Be sure to join Sally Falkow and me for a free webinar on March 29th entitled How to Map Your Brand’s Social Graph — please register now! Here are the details of the webinar:

Every brand is surrounded by the people they interact with every day: customers, prospects, analysts, the media, vendors, authorities and the community.

In the past marketers and PR people have been advised to do what is called an “environmental scan” to identify stakeholders and trends in the environment.

Now that your stakeholders are online that ‘scan’ has to include mapping the social graph of your brand: who is part of that social graph, where they are active, what they’re doing online, who they’re connecting to and having conversations with, and what they are saying about your brand.

Find out what the social graph consists of, how to map it, and why this is so important for your brand.

Presented by

Sally Falkow
CEO Social Ally

Chris Abraham
President, Social Ally

I would really love to see you all there!

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• Building The Implicit Social Graph (seomoz.org)
• Tip Sheet: Get a Grip on Conversations: Map a Social Graph (prnewsonline.com)
• Setting Up Google+ For Your Business – Free Upcoming Webinar! (marketingconversation.com)
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• ClickZ: 33Across and Tynt Team Up to Extend Social Graph Insights (tynt.com)
• So What The Heck Is The ‘Social Graph’ Facebook Keeps Talking About? (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook Open Graph: Tutto il web in un Grafo! – Daniele Ghidoli – Be-wizard 2012 (slideshare.net)

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

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

The welcoming pineapple

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

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

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

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

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

Good fences make good neighbors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media globalists unite

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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• Should your CEO be on social media ? (newmediaandmarketing.com)
• Pope to Social Media: Please Be Quiet (mashable.com)
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I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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• Ten social media stats that SMEs should know about (marketing.yell.com)
• Eight ways to measure how effective your social media efforts are (marketing.yell.com)
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I had my television début on Washington Business Report this morning on WJLA ABC7. I was invited on by Rebecca Cooper because she stumbled upon the Abraham Harrison website and liked our humor and our business.  So, here’s the video of the segment for you to check out:

It’s always a tough question: would you rather be the smallest fish in a big pond or the biggest fish in a small pond? Would you prefer to be the ugliest pretty person or the prettiest ugly person? Would you prefer to have the lowest IQ at MIT or the highest IQ at State?

This is all according to your preference, but when it comes to a blogger outreach campaign, the decision is never so zero-sum, not nearly so either/or. You can always do both, right? You can always secure hundreds of long-tail earned media mentions while you’re desperately working on securing coverage on Mashable and TechCrunch. You can lock in hundreds of posts short term while you’re wining and dining Pete Cashmore in Manhattan to make sure you become BFFs, so that you’ll have that inside track on getting column inches for your future newsworthy announcements.

However, in the meanwhile, getting those hundreds of posts on B-list-through-Z-list blogs ensures that you start building your reputation as a player. Consider this your bush league experience. Like doing your time in the small clubs. Paying your dues. In fact, most journalists and A-list bloggers glean their story ideas from the blogs they reach, from their influencers, blogs and bloggers who may well be less popular but are still highly influential.

Do you have the sort of news, offerings, and quality of content that can compete with the big players? Do you have the kind of prior relationships with the top bloggers and journalists or do they not know you from Adam?

This is not only about blogger ego and their desire to be treated like demigods by multinational agencies and their billion dollar consumer electronics clients–though that doesn’t hurt–it also has to do with the prestige of the blog’s content as well as the aspiration of what the blog and the blogger wants to become.

Where do you fit on that? You need to be realistic. You need to judge fairly where you are in the competition. Do you have the time, the resources, the reputation, the newsworthiness, the novelty, or the prior relationship to make it into TechCrunch? If not, that’s OK. There is no reason to fight over the top 25 blogs of your industry or the top 100 blogs in general, because there may be over one billion blogs worldwide, which equates to one out of every six people in the world.

Realistically, unless you’re the quarterback of your high school football team, you’re being unrealistic if you limit your options for prom to just the captain of the cheerleaders. There are so many appealing dates for prom everywhere in school. If you’re only applying to Harvard and Yale, you had better also be not only at the top of your class but also a legacy, score a perfect score on your SAT, letter on a sport, and have a well-developed set of extracurricular activities.

Work toward Prom King and an incoming freshman spot at Harvard College, but plan also on going to prom with someone and to college at all. Aim high but have a plan B and C. Remember, also, that being the best lover with the best prom date you get can always results in better dates in the future and being the best student in the college you are accepted to can always result in getting to Harvard as a transfer or in graduate school later.

Focus on being a big fish in a small pond. As you are working to succeed at that, you’ll naturally graduate to the A-list if you have the goods. But if you shoot for the A-list pond exclusively, and you don’t make the cut, you won’t have done anything to win with the B-list.

Start small and grow to make blogger outreach work for you.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Related articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we did for The Daily, section by section

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

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

The banner

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

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

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

The QuickLinks

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

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

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

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

The video introduction and the social network sharing

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

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

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

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

The news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

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

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

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

Social media and tags

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

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

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

Favicon, header title, and meta description

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• Why Using the Social Media News Release is a Big Mistake (hubspot.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The art of writing the perfect blogger pitch (biznology.com)
• Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective Than Traditional Press Releases (hubspot.com)
• Online newsroooms should go social (econsultancy.com)
• Flipboard, Smaller and Smarter, Launches on iPhone (prnewswire.com)
• Inbound marketing the way nature intended (socialmedia.biz)

Over the last five years that Abraham Harrison has been pitching bloggers on behalf of clients, we have learned a thing or two about how best to reach bloggers, how to engage them, how to get them to carry our client’s message to their readership. Whether we’re doing an outreach to the bloggers of mainstream media and celebrity blogs or to someone who has just set up a blog for the first time, it all begins with the message model.

Below is an example of a message model we developed for Miriam’s Kitchen for National Homelessness Month. We didn’t use it because we focused on Give to the Max Day instead, but I think it is an example of our best work and I’ll put it aside and we’ll use it next year for sure. I will share the entire email pitch in total below but then I will go through a line-by-line explanation as to what we did and why we did it:

From: Chris Abraham <cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org>
Subject: November is National Homelessness Month

Hi <<First Name>>

November is National Homelessness Month and I’m reaching out to you to discuss the issue of homelessness in America. I’m also hoping that you’ll discuss this issue with the readers of <<Blog Name>>. I am a volunteer at a small kitchen for the homeless in DC and while working there it occurred to me that this issue affects every town, village, and city in America.

