I weighed in this AM and my Withings scale logged 259.7 pounds and sent it to Facebook and Twitter. Soon, I received notice from my online service, connected online to Withings, that I have unlocked my 45 pounds lost badge on Fitbit!

It has taken ten-months but here’s how I have done it: gone to the gym three-times/week; counted my calories; pretended to be an gym rat so I have eaten lots of eggs and lots of chicken and very little pasta, bread, and ice cream; and — and this is key — I have forgiven myself my trespasses because I have had binges, I have had nights of beer and merriment.

I have eaten pints of ice cream that I had bought for my mother.  And I have polished off a bottle of red wine in one sitting, more than once. But that’s OK (for the weight loss) because I did not get frustrated and give up.

I started off using the fitbit thingy and the Fitbit site back in Portland but because my fitbit got killed in the laundry and I didn’t replace it. But I used all the stuff on here to log my food and workout on LoseIt almost religiously — and I still am — and also drank way more water than I was comfortable with.

Since I fetish nice things, I have been working out much harder ever since I secured a pair of red, sexy, Mizuno running shoes, the Mizuno Wave Rider 15 Limited Edition — wearing these bright and shy shoes makes me feel self-conscious because they’re too good for me. I don’t honor them with all the miles in the world so I feel like I need to train like crazy so I can honor them with better time, a better pace, a longer time out, more mileage, and wear them out as fast as possible so I can get another pair. I had been getting lighter, less-structured, running shoes before but I am really sold on these. They’re working like crazy for me and I am now a devoted Mizuno runner, just like Haruki Murakami.

Since I am a technologist, I allowed tech and gear to excite me, including my Polar FT60 to track my heart rate at the gym. I upload the logs to Polar Personal Trainer. I do my best to log and track and I also make sure everything is share-able to social media for accountability. I also use RunKeeper as well as my Garmin Forerunner 305 when I run or bike.

My lofty goal — and goals are essential — is to get back into my delicate little carbon fiber single racing shell that I call Gerris. While it is a heavyweight boat, it isn’t rated for 305 pounds, which is where I was as recently as June 2011.

And, how do I know all this? How do I keep accountable?  Well, I splurged and bought the Withings WiFi Body Scale, which communicates wirelessly not only to the Withings.com site but also to Facebook, RunKeeper, FitBit, and Twitter — so every morning when I weigh myself, my weight gets published to my wall on Facebook and to my 4,973 friend and to my 47,382 followers on Twitter. Every day.

Now that’s accountability.

I also use FourSquare for accountability because not only does it tell my friends that I am there, but it also tells me how many checkins I have made at the gym since I have started checking in.  As of today, I have checked into XSport Fitness Express 121 times.

While I really could not afford it easily, I hired James Harris, a personal trainer at XSport Fitness Express near where I live in Arlington, Virginia. On that note, I joined the gym that was closest to where I live because I was always afraid that any travel at all would give me an excuse not to go. In general but especially when the weather wasn’t perfect.

With James, he makes me do suicides — the suicide drill. He makes me work with the TRX straps. Actually, I ended up buying a travel set of TRX straps that I throw into my suitcase so I can have it on the road. A pair of shoes and the TRX and you’re done. I have the TRX Pro Pack. The Pro Pack comes with a door anchor and it all comes in a netting bag so it easily slips into my Tumi roller bag. Good stuff.

Oh!  And this is the most important thing: the more weight you lose, the easier it is to lose weight; the more you exercise and become durable, capable, and build up your fitness and remove all that weight off your joints, the easier it will be to get out there and spend more and vigorous time — and as you see progress, you will become more encouraged and less frustrated, saying “screw it, it’ll never work, it’s hopeless.”

It is not! You can do it!

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We’ve all had it. Writer’s block. You need to write something and there’s nothing there. No idea. Nothing seems like the right approach.

Why does it happen? There are six reasons why you’ll have chronic writer’s block when it comes to producing content to feed your social media dragons: blog, Twitter and Facebook. Once you recognize some of these reasons within yourself, you can break out of writer’s block and let the world know what you have to say.

It needs to be perfect

No it doesn’t! Who told you that? It never needs to be perfect. In fact, if you’re being perfect you’re probably not only alienating your audience but you might actually earn yourself a wedgie for being too much of a nerd.

Besides, it’s not like your words will be etched in stone. Unlike traditional dead tree publishing, our social media output generally never makes it to paper. So don’t worry. When I wrote for the AdAge Digital Next blog, they used to publish my articles first and then do any detailed editing after it was already live.

I routinely do my best when it comes to organizing and editing my own work; however, I always go back and read my posts out loud after they’re live. It’s amazing how much better I am as an editor when I know that folks can already read my post.

The same thing goes with tweets and Facebook Page posts: Go ahead and bring stuff down if you have second thoughts. I am not saying that you should be careless. Social media is not a live press conference where you have to field hostile questions in real time. In social media, always breathe before you respond or hit the submit button.

That said, even if you regret a tweet or the quality of a post, there’s no rule against deleting or editing, there’s only a rule against denying that you deleted or edited. And don’t forget to use strike when you change your mind.

I have just too many ideas to harness!

The best thing about this problem is that you’re not lacking in passion, enthusiasm, or creativity. The best advice I can give you is to write down, as quick as you can, all of the ideas clogging your head into a list, count them, and then be glad that you have X number of blog, Twitter, and Facebook posts queued up well in advance.

Then, choose just one, and just start writing. No form, no objective. Just write on the topic. Try writing exactly the way you would talk about it. The most successful social media content feels less like writing and more like spoken word. If you have the time and inclination, you can chop up what you’ve written and then organize it later. My only suggestion is that you don’t bury the lead. I mean, let’s be honest. You’ll be lucky if your readers get past the first paragraph, the first sentence, or — well, just be sure you get the titles right.

