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!

Related articles

• What the Social Graph Is and Why It Matters to Brands (futurelab.net)
• What the social graph is and why it matters to brands (freshnetworks.com)
• The personalized web is just an interest graph away (jaynewberg.wordpress.com)
• Building The Implicit Social Graph (seomoz.org)
• Tip Sheet: Get a Grip on Conversations: Map a Social Graph (prnewsonline.com)
• Setting Up Google+ For Your Business – Free Upcoming Webinar! (marketingconversation.com)
• Follower. Liker. Blogger. Friend. How Facebook is Trying to Reconcile Your Social with Your Interest Graphs. (socialmediatoday.com)
• ClickZ: 33Across and Tynt Team Up to Extend Social Graph Insights (tynt.com)
• So What The Heck Is The ‘Social Graph’ Facebook Keeps Talking About? (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook Open Graph: Tutto il web in un Grafo! – Daniele Ghidoli – Be-wizard 2012 (slideshare.net)

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.

Related articles

• How To Set Up A Google Plus Page For Your Brand Or Business? [Lucas Wyrsch] (ecademy.com)
• Google+ business pages – what you need to know (simplybusiness.co.uk)
• Google Plus Pages- How to be Make Super Google+ Pages (andrewsegawa.com)
• SEO for Google+ Profiles and Pages (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google Plus Brand Pages in the SERPs (all-about-content.com)
• Google + Now Open for Businesses and Brands (seo-e.com)
• Google+ Mashable, you’re doing it wrong! (charlotteclark.wordpress.com)
• A Newsroom Primer: Starting Fresh With Google+ Brand Pages (pbs.org)
• How to Create a Google+ Business Page in 5 Simple Steps (hubspot.com)
• Should Brands Create Google+ Pages Yet? (viralblog.com)

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)

Thanks to XKCD for getting it right in one — this is surely enough reason to make the switch from Facebook to the new Google+ social network at plus.google.com

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook depression is loosely defined as the feeling of “I’m a loser” failure one feels because everyone else on Facebook is having such a great time, “with in-your-face friends’ tallies, status updates and photos of happy-looking people having great times, Facebook pages can make some kids feel even worse if they think they don’t measure up,” according to MSNBC.

First of all, it is all selective sharing. Like all things. However, I had hit this crossroads in a very real way, and there are only three ways to respond: mount the pity pot for a ride, detach from social media — and the world — completely in a head-in-the-sand sort of way, or get motivated and competitive and work harder at pursuing a more brag-worthy life.

I have been attending a very prestigious conference since 2001. Every other person is a Nobel Laureate, it seems. Supreme Court justices, novelists, business moguls, celebrities, and packs of Young Turks from the best schools, firms, agencies, and banks on the planet.

It could have resulted in a sort of Facebook Depression — and I did feel both proud that I was well-received and popular at the conference from the get-go and amazingly unworthy.  My pedigree sucked, my bank account sucked, my academic career was decidedly second-tier, I had not one professional, graduate, or doctoral degrees, and my MacArthur Fellowship Genius Award was MIA.

That said, instead of mounting my pity pot, I instead looked at the people who were around me and made the powerful assumption that I belonged there and if they were a part of my family, I was a part of their family and if they were changing the world and living their dream then I must also have the capability and the tools to do this as well.

That said, I was watching CBS Sunday Morning and there was a segment about lawns and grass.  Apparently the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and that is simply because when you look over the fence at your neighbor’s lawn, you are looking at such an angle that you only see the lush green leaves of their grass and none of the gaps and dirt that you see when looking directly down.

Also, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.  When I first attended this conference down in Charleston in 2001 I was self-unemployed.  For most of the time I attended, over the years, it was by scrimping, saving, sharing rooms, avoiding expensive dinners, and staying at motor lodges and by couch surfing instead of taking a suite.

Most of the time I needed to beg and borrow and was a salary slave at NMS, Edelman, and then as an impoverished entrepreneur and small business owner.

And every time I attended the conference, be it over New Years or Labor Day weekend, instead of feeling less-then, dejected, pathetic, or unworthy, I focused on building my success, building my own self-made pedigree based on intelligence, creativity, success, creating, building, story, generosity, and love.

And I hate to say it, but a very strong motivator for a lot of us who attend the conference year after year is to build a resume, a CV, and a bio that impresses and sounds amazing coming through the mouths of the event’s two founders when they introduce you to speak.

What that comes down to is that I take a lot of risks and make a lot of decisions — doing cooler, more adventurous things both for myself and also for other people with a little birdy constantly in my ear reminding me that what I do is who I am so it is completely on me to make the choices that result in being able to write cooler wall posts on Facebook or being able to be invited to cooler conferences, panels, discussions, and have access to new opportunities.

