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, @abrahamharrison.

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)

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 am very grateful to Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz for doing the work that explains a little better how social media, online social networks, and the real-time Web heavily influence the results that Google proffers when we search in the form of Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings–a lot more clearly than my recent Search is three-dimensional chess rant.

Abraham Harrison has this synergy in its DNA but I have been doing this since 2003 for various agencies sort of by feel. But here’s a compilation of the results of Mr. Shepard’s experiments: Firstly, the real-time search you had been seeing from Google was highly-reliant on a direct firehose from Twitter, which has been mysteriously cut:

The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed. The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared–all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.

The direct result is that launching Google+, whether it was ready or not, was mandatory. Real time search of the real time Web is essential in order to be competitive with Facebook and especially Twitter–the epitome of the real-time Web–and so Google Plus is not an option, it is a requirement:

For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.

With real-time results, a highly-influential tweet, widely retweeted, could end up as the #2 result on Google within a couple hours. For reals. Not the old answer of, “I think we can get you onto the front page of Google within six months, no guarantee,” the natural SEO shop response of the past.

My analysis is that “Google Abhors a Vacuum” and so in the absence of a reliable real-time feed, Google will turn its algorithmic knobs and change the weighting to prioritize other sources such as the humble blog and other sources, such as possibly Tumblr and Posterous–the closest thing to Twitter without being too bloggy, as well as location-based services that could possibly prioritize swarming behavior, location-aware live video, live photography, and lifestreaming.

Anyway, back to the facts from Mr. Shepard, who has made a point of answering a lot of the questions I posited above with the following evidence:

After Google announced that they no longer used direct Twitter data, Rand created a previously unindexed webpage and tweeted it to his followers. Within 10 minutes, Google picked up a tweet scraper, but not the original post. After an hour we realized a mistake. We had inadvertently included a meta NOINDEX tag in the head of the webpage. Doh! After quick removal of the tag, it took Bing a full 6 hours to index the original URL, but still no Google. Not until 8 hours after the original tweet did Google index our URL. Eventually it ranked #1 for its targeted keyword phrase.

Google is indexing for effect, it seems, requiring triangulation from secondary references and auto-cross-posts from Twitter to sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo–even Topsy–and the other secondary outlets, which can make a real mess of permalinks, an especially maddening thing when you’re developing a social media strategy that must result in a directly-traceable set of metrics.

The SEO traceroute needs always be as direct and and quick as possible and cannot and should not be bounced all over the bloody earth. The good news, according to Shepard is:

Even without the Twitter firehose, it seems the Twitter effect still finds ways of maneuvering into Google’s search results.

But, much less directly but only because Twitter is the source, it is the spring, the font, from which many other indexing platforms, such as Topsy and Tweetmeme, get the grist for their mills–in other words, Google is working ever harder to pan as close to the gold vein as possible but really cannot get there any more but pans just downstream.

The secret here is now each and every tweet needs to break through a barrier into the “recommended tweets” and “top tweets”–effectively needing to make it as close to being a trending topic as possible, so that the secondary consumers (the Topsies of the world) take notice of your work. In other words, we’ll need retweets now more than ever before:

The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above. With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.

A caveat, however, is that all of this is some more 3D chess: even if you start getting loads of retweets–for example, setting it up so that everyone in your multinational, global, company retweets everything you post to Twitter–that’s only the first part.

The next, more important, part is that you’ll also need to add Klout, Twitter Ranking, Social Mention, Twitter Counter, TweetStats, etc. In other words, you need to be both popular and important.

Popularity without importance suggests fraud and gaming unless there is a secondary and tertiary rash of retweets, suggesting that maybe this low-caste, low-importance tweet contains news that is highly important, timely, rare, and powerful in much the same way that the influence and importance–where in the A-list you are listed–is conferred to you.