On that note, try to keep your post focused. That’s why it is essential to break all those ideas into little pieces and just write enough to clearly and accurately reflect what you know about the subject. And, since you have so many ideas on your list, if you find that you’re just not into what you’re writing right now, then stop, put that copy away for later into your file drawer and start on another one.

You’re not wasting time, you’re just finding today’s groove. Keep all of your work, even the abandoned pieces — they’ll come in handy later. There’s no such thing as waste in social media.

What if I get myself fired?

This sort of fear generally stems from a very threatening social media policy document or a general lack of experience or a lack of confidence in representing the particular brand, company, product, or service. Generally, the only thing you can do is over-communicate. Nobody can read minds — at least as far as I know — and nobody should have to. Management needs to be very clear as to what is practically appropriate in terms of disclosure, transparency, content, tone, language, and general saltiness.

The best way to work on your confidence is by role playing or message modeling. Message modeling will allow you to write an assortment of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook Page “treatments” for you to run by your managers as a way of vetting what they’re comfortable with. It will have added benefits as well.

First, submitting proposed content and topics to them to review, moderate, and edit will bring them into the loop, include them, and then after a pretty short amount of time, they’ll probably eventually let you know when they feel comfortable with you tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking all on your lonesome.

You, too, will eventually lock into where the boundaries are, the sort of tone they expect, deep in your muscles, and you’ll have the added confidence to have explored your limits in a safe environment and you’ll have naturally integrated the tone and voice most appropriate for your job. No worries.

I hate writing

You really should not be on social media. Social media is all about communicating, mostly in text. This requires writing. If you have writer’s block because you hate writing, you should go up to your boss and let them know that. If you’re in communications and hate writing, you should probably become an accountant.

Or, suck it up, fake it with complete conviction, and hope to become a quick Senior VP and hire someone else to do all your writing for you. Or, find someone else in your office who gets all wiggly whenever anyone mentions Twitter, hashtag, share, tweet, or blog and delegate, punt, or turf the task to her. Or, you can hire me. I personally don’t think someone who believes social media is beneath them can ever succeed in social media.

Can’t happen in the kind of sustainable way required to win the ultra marathon known as social.

I don’t know how to write well enough

If you’re passionate enough to want to, that’s good enough for me; but please don’t do it live on behalf of your brand, your clients, your boss, or your company until you do because there’s nothing that folks in our space judge more harshly than poor grammar. “Really?” you ask, “I see terrible grammar left, right, and center, why don’t those people get called out?”

Well, there’s a difference between someone who knows the rules and breaks them and someone who doesn’t. Know the rules and then decide (dude, don’t break them — but that’s just me).

I am so done with this

It’s time to take a break from social media. All the best of us have taken a break. Honestly, you’re just burnt out. Even the most passionate and wiggly of us all can feel a deep sense of meaninglessness and regret: I think about the 52,515 tweets that make up my very own @chrisabraham Twitter experience and I fantasize about all the spy novels, the experimental odes to Thomas Pynchon, and the small books of acclaimed poetry I have squandered in service to @chrisabraham and this blog. And then I say, in my head so far, “I am so done with this.”

Don’t worry about it. Take some time off and see if your social media heart heals. If it does, welcome back! if it doesn’t, start telling everyone “I hate writing” and see if you can get that promotion to Senior VP and get some other sucker to write pithy corporate marketing copy in the form of editorial content.

Good luck, and I wish you luck and many column inches, 140 characters at a time.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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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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The problem with most social media marketing agencies is that we’re fickle. We tend to keep rushing into the future, adopting anything and everything hot and new and overlooking the rest. In our constant hunger for the latest and greatest, we have mostly abandoned working class heroes like forums and message boards, preferring exciting new money to boring old money. But isn’t any kind of money good?

Unlike Friendster and MySpace, these message boards are generally privatel -held and heavily sponsored. They’re also pretty well monetized, from offering membership levels to running raffles; from placing in-line textual ads to being framed by banners. Additionally, most of the more popular forums have over 5,000 active users and have been online for well over half a decade. Since they’re not tied to Facebook or MySpace, they’re safe from the fickle tide of funding or popularity. These forums don’t care about what happens at Facebook, they only care about whether they can pay their escalating server and bandwidth fees.

What’s even better is that forum application developers such as vBulletin have hungrily adopted all the best parts of all the blogging platforms, publishing frameworks, social networking services, microblogging platforms, photo sharing sites, and social graphic services. It’s pretty amazing how comprehensive and mature these message board suites have become.

How do I know this? About a year ago I picked up a new hobby: shooting sports. I knew nothing about it but I knew where to go: forums and message boards.

There has been a real renaissance in both blogs and message boards because of social media and the ability to share, cross pollinate, and make easy reference to not only boards but to threads and replies. Most message boards have adopted all of the modern conveniences offered by blogs, including RSS feeds, email reminders, email updates, social media share buttons for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Additionally, if you happen to visit a message board or forum using your iPhone or Android, you’re likely to receive a pop-up that lets you know that there’s an app made especially for your device that will allow you to easily and simply read, post, and share on that online community site.

Mobile devices today can not only read and post to message boards but also help you discover other boards and forums. Mobile has opened up ease-of-access via smart phones, Androids, iPhones, iPads, and tablets. Not only that but access via mobile devices strips ugly advertisements, garish color choices, and a plethora of in-line and banner ads.

And if you thought that blogs are like catnip to Google organic search then you need to explore the prevalence of message boards and forums in the top results of their respective topics. This is important for several important reasons: first, it seems to me that while message boards and forums are still powerful platforms for sharing, conspiring, debating, and alerting, forums have gone out of favor among the digerati.

Unfortunately, if you look at the sort of topics that have popular forums, they’re generally not at the social media cutting edge, they’re less meta — social media about social media about social media — and more practical: What caliber should I get in my first hunting rifle? What protein supplement should I buy for my CrossFit obsession?