All without maxing out your credit cards and ruining your credit and alienating your friends and family, your community and the less fortunate.

Oh, and another tip: if you have a positive attitude and are doing what you love, you can surely make a silly trip out to the Portland Farmer’s Market or on a ride around Willamette River bloody enviable — well, it’s amusing to me, anyway.  Living large doesn’t need to mean spending large. Seriously.

Cover via Amazon

I carry my Amazon Kindle 3G device everywhere.

Currently, I read MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times exclusively via my Kindle, delivered via WhisperNet.

I run through as much content as possible at the gym on the machines or maybe on walks.  Yes, I have books as well.  I can buy them too easily and on the fly.

I found a gorgeous bullet list of reasons I wish I had thought of as to why I love the physical Kindle device, with 3G Whispernet, from Robin Sloan in the form of The Kindle abroad:

• The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
• It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
• It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
• The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
• The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
• Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
• Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

I am going to add a few more of my own:

• The deal for using WhisperNet abroad is a bargian. When you are abroad, in whatever country, you only have to pay, I think, $4.99/week to connect all week, wirelessly, via their local 3G and once you agree to that, it will recur as long as you’re abroad.  Considering how expensive 3G can be abroad for international roaming.
• While you don’t want to do it, losing or breaking your Kindle doesn’t hurt as much as it could. I know you could read your Amazon content at the gym via your iPad or iPhone; however, losing a $114-$189 device is a lot more bearable than losing a $300-$900 device at the gym or in your travel bag or in your backpack or anywhere.  In addition, all of the content is completely replaceable.  If you lose your Kindle, disable it via your online Kindle home, order a replacement, and all your content will be there when you re-connect.  And even if it is not, you can “send” any content you have purchased to your new Kindle.
• You can afford and support more than one Kindle with mirrored content. You can buy one 3G Kindle and then a couple cheaper Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers at just $114 each and then leave them at home, leave one near the sofa, one in the bathroom, and make sure your Kindle 3G is reserved for the road — so just leave it in your “to go” bag like I do.
• The only Kindle that sucks is the Kindle you don’t have. Be sure to either keep your Kindle, habitually, in your day pack, your work briefcase, or your purse, because there’s really no reason to have a WhisperNet-enabled Kindle unless you bring it with you.  It should not be preserved at a precious thing — it is a lot more durable and tough, even without a pretty Kindle Lighted Cover like the one I have, with integrated, Kindle-powered light.
• The official covers are the best covers for the Kindle, especially the one with the reading light. I personally use a black Kindle Lighted Cover which I use to read the Kindle on flights or in bed. Just beware that using the integrated light really sucks the power out of the device, rendering it as power-hungry as its cousins the Android tab, smartphone, the iPad, and the iPhone.  Otherwise, Robin is right, the batteries last forever!
• While it isn’t perfect, Kindle does have a sort of Social Network and Social savvy.So, this should be my official Chris Abraham Amazon Kindle Profile that you can look at and, I guess, connect to.   Also, if you have a Kindle be sure to sign up in order to be able to share what you’re reading and selected excerpts to Twitter and/or Facebook, which I do; caveat, the links aren’t friendly and only go to a promotional page and not to the free, web-accessible, page, which is pissing my friends off, even though they all probably know how to use Google to find the content if they need to and are just being lazy bastards.
• Finally, you don’t have to buy every single book you want to remember to read when you own a Kindle.Thanks you to the doctor who told me that I can add any title I think of without paying if I want to remember the books by adding them as “Try a Sample” instead of buying the whole book. Who knows if I will actually like A Game of Thrones; however, I can download a sample, which acts as a reminder, costs nothing, and also allows one to see if you like it by reading a bit, like you might do, at your leisure, while spending a lazy afternoon at Powell’s City of Books.
• I have replaced a lot of paper media with ones and zeros towards saving the earth. I can gloat here in Portland because I have replaced a lot of paper-based monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers with digital content, saving the forest and oil and the gas-emission of Mr. Postman.  Aside from the daily Oregonian and New York Times, which I receive at my door every morning, most of my weekly journals and magazines and daily newspapers  are delivered automagically via WhisperNet currently in the form of MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.  That says nothing of the hundred or so books I have downloaded to my ebook reader, both bought or downloaded for free.  And, I am pretty sure that powered by technology developed by E Ink Corp requires a lot less energy for its batteries from the mains and is better for the environment anyway, all on its own, rather than needing to be charged nightly — or several times a day for the power users — like the tablets and smartphones are.  Yes, yes, a well-used book is way more environmentally kind as is library use — unless you consider the overhead of heating, cooling, and lighting a library, that is.

