I just returned from guest lecturing for Chris Boesen at American University’s School of Communication’s Public Communication department. The class was full of seniors who aspire to join the PR workforce.  I didn’t talk gloom or doom because I told them a secret.  I told all of the fresh-faced smarties the secret that will make them competitive if they’re smart: become social media producers instead of being just social media consumers: start blogging yourself into Edelman, Ogilvy, Burson, Ketchum, Fleishman, and Qorvis.

So, hopefully they’ll write themselves right into an entry-level position in 9 months when they all graduate — if they’re smart (and they seemed like they were — a bunch of them already blogged and Twittered, some of them on their own and some of them because of a class — who cares how!).  I also told them that I would be happy to help them in any way they can now and in the future — with one condition: they they send me the link to their blog.  If they can provide me with a link to a blog that is about digital PR, new PR, PR, communications, marketing, or social media, I am at their service.  Otherwise, fuck ‘em! (it’s for their own good).

So, if you want to learn more about my experience guest lecturing around Washington, check out Chelsea Reviews My Comm350 Guest Lecture. I will plan on blogging about my experience at American University again; however, I am going to first see if anyone there has has much chutzpah as the lovely Miss Chelsea Clark did over at UMD.

Is it sort of like a Schrödinger’s cat situation: if Chris Boesen’s students reach out to me via a blog post, a tweet, via email, or via phone, I will follow-up with a very positive and adoring post (a total of two for American) but if it ends up being a dud (sorry Chris), then I will have to be more lukewarm in my follow-up review.

Oh, and if you’re curious as to what I went on about for 90-minutes, you can page through the below presentation at your leisure:

BL and I adore eachother so I was very excited to receive an email from her last night with a link to her latest article on Business Week, Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free — check it out and check BL out over on her blog, What’s Next Blog. Oh, and when BL asks “how many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records,” I can proudly state that Abraham Harrison LLC has the expertise, the experience, and the track record to boot!  Anyway, here’s the article:

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers
• 1,652 social media marketers
• 513 social media consultants
• 272 social media strategists
• 180 social media experts
• 98 social media gurus
• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

ZapposChief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, has been creating new media marketing and online brand strategy since 1995 for companies including IBM, Ford, McGraw-Hill, Budget Car Rental, Stacksandstacks.com, and American Greetings. She tracks online marketing trends and campaigns in What’s Next Blog.

I need to find out who these three women are.  They are wonderful and vibrant and beautiful — also, super-talented. My video phone ran out of juice during their first recital so I missed their super-cool synchronized classical music medley, but here’s what I did get, more of a Girl Band medley of new music.  They are so adorable.

They were the break time entertainment at a conference I spoke at in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week. I was invited by Zuzana Zentková of In Form Slovakia, s.r.o.to travel from Berlin to Bratislava, Slovakia, to keynote the Daily Web Conference.

Not only had I never been to Slovakia, I had never really thought about the country, focusing mostly on the Czech Republic instead of the Slovak Republic. My tickets were booked from Berlin to Vienna because, I discovered, is only 63km away from Bratislava — only a half-hour away by some fast highways.

This news is from the hasn’t this already happened before department?  Also, from the I can’t believe it took this long department. Via the Washington Post.

Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang will step down, the company announced last night, as the once-highflying Internet portal struggles to steady itself in the turbulent environment for Web media.

Yahoo! should be one of the coolest brands on the block.  With Flickr and del.icio.us, Yahoo really should be #2 — and it could be #1 if it would stop with the self-loathing — and it is not. Why?  Because Yahoo isn’t nearly shameless enough to survive in the 2008 Internet.  It is no longer the world of wizened Unix gurus who would easily define what is and isn’t couth on the Internet. Yahoo! is stuck in the days when it was uncool to splash your own brand on the brands you own (so is AOL); Yahoo! is stuck in the Internet of the 90s, an Internet wherein being good enough was good enough.

If Yahoo! was trying not to become gauche or become an ugly American in the Europe of the Internet, then it was successful! Yahoo! has become irrelevant. At least people hate Microsoft & AOL. Hell, I have nothing at all to say about Yahoo! except I adore del.icio.us and Flickr.  How could the owner of two of the Internet’s coolest properties never be able to harnest the gravity of these two major celestial bodies and slingshot themselves into #1?

Maybe there is too much modesty, not enough braggadocio, in the halls of Yahoo!  Maybe if you look closely, Yahoo! is the company that does no harm and does no evil.  Maybe the company who’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” is actually pretty shameless and far from modest. Maybe on the modern Internet (and in modern business) it is more important to say you’re doing good, being good, and being modest than it is to actually be modest.