Even though these may well be places where you can just pop in, look around, and find what you need without even registering, they can also be decades old, and all associated protocol and terms of engagement must apply. These are tight communities and if you don’t know much about virtual communities and message boards, they’re real families and the mothers and fathers of these communities are the owners, the uncles and aunties are the members with the high post counts. And, you really should take post count and join date very seriously, too, because message boards and forums are one of the few places in today’s anti-anonymity Internet that still encourages being who you are while also protecting your identity.

How message boards became a nightly ritual

My first return to message board was RimFire Central because my first pistol was a Ruger Mk III “678″ Target. At that time, I was maneuvering clumsily via their web interface. It felt antiquated and it was tough to sort out my latest posts or responses I needed to engage. Later, after getting my first Glock, I joined Glock Talk via my iPhone and it offered me the ability to download OutdoorHub, the sponsored app for GT. It opened everything up for me because it became as easy to track new content, unread posts and replies, and engage both via the boards or via personal message from one single place.

However, I soon wanted to read Rimfire Central the same way. And local shooting boards like Maryland Shooters Forum and VA Gun Owners Forum. I then discovered Tapatalk, an app for my iPhone that does cost $4.99 but is well worth it. I just checked and Tapatalk has an app for the iPad, Android, Blackberry and Chrome. The only thing it doesn’t have is iCloud support, which supposedly is in the works — so all the boards I am registered with on my iPhone don’t translate over to my iPad.

Then, after I got to know Tapatalk better, I started exploring their Network directory of cataloged forums available and discovered and joined other shooting sports communities, including The High Road Forum, Remington Owners Forum, Elsie Pea Forum, The Original CZ Forum, Defensive Carry Concealed Carry Forum. Now, over time, these communities have become a rightly rite, and I have accrued 431 posts on Glock Talk. And, to be honest, nobody has really paid any attention to me at all on Glock Talk until now and I am really hoping that I am able to earn some awe and fear by the time I make my 1,000th post.

In next week’s post I want to go into how to market to message boards. I have recently seen a maestro in action in the form of Paul M. Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, a new book that is categorized by Amazon as a Company Profile involving social U.S. history, and conventional weapons & warfare. When Paul started promoting online, he didn’t limit his online pre-sales time and energy to just blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. He recognized that the most passionate owners, collector, and proponents of the shooting sports spend a lot of their time learning, sharing, bragging, and teaching on online message boards and that he needed to engage these communities before his book went on sale to the public if he wanted to get the kind of buzz and word of mouth he needed to be able to reach the least obvious but most important brand ambassadors.

It was really a beautiful thing to see, honestly, especially after I spent years marketing on message boards and forums when I was an online analyst and project manager at New Media Strategies. Things have changed a lot since I was promoting brand online in message boards and the state of the art has evolved, become more savvy, but is very ripe and very transparent.

Man, I have a lot to share with you next week, I can’t wait!  Actually, here’s that post now:  How Paul Barrett Won Over Gun Forums

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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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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• Being Pretty Isn’t Enough for Social Media Marketing (biznology.com)
• Advice To Help You Succeed In Social Media Marketing (ronmedlin.com)
• 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)
• Is It Possible For A Business To Survive Without Using Social Media? (superdoodadsblog.wordpress.com)
• How to get more Facebook likes for your fan page (marketing.yell.com)
• How to make the most of the new YouTube redesign (marketing.yell.com)
• Daily Dose Social Media Tip of the Day – Don’t get caught up in numbers (jcsocialmarketing.com)
• One Size Fits All Social Media – Is There Such a Thing? (socialmediaexplorer.com)

Abraham Harrison’s new client, Nymgo, has now completely re-developed its networking infrastructure and is accordingly re-launching its product, website and brand with a completely new look and set of functions that pushes the envelope of mass consumer VoIP technology in 2012 — and, to celebrate that launch, they’re also offering 5 tickets to anywhere to a lucky 5 folks.

This contest is called the “Nymgo, fly me to visit someone” contest and it takes place on its regional Facebook pages for Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan — one round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world will be available to  each Facebook Page by simply choosing a friend they would like to visit. The contestant simply uploads a picture along with a required caption (maximum 500 words) explaining why they should win the trip to see that person.

Here’s some more information from the Social Media News Release that we produced for Nymgo:

Thanks to an investment from Intel Capital (USA) and Abraaj Capital (UAE) in 2010 and 2011, respectively, Nymgo has now completely re-developed its networking infrastructure and is accordingly re-launching its product, website and brand with a completely new look and set of functions that pushes the envelope of mass consumer VoIP technology in 2012.

With an established user base around the world and fast-growing multi-national workforce, Nymgo is definitely a start-up that you’ll want to pay closer attention to soon.

Nymgo is heating up its social media efforts by celebrating and honoring the hard work of expats and all kinds people living all over the globe by launching the “Nymgo, fly me to visit someone” contest on its regional Facebook pages – Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. A total of 5 competitions and 5 round trip airplane tickets , Nymgo is awarding one person on each of these Facebook pages the chance to fly anywhere in the world, by simply choosing a friend they would like to visit. The contestant simply uploads a picture along with a required caption (maximum 500 words) explaining why they should win the trip to see that person.

In early 2012, Nymgo will be the first known VoIP software company to bring its extreme pricing to international calls on its native iOS and Android apps.

While both smartphones and VoIP technology have been around for years, Nymgo has married these two concepts together to bring crystal clear mobile-to-anywhere calling at the same rates we have come to expect from PC’s.

Because Nymgo specializes in paid VoIP long distance calling, it is able to focus on giving consumers the first real alternative to that which is offered by the mobile network operators. You always know where you stand with Nymgo. You get a great quality of service, backed by our Fair Pricing and Every Day Low Pricing policies.