Again, thank you so much to Robin Sloan of Snarkmarket in the form of The Kindle abroad for inspiring this post.

Is the car the ultimate mobile device? Toyota thinks so.

With Salesforce.com, they’ve launched a social network for Toyota owners and drivers that keeps them connected to Toyota, to its dealers, and to other drivers.

Time will tell if this takes hold, but you have to admit that the Internet-connected car is closer to reality than ever before, and even before we reach that state, we all have network-connected phones with is in the car.

The question is, what do you do with that auto(mobile) computing power?

Vertical online communities, such as Caregiver Village, have always been with us in the form of communities of interest, communities of circumstance, communities of purpose, and communities of action. So, Ujala Sehgal of Fishbowl NY, shares Toyota‘s go at it, Toyota Drivers Get Their Own Social Network

Toyota announced that it plans to develop a private social network for its vehicle owners called Toyota Friend. The network, set to launch in 2012, will be developed with San Francisco cloud-computing company Salesforce.com, and will enable drivers to stay connected with their cars, their local dealers, and each other–using their car. “The car is the true mobile device,” Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, said recently, according to The Atlantic Wire.

Also check out Engadget‘s reporting, Toyota to launch social network for people who like to befriend car dealerships.

My advice to Toyota is to hire as many passionate community managers as you can. Who love cars, yes, but more so, are passionate about catalyzing conversation, keeping the momentum after pouring in the energy to not only moderate but to be encouraging and empowering–essentially, someone who is trained in organizational development or hosting amazing dinner parties.

For the first six months, it will be (or feel like) 100% Toyota staff or outsourced Toyota staffers (like the team at Abraham Harrison).

The community will never be 100% self-perpetuating. The community will always need shepherds to keep the flock together.

Though it will surely help, the passion of people about their Toyota will never be quite good enough, though I would recommend keeping the Tundra and Prius crowd sufficiently separated.

What do you think about the power of the private social network?

(Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology)

If you’re an artist, graphic designer, graphic artist, or closet drawer, please enter the Flink12 art competition.

When I started in social media, it was safely ensconced behind the authentication walls of ArtsWire, The Meta Network (TMN.com), The Well, and Howard Rheingold‘s Branstorms.  Even within the relative safety of these “use your own name” walled gardens, there were even places more private.  For example, I worked through all of my feelings about my father’s passing on the men-only, by-invitation, conference on TMN called Fire.  I also talked about dating, love, love lost, pain, and all of that other good stuff.  As I have been learning from CiviliNation, cyber-bullying and online abuse and attacks are too prevalent — even on Facebook.

Flink12 is handling the situation by crating “a fun, easy to use social network that would allow for real sharing of personal information with the people you actually care about” and “provide, without a doubt, the most secure way of sharing your private life on a much more meaningful level.” A little more like my experiences with the Fire conference all those years ago.

Here’s a post from over on my corporate blog by Phillip Rhoades about our client Flink12, Staying Social In Social Media While Keeping Your Privacy With Flink12:

Abraham Harrison’s client, Flink12, is the way to stay social but still keep your privacy. There are many social networking platforms available today to share your public self. But where do you go to privately and safely share your personal, day-to-day thoughts and experiences? Flink12 was created as a safe and secure way to share your private life. It is playful, safe, extremely private and easy to use. A unique way of sharing and communicating, Flink12 allows you to share your life in a meaningful way with the people you know and care about the most.

What is a Flink? A Flink is a group of twelve cows. Flink12 allows you to create individual groups of twelve people or Flinks for your friends, family, or coworkers. These Flinks allow you to communicate in a discreet way, sharing professional information with coworkers and personal information with friends and family. These groups of twelve are ideal for sharing different information for different types of relationships.

“Privacy first” is the highest priority at Flink12. This approach ensures that your personal information will remain completely secure. With no privacy settings to manage, your information is automatically safe. Personal information will not indexed on the web by search engines. You decide when, where and how much of your life you want to share and with whom. As it says on the Flink12 website:

Our “Privacy first” approach ensures that your personal information will remain private. Your information will not be indexed on the web by search engines. We designed Flink12 at its roots to be “udderly” private. Users have complete control.

Flink12 is totally accessible on the go as well:

Head on over to Flink12 and sign up for a free account. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

I was vanity surfing Twitter mentions of “Chris Abraham” and came upon an article over on the What About Paris? blog by blogger cum lawyer cum traveler cum intellectual cum academic cum Renaissance man, Dan Hull, Esq, entitled Chris Abraham: Seer, Force, Renaissance Man, Your Future:

He’s a Force of Nature and there’s nothing anyone can do about it so just follow his career and eventually join him. Berlin and DC-based, on fire, a Renaissance Man and a mainstay Hull McGuire mentor and friend, he’s the human reason–together with Washington, D.C.‘s Mark Del Bianco and Chicago’s Patrick Lamb–What About Clients/Paris? even exists. So we are in his debt.