I have put together a microsite that puts the issue of homelessness in perspective and also uses Miriam’s Kitchen, the kitchen where I volunteer, as a model for addressing homelessness and untreated mental illness in the US capital city. There are a multitude of news, facts, videos, photos, and banners so please feel free to repost any of it:

www.miriamskitchennews.org

If you are able to post about this issue in any form, it would really help spread the message of homelessness in its many diverse forms and maybe suggest ways to help improve many lives. Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to help. Thank you so much.

Chris

–
Chris Abraham,
On behalf of Miriam’s Kitchen
www.miriamskitchen.org

OK, now I will go into more detail, section by section …

From: Chris Abraham <cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org>

The first thing you’ll notice is that I am doing the outreach in this example. Though not the norm, I personally volunteer and donate to Miriam’s Kitchen and people know that, so I decided to reach out as me because that’s the most authentic relationship. In other cases, the names of Abraham Harrison team members fit the bill. The next thing you’ll notice is that the email doesn’t come from either miriamskitchen.org or chrisabraham.com domains. Instead, we virtually always reserve a completely new and unique domain name for each campaign, in this case miriamskitchennews.org. Why? Three reasons:

1. Clients protect their domains. Most companies and organizations have very restrictive IT policies that limit the use of their domain and the allocation of email addresses. This makes it almost impossible to place social media news release content on their site, so we reserve our own because it gets around any of those issues.
2. Bloggers don’t trust PR firms. We prefer to reach out to bloggers as the client instead of as Abraham Harrison on behalf of our clients. Why? Not to be deceptive but because a strong majority of all the bloggers we reach out to are not trained in public relations processes and don’t generally feel comfortable being communicated to via a broker, so we always try to communicate as clearly and as simply as possible, so choosing something in-between the two is best, in this case cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org.
3. Spam detectors are always a risk. Because we reach out cold to upwards of five-thousand bloggers at a time, it is essential that we don’t put ever put mission-critical domain names in jeopardy of being black-listed as spam or being taken away by a fickle registrar such as GoDaddy.com. While we’re exceedingly careful when we target and how we engage each blogger, it is amazing how few email recipients need to report a single email as unwanted before the gray-bearded email wizards can ban and block an entire domain from being deliverable–we never want to put ourselves or our clients in that precarious position. While this has never actually happened to us or our clients, we have felt enough saber-rattling and there have been enough shots over our bow that we make sure we never put anyone into a defensive position. Ultimately, protecting our clients’ brands as well as our own is of top priority.

Let’s move on to the all-important subject line.

Subject: November is National Homelessness Month

The first, and sometimes only, thing a blogger sees when she receives our email pitch is the email subject line and the sender. Choosing a title is super-hard because we want to be as neutral and as informational as possible. Teasing or tricking a blogger into opening by being cute, mysterious, or clever in the subject line has almost always blown up in our faces. The simpler the better, especially when you realize that we follow up a couple times after the first outreach–something I will go into more in a future post. But first, the salutation.

Hi <<First Name>>

When we research bloggers to pitch, we always do our very best to discover the full name of the blog, the first name of the blogger, and the best address possible. We also make sure the name is correct because it isn’t always clear. I can’t tell you how many pitches my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, and my corporate blog, Marketing Conversation, get from marketers who address us wrong, mostly as Abraham. “Dear Abraham.” Those go straight into the trash. Next, our mailer, nicknamed “The Cloud,” has a mail merge feature, allowing us to personalize our email a little bit, within reason, and appropriately.

What’s behind that first paragraph?

November is National Homelessness Month and I’m reaching out to you to discuss the issue of homelessness in America. I’m also hoping that you’ll discuss this issue with the readers of <<Blog Name>>. I am a volunteer at a small kitchen for the homeless in DC and while working there it occurred to me that this issue affects every town, village, and city in America.

The most important thing is to make sure the first paragraph of every pitch is simple, clear, concise, and immediately addresses why you’re emailing. Yes, answer who, what, when, where, why, and how–but in very short order, so get to it! Who? Miriam’s Kitchen. What? Homelessness in America, an issue that affects every town, village, and city in America. When? November. Where? On your blog. Why? To share the issue with your readers How? Posting to your blog. I added the last sentence to proactively address why I was the person to be writing at all–because I am personally invested and this is meaningful to me, for real.

I am lucky enough to have Dan Krueger and Phillip Rhoades on my team. They’re both excellent BS detectors and masters of minimalism. For a pitch like this, Dan or I generally create a first draft. Then, the other two of us go through the draft line-by-line. As if it were poetry. We cut to the bone. This process is a direct result of three things:

One, you only have a blogger for a few seconds–if she opens it at all–so you must cut to the chase.

Two, we have all received enough pitches ourselves to know who does and doesn’t read our blogs, so the entire “I am a real fan of your blog and have been reading you a long time” are generally lies. So, after you write your first draft, cut out all the inauthentic praise. Truth be told, if your targeting is good and you have a great offer and are clear as to what you want, you’re effectively doing the blogger the favor of providing good content that they can easily and quickly pop onto her blog–and you really don’t need to flatter. I am not saying that you should be short, rude, or curt, but surely be very clear as to who you are, what you are, what you want, and what you need.

Yes, I do volunteer at Miriam’s–many times-a-month. If I didn’t–or if I sent the email out as someone else in the company, an online analyst, and that person hadn’t ever graced Miriam’s, I would never make that up. Everything in the email must be honest and true. This isn’t a con job, this isn’t a cheesy 11pm pick up, this is the sharing of relevant information–don’t feel like you have to sell to someone or fool someone to cover you. Also, be very careful about playing the heart strings too loudly when you’re doing an outreach on behalf of a charity. To be honest, the less said the better–allow the blogger to come up with her own conclusions–you really don’t have to tell the blogger what to think. Not only isn’t that necessary but it can be downright insulting to bloggers, who are by their very nature free spirits.

Now, on to the meat of the pitch.

I have put together a microsite that puts the issue of homelessness in perspective and also uses Miriam’s Kitchen, the kitchen where I volunteer, as a model for addressing homelessness and untreated mental illness in the US capital city. There are a multitude of news, facts, videos, photos, and banners so please feel free to repost any of it:

www.miriamskitchennews.org

One of the results of making the email pitch so efficient and tight is that there’s a lot left behind. Most folks who pitch to bloggers still include the kitchen sink in their email pitches: PDF or MS Word attachments are still very common. The majority paste their rich-text traditional press release inline in the email, along with inline images, logos, and graphics. We refuse for three reasons.