We don’t offer you fancy promotions that promise the earth but in reality deliver nothing. Nymgo prices remain to be the lowest in the market of VOIP calls coupled with the best voice quality and customer service. No calling credit expiry dates with our Pay As You Go service.

We give it to you straight, including some great value adds – such as the ability to record your conversations, low cost texting and access the same phone book from wherever you happen to be at the time; at home, around the corner or on the other side of the world.

You pay the advertised Pay As You Go price with Nymgo. And that’s all you pay.

We don’t tie you up in long term contracts either. You can cancel either service at any time, without incurring any penalty charges.

Simply use up your credits and don’t top up again, or cancel your direct debit or credit card payment. We hope you don’t, of course. But you’re free to do exactly that, if you so decide.

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:

Thank you very much to Market Wire, Sysomos, CommPRO.biz, and SmartWomanGuides.com for including me in their Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 list:

• Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 (slideshare.net)
• Understand the ROI of Social Media (dcincome.com)
• Who Are The Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers? (forbes.com)
• Social media is ruining our minds and we have the proof [Infographic] (inquisitr.com)
• 19 Huge Social Media Moments of 2011 (mashable.com)
• 21 Captivating Social Media Stats: How People Interact With Brands [INFOGRAPHIC] (hubspot.com)
• Heatmaps Reveal Where People Look on Social Media Sites [Research] (hubspot.com)
• Social media analytics tools – tested and rated (usefulsocialmedia.com)
• 5 healthcare social media tips that break the mold for pharma, med tech (medcitynews.com)
• What is the ROI on Social Media? You’re asking the wrong question! [Sam Borrett] (ecademy.com)

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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• Social media success demands talent above technology (biznology.com)
• How to make awesome Social Media News Releases (chrisabraham.com)
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• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• WordPress 2.5 – So exciting I can hardly contain myself… (theresabloginmysoup.com)
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• 5 Types of Sites You Can Build With WordPress (thetechscoop.net)
• How To: Add Customer Reviews To WordPress (wpjedi.com)

In order to keep on the cutting edge of social media I tend to play a lot. Experimenting keeps Abraham Harrison au courant. Several months ago I received a Twitter DM from Shel Holtz asking if I would help him promote FIR for him via my social networks. The link popped off to a companycalled GaggleAMP.

I joined up. One of the options is called AutoAMP which allows me to set up my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts so that anything that Shel Holtz allows to feed into his Gaggle would pass through into my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn streams, unfettered. Shel is one of my idols and all of his content is amazing; plus, I admire his For Immediate Release podcast.

I set it up. Why? Well, I would always retweet anything from Facebook I saw coming from either Neville Hobson or Shel Holtz so why not remove the middle man and just allow their good message to pass through to my followers, as I would have done anyway, if there were enough hours in the day.

This is very cool, I thought, I really need to speak to the dude behind this. That man is Glenn Gaudet. I was able to secure my own account, and I have been checking it out. And I like what I see. Why? Well, it is 100% opt-in and rewards everyone: the publisher who wants his message to be conveyed far and wide as efficiently as possible–especially through fans, friends, and family; the consumer, who feels attached, connected, and committed to the success of the publisher; and to the community of consumers, who can then compete for prestige and prizes through an optional “air miles” points system that can easily be used to incentivize group cohesion and might competition.

What I like about the founder, Glenn, is that his heart is in the right place. This is not a Ponzi scheme or some bait-and-switch affiliate network. It is all opt-in, it is all join-in, and your success is directly proportionate to your ability to have fans who trust you and who are willing to amplify your brand on your behalf gladly–willfully! And, the more they trust you and your content–like I do anything by Shel Holtz–the more likely they’ll AutoAMP and really act as an extenti0n of your own Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn followers.

Long story short, I am trying it out and there’s a lot of cool stuff going on here. I am frustrated because building a Gaggle takes a long time. Because of Twitter limits, you can only invite, via DM, 200 of your followers-per-day so in order to invite all of my 39,553 followers, I will need another 197 days — to say nothing of the other three accounts I have connected in addition to @chrisabraham: @marcon, @harrisonmarkw, @chrisabraham.

And, because I don’t have a cool podcast to promote like Shel Holtz’s FIR, I decided to make this experiment all about my very best asset: Marketing Conversation, Abraham Harrison’s corporate blog. All the content on MC is both stellar and moderate, which is to say it isn’t my stream or the streams of the other, personal, accounts, that are more chatty and less focused on producing simple, retweet-worthy, beautifully-curated content, both trustworthy and consistent — no floods of inconsistent or off-topic BS that could possibly hurt the web of trust both Abraham Harrison and I have developed over the years.

As it goes now, I have 63 folks in my Gaggle, including me. Even now, with so few, this surely amplifies like crazy. My total member reach is up to 144,234 followers and the total message reach is up to 3,452,474! It’s sort of like compound interest: I don’t really know what it is but compound interest has made quite a few savers millionaires over the years (it’s always the way time-travelers and vampires become billionaires, isn’t it?)

I was going to go through the reports and the metrics and the contests and all the other things that GaggleAMP offers but I think this is good enough for now — I will follow up with a step-by-step walk through the service next time. Right now I am working on building my Gaggle, I am seeing how well it converts to reach, retweets, clicks, and so forth.

All I can say is that, at the very least, it makes me happy that I don’t have to pay too much attention to posting my own great content from my collaborative marketing blog, Marketing Conversation, because I know that all the new posts are automagically posted to my @chrisabraham Twitter stream without my having to remember to do it all the time — and, even better, there’s a setting that allows me to preface each post that I AutoAMP from @marcon with “RT @marcon:” which is what I would do manually anyway. And since I am so busy, I like to automate as much as possible that I can as long as it’s an exact replica of would I would do anyway.