He moves (i.e., vibrates), he talks, he laughs, he persuades–and he brims with ideas and joy. And, like the undersigned, he is infuriatingly right about too many things. Chris Abraham over at The Marketing Conversation is someone you should get to know. Chris is probably going to find you anyway. I see him in D.C., California, Charleston and–well, I could not avoid him anywhere I go.

Chris found me seven years ago–and explained what a “blog” is. He was just warming up. Since then, he and Abraham Harrison probably have been doing more to change the way people think, live, gesture, market, connect and otherwise collaborate together globally–and, yes, the ways we view ourselves, view each other and talk to one another in the Cosmos–than Buckminster Fuller, Edwards Deming and Marshall McLuhan combined.

You might as well give in to the guy. We did.

Like I said in the comments:

You are entirely too generous my friend. You are an F-22 Raptor and I am merely a Cessna 162 Skycatcher. Thank you!

More about What about Paris?

24/7 News and Ideas for Doing Business Globally aka What About Clients? Business. Law. Politics. Foreign Affairs. Verve.

Here’s a pretty random and pretty useful list I shamelessly re-purposed from Social Media Explorer by Andrew Hanelly:

1. Internet users in the U.S. spend nearly a quarter of their time online using social media (or about 13 and  half minutes per every hour spent online)
2. Nearly 4 out of 5 web users visit a social networking site on a monthly basis
3. 73% of US companies use social media tools for marketing purposes
4. From 2008 to 2012, the percentage of US companies who use social media for marketing purposes is projected to more than double (from 42% to 88%)
5. Internet users worldwide spend more hours per week with social media than any other online activity
6. 46% of Internet users worldwide interact with social media on a daily basis
7. 15% of social media users are more inclined to buy from brands that advertise in social media
8. 25% are more likely to find out more about brands that advertise on social media sites
9. 18% of new content found online is found through social media
10. The average U.S. worker spends 5 hours a month with social media at the office (It’s research, I swear!)
11. 26% trust blog posts written by people they know
12. 23% trust posts by friends on Facebook
13. 12% trust their friends’ Twitter streams
14. 11% trust corporate blogs (We brand marketers have work to do!)
15. 9% trust Facebook updates from brands or companies
16. 8% trust fellow community member comments
17. 8% trust brand representative comments in online communities
18. 6% trust brand-run Twitter streams
19. 6% trust blog posts by independent bloggers
20. 5% trust independent blogger’s Twitter streams
21. 64% trust social media more if the dialogue is open to both positive and negative comments
22. 60% trust social media more if the author or sponsor is responsive
23. 38% trust social media more based on the size of the sponsor or authors followingInternet users (in the US) are 57 times more likely to visit Facebook than Twitter
24. Only 8% of American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users.
25. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of adults who user Twitter is expected to double (from 18 million in 2009, to 36 million in 2012)
26. 7% of male American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users.
27. 10% of female American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users.
28. Young adults (18-29) are more likely to use Twitter than older adults
29. Minority web users (African-Americans and Latinos) are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white Internet users.
30. 36% check for Tweets at least once per day.
31. 33% of active Twitter users share opinions about products or companies
32. The average Facebook user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
33. 20 million Facebook users become fans of Pages per day
34. 60 million Facebook status updates are made per day

Social media platforms, social media tools, and social media teams make rapport building more efficient and more possible. Building rapport should be the goal of corporate and organizational social media engagement and online social networking. (via Marketing Conversation)

Online, most people don’t care about building intimate, persistent, and personal relationship with the brands in their life, they care about connecting, engaging, and getting the support they need in a pleasant, convenient, and timely manner. The denizens of the online world are not from Mars. Worldwide, they’re just people — real people. Brands need to be reminded that they’re real people and not just a disembodied voice.

The other night, I spent some time with some veterans of the war in Iraq and we were discussing what I did. I went through the entire thing, from blogger outreach to Twitter customer support; from engaging in many languages over many countries to online crisis management. All three of my friends responded the same way:

“That’s all rapport building!”

While they did mention that they have all received copies of How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie in their rapport building courses, I don’t believe that report-building is shallow and here’s why.

