While neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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

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

The welcoming pineapple

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

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

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

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

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

Good fences make good neighbors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media globalists unite

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we did for The Daily, section by section

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

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

The banner

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

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

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

The QuickLinks

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

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

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

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

The video introduction and the social network sharing

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

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

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

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

The news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

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

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

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

Social media and tags

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

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

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

Favicon, header title, and meta description

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last week I asked my management team if what we do at Abraham Harrison is inbound marketing. Sara Wilson, my COO, told me yes, that our digital PR strategy of identifying thousands of topical blogs and then pitching them on behalf of our clients with the goal of securing hundreds of earned media mentions is surely the definition of inbound marketing–and maybe even the way that God intended. Or at least the deities who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, where markets are conversations.

Earned media is hard. How do you get loads and loads of unpaid citizen journalists to make a gift of their valuable time and platform? It must be just short of impossible. Far from it, and we have been doing it again and again, week after week, since the Fall of 2006, about a half-decade ago.

This commonly-held belief, that earned inbound marketing is well-nigh impossible, has caused “fickle and unreliable” bloggers and influencers to be avoided in place of predictable but artificial inbound marketing. This new version uses technology and SEO, fake review sites, fake blog sites, fake news sites, affiliate marketing, monetary incentives, text-link-ads, link trading. and entire “informational” sites similar to Wikipedia, distributed globally, on many different servers and under many different domains and sub-domains to emulate its “impossible” counterpart.

That natural flow of emergent citizen-sharing was supposed to be the original source of everything online: real reviews, real stories, real communities, real comments, and real content at the end of every real search. But until recently, when Google did a big check and adjustment to its algorithm, fake inbound marketing was outdoing the real thing.

What inbound marketing has become, in many instances, is a very elaborate and convincing hoax, a simulacrum, that aims to create an artificial world of viable content, at its cheapest and most shameless, to very useful content, at its best, but which has the single-minded goal of acting as a sales and conversion channel of commercial or political products or services.

Yes, earned media outreach and engagement also has an agenda. Yes, when I engage online, I am not reaching out in order to just meet new friends, I am also interested in convincing citizen journalists and online content providers to report on what’s going on with my client on their own personal or collaborative blog to their precious readers.

The most important difference between the simulacrum of entire virtual online content cities being formed intentionally by networks and affiliations to emulate as perfectly as possible the emergent and organic reviews, reporting, discussion, recommendation, and experience and true earned media is that only earned media is authentic.

Authentic, you ask, are you serious? Yes. Let me explain. My friend Pamela has known me for years. She was under the illusion that Abraham Harrison and I had the blogosphere hypnotized. To her, under my hypnosis, these zombies would be at my very command, writing and blogging anything and everything I decided to feed them, no matter how salesy or shilled. She believes that hundreds and thousands of bloggers were at my bidding, awaiting my call.

This is not how it works at all.

Controlling only the front end of the messaging

What really happens is that we take what our client has–their assets, graphics, copy, products and services, agenda, and message–and we deconstruct it into component parts and then reconstruct it into as simple and clear a message as we can and no simpler. We construct a very terse and very clear message model that evolves into a a pitch email, and then we come out the other side of the tunnel with a social media news release (SMNR)–rife with copy and videos with embed codes and photos and images that are easy to copy and paste, sometimes going so far as to include image embed codes–and three outgoing pitch emails.

We do the best we can with this because this is really all we control at this end–the front end–of the messaging. The only other thing we can control over the course of the campaign is how we react to initial blogger response, be it in the form of an email reply to our pitch or a blog post, a tweet, a video response, or a wall posting.

I won’t go into the art of dealing with blogger email and blog responses in this post; however, it does require the patience of Job and a constant reminder of the sage words of Philo of Alexandria, “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Sometimes this isn’t so easy to remember but I have a professional team that does an amazing job of always being decent, respectful, responsive, and generous. Also, my COO and CEO like to remind me that it is very rare that a blogger ever bites us. Things can generally always be handled and addressed well before anything embarrassing or untoward evolved. These days, after really sorting out a series of best practices, there is rarely if ever a crisis.

Using clearness, kindness, and responsiveness, we are routinely able to garner hundreds of earned media blog mentions in addition to the hundreds of tweets and wall posts. Do we care about the relative popularity and readership of these hundreds of bloggers and tweeters? No, not at all. We don’t care about their compete.com score, their Google PageRank number, or their Alexa ranking. We don’t care where they show up on Technorati or on Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop. We really don’t care where they rank in Klout or Empire Avenue.