Well, search is a continuity of tactics and strategies. All of the tools that worked a decade ago are still being considered as part of the algorithm. Information architecture and proper SEO strategy is essential still, no matter how influential social media, online social networks, and personal and brand prestige have become, it is still only a portion of what really put you, solidly, reliably, on page one of Google.

While social can get you there for a couple hours, a proper organic search engine optimization strategy will help nail you to the first page. Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz says it best in his last line of his article:

Tweets or Google shares alone don’t yet equate to long term ranking nirvana. Employing a synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO savvy provides the best recipe for success.

Via Marketing Conversation via SocialMedia.biz via theBiznology blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glen Gow wrote an important article over at Achieve Marketing Leadership titled Why waste your money on B2B Social Media? that I am going to excerpt and share here.

Like Glen, we at Abraham Harrison get some pushback when we pitch B2B PR agencies as well as corporations that do mostly B2B and channel sales. When I talk to them, I get the same kind of response I got when I was pitching them Content Management Systems and eCommerce solutions, “we’re not Amazon, we don’t need anything more than just brochure-ware — why would we need eCommerce.” Well, now CMS and Ecommerce sites are the backbone of the supply chains. And, lo, the same is happening with social media. Glen Gow writes:

Businesses of all sizes are executing Twitter campaigns, creating business Facebook pages, producing corporate blogs and YouTube videos in the hopes of going viral. Those things can work when targeting consumers, but do they work when targeting other businesses? The jury’s still out, but B2B companies are nonetheless rushing to jump on the social media bandwagon for fear of being left in the dust in an environment full of constant paradigm shifts that move at lightning speed.

Well said. And their response is, “are we jumping on the bandwagon ‘just because’ or does a social media, blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking strategy pay dividends? Well, yes they do, primarily for the reason why some of the smartest B2B businesses have been blogging forever:

• becoming industry experts
• sharing what they do in much longer-form
• becoming a more important part of organic search
• offering a sense of selfless and personal generosity
• building a cult of employee and brand personality
• offering an opportunity to expose process and quality
• “getting to know you, getting to know all about you”
• making a sale, any sale, requires seven-ten “touches”
• in 2011, companies do their due-diligence via Google

And, of course, the same thing can be said about Facebook Pages, Twitter (and other real time web platforms), LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social media solutions, including customer service forums and message boards, real-time chats, and trouble-ticket support. And, if the Cluetrain Manifesto can chime in, people are already talking about your brand. More from Glen Gow:

Janet’s company may already have a social presence, whether she knows (or likes) it or not. Many employees regularly create haphazard and ad hoc postings about their company…not only LinkedIn, but also Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, and YouTube. Such uncontrolled, disparate postings can be a disadvantage and work at cross purposes to an integrated marketing plan. Far better to own your social media presence so it portrays a cohesive presence.

So, getting control of your search results, your Google results, your Twitter searches, and the like back — the first page of Google, Bing, and Yahoo! — is essential. But so is your audience — the B2B people — the procurement team, the intern that does the bidding of the C-Suite to put together a report as to who to use is for sure influenced by what folks find online — and generally on the first page of Google or posted recently on Facebook or Twitter (Google, Twitter, and Facebook only care about the last 30 seconds on the short end through the last 72 hours at the max).

How does this effect you? Well, let’s say your charcoal-suit-wearing sales monkey makes the sale by making calls on land lines, sends 4-color promotional materials via post, and then takes it to the final yard! Bravo! Almost there, soldier. However, what happens when the procurement accountant does a final check? Will the Internet do well by you? Will that cursory search win or lose you the $20,000-$200,000-$20,000,000 contract?

Will a search on Facebook, Twitter, and Google come up with nothing? Or, even worse than nothing: only self-promotional contextual Google Ads? What are you hiding when you spend big bucks on AdWords ads but have nothing really coming up well on search?

Engaging broadly in Social Media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and corporate blogs is like catnip to search — especially in Google 2.0 which shamelessly prioritizes real time content (thanks to Twitter), videos (thanks to YouTube), and highly-textual content (thanks to Google’s blog-love).