Remember the old days when you needed a proper dial-up modem to connect to the Internet? Remember the physical fax machine? Well, when two machines connect via a modem, you can actually hear their small talk. For about five seconds, in 1983, my computer and the BBS up the hill were screeching and squawking in order to build rapport. They were negotiating their language, their cadence (throughput speed), their authority, and their credentials. This was called a handshake:

A modem handshake is what occurs when the receiving modem answers the phone call and the two modems begin to communicate. Before anything else happens, the modems must evaluate the quality of the line, negotiate error control protocols and data compression that they can both recognize, and work out what the most suitable connection speed should be, based on the conditions. This process is called the handshake. If the modem’s internal speaker is turned up, you’ll hear the handshake as screeches, bells, and whistles. Once that has happened, the modems send data back and forth between the two computers. The modem that initiates the connection sends data in a lower frequency range and listens for the response in a higher range, corresponding to the recieving modem.

People are like this too. This handshake is called building rapport — or finding common ground. That’s what Dale Carnegie was all about, too.

Being good a building rapport means that you’re working on techniques and strategies to find common ground. The way Mark Harrison, my CEO, does it is by learning lots of languages in order to make certain that there will always be one shared language. I build rapport by keeping up with the news and by maintaining a broad number of interests — I can always find a shared experience or a shared topic (except sports — my Achilles heel).

What social media and online social networks allows one to do online is to burrow and connect directly to many, many, more people who are current, former, or future customers — brand curious or just bored. The next step is finding ways to better connect.

I remember that Hayes modems were the best modems because they supported the greatest number of protocols and standards. It had the absolute best rapport with other modem. It also had the best checksum and error-correction. There was nothing that those Hayes modems couldn’t negotiate: line noise, call waiting clicks — the works! Hayes modems were the Dale Carnegies of the modem world.

Too many people consider Dale’s rapport-building strategies to be inauthentic and shallow; however, the social handshake of building rapport is only the first step required towards either something deeper, more intimate, or — in most of the cases — the gateway to something very simple such as a sale, a customer support query, or a query for more information.

No matter if the intent of the conversation is to get to marriage or to get to the end of a tech support call, common ground, a common language, and a common culture before they can move forward. Authentic or not, this sort of “small talk” is essential — and the main reason why this generous, charming, engaging, casual, and often playful and off-topic back and forth banter has been so maligned is because there are lots and lots of douchebags who are, themselves, false and inauthentic, who are doing it painfully badly on a daily basis.

If you learn how better to build rapport and you are, at the end of the day, not just emulating interest and pretending to be curious but actually truly engaged, interested, and curious, then books like How to Win Friends & Influence People can really be very helpful towards helping you understand how best to connect quickly and effectively on a daily basis with a broad variety of people in order to get to the place to take the next step towards a solution.

While I don’t have time to blog about this in-depth, I found it compelling enough to post it just about completely in-tact, as it was sent to my by Ellis Simon via an email pitch to me as a blogger.

Location Determines Social Network Influence, CCNY-Led Team Finds: Number of Connections Less Important Than Proximity to Core

A team of researchers led by Dr. Hernán Makse, professor of physics at The City College of New York (CCNY), has shed new light on the way that information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks.  Writing in “Nature Physics,” they report that, contrary to conventional wisdom, persons with the most connections are not necessarily the best spreaders.

“The important thing is where someone is located in a network,” said Professor Makse in an interview. “If someone is in the core, they can spread information more efficiently.  The challenge is finding the core.”

That kind of information could help marketers and public relations practitioners conduct more effective of social media and social marketing campaigns.  It could also help epidemiologists target resources to reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

To identify the core, Professor Makse and colleagues used a technique call k-shell decomposition.  In this process, network nodes with just one link are removed until no single-link nodes remain.  The remaining nodes are assigned a k-shell value of one.  The process is repeated with higher k-shell values assigned to remaining nodes after each round of cuts.  Those nodes that cannot be reduced to a single link are identified as the core of the network and have the highest k-shell values.

In the study, the researchers examined four networks representing archetypical examples of social structures: members of LiveJournal.com; email contacts in the computer science department at University College London; inpatients of Swedish hospitals, and adult film actors.  The latter group was studied because it is a distinct subgroup of the acting profession whose members rarely appear in other genres, Professor Makse explained.

Each network member’s position in that network was plotted on a graph with the number of connections along one axis and the k-shell value along the other, e.g. (100, 5), (50, 25).  The team found that nodes with many connection hubs located at the periphery of a network, i.e. low k-shell values, were poor spreaders.

However, nodes with fewer connections but locations near the core, i.e. high k-shell values, were just as likely to spread information or infections as similarly situated nodes with more connections.  Hence, they conclude the most efficient spreaders are located in a network’s inner core.

“In the case of LiveJournal, someone with a thousand friends but a low k-shell level will have less impact than someone with a hundred friends but a high k-shell level,” Professor Makse said.  “Small players and big players spread just as well if they are at the core of the network.

For the spread of disease, nodes located in high k-shell layers are more likely to be infected and they will be infected sooner than other nodes, the researchers found.  “The neighborhood of these nodes makes them more efficient in sustaining an infection in early stages, thus enabling the epidemic to reach a critical mass such that it can fully develop.”