We just care that they have their very own platform, be it a blog, a Tumblr, a Posterous, a Facebook Page, or a Twitter profile. Full stop. That and a high probability of topical relevance, which is to say we take great pains to make sure we only reach out to people for whom our message, our email pitch, is at least minimally topically relevant and neither surreal nor out of left field.

In PR and with blogger outreach, as with everything, be a gentleman and everything else will follow. No tricks. No sleight-of-hand. Just honest reaching out with relevant material. Just the way God intended.

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology via Marketing Conversation

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• WordPress Bloggers – Are You Following This Key Strategy? (pressography.com)
• What You Ought to Know About Inbound Marketing (customerthink.com)
• Content Creation Is Easier Than You Think (cariemymarketing.wordpress.com)
• 3 Inbound Marketing Myths (customerthink.com)

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!

Image by Gauravonomics via Flickr

[Originally posted over at the Biznology blog] I must admit right away that I am a disciple of the seminal book on the Internet revolution and what it means for business, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The main premise of the manifesto is that markets are conversations and that no matter how ardent and impassioned the man at the lectern may be, the audience now has the power, through the Internet, to compare notes real-time, to heckle and critique without being shushed. When this was written, there was neither Twitter nor Facebook—and the blog was still in its infancy. I have been collecting all sort of quotes that I have been wanting to address and believe that I can write 95 posts just based on the Cluetrain’s 95 Theses, but for today I will just focus on number 83: We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

I returned to the book and read through it until it resonated with me as a social media marketer and digital PR executive. Here’s the theme of this post:

But, of course, the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They understand that they aren’t censors, they’re the company’s best conversationalists. Their job—their craft—is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

I have benefited from all of this chaos. I am not a PR type at all, having received my degree in literature and having an early career in web application development and Linux sys admin. I am not a PR type at all and yet here I am, in social media PR and marketing.

What I know that most PR execs can’t accept is that there are 50 million and not just 50 people who write about products, services, experiences, videos, movies, television, music, and politics. Every day I see traditional PR execs re-brand themselves as digital PR execs by simply transferring the old model of reaching out, personally, to just the right reporter with a press release and favor.

Over the last decade, this model has worked in the blogosphere just as long as publicists were able to discover and groom a small cadre of highly-successful and popular bloggers to become the new journalists. These new journalists are professionals, well-versed in how PR works, and fluent in the lingua franca of public relations. Companies such as AllTop, Klout, Compete, Traackr and eCairn specialize in identifying the most influential 25-50 top bloggers and tweeters—catering to this traditional PR model that has yet to be revolutionized away from its obsession with engaging only the top influencers and recognizing that in 2011, there are 50 million potential influentials and not just 50.

In the next post, I will go into specifics as to how this is even possible. And it isn’t. It isn’t possible to engage 50 million bloggers online, but it is surely essential to try—for many reasons.

The first reason why it is essential to move past the top-50 bloggers in your industry is churn. Every 18 months, a blog dies. Blogs are hard. The A-list blogs are like athletes—they’re only eligible or viable for a little while and it is essential to scout community centers, high schools, and colleges to find the next Michael Oher well before anyone else does. Every 6-18 months a blog dies, the A-list changes, the long tail reorganizes, and the blogger you had invested in heavily suddenly decides to stop blogging. It happens all the time. Read on.

The second reason to dig deep into the long tail instead of sticking with your A-list is accessibility. A-listers are hard to access. Recently, Audi apparently gave an A8 automobile to everyone who had a Klout score above a 70. Other A-listers demand Morton steaks or nights out on the town, sponsored trips, and even payola from Izea. A-list bloggers are busy and their attention is being spent on national and international brands and agencies such as Edelman and Ogilvy. Most A-list bloggers these days are advanced amateurs; more and more are semi-pro and professional, making a lot of their living from their blogging. The reason it is such a competitive place is because these bloggers are the kings and queens of their high school and you had better be gorgeous and rich and smart and have blue eyes if you want to to gain access. Remember: it is like bidding for keywords on Google or investing like Warren Buffett: buy low, sell high; everyone’s fighting over the same keywords on Google AdWords, the same stocks on Wall Street, and the same bloggers online. If you spend some time looking a little harder, you can really find some amazing content that hasn’t been discovered yet; and, if you’re smart, you’ll help that blogger and that blog take it to the next step. And guess what? You’ll end up being the hero in that scenario. You’ll have 50 million to choose from.

