I try to read through my RSS feeds every day. Today I stumbled upon an article by my friend Christopher S Penn, entitled Social media now directly influences search rankings.

It shows that Google is playing Tri-D chess in a world where most companies are mastering checkers:

If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters.

Long story short: every search you make on Google returns results that are weighted heavily to favor people in your social network, especially those people and brands to have a lot of friends, likes, and followers.

In other words, you can access top organic search engine results for your company, brand, products and services by really diving into social media marketing and eveloping connections, followers, likes, and lists–getting people to like your brand on Facebook or follow your brand on Twitter hasn’t ever just been about brand awareness, it has also become an essential secret weapon for search engine ranking.

You should read Chris’ article for sure, but I have my own example to show how personally-tailored Google search has become

A few days ago a journalist friend of mine popped me a note to ask me if I knew the Rosetta Stone CEO. I didn’t, however, he thought I must because my name came up twice when he searched for ‘Rosetta Stone” on Google.

See, I blogged for Rosetta Stone for a while and have used their products for years. When I did the same search, I didn’t show on the first page at all. Online, my friend’s world is heavily colored by me.

I showed up because he and I are connected via LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Talk, Gmail, Twitter, and who knows where else.

His search reality isn’t objective at all. It is being heavily adjusted by the connections he has and will make to other people and brands online. In real time, immediately, to order, based on dozens of tacit connections.

Google isn’t stupid. I won’t show up in all of his web searches–only those that are relevant to what he wants. However, if I have ever written and published anything online that is, in fact, relevant, there’s an excellent chance I will turn up on page one, possibly even if he’s logged out of Gmail.

With the multitude of social network profiles that I possess and maintain, the nearly five-thousand friends I have on Facebook (including the high-caste of many of my friends), the 38,000 followers I have on Twitter, and my 12-year-old blog, my 2,200 contacts on LinkedIn, 3,400 folks on FourSquare, subscribers on FeedBurner, all my content on YouTube, and others, means that Google generally tries to include me in other people’s searches of the Internet, gaming serendipity to the point that I come up as a few of the search results on such a competed-for search term like Rosetta Stone in the Manhattan offices of one of the top global newspapers.

I chose to use this example because I have invested myself so heavily towards building these connections shamelessly. People wonder why I would engage in promiscuous “follow back” on Twitter and maintain the maximum friends on Facebook? Surely I am not special. I, like anyone else, cannot maintain close friendships in excess of Dunbar’s Number of 150 friends.

I have been doing this for myself, for my company, and for my clients, using myself as the most shameless example to prove the concept that having the “right” friends online, following the few “right” people and brands is not only wrong but dangerous.

Yes, get the right followers, but also get as many followers as possible. In a world where people get their search results based on who their friends are and what they’re looking at or doing, you’re going to want to become connected to as many as humanly possible, possibly indiscriminately but certainly promiscuously. The more people you touch via social media and social network connections, the greater the chance that you will always be a top result whenever they do a search in your general direction.

Sure, my level of social media populism is not for everyone because it does take a lot of work, and pursuing the Cluetrain long tail of everyone can surely scare away some of your elite contacts and friends, which it has done, personally, because I do create a lot of content and “noise” to someone who only has 150 friends on LinkedIn, on MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. I have surely driven them away and hear, “I had to unfollow you because you were the only person I ever saw on my
Facebook wall.” Fair enough. No worries.

While this example is personal, all of these map across to brand beautifully. I am co-founder and president of Abraham Harrison and Google knows that. It is on my Google Profile (you really need to look at this and set this up and try to get all your employees to set their profiles up as well). Google met me halfway when it came to the profile, too, as it was mostly already sorted out for me when I arrived. I just made sure they didn’t miss anything.

This might all seem like Mickey Mouse child’s play but the net effect is that the experience of daily search for tens of thousands of people online tends towards returning content that I have liked, dugg, retweeted, blogged, stumbled upon, thumbed up, shared, starred, emailed, and recommended, including a mainstream media highest-caste global newspaper journalist, and others. Their search reality is strangely influenced by my Internet behavior. That’s powerful. In the attention data game, I am considered a super-node.

In terms of an SEO strategy, this means–and has meant for a while–that simply nailing your site’s information architecture, naming convention, keyword-rich URLs and titles, content, keywords, ALT tags, and link strategy is not nearly enough.

The new secret weapon for Search Engine Optimization is digital Public Relations and Social Media Marketing.

Even more info on this strategy over on Steve Rubel and SEOmoz. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmdia.biz via Mike Moran’s Biznology blog.