This knowledge could greatly help public health officials trying to head off an epidemic in situations where limited quantities of vaccines are available, Professor Makse said.  “You try to identify the most likely spreaders and vaccinate them first.”

The researchers explained the existence of hubs at the periphery of real networks as a consequence of their “rich topological structure.  In a fully random network, all hubs would exist near or at the core and they would contribute equally well to spreading.

While high k-shell value nodes were found to be the best single spreaders, regardless of their connectivity, this did not necessarily hold up for situations involving multiple spreaders.  In those cases, connectivity between hubs did not accelerate the spreading because of the overlap of infected areas created by the different spreaders.

“The better spreading strategy using (multiple) spreaders is to choose either the highest k or k-shell nodes with the requirement that no two spreaders are directly linked to each other,” the researchers wrote.

I have been a professional online community developer since 1993 on Artswire, TMN.com, Howard Rheingold‘s Brainstorms, and on The Well — this paper does a stellar job of explaining social ties in the context of online communities and social networks.

What this says to me is that no matter how well-hewn your social media news release, your email pitch, or your copy is, there are two things that are more important than any of that:  How compelling and interesting is the message? How targeted is the pitch?

For me, as a geek, a nerd, and as a social media marketer and digital PR executive, this is pretty amazing on both counts and directly relates to me and the future of Abraham Harrison — directly influencing the future of our services: what we offer and how we offer them.

What can we do as a social media marketing and PR company to get as close to the core of the social media as possible, which goes back to some OD studies that I did back in the day for my church.

There are apparently concentric rings radiating from a core.  The first ring might be called the “apostolic core.” These are the “apostles” of the church.

Each ring outside of the inner core have less stake in the organizational community.

There are always people leaving and moving on so keeping the organization relevant and vibrant required bring not merely more people but more of the right people with the same vision and passion for the community of faith as possible, so that they become not only stakeholders of the community but also the shareholders — owners, if you will.

This is important because they will become the stewards of the community and keep it healthy, happy, whole, and fed.

Organizational Development is not simply relevant to building a happy healthy Episcopal Church community or a Fortune 500 financial services company, it is essential toward building an effective, healthy, solid, stable, and empowered social networking site as well.

I always say that the most important people you bring into your social network are your first 20, then your next 200, then your next 2,000 — and by that time the DNA of your community has already been defined, especially since word of mouth and “invite your friends” is, by its very nature, very nepotistic and incestuous.

Warning: if you go for quantity and not quality early on — choosing the right fit and the best synergy — then the future of the community will have more to do with a vision not only quite a bit different than yours but sometime in direct conflict with your goals — to the point of being cancerous and harmful to the host: the community.

Sometimes this “corruption” of initial vision and goals can be a beautiful thing — it can signify that the members have taken it as their own and now have an ownership and investment in a future that is shared by owner and member.

However, there are also the tenants that trash the place and are impossible to even evict without razing the place to the foundation and starting again — and that never works because after a full community reinstall, there is always trust issues and a feeling of vulnerability and dread.  The scars can remain forever.

Here’s a little proof that Twitter is now not simply location aware, in terms of latitude and longitude or address, but is now place-aware.  I checked in to both of these places on FourSquare and Twitter recognized these places by name:

Then, I decided to click on the Trader Joe’s, Falls Church link beside the little map marker, and lo! there was the following pop-up window, which is very much aware of not simply location anymore but they’re following the trend of Facebook Places and the other location-aware social networks by starting to connect to businesses:

Via Marketing Conversation

There really are social media gurus and social media experts and my Chief Programmer Phillip Rhoades wrote up the best of their genius on his article The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online — it is both an interesting article for who and what Phillip includes in the list as well as who and what he doesn’t include.  You can read the original article and full list here via Sam Rosen at Copyblogger.

The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online

Sam Rosen and Copyblogger recently hosted a very short conference and had several thought leaders come up with 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online. Quite a few of the methods are sort of stock, cardboard, filler, but there are some gems. Here are a few that I really liked:

#3. Mike Volpe. “We share lots of things that most companies would keep internal. By sharing both the good and the bad, you build digital influence.” -@mvolpe

#11. Hugh MacLeod. “We use other people’s stuff or other people’s content to socialize. And your stuff’s either a social object or it’s not.” -@gapingvoid

#22. Shama Kabani. “Create [video] content around your area of expertise and then distribute, distribute with gusto!” -@shama

#24. Johnny B. Truant. “Defy convention where it’s appropriate. Only a few people dare to step outside. And people take notice of that.” -@johnnybtruant

#46. Brian Clark. “Learn to be a storyteller. Narrative — it’s what makes us human. Big media does it great. You have to as well.” -@copyblogger

#51. Shashi Bellamkonda. “Find out from your customers which social networks they are using, and be there for them at the moment they need you.” -@shashib

#52. Gretchen Rubin. “Self-expression is the new entertainment. Get people talking. I had success just asking, ‘What’s your comfort food?’” -@gretchenrubin

#59. Julien Smith. “Get someone else to take a look at what you have that you maybe take for granted and gives you an advantage over other people.” -@julien

Any that you particularly like? Any that you think they completely missed?