1. Our email pitches are all about starting a conversation. We’re more interested in getting an email reply that we can respond to than we are in firing and forgetting.
2. We always send plain text emails. We do not include anything that might result in spam-boxing. We don’t even include any “http://” prefixes in our links, assuming that the webmail or email client will activate the link when the blogger opens up their email and views the content.
3. We don’t take the blogger’s interest in our pitch for granted. The email, to me, is a speed date. We don’t want to waste anybody’s time or good will, so we allow the blogger to decide whether she wants to go on a second date. We like it best when the chemistry is so intense that our client and the blogger drive to Vegas immediately and get hitched–by which I mean we reach out, the blogger immediately likes our pitch, immediately posting to their blog as well as Facebook and Twitter–but we don’t want to assume any of that. We like to play it cool because a heavy sell never works, especially in an earned-media PR campaign.

On to the end of the email:

If you are able to post about this issue in any form, it would really help spread the message of homelessness in its many diverse forms and maybe suggest ways to help improve many lives. Please let me know if you have any questions and if you are able to help. Thank you so much.

Chris

As I said before, being clear as to why we’re writing is essential. Being clear what you want and what you expect is essential, too. Too many pitches I receive simply share their message but are never bold, brave, or courageous enough to make an ask: please post it anywhere, anyhow, to help spread the message of homelessness in America.

The most essential thing, however, is that this is really just a speed date. If we pass muster but the blogger just isn’t sure who we are or why I am emailing her, we need to be painfully clear that this email is not a fire-and-forget. That this email is the beginning of a connection and that simply hitting reply will result in swift answers. Also, accountability. We end just about every email with a direct request to the blogger to please let us know if she ends up helping and sharing–and that we’re appreciative either way. At the very least because she’s spent some of her time opening and reading our email.

Finally, the signature.

–
Chris Abraham,
On behalf of Miriam’s Kitchen
www.miriamskitchen.org

If you’ll notice, we don’t misrepresent ourselves–or myself–as being on the staff of Miriam’s Kitchen; however, we also don’t want to confuse the purity of the message by bringing a second brand into the brief message model, such as would be the case if I included Abraham Harrison LLC in the signature. So, we chose to split the middle.

What you’re thinking right now is “how in the heck could you blog so much about such a short email?” Well, it is because we spend a lot of time, many revisions, and three or more staff cutting, editing, re-ordering, and BS-detecting each message model. We’re very intentional, very formulaic, and also very careful. We don’t want to tell bloggers what to think. We don’t want to put words in their mouths, and we surely don’t want to alienate a blogger because we color the copy in such a way that they reject our pitch based on style instead of content and mission.

It is like a first date, especially for a man like me: it is more important for me to remember to be a good listener and not to spend the entire meal making it all about me. The longer my message model and email pitch is the more likely the blogger will feel like I might have sent them an email in error. I want each email pitch to be as neutral and factual as possible. All dogma, passion, color, interpretation, and story should be provided by the blogger–and don’t forget that everything that you cut out of the email message model can possibly find a happy home in your Social Media News Release.

While the email might seem very casual and conversational, winging it is not an option when you’re officially reaching out on behalf of your brand. This is doubly so when you’re reaching out on behalf of a client. The message model is a getting-to-know-you process and not simply a product. Before I explain what goes into an email blogger pitch, I need to explain this process and the philosophy that we have developed through trial and error since the Fall of 2006.

Being completely familiar with the client, the brand, the product, and the services, before moving forward with the pitch is essential. Anything we don’t use in our message model and email pitch we aggregate it into a social media, multimedia, social media profiles, news release.

This process of collecting all of the client’s assets and collateral material, including videos, photos, ads, bios, history, background, context, interviews, case studies, testimonials, and media mentions, help us then decide if there are any missing pieces that we need to request from the client or create ourselves.

Then we can interview the client to discuss what the subject of the pitch should be, what the ask is, and then which blogs and bloggers should be included–or excluded–and who to exclude is often more important than who to bring into the pitch.

My next blog post will focus on what I am all sure you’re curious about: the social media news release (SMNR), that “kitchen sink” catch-all supporting document that provides all the details, content, media, images, and greater story that has been pruned from the initial pitch but surely deserves being told.

A future post will be about the value of following up a couple times with any bloggers who don’t reply or post. We have evolved a process that does not email just once but also sends two follow-up emails to those bloggers who don’t reply at all. Funny thing is, we get only 25% of all posts from the first email. We get 50% of all our total earned media posts from the first follow-up email and another 25% from the final outreach, so I really want to go into the why and how of that–and how we handle something that might very well be scary to some of you and and might feel like we’re being a pest to others–and I will address all of those fears and perceptions.

Please feel free to ask any questions or make any comments you might have on your mind after reading this blog post and I will do my best to respond.

Related articles

• Testomonial from Miriam’s Kitchen (chrisabraham.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Please Support Miriam’s Kitchen on Give to the Max Day (chrisabraham.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Set up your Google+ Brand Page right now! (chrisabraham.com)
• Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
• Live people over Robot Armies and Zombie Hordes (chrisabraham.com)
• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• Write your blog to be taken completely out of context (chrisabraham.com)
• Amplify Twitter and Facebook with GaggleAmp (chrisabraham.com)

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

Google+ launched prematurely — so take advantage!

There is unnecessary unrest that has been buffeting the launch of Google’s newest online social network, Google Plus, and the reason for that is simple: Google was forced to launch G+ because Twitter blocked Google’s real-time and direct access to Twitter updates. This is now becoming old news but it explains everything. This is why Google+ didn’t have a brand page similar to Facebook Pages, built-in upon launch, resulting in either a transparent and compliant real name membership or deletion, with the exception of Ford Motor Companyand a few others that are the only brands that are in a testing phase, the sort of testing that happens in limited and private beta.

What has been happening even before the real names scandal is the scandal that any and all Google Plus profiles that were not simply real users with real names were deleted en masse. Most of the very early adopters who did not read the explicit terms of service (ToS) took the opportunity to not only create a G+ account for themselves but also set up Google Plus profiles for their brands and companies as well.

Within a day of being allowed in via viral invite or connections, there were thousands of connected, fleshed-out and promoted ad hoc corporate and nonprofit brand pages popping up everywhere.

This is a pretty common behavior in any new system as the tech-savvy flood in and test boundaries and limitations even if they have read the ToS closely. The truly unique and impressive (or tyrannical) response was in Google enforcement, which was immediate, insidious, terrifying and often sloppy when it came to brands. Brands were deleted that were, in fact, true names run by true people, often celebrities.