The third reason to spend more time exploring the smaller, newer, less popular blogs is availability. Most bloggers start their blogs out of passion. Others, because they were hoping to get some swag. Still others started it as a way to get a job, to push their agenda forward, to make a little extra cash from Google AdSense and Amazon Associates (good luck on that), to start working towards a future as a journalist, because they hate their jobs, because they’re expressing some pent-up creativity, or because if they don’t get stuff off of their chest they’ll burst. There are a million reasons. The one thing that most of these bloggers winsomely dream is that they’ll be discovered some day. Every day, my agency discovers bloggers. Every campaign we discover several thousand and reach out to them on behalf of high-profile clients and that is generally the very first time that most of them have ever been pitched by an agency—the first time they, as a blogger, have ever been kissed.

The fifth reason to reach out to many more than just the top 50-150 bloggers is impact. No matter how successful an A-list outreach, the total number of blog posts even possible is 50-150. And we all know that even the shiniest of golden PR children don’t do 100%, so we’re talking a fraction of that. Closer to maybe 10-25, tops. When you include everyone—as many of the 50 million as possible who are germane to the campaign—you’re talking between 1,000-5,000 blogs in a typical long-tail blogger outreach, resulting in 50-400 earned media mentions—and I am only going as low as 50 because my Director of Client Services keeps on telling me we need to under-promise and over-perform. We routinely get 200-300 posts and tweets.

The sixth reason why pitching, engaging, and responding to blogs and bloggers nobody has every heard of is to be their first—and this first contact with a brand can be the experience that encourages them to continue blogging. I always use Tina Fey as my analogy because I love her. She’s amazing. But I am pretty sure she’ll never come meet me for coffee. However, if we were chums Freshman year at UVA when she was all frizzy hair, brocade vests, and bolo ties, just getting into comedy—insecure and unsure—and if I was her number one fan, helped get her gigs and exposure, and then kept encouraging her in her passion, then she would indeed be someone who might meet me for a quick joe and a muffin in the morning before work while I’m in town. Same thing with long tail bloggers. Getting pitched by a PR company early on might turn that blogger all Sally Field, “You like me, you really like me!”

The seventh reason is because hundreds of earned media blog posts effect Google differently than a couple dozen. While delivering client message to as many bloggers as possible in order to garner as many earned mentions as possible as quickly and as numerously as possible—for the impact—is always my number-one goal, I have also noticed that the secondary effect of having hundreds of independent, real, true, B-Z-list bloggers suddenly carry my clients’ news is the most powerful organic SEO benefit you can ever imagine, almost over night. White hat link-farming, if you will—primarily because none of these hundreds of posts are scripted, are paid for, are demanded, are aggregated, are blogged, or are mashed up from RSS feeds, search results, or a hive of link-farmers doing black-hatted sort of things. I mean, in order for any of this to work, the narrative needs to work, the pitch needs to work, the gift and ask need to be compelling. There’s no way to cheat on this—the outreach campaign needs to be absolutely solid, compelling, and generous for it to work, but at the end of the day, hundreds of legit blogs linking a client’s products and services and do the sort of magic that used to be merely the thing of legend.

And finally, the eighth and top reason why a long-tail blogger outreach is so worthwhile and is the future of PR: the power of the Internet is that everyone can participate and that there is zero barrier to entry. Actively ignoring everyone and only putting your attention and time and money and resources on the same old someone—journalists, celebrities, broadcasters, and A-listers—really misses the point of what The Cluetrain Manifesto has to tell us about this new thing. We were—and are currently—able to see the effect that everyone, connected and engaged, had on the the government and leadership of Tunis, Egypt, and the Middle East—and this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you think that it is amazing how a Facebook Page, a flurry of tweets, and the bravery of passionate and dedicated people can take down a 30-year dictator, think what it can do to equalize the business playing field. To be honest, The Cluetrain Manifesto was at least a decade ahead of its time.

There we have it—the nuts and bolt as to how to start this long-tail revolution are in the next installment. Thank you for being patient and for spending some time seeing why I am so passionate about the Cluetrain theory of everyone. Let me know if you would like me to spend more time in a future post discussing some of the other 94 of 95 theses.