That said, none of this can be done in a vacuum. For a long time there, the corporate web site and eCommerce site were the red-headed step-children of a company’s brand. It is essential for whatever social media solutions you choose are completely integrated into your brand management strategy. More from Glen Gow:

Best practices already exist for leveraging social media as part of an integrated marketing plan. No marketing element should be done in a vacuum, and from tradeshows to ad campaigns to thought leadership webinars, integration and expansion are the keys for a successful marketing impact. When used as a follow-on tool for another campaign, social media channels provide an excellent venue for broadening the impact of other marketing strategies and investments. And while not everything goes viral the way we might like, with a Tweet here, a Facebook posting there, you can dramatically increase your reach.

One thing Glen doesn’t get into is reputation management. Pouring your experience, talent, successes, promotions, products, services, processes, quality, client lists, testimonials, corporate history, and executives’ experience and bios in text on blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and on Twitter is an amazing inoculation in the off chance that something does go wrong, someone does make an attack at your good name — and it all goes sideways. In terms of reputation management, it is much easier to both actively engage naysayers when in a crisis and need some online crisis management. And, even if you choose to not engage, you will have already “owned” the top three pages of Google so can better weather a news item, a personal vendetta, etc. Seriously, we at Abraham Harrison do that every day and it works!

Of course, if you’re not willing to procure good people — community managers, professional-quality tweeters, online analysts, and some time very day, across all of the time zones, you’re not going to get the full impact; however, don’t worry, any little bit of committed work towards 24/7 support, blogging, and hourly tweets is a step in the right direction. The biggest shortcoming that I always see is starting all hot and heavy and then, within 6 months, losing steam and leaving behind a social media corporate ghost town. That’s the worst. If you’re going to do that, don’t even bother — just squat all the brand-specific social media logins you can and sit on them — don’t embarrass yourself.

(Via Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation)

Related articles

• B2B social media marketing is essential (socialmedia.biz)
• 13 Reasons Your NOT a Social Media Expert (thesocialtrex.com)
• The 100 Things You Need To Know About Social Media (simplyzesty.com)
• 15 essential social media facts and figures for B2B marketing [del.icio.us] (jeffbullas.com)
• Breaking Down The Complexity of Social Media: A to Z Series (socialmediapearls.wordpress.com)

(Guest post by Stacey Acevero, social media community manager at Vocus and PRWeb)

Do you like one-sided conversations?  That is, do you like trying to converse with someone who a) doesn’t listen to you and/or b) clearly has an agenda?

If you’re like most, the answer is no.

It can be pretty easy to create messages on the web — but to create messages that attract and engage takes a brand that is dedicated to developing something other than another outpost for corporate messages.

There’s likely no shortage of people looking for your products/services; the question is – do they want to do business with YOU?

The quantity of brands gives searchers a plethora of options to choose from and more often than not, brand personality plays a role in the purchase decision.

To help create a brand that consumers want to engage with, follow these 4 simple rules:

1) Understand your audience
You wouldn’t dare invest the time to teach algebra to a 3 year old, so be sure that your messages are targeted toward the right people in the right places to best invest marketing time and resources.

When developing a target market profile, answer these questions:

• What does my ideal customer look like?
  Take into consideration demographics, shopping habits, online savvy
• Where does my company fit into the marketplace?

Are you an established thought leader, new to the market, less expensive, more expensive?

• Where does my target audience spend time online

Social Networks, Forums, Email

• Where do they go for information?
  Search engines, Company websites, News sources, Press releases

Keeping your prospect in mind when you create content will help your message stay editorially valuable and consistent across channels.

2) Give, Give, Give
On the path to engagement, is a sometimes long line of giving. Companies must learn to part with information, resources and time if they want to be considered an approachable and involved brand.

Prospects don’t have the time or patience to wallow through corporate grandstanding.  A big opportunity for most brands is to flip their messaging.

