthdays and the name of their spouses and kids. You, a corporate shill, are becoming part of the online conversation and you are building online equity and real online trust. You will be able to ask favors and grant favors. You will even eventually meet one for lunch. It will happen. It happened to me.

Prospecting Bloggers

While exploring the blog search engines for relevant company-related content, take note of particularly friendly blogs and bloggers. Also take note of any blog and bloggers who are actively embedding your company code into their blogs. If a blogger consistently uses your company, comments on blog posts, or has ever given a positive or neutral review of your company, consider asking the blogger to be part of a select list of folks who will receive news, updates, upgrades announcements, and other company news with the understanding that when the news is received by the blogger, the blogger can do whatever they want with it. This is why it is important to make sure the blogger (or message board owner) is committed to liking your company. If you have an agency to conduct blogger prospecting and the online advocacy, be sure they know the form and content of the messages you would like to be conveyed. The prospect may or may not blog about the news. The hope is that the prospect will decide to blog about the news, either positively or neutrally. Once the email goes out, however, you have no control of what is done. If you have any second thoughts about the prospect being a friendly, don’t do it.

Reaching Out to Online Influencers

Every day, go through the universe to each blog, message board, social network, and social bookmarking site and use either the built-in search form to search for discussions about your company, your competitors, or choice keyword phrases, looking for relevant content.

Consider joining the conversation only if there is something worthwhile to contribute. Only enter the conversation if you can answer a question, clear up a misconception, announce news that would be considered interesting to the members, offer a promotion or discount, or contribute to the conversation with expertise or insight that would add true (and not just promotional) value to the conversation.

Activating Bloggers

One a list of friendly and like-minded bloggers have been assembled, organize them in an Outlook Contacts folder. don’t hesitate to reach out to individual bloggers and friendlies informally in order to build a connection and a conversation. It is important to make sure any formal outreach is carefully considered before moving forward.

When it is time to reach out and message to the list, there are several things to consider before emailing. The most important thing is to make sure you have something important to share or a gift to give. This can be in the form of something simple, but there always has to be a reason for reaching out.

One way to make the connection feel more intimate is to use Outlook’s fine email merge to send out an email. Listservs and mailing lists can be seen as too impersonal, as are formatted newsletters-looking missives. After sending out one of these group activation emails, be sure to respond quickly and personally to each and every personal query and response you may receive.

The primary goal is to build a relationship between other bloggers and your company’s community. The secondary goal is to have the community blog about your company organically on their own; saying whatever it is they want to say.

Ideally, if everything is done above board and transparently, and the prospects are tried and true, then any and all coverage will be either very positive or at the very worst, neutral in tone.

Anyway, this is a work-in-progress so please pop me an email to cja@well.com or leave a comment below if you have any feedback.

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

Some of the first recorded offline / online viral campaigns were developed by Tim Nolan of Spent2000.com fame circa 1996. By placing abstract pairings of catch-phrases, quotes, song lyrics and image mashups, Mr. Nolan developed a method of creating “buzz” around a URL based installation. Phrases like “This city isn’t safe” placed along side a URL created curiosity enough in people’s minds to remember a URL and visit again once they were online.

Viral marketing sometimes refers to Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing, designed to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via “offbeat” stories worth many times more than the campaigning company’s advertising budget.

The term “viral advertising” refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text.

Viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing the marketing campaign, relative low-cost (compared to direct mail), good targeting, and the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at a low cost.

The hardest task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail advertising, the business-to-consumer (B2C) efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing. Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail; it encourages users of a specific product or service to tell a friend. This would be a positive word-of-mouth recommendation. One of the most successful perspectives found to achieve this customer base is the integrated marketing communication IMC perspective.

History
Some argue the term viral marketing was originally invented by Tim Draper and coined by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail’s e-mail practice of appending advertising for themselves to outgoing mail from their users. The first to write about viral marketing was media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a “susceptible” user, that user will become “infected” (i.e., sign up for an account) and can then go on to infect other susceptible users. As long as each infected user sends mail to more than one susceptible user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one), standard in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.

An even earlier reference can be found in Richard Brodie’s famous book, Virus of the Mind. Brodie worked for Bill Gates at Microsoft, who was quite aware of how information could spread quickly to win an argument and then a market.

If each user sends mail to more than one susceptible user then the campaign will in theory continue forever, or at least until all susceptible users have already received the message. Even if the message is not forwarded quite that often, the message might still be forwarded many more times than it was initially sent. For example, consider a campaign that starts out by mailing 100 users. Not all of them will forward the email, but some of them might. This ‘some’ would be tested using market research; say, for example, that it turns out to be 80% and that each forwards it to only one friend. In this case, 80 people would receive a “first generation” forwarded message. From there it would decline roughly exponentially, so that each generation would be smaller than the next, as 80, 64, 51, 41, 33…

Eventually the campaign would fade out. Research must be carried out on the life expectancy of such a campaign. More complicated formulas can be generated, but this would be the easiest for most marketing departments to work out. So the final campaign would cost the original amount of funds needed to send the email to 100 users and the rest (357, in this case) would be users marketed by viral methods and normally for free.