Another thing I like is that I can tweet something over on @chrisabraham and if I really intentionally and explicitly desire that tweet to go out amongst the members of my Gaggle as-is, then I can affix a simple #ga hash tag to the end of that tweet and it will be added to either my Gaggle members’ message queue or it will be automatically queued up to go out automatically via AutoAMP.

• Amplify your good message with GaggleAmp (socialmedia.biz)
• Amplify your good message with GaggleAmp (biznology.com)
• FIR Interview: Glenn Gaudet, President and Founder, GaggleAmp (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Interview: Glenn Gaudet, President and Founder, GaggleAmp (holtz.com)
• GaggleAMP Offers Social Message Distribution For Companies (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Join the FIR GaggleAmp experiment (nevillehobson.com)
• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #616: September 12, 2011 (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Speakers and Speeches: Shel Holtz on Content Curation (nevillehobson.com)
• FIR Speakers and Speeches: October 2011 – Shel Holtz on Content Curation (holtz.com)
• 3 Ways to Improve Internal Content Sharing (hubspot.com)

Last week, I wrote Max SEO with 8 simple Google+ steps before Google opened up G+ Brand Pages, so first go read what I wrote in the previous post (because all of the advice still applies).

In this post, we’ll work on setting up your brand page right away in the right way. If you follow these steps, you’ll be as well-placed as possible.

First, did you notice that there’s a new button on your Google+ profile? Go ahead and click “Create a Google+ page” and we’ll get started…

I chose “Arts, Entertainment, or Sports” because it offered “blog” as a choice. Since I am creating a G+ Brand Page for my blog, Because the Medium is the Message at chrisabraham.com, it was obvious to me, but I did poke around a lot just to be sure. Then you’ll have a few things to fill out, including your tagline, a branded photo (I didn’t have one so I just used a funny photo of my big nose with a nude Breathe Right Nasal Strip.

The next step, after uploading my photo, as seen above, is an opportunity to crop the photo — so feel free to upload any photo you want as you’ll be easily able to crop however you like — just like on Facebook.

When you click “Continue” after cropping and all that, you’ll get the below dialogue, asking you to send out a post onto your own personal Google+ profile wall.

So, follow my advice in Max SEO on G+ in 8 steps and make sure you make the announcement publicly and consider including emailing as well.

Now the tricky part: In order to post as a brand page you need to become the brand page. When you are the brand page, you post as the brand page. It might get confusing–it is for me. It is a little like the new Facebook Pages where you can re-identify you as your brand. So, how do you swap? It isn’t 100% obvious, especially if you’re used to how it is done on Facebook. See below:

The menu is subtle, grayed out, and right next to your profile picture. The profile picture is also a clue as to who you currently are: Chris+ or Abraham Harrison+ or Because the Medium is the Message+… see the pull down below. The good thing is that there are some visual clues and the profile icon does changes when you’re a different brand and a different person:

Then you’re “done”–which isn’t to say we’re done. Why not try posting your first post–and I will show you why you have some work ahead of you:

See? You have no friends! You can only, by default, post it like you do on your first day tweeting or blogging–nobody’s there except only the hungry eyes of the Google Real-Time Web and Google Real-Time Search.

OK, so how are you going to sex all of this up? Well, continue emailing your friends, blogging, and posting on your Facebook and announcing your new Google+ brand page on your Facebook Page or Pages, and tweet the heck out of it on Twitter. If you look below, you can check to see how many people add you to their circles and follow your new brand page over time:

OK, now while you’re doing a loud Olly Olly Oxen Free to collect your new followers, you need to take the next step, which Google doesn’t make so obvious: you have lots of opportunity to add some more information about you and the page. It’s hidden under “About” and “Edit Profile” as you can see below:

If you click on the text after “Introduction” and “Contact Info” an editable box will pop up and you can write up an introductory about me/about us with a bonus: the introduction accepts rich text and HTML and links and whatnot–so there is a lot you can do with this About: Introduction information. I pasted a very long tract of text over on the Abraham Harrison+ page and there were no limits to links, etc. Maybe you can even paste in graphics and photos–I have not tested it yet.

Then you can really go to town with the contact info: you can keep on adding and adding and adding–I added just about the kitchen sink, as you’ll see below:

Et voilà!

That should be good for now. And, if you need to figure out what to do now, why don’t you follow my 8 simple Google+ steps to max SEO.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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• SEO for Google+ Profiles and Pages (searchenginewatch.com)
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Let me boil my last post, Here’s why it make sense to use Google Plus, down to practical pieces. Part of what makes a technology premature is that you have to be careful how you use it, because it isn’t mature enough to just work no matter what you do with it. To help you carefully handle Google+ for maximum advantage, I’ve assembled eight steps that help you get the best search visibility from your Google+ posts. These tips ares simple, but some are easy to overlook. I hacked this awful-looking graphic as an example:

Here’s a list of things that you need to consider before you invest your time and energy in Google+:

1. Make sure all your posts are Public. You can add more circles in order to spur interest amongst your friends, but be sure you explicitly tell Google, through your willingness to share publicly, that they can index your content in their public search engine. Check this every time because sometimes Public isn’t always selected, depending on the situation. Here’s my Google+ public profile.
2. Use a clean URL when you add your content to Google+. Google+ hasn’t been translating URL shorteners well, so use a link from the source. This will not only allow Google to better populate the content as you see above, including the Title, Blog Name, Description, and an Image from the post, but it will also allow that content to be cross-referenced to any Google +1 “likes” from others within Google+ and the rest of the Googlephere. Site URLs are translated the way they are on Facebook. You need to paste the URL into the “Share what’s new…” text box.
3. Prefixing names with a plus sign links that name to the person’s profile on Google+. You can include your friends and people you’re connected to on G+ in a similar way you do in Facebook, but Google+ has a gimmick that you may know or not. In the graphic above, you’ll see a blue box around Arsh S and Jenna Levy — I did that by adding a plus symbol (+) before each name while I am writing the article. G+ then populates a pull-down, offering pre-populated names of people I am connected to. I just need to select and go. Sometimes the profile’s privacy setting prohibits the link reference to persist after posting. Linking to people is a good way to engage, inform, and initiate conversation.
4. Even though Public should cover your inclusion in Search, you still need friends, circles, engagement, and sharing. In the same way that increased engagement levels and shares result in a higher placement, a greater “bubbling up,” and a longer life on the Facebook Walls of the friends and Fans/Likers on Facebook, the same goes for Google+ — and with both G+ and Facebook, the greater Social Graph is much broader than just shares, likes, comments and +1s on their respective platforms, it also includes +1s and Likes and comments that from the polling on websites, blogs, newspapers, and magazines Internet-wide.
5. Always make sure you populate every single page of your your blogs, corporate sites, personal sites, and e-commerce sites with the Google +1 button. The simplest way is by embedding code directly from the Google +1 widget embed page. For WordPress, I like to use the Google +1 Button by Alex Moss. If you use Drupal, check out Google Plus One +1. If you use Blogger or Tumblr, you’ll need to hack the template, in which case you’ll need to hack in Google’s widget yourself.
6. Spend all the time needed to fill out your Google Profile as completely as you’re comfortable. The Google Profile self-creates based on a lot of little choices you have made over time. But you can always add to it and even curate and help it grow and get it right. So, check out your Profile and make it as good as you can. I recommend you give ’til it hurts because in this economy of information, Google rewards authenticity and relinquished privacy very well, historically. Here’s my Google Profile and I have surely given ’til it hurts.
7. Optionally, consider checking the “Also email X people not yet using Google+” check box. Consider including the people who you’re connected to via other Google apps like Gmail in the post as a way of calling “olly olly oxen free” — a form of clanging the chow bell. However, this advice comes with a caveat: only do it on your best posts and only rarely; otherwise, you’re going to elicited a negative response. I made this error and regretted the simple click made too breezily and too often, so heed my warning.
8. Finally, commit to participating in Google+ by becoming an authentic part of the community. This is what Google Search wants more than anything, and it will reward accordingly by ranking your relevance in a similar way that Klout does: the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network and across their extended networks; amplification of how much you influence people; and your network impact of your influence on your network.

In short, Google juice and yummy organic SEO on Google Search. And quality rules. All Google cares about is relevance and its entire search algorithm revolves around this principal.

And, it all depends on how many people read, click, share, +1, and comment — and the more the better, resulting in higher real time web search ranking results over in Google Search, optimizing your SEO.

And, in case you didn’t get the memo, the Social Graph (be it the Facebook Like embed you can put on your site or the Google +1) are part of the new generation of Link Juice. The more sites, shares, and comments that happen even outside of Google + are all part of that — even the little +1 buttons that are all over every search result you see in both organic results as well as in the current crop of Google AdWords/AdSense contextual ads.

And it could all start with jumping in, feet first, into Google+ and committing time, passion, and resources to it over the long term. And, when Google+ Brand Pages are finally launched for public consumption, you can use the gravity you’ve already built up in your private profile for your company also.

That’s all I have for now. Before we end, I want to remind you that Google is working hard to make sure you can’t just call it in to Google+ the way you can on Facebook and Twitter. And, we all know that calling it in, cross-posting, and aggregating strategies are only a smart part of a good social media strategy.

Please let me know if I missed anything. As I have learned over time, all the best tips and tricks are generally always revealed in the comments of the readers.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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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

Related articles

• 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)

Very very very funny: via DC Earthquake Devastation via jmckinley’s posterous

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I am in the middle of guiding some new bloggers over at Marketing Conversation on how to blog most effectively. It is pretty exciting and instructive because there are many things I take for granted. One of the biggest trends I see is internal shorthand. What I mean is that my bloggers tend to write based on a lot of assumed context. When they write my company name, they might choose AH instead of Abraham Harrison; and, since that AH is on a corporate blog, they might forget to link it to the best page in the corporate Web site.

They simply assume that people who are reading content from Marketing Conversation or Because the Medium is the Message–or even an article on the corporate Website–are in on the joke. That they grok the context.

Not only is that not true but it is dangerous, because I am guilty of it myself. I would say north of 80% of the people I engage with on a daily basis online don’t know that I am president of a digital agency with over fifty staff and dozens of clients. See, I make the same assumptions.

I assume that I shouldn’t be so self-referential because “they” surely know who I am by now, I have been branding for years. Pretty darn shamelessly if you ask me — at least I thought so. Not so.

And I have not even gotten to the most important part: even if people know who you are, what you do, the company you own, and its products and services intimately, their brand perception hasn’t evolved at the speed of your business. What I did in 2006 is quite a bit different than what Abraham Harrison does now, as a company.

Even worse, after we spend all of this time, resources, hours, money, and brain trust on creating insightful analysis and share it for free on our blogs and via Twitter and Facebook, we’re living in a Derridian world: “there’s nothing outside the text.” Let me explain . . .

In a world of excerpting, reading, sharing, retweeting, and sharing shares, or decontextualized via RSS or auto spamblogs, simply all of the breadcrumbs required to bring a reader down the road back to you, your brand, and your sales channel needs to be contained not only in that blog post but also in that tweet, if possible.

Each post needs to be as self contained as a biosphere.

You need everything that you could possibly need to have your post make sense on the same page, within the same post–for three reasons:

1. If you’re quoting another post, excerpt as much of that content to make your point and make it unnecessary to need to link out to read that other article–they won’t make it back
2. If you don’t have everything sorted out, completely contextually-inclusive both with references as well as with your branding, your products and services, all on your article’s back, then something might get left behind
3. If everything’s not completely clear and tidy and tied with a bow–fully sorted–then you’ll lose them anyway because you need to grab them in short-order, every time.

