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 have done everything to do with podcasting except for having a podcast.  I would say I am as close to an expert in podcasting as anyone can be without a stitch of practical experience.  I have been listening to podcasts for well over five years and know all the major podcasters.  I attend as many podcamps as I can.  I have even been blogging for 12 years and yet I have never started a podcast.  “Why,” you ask?  Well, because podcasting is really really hard.

It has been such a challenge to be persistent enough to maintain both Because the Medium is the Message and Marketing Conversation.  To keep up-to-date with what’s going on, being au courant, relevant, and interesting.  That’s hard enough. Recording audio or video, synchronizing with a co-host, making technology work, making sound work, learning the recording, editing and compression strategies necessary to compete with more professional podcasts, and then being persistent, consistent, amusing, reliable, and worthy of a Very Large Download approaching 50-100 megabytes.

I listen to No Agenda religiously as well as Adam Curry‘s Daily Source Code when I can.  I also listen to Shel Holtz‘s FIR as much as I can and used to listen to many more — but it is also hard to spend and dedicate the time listening.

I believe that podcasts are going the way of the blog.  As I wrote in The Blog is Dead — Now’s the Best Time to Start Blogging!, most of the fair weather bloggers have given up because even blogging is hard. Especially when you do it alone. Now, Marketing Conversation is becoming much more effective and popular these days, but that’s because we’re blogging as a team — we’re collaborating.

Podcasting is sort of a little like radio — people listen to their favorite personalities.  I guess you could have different hosts and run Coast to Coast AM post Art Bell and have a stable of hosts, but then there is the challenge of organizing more than just yourself, wooking multiple people to commit what can be a grueling schedule of keeping, maintaining, editing, uploading, and marketing a podcast.

What’s more, podcasts are a little dangerous.  The more successful a podcast becomes, the more people download and the chance that you will incur lots and lots of bandwidth overage charge.

What’s more, casually monetizing podcasts is impossible. With this blog, I can post annoying Google AdSense / AdWord ads all over the place and make a couple cups of coffee back and help underwrite the hosting.  For Podcasts, however, the only advertising that you can do is either reading ads into your podcast that one or more sponsors have given you — thus, you have to spend lots of time finding sponsors and advertisers — or you can ask for pledges the way Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak — and NPR — does, sending people to a pledge or donations page.

That said, God bless everyone who goes through that ringer.  I guess I would surely participate in a podcast as long as someone else did all the editing, all the pre- and post-production, all the uploading, all the hosting, all the fees, and took care of all of the advertising stock.  Then, I would be more than happy to saunter in and be the face, be the voice.

So, until someone offers me that, I will just listen.  I listen via my iPad, via my iPhone, via my Blackberry using an awesome app called Podcasts — and it is surely worth the $3.99 fee as you can download password-protected podcasts like Streamlink offers — and also I love using the built in Nokia podcast software on my aging-but-still-awesome Nokia N95.

Anyway, happy new years and I don’t know really why I wrote this.  Maybe because I was listening to some podcasts this AM and, for a second, I was contemplating it, especially as I unpacked my trusty ZOOM H2, until I stopped, reconsidered, and said, “no way, man, podcasting is too hard!”

God bless you merry podcasters of the world!

I sit here blogging from my G1 Android phone, allowing me to live blog from my chair. I just finished listening to Shel Holtz and he made a lot of sense here as he spoke to us at Blog Potomac, a yearly unconference, founded by Geoff Livingston, social media rockstar and local boy.

Shel’s talk brought me back to basics: “in PR, we are considered counsellors, not merely strategists: we are responsible for guiding our clients to do not the most comfortable thing nor the safest thing, but the best thing for their brand, their reputation, their message, their communication, and their message.”

OK, that isn’t a real quote but that’s what I heard from Shel at #blogpotomac — and I heard this: don’t follow the shiny tools, follow the conversations; don’t assume that the best place to reach people is online, find out where people are actually having their conversations.

I also heard something so brilliant that I have been saying and I know that Sally Falkow reminds people about this: before tweeting and before blogging and before engaging and before messaging there is planning.

Planning, flow-charting, framing, researching, and testing are very important things to do before even starting a social media — or any PR — campaign.

Shel Holtz said, “beware, you might very well have the most amazing campaign that ran flawlessly and without hitch — going to all the wrong people, all the wrong communities, and be completely misplaced,” also not a real quote but in his spirit.

One other thing thet Shel Holtz said — amen, amen — is that being the most advanced user of social media, social networks, Facebook, Twitter, etc, does not even remotely make you the right person to run a social media campaign.

More life blogging from the Blog Potomac in Falls Church soon! Later.