Notable examples of viral marketing

* The spread of the R. Tam sessions for the 2005 film Serenity
* Burger King’s The Subservient Chicken and Coq Roq
* Carlton Draught: Big Ad campaign.
* Ford Motor Company’s Evil Twin campaign
* Gmail
* Heinz’s Ketchup Against Tomato Cruelty campaign
* Blair Witch Project
* I Love Bees – viral marketing for Halo 2
* Jamie Kane BBC sponsored online game
* McDonald’s “McRib Farewell Tour”
* Microsoft’s Origami Project campaign
* Microsoft’s Xbox 360 campaigns, called OurColony and Hex168
* Tupperware parties
* The Ring movie and its massive cursed video secret promotion
* The Ring Two movie promotion used another blank-label videotape ending with www.she-is-here.com, a website where users shared their unexplainable experiences with the cursed videotape
* Snakes on a Plane’s “Get a call from Samuel L. Jackson” campaign
* FX Networks’ use of Myspace pages as advertisements
* Sony’s viral videos promoting the 2005 release of the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus through “giant sitings” on giantology.typepad.com/ and other sites. Convincingly created “home videos” and news reports depicting evidence of ancient giant creatures in India, the polar north, and Peru.
* Disco.app CD burning application for Mac OS X.
* The Rolling Rock Beer Ape commercials
* Sony’s Playstation Portable campaign, alliwantforxmasisapsp, which has been met with scorn.
* Apple Inc.’s Iphone campaign.
* Iron Maiden’s The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg single was preceded by viral marketing.

Via Wikipedia

Street Team Promotion.com offers Online Marketing and Brand Management solutions to bring your influence directly to the people that are buying, or considering buying, your products and services.

They are online everywhere in the world. They are your customers. They surf, they play, they shop, and they chatter. It is viral and the stakes are high.

Street Team Promotion.com offers online outreach to consumers using brand advocacy teams, discussion, messaging, blogger relations and more. We work to help you start and control the buzz or just eliminate the noise. We provide online expertise in community technologies, blogs, wikis and message boards.

We work with clients to develop targeted “word-of-mouth” marketing strategies, as well as tactics used on Usenet, message boards, social networks, and blogs. We work strategically to develop online advocacy programs and outreach campaigns to protect your brand.

The chatter and communication online that is shaping perceptions for many trends and consumer buying habits is at it’s all-time high…and going higher. With online competition looming close by, you cannot afford to let others define your message or your brand.

- Community Outreach
- Blog strategy
- Online Buzz Marketing
- Social Networking
- Youth Marketing

According to Louise Story, “consumer brand companies have long wished they could find a way to eavesdrop (legally) on customer conversations. Marketers can easily read Internet blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites, but what people say over coffee or across their cubicle remains largely unknown.” Conversation over coffee or across the cubicle isn’t special and here’s why…

After doing word-of-mouth marketing and brand intelligence — and having spent over ten years invested in online communities — I can say that online conversation is as intimate, honest, and revealing as it may be “over coffee or across the cubicle.”

In fact, I would posit that online conversation, in general, is more authentic because either anonymity is possible or people have a false sense of security when they are in bunny slippers and jammies all comfy at their computer.

Online, people feel safe and are relaxed and spending some time with people they are really intimate with — coworkers and and coffee dates are never that close, really.

Leveraging the Intelligence, market research, and collected polling data culled from “Internet blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites” is almost like researching chimps and apes from the point of view of Jane Goodall — close, without barriers and walls, accepted in the tribe — instead of in a nature reserve, a zoo, or on the dissection table.

Want me to paint my analogy against the wall, well, check this out:

My Online Brand Intelligence Analogy

Let’s consider the chimpanzee. There are several ways to learn more about the chimpanzee: through dissection, in captivity, and in the wild.

Although dissecting the chimpanzee to see how the physiology works is essential as a form of training and education, dissection doesn’t help with knowing the behavior of the chimpanzee.

You might be able to make assumptions about how intelligent it is or what it eats, but in terms of behavioral studies, its irrelevant. This is similar to posthumous studies of market data — there is no life there, only corpse.

Polling and focus groups are like observing the behavior of the chimpanzee in capacity — you have a living, breathing, chimpanzee, but you have one that is under stress, duress, and has been partially acclimatized to appeasing its handlers — it wants to keep safe, it wants to be fed, and it wants to get out — so observing chimpanzee behavior in captivity is like observing consumer or market behavior in focus groups — you have real-live response, but you have the response of something that is beholden to you, that is wondering what’s in it for me — you have corrupted behavioral data.

If you want to really know the true behavior of the chimpanzee, you need to observe it in the wild. And to get the best concept of the behavior of the chimpanzee, you need to become — or at least be accepted as — a chimpanzee.

Jane Goodall was a pioneer in the behavioral study of primates because she was accepted over time into the community of chimps. Online brand intelligence can study and report on brand and consumer behavior in the wild, in the wilderness.

Where behavior is true, honest, and living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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