Abraham & Harrison offers its clients comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing campaigns based on the core fundamentals of effective Marketing Communication techniques. We integrate Online Publicity, Online Grassroots & New Media Marketing, Business Intelligence and Search Engine Services to ensure that our clients’ message, the right message, is being portrayed in every corner of the digital space. Additionally, we offer our expertise in the areas of profiling, intelligence, forensics and crisis management. Although Abraham & Harrison offers its clients the ability to cherry pick the services that best suit their needs, we strongly suggest customized, tailored packages of services for most clients, as our experience has proven the power of an integrated, comprehensive approach.

Please see our website for further information: http://www.abrahamharrison.com/

Abraham Harrison LLC Services

Online Publicity and Blogger Relations

Not unlike traditional public relations, the Abraham & Harrison Online Publicity and Blogger Relations strategy not only identifies the right people for you to be talking to, but also connects these people with your brand and your message. In targeting the true online opinion leaders, we are able to not only hone in on the demographic communities that matter most to your brand, but also promote your products and services in a favorable light. Online Public Relations is an ideal brand awareness and brand promotion solution for small to mid-sized businesses looking to increase their visibility online. In leveraging the constant flow of online chatter, the Abraham & Harrison team creates and fosters relationships based on like-mindedness, or the opinion leader’s likelihood to be receptive to your brand and messaging. It is the relationship building aspect of this program that makes Online Publicity an optimal solution for prospective clients that have the infrastructure to support and maintain relationships with interested parties.

Examples of typical Online Publicity campaigns include: Event Publicity, New Product Launches, Crisis Communication, Brand Re-Information Campaigns, Overall Brand Awareness/Promotional Efforts.

Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing

Also referred to as Online Advocacy or Online Guerilla Marketing, Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing is an integrated approach to identifying and reaching your targeted demographic from the bottom up. These programs are a quick and effect means of spreading news and information to a targeted network of online influencers within the blogosphere, message boards, video communities, social bookmarking sites, listservs, etc. This strategy involves the development of key creative and general messaging by the client and allowing our team of Online Grassroots experts to run with it, determining the best way to roll that up into what the demographic audience would be most receptive to. As opposed to the much targeted approach of Online Publicity, Online Grassroots Marketing allows us to capitalize on the “long tail,” or the complex nature of online chatter in which dialogue about our client’s brands isn’t always localized within its primary, secondary or tertiary demographic targets.

Examples of typical Online Grassroots Marketing campaigns include: Social Network Marketing, Asset Distribution, Social Media Marketing, Viral Marketing.

Business Intelligence

Collectively, the Abraham & Harrison Management Team has over 5 decades of global branding and marketing communication strategy experience. It is with these years of experience that we have learned that for some clients, their bottom line is most affected by having real-time, accurate business intelligence information about market landscape, trends in their overall brand perception and valuable online opinion about their competitors. The deliverable on these initiatives is a comprehensive, detailed report, evaluating and analyzing trends within the mediasphere; blogosphere; user generated content outlets, message boards and forums. The Online Business Intelligence service also gives the prospective client to determine which demographic communities about which they are most interested in gaining information. These reports can be delivered as a one-time State of the Union analysis or as an ongoing trend analysis, depending on the client’s needs.

Search Engine Services

Brand of the world, large and small, know that visibility of favorable content within key search engines can make or break your marketing and public relations initiatives. In addition to offering tailored marketing communication and business intelligence solutions to our clients, Abraham & Harrison is also a full-service Search Engine Marketing agency. Programs falling within this department include: Traditional Search Engine Optimization (Promotion), Defensive Search Engine Optimization (Protection), Domain Name Protection and Domain Name Services.

Online Reputation Clean-Up and Defense

Despite providing Internet users with a wealth of accurate information, some brands have faced the hard reality of the adverse affects that negative online chatter and mis-information can have. Fortunately, the majority of these trends can be reversed, if treated early and in the right way. By providing clients in need of Online Reputation Clean-Up and Defense services, the Abraham & Harrison team harnesses the power of an integrated approach to attach negative opinions and misinformation from all sides. In combining our Search Engine Services (including Domain Name and Defensive SEO), Online Public Relations, Business Intelligence and our Online Grassroots and New Media Marketing Programs, the Abraham & Harrison team is able to deliver quick results. In the past, we have proven effective in minimizing the visibility of unfavorable content online, countering misinformation with real information and creating valuable allies among online opinion leaders on behalf of our clients.

About the Founding Partners

Mark Harrison, Founding Partner and CEO

Mr. Harrison’s unique history of professional experience blends technology, education, business, and international affairs. Trained as a diplomat, Mr. Harrison has worked with UNHCR, the IMF, and the World Bank Group. He has served as a political functionary, technologist, and journalist in the US, Europe, Thailand, Israel, Tanzania, and Guatemala.