Too many companies’ content still leads with a barrage of here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s the other things we do, we were founded in.. and oh by the way, here’s how we help you.

Imagine meeting someone for the first time and telling them your entire life history without ever asking a question about them. Our guess, you aren’t setting yourself up for a new lifelong friend.

The same applies to engaging with people online. The messages brands should create start by asking these questions:

• Is the content relevant – what can you share that will help improve your reader’s life or job?
• Is it newsworthy – How do you incorporate industry trends and thought leaders’ insight to help support your messages?
• Does it entertain – Don’t forget to flex your creative muscle.  Find ways to make your topic interesting and compelling.

3) Keep content community minded
Incorporate elements into your content that appeal to readers’ sense of community.

People love to share good content with their networks and love the brands that help them do so. Help create community by:

• Featuring share buttons within content
• Asking questions (be sure to allocate time to responding)
• Hosting Twitter chats

4) Tie into causes people care about
People want to do business with brands they believe in and recognize there’s more to the business world than selling.

Yes, our day job may be to acquire and retain customers but what else are we doing with the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the process of doing business?

Choose causes that reflect your brand’s connection to the world and promote your involvement.  If you sell green products, for example, create content that helps people make green-friendly lifestyle changes.

When you consider yourself a member of a global community you’ll be able to craft messages that draw people to your brand that aren’t product/service-centric. Just because your end goal is sales, doesn’t mean talking about it is the only way to make connections.

Transitioning a brand from a blank face to a personable, engaged company powered by humans is no easy feat. And it certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

Start by knowing your audience, listening to them, helping solve problems and showing your place in the world and you will be on your way to having a brand with which people can’t wait to engage.

Author: Stacey Acevero is the social media community manager at Vocus and PRWeb.

After doing social media client service work for many clients over the last four years and especially in 2010, we at Abraham Harrison have a lot of tips to give businesses when it comes to leveraging Facebook and Twitter — and social media in general — for business and for our clients and it seems to me that Webbiquity B2B Marketing Blog is in our head!  Here’s there most excellent Seven Ways to Use Social Media for Business:

1. Share content (your own and others’). Producing and sharing content with your market both attracts prospective buyers and educates them, potentially shortening sales cycles. Content marketing doesn’t always produce immediate or direct results, but it does increase brand recognition, credibility, online visibility and yes—sales—over time. In the research cited above, 74% of marketers who have been using social media for at least two years report that it has helped them close new sales. Social media marketing requires a commitment over time; it’s the not an approach where you can dip your toes in the water and expect immediate success. But for those marketers willing to produce and promote their own content (building credibility) and valuable content produced by others (expanding their influence network), social media pays off.

2. Get ideas for product development. Ultimately, no one knows the challenges that your prospects face better than your prospects themselves. And no one knows the benefits and shortcomings of your current products better than your customers. There’s no better source of information than your prospects and existing customers to help generate new product ideas. Marketers no longer have to rely on expensive, contrived focus groups; social media provides a vastly larger, richer, more real-world source of information.

3. Provide customer support. Customers are increasingly seeking support through social media channels, as well as complaining via social media about poor product and service experiences. Smart companies are providing social media support options and actively monitoring social media networks for brand and product name mentions. (For example, DirecTV is good at this; JustHost is not.) Using social media channels for customer support can both improve a company’s image—by demonstrating, publicly, responsiveness to customer issues—and reduce customer support costs.

4. Perform competitive and market research. The prospective buyers in your market have been talking about their challenges, and the relative merits and shortcomings of alternative solutions and vendors, for as long as your market has existed. Social media brings these discussions into the open. Marketers no longer have to rely on expensive research methods or proprietary data sources to get this information. Tracking mentions of competitors and industry terms using social media monitoring software provides a vast trove of inexpensive, real-time competitive and market intelligence.