Yahoo!, Yahoo!, Yahoo! please try your darnedest to spend more time sharing yourself with the world and less time being the best of the good citizens.  Google is absolutely shameless when it comes to all the good work they’re doing.  They are not keeping their religion to themselves, they’re not praying quietly to themselves in a bare cell, away from prying eyes!  Google is on the soapbox!  Google is bragging!  Google is sharing the Holy Spirit with the world!

If you keep on slipping those alms into the alms box of Internet Good Works by dark of night you will actually become irrelevant.  Nobody is against you but nobody is for you, either. Nobody cares.

What’s worse, I don’t think enough people even really think much about Flickr and del.icio.us being Yahoo! properties.

Yes, you make folks become Yahoo! members, but that’s not enough. In DC and Virginia, everyone has a Safeway card but nobody like to shop at Safeway — it’s only because Safeway makes it super-easy to become a member.  There is no brand loyalty, there is no passion behind the brand (OK, OK, Safeway Select pasta sauce is awesome — it is like Safeway’s Flickr), even if everyone has a Safeway scan card on their key ring.

Anyway, Yahoo!, I am so sorry for the rant.  Oh, also, why is it that all of my geeky friends in the Zope and Python world all want to work for Google and not for Yahoo!?  How come all of my PHP and MySQL friends ache to work for Google and not for Yahoo!  How pissed you must be to suffer that Google drank your milkshake.  They took you toys!  You, Yahoo!, where supposed to be that success story!  I mean, you were the first search engine, after all!  You were the first directory, right?

Well, it is time to get off your pity pot, kick Jerry to the curb, and again become the Yahoo! I have known you since 1994 and have loved you (although I have not used your email address since Gmail came out, sorry) and I really want you to get you some smarts.  Give me a call at +1 (202) 352-5051 or +49 (0)151 52579077 — I would be more than happy to try to help you turn this ship around!

Viel Glück

The folks around the office have been gushing about Starbucks’ breakfast sandwiches. I finally tried the $2.99 ham, egg, and cheese “Egg McMuffin” myself and here I am gushing* right along with them. I really hate Starbucks’ lunch menu. It is offensive to charge over a fiver for a cold prepackaged sandwich. Everything changed last month. No, lunch still sucks at Starbucks, but they introduced breakfast sandwiches. No joke.

I hope that the following article is a good first step towards deciding if blogging is the best investment of your time, energy, resources, and message.

I have been participating in online virtual communities since I bought my first 300 baud modem back in 1983 and logged into my first Honolulu BBS. In the last 22-years, I have been a member of many different virtual communities, including discussion forums, USENET newsgroups, Wikis, and of course blogs. There are some important things to consider before you decide to use blogging — or any sort of online communication — as a way to convey your company’s brand and message.

Effective PR Blogging

How to develop an effective public relations (PR) blog strategy for your company or organization.

For-profit companies and the modern incarnation of the traditional University have a lot in common. Universities have been using viral, buzz, and word-of-mouth marketing for years: their students, their professors, and especially their alumni networks. It is little wonder why MIT and Yale offer future Presidents lifetime free email addresses in the form of alum.mit.edu, and aya.yale.edu — because when smart people share valuable information, people want to know where that person went and where that person works.

It is very likely that your business can benefit in a similar fashion by setting the best and brightest in your company free to create goodwill for your firm and spread your name in the community. If properly utilized, these ambassadors can have a significant impact on the image and standing of your company, so they should be carefully chosen, loyal, invested team players. At present, the best tool for this job is the weblog, better known as “blogs”. In the article below, I will try to give an overview of the use and impact of blogs, and to provide a history and contextualization of blogs, so you can better decide if and how you would like to implement this powerful tool.

Years ago, I served as Managing Director of beehive North America, a software company that developed web applications using a Python-based programming platform called Zope. In order to see where interest lay, I started the Zope Python User Group (ZPUG) and a personal blog that featured my day-to-day while also being the only place where photos, information, and meeting minutes for the User Group could be found. I quickly realized that it is possible to shamelessly promote yourself, your wares, your company, and your services if you are perceived as giving way more than you get.

In my case, I used my personal blog to cover monthly ZPUG meetings, how my travels to Germany to visit my parent company went, and how cool it was to train Zope to the gang at Pfizer, Johns Hopkins, and the Nature Conservancy. I talked about working on new e-Books and developing new components for our Enterprise-level content management suite of applications that we were developing for major Berlin banks.