He has served as CTO and Technical Counsel to a companies ranging from Fortune 500′s to start-ups, and has guided projects across the globe. He served as a technology adviser to Primedia, the US media conglomerate, Channel One, the world’s largest in-school education and television news network, and largest minority-owned TV network in the US. He has built systems and infrastructures for the afore-mentioned organizations as well as a number of other major corporations including Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and Bell Atlantic/Verizon. Mr. Harrison currently acts as CTO and marketing adviser to Techcelerator, the Silicon Valley venture development firm headed by tomandandy.com’s Tom Hajdu. He is also an associate of Joseph Jaffe’s New York based new media marketing company, crayon LLC.

Over the past 15 years, Mr. Harrison has taught at the secondary, university, and post-graduate levels in the US, Canada, Germany &Tanzania, and has developed curricula in business, academic methodology, languages, and technology. Mr. Harrison has lived and worked in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America and speaks English, German, French, Swahili, and Spanish.

Chris Abraham, President and Founding Partner

Chris Abraham is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant, and adviser to the industries leading firms, specializing in web2.0 technologies, including content syndication, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media. Chris is a leading expert on corporate and PR blogging with a focus on citizen journalism, new marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

In addition to his roles as consultant and analyst, Mr. Abraham currently acts as Chief Marketing Officer and technology adviser to Techcelerator, the Silicon Valley venture development firm headed by tomandandy.com’s, Tom Hajdu. He is also an associate of Joseph Jaffe’s New York based new media marketing company, crayon LLC.

Mr. Abraham is one of the internet’s social media pioneers, having entered the scene in the early 1980′s in the days of BBS’s via dial-up over 200 Baud acoustic modems. Throughout the 1990′s, he was a core member of the ground-breaking, Washington, DC-based Meta Network (TMN), and its parent company, Caucus Systems where in 1999 what is today known as “Web 2.0″ and “Enterprise 2.0″ was defined in colleague Tom Mandel’s whitepaper “How Companies Think – Creating Collaborative Intelligence Online” and executed on a daily basis for companies, universities, and organizations via the seminal social media platform, Caucus Software. For more than a decade, Mr. Abraham laid the groundwork for today’s modern social media as an online facilitator with Caucus Systems clients serving such clients as IBM and the US Government, and teaching with the University of Kalamazoo in the Education for the Arts project – the world’s first accredited online high school course in creative writing.

Before moving to his current position, Mr. Abraham was a Senior Account Supervisor and a member of the Interactive Team at Edelman in Washington, DC, doing online public affairs. Before joining Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media Strategies, a pioneer and industry leader in online brand promotion and brand protection. At NMS, Chris directed the technology strategy for the firm, including the development, deployment, and launch of client and internal corporate blogs, marketing blogs, vertical industry blogs, PR blogs, promotional blogs, public affairs blogs, social networks, and podcasts.

Prior to joining NMS, Chris was a Washington-based technologist for over a decade. As Managing Director for Berlin-based beehive North America, Chris focused on developing web applications and offering training for corporate clients such as Pfizer. As GNU/Linux SA and online facilitator for Caucus Systems, Chris hosted virtual online events and communities of practice for clients such as IBM and eForum 2000.

Chris Abraham maintains the PR and marketing blogs, Because the Medium is the Message and Marketing Conversation. The blogs were originally designed as a laboratories in which to explore the media, the mediasphere, the blogosphere, marketing, PR, and buzz marketing but has expanded to become a media filter, including technology, blogging, pop culture, memetics, news, and analysis; meaning just about anything. Chris recently spoke about the main stream media and citizen journalism on the BBC World Service radio program World Have Your Say during the We Media conference in London.

Mr. Abraham is an active member and attendee of former US Ambassador Phil Lader’s Renaissance Weekend conference where together with other industry leaders, US Senators and Congressmen, former US Presidents, renowned artists and writers, and other cultural, political, and business leaders he has spoken on topics ranging from new media to technology futurism to virtual company management. He is an experienced sailor with thousands of blue water miles to his credit, an impassioned rower with his own single shell housed on the Potomac River, an avid bicyclist, a trained and qualified dive master, and an accomplished photographer with over 20 years of professional experience and thousands of images with the world’s top stock photo agencies.

Abraham & Harrison Vision Statement

In the rapidly changing world of marketing and public relations, the lines between traditional strategies and new media strategies continue to shift as the line separating the two is constantly moving. What was once viewed as impossible, is now quickly transforming into more and more of a science, with the Internet emerging as a unique and remarkable platform for consumer and business communication. Faster now, more than ever, people around the world are able to communicate with rapid fire quickness. Formerly “untappable,” obscure word-of-mouth is now a medium that many brands are leveraging to disseminate information; promote their products and services; as well as protect their namesakes. In this day and age, we don’t need to remind you of the Internet’s effects (be it favorable or dismal) on many popular brands. It is this phenomenon that has made Online Conversation Marketing an ideal solution for a variety of notable brands, ranging from Internet start-ups to public interest groups to major consumer brands.