5. Answer prospect questions. It’s no longer the biggest ad budget that wins. People want to buy from companies that are smart, helpful and responsive. Social media provides the mechanism to demonstrate those qualities. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, community sites (e.g. Toolbox.com, Focus, Ulitzer) and specialized discussion forums all provide opportunities to respond to questions and demonstrate industry expertise. You probably can’t be everywhere, but again social media monitoring tools can help set priorities and provide notification of situations to address.

6. Develop relationships with influencers. Third-party validation has always been more valuable than advertising or other types of self-promotion. Traditionally, customer case studies, PR and analyst relations have filled this role. Social media provides a more direct path to identifying and building relationships with a variety of voices in your market: analysts, journalists, customers, bloggers and other key influencers. If you build and nurture this network, these people will help amplify and validate your message.

7. Facilitate offline connections (e.g., promote events, meet up at trade shows). As valuable as social media is for building and engaging online networks, there is still tremendous benefit to meeting with people IRL and deepening relationships through offline conversations. The social media “big four”–Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs–as well as specialized social event tools like Lanyrd, Meetup.com, Eventbrite and Amiando can all help with arranging and promoting offline opportunities to meet in-person with your online social acquaintances.

The cool kids at Rosetta Stone thought my Rosetta Stone Blog bio first draft was very funny but a little bizarre and they asked for something else — not stiff but also not zany.  I asked my lovely Intern, Ellie Brown, to give it a go and she did not just smashing but swimmingly!

Thousands of people around the world know exactly what Chris Abraham had for lunch yesterday.  With 13,000 followers on Twitter, two popular blogs of his own, and posts on Digital Next blog and SocialMedia.biz, Chris is widely followed and generally considered an interesting guy.  So on the contrary, his content is far from the despised “what I had for lunch” post, as Chris frequently imparts his knowledge of social media, salivates over expensive cars, and documents his adventures as an American living in Berlin, Germany.

In between his trips across the Atlantic to and from his homes in Washington, D.C. and Berlin, Chris runs a social media marketing agency called Abraham Harrison LLC with his business partner, Mark Harrison.  AHLLC has 35 employees from 12 countries around the world and the diversity of culture and language makes staff meetings less like, well staff meetings, and more like a UN summit.  Many employees could conduct the meeting in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, German or a combination of all 5 languages at once.  The diversity of staff has allowed AHLLC to retain clients like Brazil-based OLX, (insert other international clients) as well as Team USA in the winter Olympics, the Fresh Air Fund and Habitat for Humanity.

Not wanted to be one-upped by his staff (again), Chris is trying to remedy his lingual shortcomings by learning German with Rosetta Stone.  He also would like to impress his friends in Berlin with his fluent, witty, dinner party conversation in German.

Chris resides in both Washington, D.C. and Berlin.  He can be found most places on the Internet, including on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/chrisabraham), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/chrisabraham), and LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisabraham).  His insights on social media marketing, the BMW, and Berlin dinner parties can be found at http://www.marketingconversation.com and http://chrisabraham.com.

What do you think?  Is this a second draft or a final draft?

Kudos to the women who are driving social media forward through their creativity, passion, innovation, education, salesmanship and business acumen.  And thank you to Ellie Brown, a star of social media in training, for writing the below up:

Women have been dominating the conversation since the beginning of time.  Even back in our caveperson days women were chatting away while gathering food and firewood while the men were stuck silently hunting woolly mammoth.

So of course, women would naturally take to social media’s conversational style; couple that with some stellar business backgrounds and you’ve got the makings of some pretty influential ladies.  Lee Odden took it upon himself to recognize the 25 best and brightest women in social media today in his post “The 25 Women That Rock Social Media”.  It is wonderful to see that in this emerging business industry – we are holding our own against the boys’ club.

Without further ado, here is the list you’ve all been waiting for:

Katie Paine @kdpaine – Katie is a world traveler, author, consultant and PR measurement guru that has been publishing, presenting and educating us about PR and social metrics long before social media, social web, social this and social that became fashionable amongst communicators, marketers and certainly, mainstream media.