Do not use acronyms unless your brand is that acronym. Abraham Harrison, LLC, is not yet AH or even AHLLC–we’re no IBM. Abraham Harrison should always be linked. Every name of every employee should be linked to their bio on the corporate website at best case or to a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook profile at the very least. Every product or service should be linked to its exact corresponding sub-page on the corporate website if at all possible.

In blogging, we often do a much better job of linking to other people, companies, and blogs in the form of attribution than we do ourselves.

Even more essential to these constantly contextualizing linking strategies is that the keywords should be hyperlinked and not some worthless [link] or a pithy here or there or my work or any of that, if at all possible.

Search abhors a pronoun.

Finally, any and all posts should be wrapped in analysis, if at all possible. Don’t just excerpt a social media news article onto your blog or site, make it your own. While collecting news and propagating it through your blog with attribution links and excerpts and all that can result in your colleagues and neighbors and even prospects to learn of your existence, you’re not really adding value when you just propagate–it is essential to interpret, analyze, and synthesize, allowing all the marrow of your experience to be extracted in answer to, “well, that’s great content, but it is content from your competitor so maybe we should be using them instead of you if they’re so insightful.”

In a perfect world, with a corporate blog, people should be subscribing to and reading posts on Marketing Conversation in order to learn more about the products and services and quality of mind of Abraham Harrison and not just to get an aggregation of the latest social media marketing news.

Sometimes I forget that and it is something I would like to share with you in addition to sharing it with my new bloggers.

Via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

I’ve run a social media marketing agency since Autumn 2006 so Abraham Harrison is almost five years old. In that time, we’ve learned quite a lot. One of my biggest learnings is that you can’t always get a direct bead on your demographic target–and that’s OK. We’ve worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global non-profits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn’t always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out: What I’ve learned is that if you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him.

I call this “fire for effect,” which is a term taken from artillery for when you don’t quite know where your target is or your target is well-guarded or sheltered. So, what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly. (In artillery, you generally try to have someone down range, a forward observer, who can help you drop your mortars closer and closer, called adjusting your indirect fire, which I will discuss further along.)

Let me bring this analogy back to social media marketing. In two instances, I have seen indirect social media marketing work wonders. 80% of what we at Abraham Harrison do is long-tail blogger outreach. Instead of “sniping” at just the top-25 most influential bloggers in any one vertical, we dig deep and often come up with between 2,000-10,000 relevant blogs. Most client projects make it easy for their general appeal; however, in a couple notable cases, firing for effect was the only thing we could really do: targeting health care providers for a client that sells health care devices and targeting astronomers for a global radio telescope project.

What we quickly realized is that not only were the doctors and scientists that my clients most desired generally not blogging, they were also very busy and quite invulnerable to the sort of blogger PR pitches we were wont to do, but they were also unpredictable and often volatile.

Doctors were almost impossible to access directly and scientists tended to be impolite whenever they received a plea via email from someone they didn’t know — typical A-lister behavior.

What we needed to do was to brainstorm and expand our campaigns to include everyone around the doctors. Since the campaign was a public affairs campaign on hospital acquired infection-prevention, we brainstormed on who else is in the space–targeting the “ground” immediately around the docs, expanding as far out as we had budget and time.

Who did we come up with? Well, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, public policy bloggers–the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long. All the earth around the OR, an impenetrable fortress, was razed and we super-saturated the blogosphere, the twittersphere, and the Facebookosphere with discussion, mentions, messaging, excerpting, and commentary about the very real issue of healthcare associated infections in today’s hospitals and clinics: ventilator-associated pneumonia, surgical site infections, cross contamination, etc.

The same thing with the scientists who are associated with the radio telescope campaign. The scientists were there, they were just snippy, so instead of risking too much negative feedback, we instead isolated them and instead reached out to everyone around them: science nerds, space geeks, techies, amateur astronomers, sky watchers, backyard astronomers, and stargazers.

When it comes to blogger outreach and engagement, the goal is never to convert the blogger into a customer, I must remind you, but is always to message through the blogger onto his or her blog as a post, tweet, retweet, or wall post. If the blogger is a gatekeeper, a blockade, to the blog and the blog’s readers (and to the spiders and bots, busily indexing links and content for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), then you must abandon them and move on to the more accessible publications–generally the hobbyists, the amateurs, and the aspirants of the social media and blogosphere.

Amateur hobbyist bloggers are generally hungrier, more available, more grateful, and don’t have the hundreds of “date offers” that journalists, professionals, or A-listers generally have–they’re interested in making a name and are generally pretty amazed when a brand or an agency is sensitive and generous around to notice a blog that’s not solidly in the A-list and are generally really appreciative and open to building an authentic relationship.

Why do all of this? Why expend all this energy and munitions on indirect fire? The obvious answer is to smoke them out. Since we’re often able to start a wildfire of blog posts, tweets, likes, retweets, and Facebook shares, there’s really nowhere for these well-fortified A-listers, scientists, professionals, and surgeons to hide.

And since all of the messaging, all the wildfire, is no longer coming from up range, from our battery, then it is no longer associated with us or our clients. Now, the wildfire is owned by the blogosphere instead of the client or my agency.

This means that the public affairs messaging, the content from our social media news releases, and the emailing back and forth between my crack team of online analysts and the hundreds of bloggers who take up the flag of our outreach, become detached from the final end-product: the rash of intense conversation, posting, tweeting, and retweeting that has all of a sudden lit up the social mediasphere like day actually comes from an impressive number of bloggers and readers from the space and not, at the end of the day, directly from us–so, it is much more likely that these unassailable influencers will end up, at the end of the day, be influenced anyway, without ever being pitched directly by us.