I remember adding Vin Diesel to my circles. He was removed, though I never discovered if real Vin or brand Vin or fake Vin fell under Google’s sword. Another was Captain Kirk (William Shatner), who was deleted but who really was who he said he was.

I won’t get political here and talk about whether it is OK or not to demand and enforce real names or if anonymity for safety’s sake is what should be allowed — except to say that if you’re not savvy enough to effectively fool Google, then you’re not savvy enough to escape detection and maintain the integrity of your privacy and anonymity. So you need to make sure any privacy and anonymity processes you adopt needs to be foolproof. If not, you’re really deceiving yourself as to how protected you are behind your nom de guerre if someone really wants to identify or harm you. OK, enough of that.

Why did Google give birth to a preemie?

The meat of this article is why Google would give birth to a preemie when there really was no reason to release until everything was perfect. Well, there surely was an intense flame under Google’s seat that made them roll something out that was bound to be more trouble than it was worth, and that’s the real-time web.

Until Google Plus, there was only one true source for real-time news and real-time trends: Twitter. While Facebook speaks about its Social Graph and is privy to real-time trend data, only Twitter shares with the world by default. A microblog instead of an online social network. By default, Facebook profiles tend to be walled gardens, sharing only with explicitly-approved-of friends. Facebook Pages are much more open and search engine optimized, but still suffer from being very proprietary and more difficult to directly hitch onto in the same unfettered way that Twitter has been known for — until now.

Back on July 3, Twitter cut Google off. The details are murky (and if you do know details, please help me out in the comments), but before that happened, Google was able to build an entire new product: real-time search results. If I searched for “Chris Abraham“ or “chrisabraham,” I would see a short, scrolling, section towards the top of the search results that would cycle through my latest tweets as well as tweets that were related, such as mentions of me or retweets.

This real-time search that tapped Twitter’s real-time web become one of most exciting and interesting Google killer apps–something that Yahoo! and Bing couldn’t match, matched only by Twitter’s own search.twitter.com. Real-time web results also amplified the value of Google’s old reliable Google Alerts service, allowing it to become one of the most valuable early-warning reputation management tools in marketing — and all for free, at least $600 less than professional social media monitoring dashboards such as Radian6, Sysomos and Visible Intelligence.

When Google’s full-pipe access to Twitter was mysteriously cut, for whatever reason, Google scrambled, attempting to keep up appearances by turning up its sensitivity to secondary sources like Friendfeed and Tweetmeme as well as its focus on blogs and other sources that receive nearly immediate updates, but nothing was able to surf the real-time Web the same way that Twitter does, globally, in one normalized and consistent XML feed.

The results were that after the direct access to real-time tweets was cut off, the latency between a tweet and when Google was able to reflect that plummeted. Compared to the world pre-Twitter, it was nearly real-time; however, it was more akin to the free stock market numbers that you can get on Google and Yahoo! Finance: there was often a 10-minute time delay–way too long to be the best, way too long to appeal to journalists, activists and businessmen to use Google as an integrated news portal instead of where you go after you see what’s going on on Twitter, where the true pulse is.

Google Plus was launched prematurely as an emergency heart transplant to save a patient that had lost his pulse because it wasn’t in possession of its own heart — it was reliant and dependent on Twitter to maintain the pulse.

Google+ was a very smart idea, but it only makes sense in its half-assed Tonka Toy sort of state when you consider the above. If Google can activate every single Gmail user on Google+, then Google will have over 220 million new users and sources of real-time updates for their real time search product, matching or bettering the number of users that Twitter has. If they make it happen — and they’re being very aggressive with their methods since they pretty much just give an account to anyone with a Gmail account.

Plus, for anyone that really cares about being part of search, anyone who cares even a little bit about Google’s search hegemony, there’s another benefit to participating in Google+:  search priority, search timeliness and search relevance. There’s a good chance that the best way to show up first on Google search is to invest your brand and your time force-feeding all your content and trends to Google products such as Plus and YouTube.

Why it make sense to use Google Plus: Reach

That’s the reason why I go out of my way to make sure I cross post to Google Plus in addition to Facebook and Twitter. I want my content to remain relevant and essential when it comes to Google’s serendipity engine. When it comes to my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, 80% of all of my traffic comes from Google and other search.

I wonder what’s going on with Twitter and why Google was cut off, but this obviously made Google not just nervous but quite irrational and more willing to play the “beta test on paying customers” game that Microsoft is well-known for. While I believe that maybe Google is post-beta and post-labs, there is no branded indication that Google+ is more than a work in progress on its way to a fully formed being.

It surely is not fully formed. It’s a chalked suit that’s in the middle of being tailored, but is far from finished. Google+ was deployed too soon to really be able to invest in down the long-tail. Luckily, Google+ is still very much the home of the technorati, the technical elite. While Google+ likes to portray itself as being modular and flexible, it is really a hodgepodge mess that is far from being intuitive.

What’s worse is that none of my iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry apps, such as FourSquare, Hipstamatic, Selective Tweets, or any of my normal cross-posting tools have yet to integrate Google Plus, so I can’t, as far as I know, add a hashtag to my SMS tweets to 40404 that cross-posts to Google Plus the same way I can do to Facebook with a #fb.

When will Google Plus Brand Pages arrive?

All in all, today, a quarter of a year after Google+ was prematurely born, there are very few solutions for sharing, cross-posting and auto-posting that don’t include grabbing code snippets, hacking JavaScript, and dancing with Chrome 3rd party ad-hoc solutions that nobody short of a coder would be able to sort out.

So, Google Plus assures us that Google+ Brand pages will be awesome, be better than Facebook and meet all our needs as social media marketers. However, Google has been reporting that Brand pages will go public “later this year” and this is later this year, at least in relationship to the July 2011 announcement. We’ll see how late in the year Google Plus Brand Pages will come to fruition; however, if I am right about the rush-opening based on panic and desperate need, then it will be closer to the tail end of the year than any time in the Fall.

That said, I spend an extra hour a day making sure everything I share and say on Facebook and Twitter is shared to Google+ as well. Why? Well, if everybody’s bailing on Google+ already, then there will be relatively little competition for the “real-time web” search results on Google. I assume that since anything I tweeted showed up immediately before the break in Google Search that everything I “Plus” will be immediately indexed and show up in real time web, real time Google search as well–as long as I always remember to select “Public” every time I post things.