A. Jo. Martin @digitalRoyalty – Amy Martin’s Twitter bio (and follower count of 1 million plus) is one hell of a resume: “Work w/ Shaquille O’Neal, UFC, White Sox and other sports, athletes, entertainment and corporate brands to develop measurable digital & social media strategies”. That’s not all: There’s YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, UStream and others. Walk the talk.

Charlene Li @charleneli – A true pioneer in the field of social computing, Charlene’s accomplishments with Forrester and as co-author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” propelled her into starting Altimeter Group providing thought leadership, research and consulting on new technologies. She shares insights on her blog.

Tamar Weinberg @tamar – A techie at heart, Tamar has been an active power user and social media marketing practitioner for several years. She’s also an author of an excellent book on Social Media Marketing called, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web.

Valeria Maltoni @ConversationAge – I like to think of Valeria as an Italian secret social media agent that helps others learn the value of conversations and connecting people on the social web. Among her many other accomplishments, she’s authored an eBook, “Marketing in 2010 – Social Media Becomes Operational” (pdf).

Jessica Smith @JessicaKnows – Once a Wal-Mart mommy blogger and now VP & digital integrator at Fleishman-Hillard, Jessica and I met on a panel (Looking Ahead: The Nexus of Social Media & Public Relations) at PRSA International in San Diego. Her practical insight made a big impression. So very smart.

Shonali Burke @shonali – A true social butterly, Shonali can be found speaking at conferences or Waxing Unlyrical on media & communications topics. More likely, you’ll find her working with clients on strategic communications, PR and social media as an independent consultant – a career she moved into after working with the ASPCA.

Beth Kanter @Kanter – Beth Kanter is a social media force of nature in the non profit space. She has the longest running blog for non profits, is the CEO of Zoetica and co-author of the upcoming book, “The Networked Nonprofit”.  In 2009 Beth was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media. Be social, do good. Walk the talk.

Maggie Fox @maggiefox – Maggie is CEO of Social Media Group, which is a very large social media consulting agency that has worked with the likes of Ford Motor Company, SAP Global Marketing, Yamaha Motor, Corbis and Harlequin Publishing. She’s also a frequent conference speaker and contributes to the SMG blog.

Mari Smith @MariSmith – With enthusiastic Mari, 8,688 Facebook fans and nearly 60,000 followers on Twitter, there’s no question she a power social media practitioner. That “walk the talk” perspective helps her provide social media training and share her insights as a speaker and consultant.

Jennifer Cisney @kodakCB – I think Jennifer is the first blogger with a “Chief” designation, given for her role as Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager at Eastman Kodak. She’s active both in her professional role and personally on sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogging. More walk the talk.

Kami Huyse @kamichat – Not content with simply running her own PR and social media consulting practice, running workshops and publishing her insights on effective social communications, Kami decided to co-found another agency, Zoetica, serving the non-profit sector.

Deirdre Breakenridge @dbreakenridge – Author and c0-author of several important books on PR and social media including, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations“, Deirdre runs a successful agency, PFS Marketwyse, and is an adjunct professor teaching courses on Public Relations and Interactive Marketing.

Beth Harte @BethHarte – Community Manager for MarketingProfs is a position Beth takes to heart (ba dum bump). It’s a great intersection of social media and marketing plus PR position that allows this long time marketing professional to show her stuff, besides blogging, teaching and speaking at conferences.

Shannon Paul @ShannonPaul – The “very official” Shannon Paul was helping the Detroit Red Wings with their social media before she landed a spot at PEAK6 where she excels even more as a social media manager.

Amber Naslund @AmberCadabra – In my opinion, Amber as Director of Community is exactly what Radian6 needed. Her mix of marketing and social media expertise is shared on Altitude Branding as well as through several eBooks and speaking at conferences.