Via the Biznology blog

Mention in Twitterville by Shel Israel, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

I have been recommending books by Shel Israel (@shelisrael) since I started teaching blogging back in 2006 when I started recommending both The Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

Well, I was seriously blissed out when Shel popped me a tweet to let me know that I had been mentioned in his new book, Twitterville.

I received a review copy (I am a marketing, social media, and PR blogger, after all) and flipped right to the index (a very Washington, DC, thing to do) and there was my name — Abraham, Chris 79 — and the above paragraph.

I received the book today but I am already through to Chapter 2; however, I don’t have a lot of time right now so I will hold off on my review until a little later.

I have been really learning and enjoying all the posts about Twitter today coming through my newsreader, including one from Stephen Collins of AcidLabs, Is it brandjacking if you come in late and don’t ask nicely? While the post is about Brandjacking, which is interesting, I responded to this little excerpt:

With all the attention now surrounding Twitter, it seems that every brand and celebrity under the sun suddenly is or wants to be represented on it and every other social network. It seems as if the business world has finally read Cluetrain and wants to be in the bazaar engaging in the conversation.

But the fact is that while some brands have been engaging in the conversation for quite some time – Zappos, Dell, Comcast and others come to mind – others have only recently realised that this conversation even exists. And worse, they don’t seem to realise that there are a few rules that define how you engage in that conversation.

That was awesome — that is awesome! I have been a fan of The Cluetrain Manifesto and also The Cathedral and the Bazaar for for a decade and I think it is really important to return all of this Twitter hype back to basics.  Here are the first 6 theses of 99 of the Cluetrain Manifesto:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

I just received an email from Simon Owens, pitching and informing me about a retrospective article he wrote for PBS on the 10-year durability of The Cluetrain Manifesto, my own personal bible:

I remember reading your interview with Martin a few weeks ago that mentioned the Cluetrain Manifesto.  I recently got a chance to interview three of the four authors of the manifesto for a PBS feature I wrote about the book’s 10-year anniversary. They each reflected on the last 10 years and how the rise of Web 2.0 — Twitter, social networking, blogging — fits into the relevancy of what they wrote:

Well, I am happy to share this with you!  Please feel free to go and visit ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ Still Relevant 10 Years Later over at PBS MediaShift blog or just read it after the jump…

‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ Still Relevant 10 Years Later

When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters — written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a “manifesto” — were thought to merely point out the obvious to the many who refused to accept it: Companies and organizations now had much less control of information as the web had become a previously unheard-of medium for conversation. It was published in its original incarnation on the web in April 1999 and an expanded printed edition became available in 2000. This year marks the 10-year anniversary of its debut.

I recently spoke to three of the four authors of the manifesto about the last decade and the relevance of their words today. Does the existence of Twitter merely confirm what they asserted about the near-instantaneous conversational tone of online media? Surprisingly, their individual answers varied widely (some were almost borderline curmudgeonly) but all seemed to agree that, for the most part, the “Cluetrain Manifesto” has continued to be relevant and — with a few exceptions — its 95 theses have held up to the test of time.

The manifesto — divided up and written by four authors — is directed almost entirely at those who had previously viewed the world through a mass media lens, asserting that the Internet had become a means for one-on-one communicating and that the genie could not be put back into the bottle. The writing stresses the need for authenticity above all else, claiming the user base — the customers — would bypass corporate PR rhetoric and take near-complete control of a brand.

I recently reread the document in its entirety and within the context of the Web 2.0 years — which are defined by the ease of communicating without technical expertise — it was easy to detect the themes and debates that are still being dissected today. Though blogs certainly existed when the manifesto was composed, they weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, and social networks, social bookmarking and Twitter were years away.

In 1999 when Cluetrain was published, Rick Levine was the president of a company called Mancala, a web start-up in Boulder, Colorado, but today he makes luxury chocolates for a company he started with his brother. Though he’s operating what some would consider a more traditional offline business, he told me he still uses the Net to promote his venture (“I’m still blogging, still Twittering,” he said.) When I asked him about the micro-blogging service, he said that its 140-character limit may be the key to forcing companies to shed their inauthentic voices:

I think what’s happening — what Twitter does is it’s forcing you to start a conversation. When there’s a company on Twitter, on the other end of that wire there’s a person typing 140 characters. They work for a company, but it makes it much harder to have a corporate pre-digested official response. So what we were talking about in Cluetrain was saying there had to be a real person on the other end of the line who is participating in the conversation.