So, while it might be a half-assed product with a lot of promise but very little cohesion or continuity, it is also all that Google’s got right now, so they’ll be leaning very heavily on anything and everything that is being openly and publicly shared on your wall. So it is stupid and short-sighted to roll your eyes, turn your back, give Plus that hand, and go away until Brand Pages go public.

Take the extra time, become an expert in the space, work on your Google Plus celebrity, and enjoy the added prestige you’ll enjoy as a direct reward for your taking the risk and investing in this new platform — and Google Search cannot deny that it’s nepotistic and favors and rewards early-adopters and devotees, so make sure you spend a little time becoming OG+ (Original Google+) and you might discover that you’ve discovered a secret weapon in your messaging, marketing, publicity and organic SEO campaign.

But don’t you dare try to create a Google Plus account in anything but your very own true name, because Google seems to have a hair trigger when it comes to summarily executing any members who it doesn’t deem absolutely authentic.  Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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• Here’s why it make sense to use Google Plus (socialmedia.biz)
• How Twitter impacts on business local SEO (marketing.yell.com)
• Google Real Time Search v2 (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
• Cool Tools (emkaytsg.wordpress.com)
• If Google+ Facebook equals X. Find X? (marketing.yell.com)
• Google Does Real Time Again (arnoldit.com)
• Google Reader Users Explode Over Redesign: ‘Rip The Team Several New Orifices’ (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
• Is Google+ the next Facebook for marketers? (thecontentlab.icrossing.com)
• Google+ Backpedals On Its Real Names Policy (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
• Google Will Index Public Facebook Comments, Twitter Collecting Tales Of Tweets, Sony Forecasts Fourth Annual Net Loss (fastcompany.com)

Maybe the reason why you can’t even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you’re not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how your serve your Web pages, especially when your modern CMS is backed by a database.

I have a theory that both where you end up on search results as well as how much money you can make advertising AdWords ads via AdSense depends not merely on SEO or surfing the right trends or even finding the long tail sweet spot, but also on how quick, responsive, reliable, and durable the server that hosts your blog or site is. The faster the page loads, the better your site will rank on Google search, all other things being equal. Take it to the bank.

When my server was really under-powered and unoptimized, I was averaging $4/day, then after moving stuff around and optimized, it went up to a more reliable $11-25/day. Then, the site started getting more popular from better ranking and then the reliability decreased and the daily take returned to $4-6/day or so.

Now, with more physical RAM in the box and some cloud-based back-up to handle big popularity spikes, I am seeing quite a few $15-$25/day pay-outs.That’s only one person’s experience, but that’s all I got.

What I am going to tell you is not hard science. I might even be recognizing the wrong patterns. And, my sample size is one subject over a long period of time, my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, which is a very big, old, blog with 6,894 posts, 4,631 comments, 4,244 categories, and 14,092 tags — all back-ended by a MySQL database and fortified with WP Super Cache on a dedicated server.

My blog gets about 50,000 visits-a-month and once-in-a-while I will get a spike to 20,000 visits in a day — for example, when I surfed the Royal Wedding coverage. I serve AdWord ads on the site and I have been noticing that all things being equal, whenever my system administrator adds RAM memory, is able to optimize the database, increase uptime, and add either bandwidth or resources to the box that in some way makes the site quicker to serve, especially when slashdotted or digg-dotted from popularity, then Google rewards me with more advertising revenue.

And this happens not only during the days when I am being crashed by being mentioned on Mashable or retweeted by Guy Kawasaki, adding hardware and software resources to my dedicated server that adds to the box’s durability, reliability, and especially quickness and responsiveness is what does it on a daily basis.

And, I understand why Google does this. Isn’t this obvious? They are looking to provide their visitor, their users, their searchers, with a seamless and splendid experience. So, amazing user interface and quality of research and content cannot be enjoyed from a site that has repeatedly shown that it is habitually slow or unresponsive.

I honestly believe that the time a page loads is an important variable in the algorithm that Google deploys when it is indexing and ranking resource sites. You make have your user interface and site architecture and content completely sorted out, you might have organic link-tos and a PR of 5 or above, but at the end of the say, Google won’t send its searchers to a site that won’t load fast.

Cheap, slow hosting is fine when you’re new, but when you get as big as the Chris Abraham blog, with almost seven-thousand active posts and an open-season on comments, you really need to make sure your hardware can match your traffic, your popularity, your spikes, and your database requirements–and exceed them–or Google might give you ranking demerits and you might lose the trust and faith that Google had in you, resulting in their needing to either rank you down a few or off the front page so as to prevent a negative user experience.

Don’t forget that this is especially important for someone who is using Google on a smart phone. These folks are searching for timely information, especially when they’re on the road having a mobile web experience. After suffering through EDGE or 3G bandwidth issues just to reach Google, getting a “database cannot connect” from your site or blog doesn’t make you look good nor does it make the search engine that referred you.

What do you think? What are your experiences?

Via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• Organic Search, E-Commerce and Page Load Times (firstrate.co.nz)
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• Site Down Too Long? Your Google Rankings Will Suffer (seroundtable.com)

I used to be a very bold and opinionated blogger who wrote about dating, gender politics, feminism, the new sexuality, and online dating back in my early to mid-thirties. Yesterday, over lunch, Caroline and I were chatting about gender and sexuality and dating and and I started quoting my own blog posts. Caroline eventually asked me to maybe send her links to them for insight, amusement, and entertainment value. So, I thought I would share it with you, too, circa 2005-2006 with some more recent forays:

• Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s
• What Ever Happened to Feminism?
• “Our Men Must Be Wealthier” say Ivy League Women
• 40s Sarah Susannah Katz Goes a Courtin’
• 47% Are Single in DC and Mostly Women
• 51% of American Women are Living Without a Husband
• A Cute Woman Wants a Cute Man from Chemistry.com
• A Woman on Older Men with Younger Women
• Women are Way Smarter than Men
• Advice for Beginning Your PhD Career
• All Washington Singles Have Insurance Policies
• American Girls-Gone-Wild Sexually-Speaking
• Answering eHarmony Questions
• Are You Available?
• Chemistry.com Through a Woman’s Eyes
• Chris Abraham As Quoted in The Atlantic
• Chris Abraham is a Feminazi and Proud!
• Curvy Women — Not Boys with Breasts
• Dating in Washington is Unfair for Women
• Dating is the New Single
• DC Girls Don’t Date They Just Hang Out
• Dear Craig’s List Forum
• Divorced is the New Single
• Do DC Women Get Groped and Flashed on WMATA?
• Salt Lake City is the New San Francisco
• Does Domesticity Conflict with Feminism?
• Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments
• Feminism is About Choice Not Obligation
• Feminism is Dead Long Live Feminism
• Feminist Discourse on Body Image and Beauty Myth and Me
• Follow-Up to Dating is the New Single
• Formula for What a Man Has to Do to Attract Women
• Formula for What a Woman Has to do to Attract Men
• Great Advice for Writers But Poor Advice For Players
• Happiness Costs $100,000 More Per Year
• I am Getting Married Super Soon!
• I am Meredith Grey
• I Like Being Your Friend Part II
• I Like Being Your Friend
• If I Were a Rich Man
• If You Feel Sexy You Are Sexy
• Is a DC Woman’s Success Defined by Blonde by Bottle and Sexy by Sport and Health?
• Is a Modern Woman Still Mostly Valued For Her Uterus?
• Is it Better to Settle and Have Someone than Be Single Forever?
• John Hlinko Sighting on Wonkette
• Lacrosstitution and Manolo Blahnik Feminism
• links for 2008-09-04
• links for 2010-07-20
• Love Advice from a Former French Man to Us Americans
• Love Begets Love
• Marriage is More Practical Than Love
• Married is the New Separated is the New Divorced is the New Single in Washington
• Married is the New Separated
• Married is the New Single
• Marry Him Book News from Lori Gottlieb
• Match.com Is the Only Good Online Dating Site
• Meet Hot Drunk Women, Wealthy Guys, Meet Ugly Guys via Google Adwords
• My Earnest Online Dating Experiment
• New Feminist Memo to College Jocks got Lost in the Male
• News Flash: Feminists Are Still Angry
• Online Dating Failures for Valentine’s Day
• Online Dating with Chemistry.com Through the Eyes of a Cute Single 30s Woman
• Only Ever Marry the Person You Love
• Peggy Orenstein and Lori Gottlieb explore girlie-girl princess culture
• Physical Attraction is a Key Player in Relationships
• Professional Women Won’t Date Their Equals
• Restraint is Sexy as a Strategy of Seduction
• Return Your Shopping Carts to Chemistry.com
• Separated is the New Divorced
• Sexually Insatiable Female Morons
• Signing Up For Chemistry.com from a Woman’s Perspective
• Single Men and Single Women of Faith Should Try eHarmony
• Some Early Quotes from Marry Him by Lori Gottlieb
• Stories from DC Cads
• The “All’s Fair in Love and War” Clause
• The Interested Bin
• The Ladder Theory Redux
• The Last Rites of Bokononism for Kurt Vonnegut
• Washington Singles are Undateable Because They Treat Dating Like a Job Search
• We Men Didn’t Get the Memo
• What Are These And Why Do They Make Me Laugh?
• What Every Man Should Own
• What is Love?
• Where Do They Hide Sizes 16 and Up
• Why Do Men Date Younger Women?
• Why Don’t Guys Ask Me Out?
• Why Men Date Younger Women in Their Own Words
• Why Men Date Younger Women
• Will Chris Abraham keep his Moratorium on Dating until 2008?
• With Love There Is No Can’t Only Won’t
• Women in Film
• Women Owe Their Freedom to Poorer Women

One of the best things about my company, Abraham Harrison, is that I can always make my commitment to Miriam’s Kitchen work.

(Above, John Murphy, second from right, with some of Friday night’s volunteer team. (L to r) Maryl Humm, Chris Abraham, Toni Jones, Mary Hudson, Murphy, Flynn Hudson.)

Our amazing clients are so important to Abraham Harrison’s success but so are our people as well as the communities in which we live — and no matter how much I love the work I do for Abraham Harrison, the work I do as Sous Chef and Floor Captain at Miriam’s Kitchen is my favorite work.

Here’s an article that fellow volunteer, Jane Hess Collins, wrote for Washington Life Magazine: Get Out and Give Back: Cooking with Miriam’s Kitchen:

The first clue that Miriam’s Kitchen, located inside the Western Presbyterian Church, is serious about serving fresh food is their herb garden of parsley, basil and rosemary on Virginia Avenue. Inside, the kitchen was an organized beehive of activity, like a scene from “Iron Chef,” except we were all working together to prepare dinner for the District’s homeless.

John Murphy, the assistant director of kitchen operations and supreme multi-tasker, had things well under control. Friendly and deeply committed to his homeless customers, Murphy told me how concerned they were about the debt ceiling debate and its effect on them. Otherwise this young chef was laser-focused on getting the meals ready by 5 o’clock. I had barely donned my apron and ball cap before he listed my tasks to me in rapid-fire order. First, I was to carry several crates of fruit up a short flight of stairs into the walk-in refrigerator, then fold up the cafeteria table that held the crates (at 98 degrees outside, walking into the fridge was my favorite part of the afternoon).

Next he gave me a huge vat and several commercial-sized cookie sheets covered with dozens of cooked pork bones and told me how to prepare a pork and vegetable stock. In his same brisk manner he explained the nutritional value of animal bones, how to get the most flavor out of them and where I could find the peppercorns in the cavernous refrigerator. As I counted bay leaves and broke rosemary twigs, I could hear Murphy manage, educate and encourage each of the 13 volunteers with the same detail and attention he paid to me. All the while he checked our food preparation and gently nudged us toward our 5 o’clock showtime.

The kitchen was small and warm, and there was a fair amount of “excuse me’s” going on while we sliced, diced and stirred around each other. Thankfully my work station was directly beneath the shelf of plastic gloves, which I kept replacing whenever I wiped off my sweaty forehead. On the wall in front of me was a framed New York Times article about First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to Miriam’s Kitchen and her passion for healthy food. Talk about incentive!

A few minutes before dinnertime, Murphy called me away from chopping celery for my stock pot and dispatched me to the serving line. A promotion! Five of us volunteers were shoulder-to-shoulder, wearing ball caps and plastic gloves, looking and feeling like the high school cafeterias servers from back in the day. We only had a minute to check out the night’s menu before the dinner service began, and there were too many people around for me to sneak in a bite.

Miriam’s Kitchen believes in offering options, and the 135 dinner guests that evening had their choice of lamb or pork pita sandwiches, zucchini with other mixed vegetables, oregano rice, lettuce and onion, and some to-die for cupcakes that deserved a television show of their own. High school cafeteria food was never like this.