Liz Strauss @lizstrauss – Don’t be alarmed if Liz calls you a SOB. That’s a good thing. Her SOBCon event is a think tank for social media and attracts the brightest and the curious-est. Liz is another “walk the talk” and highly networked social web enthusiast that blogs, consults and speaks at industry conferences.

Debbie Weil @debbieweil – Debbie “wrote the book” on corporate blogging (The Corporate Blogging Book) when most online marketing and communications professionals were still trying to figure out what a blog was. She runs a successful corporate blogging and social media consulting practice, works as a strategic advisor for Compendium software and continues to share her insights via blog and public speaking.

Laura Fitton @Pistachio – Laura was an early star on Twitter and with a mutual embrace, she’s turned that knowledge and network into a new business, oneforty along with consulting, speaking and co-authoring a book, “Twitter for Dummies”.

Sarah Evans @PRsarahevans – Sarah Evans showed up on Twitter like a firecracker (on my radar at least) and hasn’t looked back since with #journchat, blogging, Facebook, Twitter and plenty of real-world social networking at conferences. She’s also launched sevans Strategy and works as a Community Manager at PitchEngine.

Toby Bloomberg @TobyDiva – Toby is the original social media diva in my book and a long time business blogging evangelist for companies since 2004. She consults with companies on strategic marketing plans that incorporate social and traditional media.

Li Evans @storyspinner – As Director of Social Media for Serengeti Communications, Li is one of the few SEO savvy social media people I know that also has a public relations background. She’s a very active conference speaker, blogger, social network participant and publishes “how to” videos on internet marketing and social media.

Julia Roy @juliaroy – Julia is a Senior Manager of New Media at Coach and is yet another “walk the talk” social media participant with an active blog and participation on social sites ranging from Facebook to Vimeo.

Sally Falkow @sallyfalkow – Sally and I have been on many panels together at Search and Public Relations conferences talking about blogging, SEO and social media. She’s an active social media marketing and PR practitioner that blogs and runs an agency as well as a software services company called Press feed.

B.L. Ochman @whatsnext – B.L. “tells it like it is” as you would expect from one of the few people actually born in NYC, which makes her blog, AdAge DigitalNext articles and tweets both snarky and interesting. B.L. works with Proof Digital Media (part of Burson-Marsteller) as Managing Director of Emerging Media. She’s led some of the earliest social media consulting projects and has been blogging since 2004 (at least).

I heart Facebook. This morning I awoke to Yet Another Facebook Innovation (YAFI). Facebook amazes me because they are driven to make things easier for me — or at least give it a go. Facebook is willing to suffer constant backlash in order to improve usability and efficiency. Case-in-point below:

New Friends Facebook Check Boxes

In this particular case, the innovation is what I call a “Twitterish” innovation — stealing something directly from Twitter. A couple weeks ago, I stayed up until 12:01AM to secure another hype-drenched Twitterish innovation: vanity URLS: facebook.com/chrisabraham — I am such a sucker!

However, Facebook is an equal-opportunity thief and also quite creative as well. Next innovation inspired by Utterli, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn?  Who knows!

I hate to admit it but I am used to lazy web applications.  I am used to apps like Flickr, Delicious, Craigslist, Ebay, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube — sites that are pretty much the same as they were when they were born. Facebook, on the other hand, innovates almost constantly. In fact, Facebook tends to innovate so aggressively that there are millions of members who constantly picket Facebook to revert itself to the way it was when it was a college-only service. The reason why most apps don’t innovate is because of this vocal minority — the change-averse.

Another thing I love about Facebook is that they’re not wed to their innovations.  When Facebook Beacon pissed off the world, they scaled it back. The developers at Facebook are smart — land grab with ten new innovations, throw them agains the Wall, and then see what people adopt and then, over time, remove the fails.

Facebook is willing to spitball, Facebook is willing to steal ideas shamelessly from other platforms, and Facebook is willing to fail fast and move on.  That’s what you’re supposed to do!  That’s why I love Facebook.