Summer intern, Leslie Quiros, must be a pretty popular young woman — she is appalled by the huge volume of birthday wishes she gets every day-of-her-birth.

OK, I joke, I get quite a few as well, but I roll around in them. However, I am shamelessly hungry for love and approval and the endless birthday wishes makes me titter like a pothead on nitrous!

Anyway, please go take a look at her awesome article:  Alleluya!… Facebook fixes another problem

Alleluya!… Facebook fixes another problem

If you are like me and get annoyed by news feeds from people congratulating a friend who is celebrating his or her big day, you might find this post interesting.

If you are the type of person that checks Facebook every 30 minutes or so—like me— you might have noticed a few changes taking place. As the Facebook creators try to improve the social networking experience, they are now testing a new design that “organizes birthday-related messages in a much cleaner, simpler way that’s consistent with other recent user-interface changes (CNN.com).”

According to this article, you will no longer have to worry about opening your home page and seeing post after post of “happy birthday____, hope you have a good one!” from 50 different people. Instead, Facebook will summarize all birthday-related posts into a single news feed on your home page. As a result, your wall won’t be spammed with these posts and you won’t miss more important events going on in Facebook.

As Mashable points out, hopefully with this new design Facebook will find a way to also summarize all Birthday-related posts on the person’s wall so that more important messages don’t get lost or to avoid having 4 wall pages of “Happy Birthday.” I don’t mean to sound like the Brithday Grinch, but when you have more “friends” than you can count, it can get a tad irritating.

So readers who are like me… don’t be scared to jump up and down screaming Alleluya- for I already did!

I just noticed tonight, when I logged into Twitter‘s web interface, that there’s a new list of two suggest Tweeters featured on my home screen that Twitter suggests I follow.

Also, how long has this been live?  When did it launch? Days? Weeks? Months?

As you can see to the right, it also offers me a “view all” which leads to the “Suggestions for you” AKA twitter_suggests tab.

My question is: are @websuccessdiva and @chrisharrington really people I should follow based on some sort of sophisticated algorithm or is this a hustle?

Could these these recommendation be another form of advertising?  Paying to make yourself a priority recommendation, sort of like Jason Calacanis tried to do with his offer of $120k, $250k, or $500k for being a top recommended Tweeter on Twitter. (Did they ever take him up on it?)

Could it be a double secret marketing and advertising profit-making campaign in cahoots with Featured Users? Various versions of Featured Users are all over the internet, making quite a pretty penny in the competitive world of follower-wooing.

Well, I went over to check out the list of top-tweeters, at both Twitaholic and WeFollow Top and then followed Ashton Kutcher @aplusk and this is what I saw:

If you’ll notice, there’s the list below that states “Since you just followed ashton kutcher, you might also want to follow:” and they recommend @delta_goodrem, @AdhitHeaven, and @OfficialVernonK — are these recommendations based on a sophisticated match-making logic or some dynamic AI that looks at my choices and recommends these people to me based on my history, my tendency, their interaction with @aplusk, or their relationshop with him?  The number of followers?  The types of tweets?

Or, have they in some way bought their way into this “featured user” and “recommended user” rarefied air?

Do you have any more questions?  Do you have any answers?  Do you have any rumors? Conjectures? Conspiracies?  Via Marketing Conversation.

I wasn’t intending on blogging this as there is honor amongst thieves.

However, I just got pissed off there were so many copies of the exact same auto DM that I got sick and tired of deleting them.

The screenie that you see to your right is just all of them that I can catch on my wee little laptop before you couldn’t read it any more.

There are many that I already deleted and quite a few that are below.

I don’t want to count them all. I don’t want to sink any more time than I am now.

Here’s what the Tweet auto DM says, again and again (click on the image if you want a better look):

hagenpr Thanks for following me on Twitter! Check out www.hagenpr.com. Bernhard

So, Hagen PR AKA @hagenpr on Twitter, what happened? Also, how come no mea maxima culpa?

There are so many auto DMs! Unconscionable!

Anyway, let’s see if there’s anyone else complaining about this on Google… nope.

I guess I am the only one. Can you find any?