My tasks were to grab a tray, place pita bread on it, greet the guest and ask whether he wanted homemade pesto or mushroom gravy. It was easier said than done, at least for me. The line of hungry people moved quickly and soon I felt like Lucille Ball in that famous candy episode. My “Pesto or mushroom gravy?” question turned into “Pesto or basil?” and “Mushroom or gravy?” It took the other volunteer servers to keep me on track.

By 6 p.m. dinner was over and the clients were gone. Both the Miriam’s Kitchen staff and the volunteers labeled and put away the leftover food, cleaned the kitchen, tore down and stored the portable tables and chairs, and swept and mopped the floors. It was done so quickly that I forgot how much I hated to clean.

Miriam’s Kitchen serves over 4,000 homeless men and women (24% are veterans) each year through their meal programs, case management and diverse art therapies. Their most immediate gifts in kind needs (according to a handwritten note by the volunteer sign-in log) are ground coffee, sleeping bags and hotel-sized toiletries. There’s always a need for volunteers, especially during the evening meal.

Just don’t come hungry. It’s too tempting and the food is too good.

Jane Hess Collins helps and encourages people to give back through her volunteering, writing, speaking, coaching and workshops. You can follow Get Out and Give Back on Facebook, Twitter and her website.

Via Marketing Conversation

[Guest post by my CEO and best friend, Mark Harrison]

I have been searching literally for years for a voice-isolation, noise-canceling headset that can handle the noisy environments I have to make calls from on a daily basis. As CEO of a globally-distributed online social media company, I spend 2-8 hours a day on calls. More often than not, I am making these calls from an airport, train, restaurant, or car – or while walking from one of these to another. Wind and ambient noise has been such a part of my telephone world that my team had become convinced that I actually live in a cardboard box under an overpass somewhere.

Over the past few years, I have spent a small fortune on headsets, searching for something that would filter out the background noise and transmit only my voice. I tried countless bluetooth headsets (which did middling jobs, and gave me headaches to boot), and a pile of wired headsets (many of which blocked outside noise for me, but transmitted most all my background noise to the suffering people on the other end of the line.)

Then, about two months ago, I discovered theboom.com googling “voice-isolation headset”. I bought the V4, and it solved my problems immediately. I can be in the noisiest of environments, and the only thing anyone hears is my voice. Here is a recording I made the other day while on the autobahn on the way from Berlin to Munich, in an open convertible at 140kph while passing a deafening construction site. I was having a hard time hearing myself speak, but theBoom headset really only transmits my voice.

The Boom headset is not cheap – the V4 consumer model I use is nearly $200 with tax and shipping, but it’s absolutely worth it to me. The only problem that I’ve had is that the plastics in the V4 have not held up well to my heavy use. The plastic around the earpiece and the ear wrap has cracked and I’ve had to re-glue the foam windscreen. I am thinking for my travel-heavy usage, I am going to have to buy the hopefully more robust “E” model.

In the meantime, I’ve bought a backup v4 for myself (which I am using now what with the first one having fallen apart), one for my girlfriend so we can talk on her morning commutes on the insanely loud BART train, and one for Chris Abraham, my business partner the lord of this site, for his similarly mobile work life. The headsets do work acoustic miracles, I could hardly recommend them more strongly.

Yesterday, Mike Moran and I were invited to be on The Voice of Russia to discuss Google+with their two charming hosts. We really geeked-out and didn’t dumb it down at all.

Google’s new online social network called Google Plus first hit the web. A lot of people thought this was Facebook or Twitter. But as tech insiders continue to dig deeper into its features and capabilities, they are finding it does more than just refine popular networking tools found on other sites. It also streamlines the social media experience.

Joining us on the line to talk about Google Plus are Mike Moran, Chief Strategist at the Converseon social media consultant agency and Chris Abraham, President and Co-Founder of the Abraham-Harrison, a digital PR and social media marketing company.

Via Marketing Conversation and The Voice of Russia

Abraham Harrison sales star, Nina Martin, just gave my circa 2008 bio a makeover — what do you think?

Chris Abraham, President and Co-Founder of Abraham Harrison, LLC, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms. Chris has been recognized as a Top 100 Social Media Expert and his blog for Abraham Harrison is ranked by Technorati in the Top 100 small business blogs.

Prior to starting Abraham Harrison, Chris was a member of the interactive team at Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC, consulting clients such as Wal-Mart, Shell, Nissan, and GE on blogger and social media strategy. Before Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media Strategies, a pioneer in online brand promotion and protection with clients including Sci-Fi Channel, Buena Vista, TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA, RCA, and NBC.

Chris has had a web presence since 1993 and started blogging in 1999, focusing on community, connection, innovation, and brand extension. As a technologist, Chris has consulted T. Rowe Price, the US Department of Treasury CIO, Friendster, Deutsche Telekom, and others.

Chris has taught blogging courses for the Writer’s Center of Bethesda, has been a guest lecturer on social media and blogging at Columbia University, University of North Carolina, Georgetown University, American University, George Washington University, University of Oregon, University of Maryland and others. He has spoken at social media conferences all over the world including conferences in the United States, Sweden, Slovakia, and Canada. Chris has also led Webinars on subjects such as online PR, Twitter, reputation defense, personal branding, advocacy and policy, and marketing.

On April 8th, I went to the NRA HQ Range and spent the entire hour trying to stop flinching. Yes, flinching.

When I started the hour I was doing pretty well — but, after a while, the recoil, kick and bang of the compact .40 S&W round through the light, short-barreled, shorter-gripped, compact Glock 23, makes me anticipate the next hand-explosion, and my wrist automatically pitches the barrel down.

As though I had the nanosecond reflexes to compensate, physically, like a human muzzle break. Doesn’t work. You really have to relax, squeeze the trigger smoothly, and ultimately allow yourself to be surprised at the break.

I don’t believe that this grouping is particularly good but I am a beginner and the little pistol spooks me every time and beats me up — so I am getting used to it so really all I need to do is spend time with it.

I don’t know about you but this pistol, the Glock 23 — and all Glocks are identical in almost every way outside of barrel, slide, and grip length — is the most simple of devices I have ever seen that portrays itself as a firearm, a gun, a weapon.

Four pieces: the slide assembly, the guide rod and recoil spring assembly, the barrel, and the receiver assembly. Any more field stripping is almost never required. Who would have guessed? See?

Kelli Matthews invited me to spend the day at the University of Oregon as a guest of the School of Journalism and Communications to speak about my brand of social media and digital PR and marketing.  In addition to speaking with Kelli’s students, Pat Curtin, SOJC Chair in Public Relations, invited me to speak to her class as well.  It was a busy day and so invigorating!