We have seen this happen time and time again, so much so that we have cliches for these things: priming the pump, setting the stage, tenderizing the steak, fertilizing the field–and, of course, carpet bombing (I like that last one the best, but my management team wants me to stop using military analogies, so please forgive me for all the above).

Because nobody believes me that this all works, I like to collect “thank you blogger” posts (from the clients who allow) wherein we “thank” the people who blog and tweet for us, through earned media (we don’t pay anyone–all of this isn’t payola-based) and the numbers speak for themselves: Thank You Habitat for Humanity World Habitat Day Bloggers, Thank You All Who Supported International Medical Corps!, Thank You Fresh Air Fund Bloggers, Thank You Snuggle Crème Bloggers, Thank You To All Of The Olympic Bloggers, Thank you Alzheimer’s Bloggers, Thank You Habitat For Humanity World Habitat Day 2010 Bloggers, Thank You HAI Watch Bloggers, Thank You MLK Memorial Bloggers, Thank You Motionbox Bloggers, Thank You To All US Winter Olympic Bloggers–so, the proof is in the pudding.

At the end of the day, the results outlive the campaign on organic search. When hundreds of blogs and tweets are published online–public, archived, and indexed–most of which link to your client’s social media news release, Web site, issue page, or landing page–hundreds of posts from a diversity of blogs and sources, almost always focused on a very impassioned three-week span. While I don’t condone link-farming or any black hat or even grey hat tactics, earned media mentions–where “earned media” means that you make the offer–the pitch–to the blogger and the blogger decides if and when he or she will post and how he or she will post.

Some bloggers post the our pitch email directly to their blog and that’s cool. A majority mention that they received a pitch from us and our client as well as excerpting and blockquoting a sizable amount of our very own copy from our social media news release. A minority actually spend the time to go in and write up a brand new piece, researched and contextualized, and we love those, too. We’re realistic: we’re reaching out to someone, asking for their help, not paying them anything at all except attention, and then expect them to do us a solid and actually post about our clients for free? Well, we’re always darned grateful for just about any mention–even, believe it or not, the spiny ones. It’s all good.

And, at the end of the day, as they say, any publicity is good publicity as long as they link our client’s name, product, services, and keywords as close to right as possible.

Via Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz

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

Here in the US we have “see something, say something.”

During the Cold War‘s “red scare” the FBI and local police went around photographing folks at gatherings and protests. Now, regular folks are crowdsourcing the identification of people who are involved in riots such as the recent riot after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup Finals. They’re using all the photos they can find from blogs, newspapers, from Flickr, from Facebook, from phones and the television news. And they’re using social networking to ID each rioter and “summarily executed,” reputation-wise. According to Poynter:

The Guardian reports that people identified in photos and videos have been “deluged by hate calls and threats” and fired from their jobs.

Apparently, there are “several websites and Facebook groups aimed at identifying and punishing people who rioted in Vancouver,” and this is only the beginning.

What do you think about such things? Are we helping over-burdened coppers bring anti-social hooligans to justice, is this social media vigilantism, or is this something a little more nefarious and insidious?  Does the panopticon live? Is this Great Britain’s CCTV taken to the streets?

None of these questions are rhetorical.

On one hand, I think this is so cool but on the other hand, what of due-process, what of rule of law?

Witch hunts never really turn out the way you’d expect.

Image via CrunchBase

Well, the reason why Robert Scoble loves Google+ so much is because neither your mum or Joe Sixpack will be able to sort it out at all.

So, what is Google+ for then?

It’s for us!

Come on now, we geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ. That’s what we have in Google+ right now. Do we really want to mess that up?

Plus, let’s just be honest here. There are pieces of Google+ that are mighty geeky.

Let’s start with how to bold and italicize text. Do you have a pretty editing window like, say, exists on Quora? No way.

To bold text you surround that text with asterisks. *Like this* GEEKY ALERT! Italicize? Put underscores around the text. Strikeout? Put hyphens around it.

And that’s just the little thing. Let’s talk about the big thing. Circles. Now, heavy and passionate users of social media, like myself, really love things like lists and groups. Why? Because we want to spend hundreds of hours making sure our social graphs are really organized.

Normal people do NOT do this. They just want to friend their 20 real-life friends and 30 family folks and be done with it. Average/normal users want the system just to bring them fun stuff without doing any work.

See, if you put the average Silicon Valley geek in front of a TV and tell him to sit on the couch and watch TV for four hours they won’t know what to do. They will start building databases of their favorite shows, start figuring out how to optimize their DVRs so they can fast-forward through commercials faster, and stuff like that.

Normal/average users? They just want to watch TV and drink beer.

So, what does that mean for it’s success?  Google Wave was plenty geeky and plenty arcane and that failed.  Why?  Well, maybe because most of us who are already geeky already have IRC and chat and so forth and we’re excited to be using Facebook to share our geek and our cool with the our mums.

Well, anyway, I guess I didn’t make the cut because the first round of Google Plus invites only went to people with strong social graphs:

Google admitted tonight they are only accepting people who have strong social graphs so that they can both make sure everyone has a good first experience as well as test out some of the technology before opening it up to a wider audience

Doesn’t bother me at all, really, since I barely have enough time to keep up poorly with Facebook and Twitter, but I really wonder if geeks need any more isolation or if geeks really need to spend any more time having little pow-wows amongst themselves. Amongst ourselves, actually, because I was indeed a technologist from 1993-2003: Linus SA, etc…

I primarily feel this way because the reason why Google has failed so far with regards to Buzz and Wave is not because they didn’t appeal to geeks and techies, it’s because they only appealed to them.

We’re a country of mums and beer-drinkers and the only real value of being so fricking smart, so fricking successful, and so fricking connected is in order to be able to say, to the rest of the world we might just want to say:

Look mom, no hands!

via Why yo momma won’t use Google+ (and why that thrills me to no end)