With just a blog, it’s still possible to be a corporate shill doing blog postings. And that’s not human, no more reflection of a real person’s voice than any PR exercise. So it’s possible to masquerade in a blog and have some lip service to corporate PR. It’s much harder with Twitter because it is a real conversation, it’s happening more in real time, and the good news is that it’s forcing companies to have a human voice in the conversation.

But when I asked Christopher Locke about the service, he was more skeptical about it.

“I’m not a big Twitter fan,” he told me. “Well for one thing, I don’t live on a cell phone, in fact I don’t even have a cell phone. I’m pretty much a recluse at this point in my life. I sit in front of my laptop all day long; if I’m awake I’m online and even sometimes when I’m asleep I’m online.”

I asked Locke how the manifesto has remained relevant within the last decade, and he pointed to file-sharing as an example of an industry struggling in vain against the book’s theses.

“One of the first big battles was the RIAA and the question of whether you can you put music in a box and prevent file-sharing of MP3s,” he said. “I don’t know the state of all the copyright law — it’s a whole study I’m not very up on. But basically, no one’s been able to put this back in a box, which I think is what we predicted. Once the genie is out — it was out in 1999 — it was clear. There were attempts to prevent the kind of anarchy and free-wheeling stuff that we’ve seen, but it was frivolous, it was hopeless.”

The Cluetrain author said that in 2002 he “unplugged in a major way” from the Internet and got interested in a “radically different set of things.” This led to the launch of a blog called Mystic Bourgeoisie, a site that carries the tagline, “The unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds & came to believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush.” The blog seems to be attacking New Age spiritualism (the posts do not provide much context) and Locke told me he hopes to develop the project into a book.

David Weinberger, who has continued to write about the significance of the Internet, told me he isn’t surprised that industries are still showing resistance to the manifesto’s theses.

“There’s real progress and it’s a daily struggle,” he said. “I think it’s likely to be a daily struggle for a generation. Many of the changes we now take for granted, and thus they are invisible to us. There was a time when if you wanted to buy a car, you had to rely upon the information that the car dealer gave you. These days the car’s website is maybe the last place you go to.”

When asked why he thought this struggle continues, Weinberger said it was because there are real risks involved with online media.

“Institutional participation in the leading edge of social media is always going to be tinged with embarrassment,” he said. “The leading edge is always where they’re going to be most exposed and will likely do things in which they look foolish. And I salute companies that are willing to look foolish.”

I asked each of the authors I interviewed (Doc Searls, the fourth writer, did not respond to my interview request) if there were any theses they felt were wrong — and two of three pointed to thesis number 74, which read, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.”

“That was clearly wrong,” Locke said. “Advertising isn’t going to work? Yes, it can. Google is the biggest brand and company going and they’ve made it completely on Internet advertising, and so checkmate.”

Weinberger seemed to agree.

“It was really shortly after that that I smacked myself in the head and said that ‘Well, a lot of those theses are big and bold,’” he said. “They’re not subtle, which I think is appropriate for what we were trying to do. But that one, I think we were just wrong, and I wish I had slapped my head before we published it. Because though advertising has changed, the kind of advertising that appeals to the lizard part of our brain, that does work.”

Later this year, a new edition of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” will be published, with a new forward and new content. The last decade — with the rise of blogging, social networking, and YouTube — has seen a vast increase in the level of online conversation mentioned in the book, but the old media filter still remains as a powerful broker for influence and branding.

And while there are weekly reports of companies dipping their feet into social media, there are still daily squabbles between the Cluetrain evangelists and those who have so far resisted change. But according to the manifesto, whether they accept the change is irrelevant, because the online (authentic) conversation will carry on with or without them.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Internet is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to the Internet.

The Internet is the largest, most diverse and most global collection of affinity groups ever to exist. Affinity groups are, by their definition, groups of like minded-people sharing a degree of trust who coordinate their activities within a larger, uninformed community.

The Internet is neither a place nor a destination. One cannot broadcast to the Internet and there is very little correlation between throwing money at advertising and building brand equity. To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations,??? and marketing to the Internet not only requires engagement in the conversations that are already happening online, but it also requires engaging with the real people having these online conversations.

Consumers are ever better informed and discerning. Your potential customers have choices and they know it. People now have too much information and are looking for informed help in making their choices.

More than ever, people are turning to other people they trust to help them make their decisions, and more and more, these trusted people are Influencers that your potential customers know from their online lives.

Via Abraham PR