It was a lovely and smashing and the students are smart and amazingly attentive. Great questions, gorgeous campus even during a typically moist day in Oregon.

We discussed all sorts of things, including what Abraham Harrison does, about the Cluetrain Manifesto, about the real truth behind social media engagement, ROI, measurement, expectations, software, relationships, blogger outreach, social network engagement, and how best to play Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the rest like a Stradivarius.

Long story short: never let anyone catch you rolling your eyes, speaking up, or speaking down to anyone. Yes, don’t speak up to anyone either because people really hate kiss-ups and they’ll treat you like complete crap.

I also discussed the issues around brand management and reputation: people and their companies do not have a glass jaw — or shouldn’t act that way.

Kelli took me to lunch at a local pub and I got to meet PR’s amazing future: Karly Bolton, firm director at the other AHPR, and Angela Seits, a U of O grad student.

People love flaws, people love mistakes, and people love recovery even if it doesn’t include vindication — unless they come across as pathetic, unresponsive, or scared.

Manning up, being responsive, and apologizing without reservation — as well as actually solving the problem in a painfully generous way — is the way to do it. Never seppuku.

See the photo above?  The woman with the pony tail on the MacBook?  Well, that’s Jenna Levy, our new intern at Abraham Harrison, the other AHPR.  We got to meet in person for a little while but she put school and class and a test ahead of having coffee with me. To be honest, that’s just the kind of Intern we like: business before pleasure!

Anyway, I love any and all opportunities to speak at colleges and universities — just saying.

Finally, thanks to Kelli Matthews and the denizens of Allen Hall for their generosity, patience, attention, and passion.

Go Ducks!

I got to meet Cece Salomon-Lee of PRMM a while ago but only finally got over my Bronchitis recently so I took the opportunity of being in the desert in some pretty light to do the interview — so, please visit Cece over at her blog and read PRMM Interview #16: Chris Abraham on PR and Social Media:

I met Chris Abraham, President of Abraham Harrison, while he was in a San Francisco late last year. While we were unable to record an interview at the time, I sent Chris some questions via email. Here are Chris’ video responses, as he shares his thoughts about his company, why they don’t consider themselves a PR agency, and what he would like to see in 2011.

Briefly, Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. He can be reached on Twitter @chrisabraham.

If you are interested in submitting suggestions for future blog posts or would like to be a guest blogger, please contact me.

Via Marketing Conversation

[Guest post by Stevie Wilson of the LA Story blog] If you aren’t familiar with me, this is Stevie Wilson and I post very intermittant posts here and on Marketing Conversation.com .

Chris Abraham has been on my blog many times–both in podcast and in reference (where have you been?). If you read this blog you know that Chris Abraham, attends– and speaks at– many major social media events and conferences. He’s an interesting person to know because he’s a multi-dimensional person with an inquisitive mind and lots of interests. If you want to know about the posts on my blog, head over there and do a search on my blog or head over to www.chrisabraham.com or marketingconversation.com and search for my posts there. This might be a bit redundant for this blog but hang with me people, it gets better!

Chris Abraham (looking pretty dapper here and he was dressed pretty much like this the night we had dinner)

Before we get into the podcast, you need a bit of back story. I interviewed Chris Abraham at least 3 years ago– about a statement he made about his life. (Like I said, it’s a podcast, hunt it down in my blog or his). I was able to connect to him and he was willing to talk to me and so began a series of irregular podcasts and contributions to blogs that sort of created a friendship of sorts. Given the range of topics, we have no problems laughing at each other’s jokes or finding out that we both like to do target practice. Yet during all this time, I had never met Chris. The only way I had seen him was his photos or if he was in a video–really– in at least 3 years.

So as Chris Abraham made this sojourn across the country, making pit-stops in all kinds of places (and being stuck in ice storms), we eventually put together a “meet-up” and when all was worked out, we met at the Beechwood Restaurant in Venice. Not the easiest place to find for an Angeleno who doesn’t know Venice but so much easier for someone from out of the area — he beat me there because I got lost and circled the area twice! Patient man that he is, he recognized me as I can flying in the restaurant door and we headed out to the patio for dinner — and to get me a cocktail.

We ordered up some appetizers– and this man has a taste for the exotic and I went with it. Great idea too! Fried edamame, fried spicy chickpeas (YUM!) and some sashimi type fish.

This podcast was done LIVE in a busy restaurant. I have tried to amplify and clean up the sound but parts might be a bit faint so turn up the volume or plug in a headset and turn up the volume. It is very very funny. We had a diverse range of topics to talk about.

We did order dinner– and you will hear it in the podcast along with 2 people who were sitting next to us. The person who mentions Steve Martin’s book is the wife and the man talking about dying his hair red is the husband.. and they were interesting people–VERY interesting people.

Here’s my dinner– and me! Photo by Chris Abraham.

(sparkly eyes thanks to the Jack and Jill cocktail and a lot of laughte. Recipe at the end. )

I didn’t take a photo of Chris because he was back-lit and he would have either been dark with a halo (hmmm Chris does that mean you are an angel in disguise?) or I would have/should have used my flash and then worked it a bit in photoshop! Why didn’t I ? I thought it would stop the flow of conversation and the people on the other side were listening to our conversation too. I guess we were pretty interesting or we were having a better time than them.

Beechwood Jack and Jill Cocktail

• Lairds Applejack
• Pomegranate Syrup
• Fresh Lemon Juice
• Orange Bitters

Served on the rocks, topped with Prosecco.
Yummy drink and the Prosecco adds just the right amount of fizz.

Thankyou to Chris Abraham for being willing to podcast in that environment. I think he may not remember all that was said. I certainly didn’t. Also the couple next to us were very chatty and very funny. Thanks to Chris for dinner too.. he was willing to fight me for the bill. So I deferred to his better judgement as he is over 6 feet tall and I am about 5’3″. We both have the similar taste in cars– fast, German and BMW are 3 key words. What they will be next year.. could be entirely different.

Chris Abraham has left LA now and headed north. So by the time he sees this I am not sure where he will be. However maybe, if we are very lucky, he will head back down into LA and I can corral him into another podcast about social media topics or affects or whatever topic he chooses. “The princessification of girls” is on facebook and his blog.

Thanks again Chris. It was really fun. Hope we can have coffee or show you something other than Venice as part of a tour of LA. I think you would like to see more of So. California.

Stevie Wilson, LA-Story.com