Since it wasn’t a corporate blog proper and served as my personal home page, I could easily discuss everything that was happening to me, including recipes, pet stories, travel experiences, and lots and lots of work. Since I spent over half my waking hours working, I spent a lot of time blogging about beehive NA, its parent company beehive GmbH, ZPUG, and Zope and Python in general. And since the software is Open Source and constantly evolving and maturing, my blog became a valuable resource to find more Zope answers, Zope help, Zope information, Zope training, and Zope developers. And that trainer and that developer would usually be beehive NA or beehive GmbH.

Like I said before, Universities have been doing this kind of viral and buzz marketing for centuries. And since Universities openly and readily share their scholarship, no matter how shameless the pomp of their titles, they and their hallowed Academies most certainly offer back much more than they are perceived as taking. And yet they are not paupers. Universities control endowments in the billions of dollars and command princely sums for the privilege of study. This is a shrewd business in which prestige, altruism, collaboration, brain trust, and purity of thought result in a self-promotional carte blanche that only finds its equal in organized religion. There is nothing even close in the commercial world.

Most of the early tech companies and early adopters of the Internet circa 1992 were former academics. The first thing these academics did when they moved from the Ivory Tower to a suite of offices was to get back into the USENET newsgroups they frequented during their research days. In truth the only notable difference in their discourse was in the signature file at the end of every posting. Instead of an .EDU address, the posters transitioned their emails to .COM. These were the pre-SPAM days when it was okay to have your plain text email address in a public posting. Everybody had their real email in their revealing signature at the bottom of every posting. This signature said a lot about you. It lent legitimacy to your words and allowed you to be the expert. If your media.mit.edu email address worked, then you were in fact who you said you were.

There isn’t a better form of word of mouth marketing than having the name of your company associated with brilliance. Universities have known this for years and it has become institutionalized in the axiom, publish or perish. Whether a professional journal, a conference, academic paper, the essay, or in postings on USENET, the reputation of an academic and the academy can hinge on the prestige associated with good PR. And in the academic environment, content is king.

USENET used to be exclusive and it wasn’t until well into the 90s when gateways opened up to AOL and other ISPs to USENET, followed closely by spammer, spiders, and bots. Forced into exile by bozos, baiters, flamers, and newbies, USENET became Balkanized. A brain drain into more exclusive communities ensued. One of the earliest homes for the alpha male techie was Slashdot, which launched in 1997 and is a prototype for the modern blog with Dave Winer’s Scripting News being one of the earliest. Both of these sites were highly technical with strong academic influences.

Until 1999, one might find some important vestige of USENET in a personal web site or in a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) but these were publications and not open for debate and collaboration in the same culture of open sharing found in the Newsgroups. In the late 90s, web logging (blogging) became a viable option for savvy users and early adopters. Blogs allowed easy daily postings and associated threaded discussions and XML-based Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Blogging articles – whether personal, technical, or professional – with the ability to accept reader comments and be able to track visitors has become a major force in the media in the last few years, arguably influencing the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Not only were people interesting in learning what other people were thinking real time, but people were eager to talk back and get involved in dynamic debates over issues as they happened.

RSS has become very simple and widely adopted in recent years. The reading of online content via RSS client software allows online readers to dispense with their Favorites and Bookmarks and read online news, journalism, journaling, papers, search engines, and magazines in the same way we now read email.

Most consumers ignore corporate sites as sales pitch and propaganda. Not so if you allow your employees to speak for you. Talk not only about the cool new project and hot new services, but everything else. If you hire smart, if you trust your employees, if you walk the talk, then there is nothing to worry about. And people really enjoy listening to employees discuss their day-to-day. Consumers want to know your company’s eye color and they only way they’ll find out is by getting to your you through your employees.

It is similar to visiting campus before applying to college. You want to stop a couple students (or talk to a couple alumni) and ask them about their experience. People love gossip and people adore getting the inside scoop because everybody likes dirty laundry and everybody loves being let in on a secret. What this comes down to is that people demand to be entertained and nothing gives back more than feeling like an insider.

If I were to recommend blog-building to a .COM enterprise, it would have to be at this level: invite your brightest to blog just outside the umbrella of the company with your blessing. There are some important ground rules: the employee needs to feel comfortable and not micromanaged otherwise the blog will not be perceived as honest. People can tell when their being duped; additionally, it is essential that there is trust there on both sides; finally, it is important to find the employee who really wants to do this, otherwise the blog will fall to disrepair.

It takes such a leap of faith to convince the corporate lawyers to loosen their grip on blogging employees. And, as the number of bloggers who get canned by their employer for blogging, increases, people are going to become more covert about it. They go underground. They are blogging already anyway. Why not allow them to blog fully, blog freely, and share with the rest of the world the proud fact they spend half of all their waking hours working for you, your company, and fulfilling your vision?

©2004 Christopher James Abraham