Abraham & Harrison is comprised of a trained team of media, marketing and public relations experts working together to drive positive online presence on behalf of our clients. Operating in a “virtual office,” the Abraham & Harrison team is spread across four continents, representing more than 10 time zones and almost a dozen languages. This dispersion has given us a notable competitive edge, allowing us to quickly and effectively employ comprehensive Online Conversation Marketing Campaigns within more than 50 countries. Despite its benefits, the “virtual office” does not provide for the ideal environment for rapid response communication, in a traditional sense. Though Abraham & Harrison has proven its ability to provide crisis communication and react to changes in campaign strategy and messaging, we do not operate in a newsroom and are unable to collectively stop on a dime and refocus in the same way that traditional PR houses are able.

Online Conversation Marketing grew out of the increasing importance of relationships as it relates to effective branding via the Internet. Despite the wealth of information and opinions “out there,” Abraham & Harrison understands that an elite few lead sweeping trends in Online Conversation tone, volume and reach. These Online Opinion Leaders or Influencers continue to break news and share opinions that reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of consumers everyday. Thus, the overarching strategy of Online Conversation Marketing is influencing the influencers – much like securing online endorsements on behalf of our clients. Unlike the formalized world of traditional marketing and PR, an effective Online Conversation Marketing Program takes much longer to develop, as Abraham & Harrison is in the business of securing positive relationships with often busy Opinion Leaders. We have been able to complete campaigns on behalf our clients in as little as 6 weeks, however, the turn around for the majority of brands is generally several weeks, if not months, longer. The “public” that we relate to is not the mainstream media, whose relationships can often be bought and sold; the “public” that we do relate to are the online influencers, who oftentimes, are no more than regular Internet users with a well crafted, interested blog or website that has drawn in its own audience. Although Abraham & Harrison already has a sundry of these influencers in pocket, we often have to develop new relationships on behalf of our clients, given their diverse demographic targets and needs.

Abraham & Harrison leverages email to conduct the majority of relationship building with online influencers, however, we are not a direct or email marketing agency. Often times, the opinion leaders that we contact on behalf of our clients are being reached “blindly,” meaning that they have not opted into any particular program. In order to effectively carry out these campaigns and still remain CAN-SPAM compliant, we pick and choose our targets carefully, ensuring that we provide them with relevant messaging and “gifts” or promotions or information that would be of interest to them. At the end of the day, much like traditional PR, a poorly thought out Online Outreach campaign (the facet of Online Conversation Marketing most like traditional PR in which we build relationships with popular bloggers and influencers on behalf of our clients) can result in little to no positive outcome for the client. It is for this reason that the ramp up time on these programs typically runs anywhere from one to three weeks, as we prepare lists of appropriate, likeminded targets that will likely respond well to our clients’ brands as well as development of appropriate, effective “messaging.”

All things to considered, it is also worth highlighting that unlike other Online Marketing and Advertising agencies, Abraham & Harrison does not thoughtlessly disseminate links and off-topic messaging throughout the user generated corners of the Internet. We value relationships and act as persuaders, storytellers and attractors on behalf of our brands. In working individually with online influencers and Internet users as both a macro (Online Outreach) and micro (Online Engagement, Grassroots Marketing) level, Abraham & Harrison builds relationships and drives favorable, organic conversation in a compliant fashion. The Abraham & Harrison methods reflect the natural progress of organic word-of-mouth – starting small and progressively growing to reach a larger and larger audience. In respecting the online community, the Abraham & Harrison team stands firmly against online solicitation (SPAM) of any kind. Both in Online Outreach and Online Engagement, we are fully transparent, or “open kimono.” We have found these methods to be the most effective when working with the “online public.”

As common conceptions of marketing relate to Online Conversation Marketing, Abraham & Harrison does operate neatly into the bucket of branding, as our methods are a combination of Search Engine Optimization, Grassroots Marketing and Online Public Relations. Clients in the past have likened us to online brand ambassadors. Such being said, we do not fit any pay-per-performance or CPM model. Our metrics are based on conversation and relationships rather than conversions and impressions, much akin to tradition grassroots and brand ambassador strategies.

To conclude, Abraham & Harrison is pleased to offer its unique Online Conversation Marketing services to an array of brands and organizations. Our past clients have found the mix of SEO, Online PR and Grassroots Marketing to be exceptionally effective in achieving their overall marketing objectives. Millions of people are talking online everyday – are you listening?