Oh, Bernhard Hagen of Hagen PR, why did you forsake me?

Twitter Bio:

Hagen PR – Public Relations in Europe and China; twitters about the company, the client’s activities as well as business and industry news.

I am sure you and your PR firm rock. We at Abraham Harrison love Europe and my CEO and I speak German.

Why don’t you schedule a meeting with my CEO, Mark Harrison, in Austria or Berlin, and you can maybe buy him a beer on my behalf and we can put this all behind us.

From the Hagen PR website:

Today’s business communication is international. And so is our approach: We support ambitious companies with high-level public relations services in Europe and China. From strategy development to the press release – we boost your PR efforts.

I personally recommend avoiding auto DMs — nobody appreciates it and nobody likes them.

If you don’t know, a Twitter DM refers to a private direct message.

None of these ever feel authentic, honest, or intimate — especially if there are possibly hundreds of the same copy of the same message, which I daresay you and you team did not lovingly write by hand.

Pop Mark an email and set up a meeting and we’ll call it even.

Via Marketing Conversation

This morning I found a link on Facebook that linked to Corporate Social Media Is Not Social — It’s Sales Media by Tom Foremski and came away with a comment that I will share here, though I am pretty sure didn’t respond directly to the post so much as just wrote what the post inspired me to. (Via Marketing Conversation)

I have reread the story and yes, the ultimate theme is “So let’s be honest about corporate use of social media — it’s really all sales media — let’s not dress it up as anything else.” That said, I can’t help but interpret the tone as scolding.

You can check out my comment here:

Although I think the tone and theme of this post will be popular, I believe it is also naive. I have found that if your message is targeted and generous, people are grateful to be identified, recognized, and then engaged with where they’re already spending their time.

Someone who inelegantly brings up Avon or Tupperware at a cocktail or dinner party does make the whole thing untoward; however, clubs, gold courses, the ball park, and any number of places have long been the sites of the initial conversation that have lead to quite a bit of very important business and quite a number of sales.

The biggest deals happen on the links.

Anyway, cheap people sans couth are a dime-a-dozen, but even these people are indeed rewarded — sometimes handsomely monetarily — for their aggressiveness, dedication, and shamelessness even though they dismantle their reputation and burn their bridges along the way.

Also, peddling crap is always unforgivable — please keep those Cutco knives the hell away from me!

Here’s the original post over at Silicon Valley Insider:

When it comes to corporate use of social media I have problems with the use of the word “social” because it’s not accurate. It’s not social.

When most people use Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, they use it for its social qualities. Yet when corporations, and many professionals use social media, they are using it for commercial purposes, they are using it for sales.

This is an important distinction because it affects how businesses should use social media.

I was moderating a panel earlier today on how businesses can use PR to leverage social media, and Louis Gray said something that was very wise. He said that people create their Facebook pages in a specific way because that’s the way they like it, they are comfortable there. If you come along and engage with them you need to approach them as if you were a guest in their home.

That means businesses have to be cautious about how they sell on social media sites.

All that relationship building and engagement is not because a business wants to get to know Jane or John better, as a friend or relative would, it wants to sell more of its product or service. That’s a far different agenda from most people’s engagement in social media.

Like at parties, people will avoid that person that is selling something. Friends that invite their friends to tupperware parties, or similar, are tolerated for a while, but not for long. Similarly, companies that use social media as sales media must understand there is a time and place for it, or they risk alienating people.

Sir Martin Sorrell, the head of WPP, the world’s largest marketing and communications group, has similar concerns about the commercial use of social media. The Financial Times recently reported:

Sir Martin warned on Tuesday that social media sites are ”less commercial phenomena, they are more personal phenomena,” more similar to ”writing letters to our mothers” than watching television.

”Invading these [social] media with commercial messages might not be the right thing.”

So let’s be honest about corporate use of social media — it’s really all sales media — let’s not dress it up as anything else.

What do you think?  How appropriate was my response?  Was the article a bit of pandering?  I am a huge fan of open, transparent, and honest engagement with the express aim of brand- and relationship-building.

How inauthentic would it be for a bunch of folks from a PR, marketing, or corporate to enter a social network and not talk about clients and campaigns and the office?

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Here’s yet another example of why one needs to pay attention to social media as well as be on social media — from the boss’ point of view for sure — and why your character is the sum of what you do and say every day.

Yes, even when you’ve just arrived home from the job you hate, get into your bunny slippers, make a cup of tea, and decide to open your heart and your venom onto Facebook.

Stupid is as stupid does and this woman was not long for that job anyway and the Universe was being merciful and helping her along towards her next opportunity, though I wouldn’t hire her!  Social Media and Facebook just allowed her to be easily stupid and simply careless.

Via Caveman Circus via Marketing Conversation