In this video, I walk you through all the nooks and crannies of my favorite new social media sharing and amplification platform called GaggleAMP.

I share the GaggleAMP dashboard from my very own Marketing Conversation gaggle and also share the gaggles I am a member of, including SobelMedia’s, Shel Holtz‘s FIR, and the official GaggleAMP gaggle.

I do my best to share all the features from a Gaggle Manager and Administrator perspective — but I mainly just feature the ones that I use every day, to the chagrin of Glenn Gaudet who keeps on trying to get me to use all the features (oh well).

But even so, I spend a lot of time showing you around just about everywhere, so if you’re curious what GaggleAMP is about, please check it out.

And if you would like to join my Gaggle, please do: http://gaggleamp.com/4+Xsxoj

Via Marketing Conversation via YouTube

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• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #639: February 20, 2012 (nevillehobson.com)
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If you want to succeed in running a kitchen for the homeless in Washington, DC, or have wildly successful social media marketing campaigns, it all comes down to one thing: do you respect and appreciate your guests?

Do you cut-corners and just serve slop or do you prepare organic, healthy, and delicious meals with an obsession for presentation and taste?

I volunteer as sous chef at a Washington, DC, homeless kitchen. They serve fresh, organic dinners to folks who really need a healthy meal. Miriam’s Kitchen treats everyone who dines there as respected and honored guests. I have learned a lot about how to be a much better social media marketer as a direct result of working both in the kitchen as a sous chef and also as dining room captain. Can someone who isn’t in love with the taste of food be a top chef? You know what they say, “never trust a skinny chef.”

Well, it seems to me that there are quite a few PR and marketing companies that aren’t in love with social media. Even worse, they have downright contempt for the honest denizens of social media. Can you truly be effecting in social media marketing, digital PR, and SEO if you’re not completely in love with it? Can one ever trust a skinny social media maven?

And even if you’re not in love with social media, can you be truly effective if you don’t taste what you make? If you’re too “busy” or too “above” rolling up your sleeves and getting into the kitchen, can you actually create social media campaigns that are fashionable, timely, au courant? Are you serving campaigns that nobody’s ordering — and would you even know?

Too often, for too many traditional agencies, social is just another channel, another product to sell in order to be integrated and full-service — there’s very little passion — or respect — for online community. Much of this is not intentional, it’s just that “full-service” agencies, and their practitioners, are oftentimes spread too thin over too many media and too broad mission.

It reminds me of a recent experience I had at Miriam’s: I prepared enough sauce to feed one-hundred-and-fifty homeless men and women and forgot to even taste it. Seriously. I was so busy chopping onions, peeling and crushing tomatoes; browning the onion and garlic; and adding oregano, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper in the too short amount of time I had that I never dipped in a plastic tasting spoon to see if it all worked together.

I looked at my watch: I was on time! However, I looked over at John Murphy, head dinner chef at Miriam’s Kitchen, and my boss.

“How does it taste?” he asked. I looked at him dumbfounded.

“We can’t feed our guests with food that doesn’t taste good,” John continued while dipping a clean plastic tasting spoon into the sauce and tasting it, “that you wouldn’t eat and enjoy yourself — you need to always monitor the food you’re cooking by both taste and presentation.”

“I know we’re in a rush but you must put yourself out there in the dining room and you must make sure what you serve isn’t just nutritious, organic and fresh but also appealing to the eye and palate.”

In my mad rush to deliver, I completely forgot that the food I was preparing didn’t just have to get done but also needed to be delicious, compelling, appealing, and well-seasoned. And, so I tasted. It was bland.

I doctored it up and the results were delicious — and so was the presentation, with fresh basil and rosemary adding green to a sea of red when it was finally served to the kitchen’s guests. So, what happens if you’re not willing to be an active participant in the flavor of the meals you serve.

Corporate folks used to call it “eating your own dog food,” right?

What I see in the social media marketing and PR space, however, are lots of folks who are cooking and cooking and cooking without ever taking an interest in tasting. What I mean in this case is that there are too many social media marketers who have zero interest in social media, social networks, technology, or online community.

And, even if you do taste-as-you-go, how’s your palette? Maybe you’re serving fast food but you have a foodie palate — are you able to connect with your guests cook to their unique taste in food? Are you able to produce meals that appeal to your guests or do you feel contempt for their lack of sophistication, always trying to force tastes and textures that might, in fact, disgust them and drive them away, never to return.

How well do you know the palette of your market online? How much of a died-in-the-wool social media consumer are you yourself? How engaged are you on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, or Google+ yourself? — to say nothing of message boards, forums, or reddit.

You make think your know how to market to online denizens but just because you may understand how to market or promote using traditional tools to traditional markets doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to map those strategies directly to this new, vibrant, global online market — or, to map those recipes directly to your new restaurant.

Are you invested in social media? Are you a fanboy or fangirl of social networks? Do you spend too much time developing online relationships in online communities? Are you the first person rushing around to try to get an invite to Pinterest, for example? If not, do you really have the sort of passion and commitment to knowing your audience well enough to be able to cook for them?

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada.

Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity. If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success. Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet. This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage. Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign. You need both quantity and quality of Likes. I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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I was one of the first Qik users and then it sort of all fell apart when Qik didn’t support my Blackberry Bold 9700 so I abandoned it. Now that I have an Apple iPhone 4, I have reinstalled Qik, paid up on my $49/month, and will see if I like it and use it. Here’s the feed, which I guess it either “last video” or “live video” depending on if I am filming or not. let me know what you think and if you like it or use it.

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.

While this video is trying to be a scold it is actually exciting bike messenger porn:

Why? Because even if there were proper bike lanes and bike intersections and even German bike crossing lights, it wouldn’t change what is happening here.  It is in the culture.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s when I was a bike courier in Washington, DC, I rode like a bike messenger.

I always took the quickest route between my pick up and my drop off point. It was all about the the traveling vector and predicted point of impact.

I became very good at predicting someone committed to their vector, someone who might betray they vector, or someone who was vectoring shyly. And I could anticipate someone who would probably freeze (bad) or change their tack (worse), or stop short (worst).

So, the video actually tends to be, to me, daily bread. Not anymore, though, because biking in Berlin has beat it out of me (bikes laws are tough) and Portland literally pisses and moans about people who don’t follow lanes, signs, right-of-way, and lights.

Anyway, this video ends up being a master class in how it is — and often should be — done.

Please watch this video before I go on — it is very touching and very honest — much more honest and brave than most of my clients have been:

Abraham Harrison is working with My Fellow American to promote the fact that quite a lot of the people we interact with every day, in the shops, on the street, in the hospital, at school — our neighbors — are Muslim.

Today, Daniel Tutt wrote a post on the Huffington Post addressing the campaign behind video, My Fellow American, ‘My Fellow American’: Short Film Offers Platform for Combatting Islamophobia:

America has always been a melting pot, but in the post-9/11 world the environment can be downright hostile. Radio talk show hosts, pundits and politicians utter statements about Islam and Muslims that if they were to say the same about other religious groups, they would face severe consequences. This hateful discourse leaves me wondering how I can respond in a way that is constructive and doesn’t simply perpetuate the shouting and hate speech.

A 2010 TIME poll reported that 62 percent of Americans claim to have never met a Muslim. This left me wondering: What about those Americans that do know a Muslim? How can can they effectively respond to this climate of fear and hostility towards Muslims?

A new online project, “My Fellow American,” enables people of all faiths and backgrounds to share a story about a Muslim they know personally. The centerpiece of the project is a short teaser film that juxtaposes voices of hate with everyday Muslim Americans. It serves as a call-to-action for people of all faiths to stand up against this climate of hate speech and Islamophobia.

After watching the short film, the viewer is encouraged to visit the website, where dozens of Americans have already submitted short YouTube stories about a Muslim they know and admire. It calls on people of all faiths to sign a pledge and share the project with their network and affirm that American Muslims are indeed our fellow Americans. The pledge reads:

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all.

To take the pledge and share your Muslim story, visit the My Fellow American website.

Be sure to ‘like’ My Fellow American on Facebook and follow My Fellow American on Twitter, too.  Please submit your story of support and, if you could, please submit your video story and support

The site also has many other cool features including the ability to share your own stories and even taking the “My Fellow American” pledge. I would love it if you could post or tweet about this and share the video with folks on Twitter and on Facebook or even onto YouTube or on your blog.  Here’s the embed code for the YouTube video:

<center><iframe width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/cjm0uk2JO58?hd=1″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></center>

I decided to take lots and lots of time to go through as much registering and setting up of Tumblr as possible before we all run out of patience.

This video goes through all aspects of registering, logging in, setting up, and developing content, blogging, uploading images, audio, and videos. Feel free to skip around and maybe you can learn how to use one of the most hip, chic, and popular blogging and content-sharing platforms.

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)

Kelli Matthews invited me to spend the day at the University of Oregon as a guest of the School of Journalism and Communications to speak about my brand of social media and digital PR and marketing.  In addition to speaking with Kelli’s students, Pat Curtin, SOJC Chair in Public Relations, invited me to speak to her class as well.  It was a busy day and so invigorating!

It was a lovely and smashing and the students are smart and amazingly attentive. Great questions, gorgeous campus even during a typically moist day in Oregon.

We discussed all sorts of things, including what Abraham Harrison does, about the Cluetrain Manifesto, about the real truth behind social media engagement, ROI, measurement, expectations, software, relationships, blogger outreach, social network engagement, and how best to play Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the rest like a Stradivarius.

Long story short: never let anyone catch you rolling your eyes, speaking up, or speaking down to anyone. Yes, don’t speak up to anyone either because people really hate kiss-ups and they’ll treat you like complete crap.

I also discussed the issues around brand management and reputation: people and their companies do not have a glass jaw — or shouldn’t act that way.

Kelli took me to lunch at a local pub and I got to meet PR’s amazing future: Karly Bolton, firm director at the other AHPR, and Angela Seits, a U of O grad student.

People love flaws, people love mistakes, and people love recovery even if it doesn’t include vindication — unless they come across as pathetic, unresponsive, or scared.

Manning up, being responsive, and apologizing without reservation — as well as actually solving the problem in a painfully generous way — is the way to do it. Never seppuku.

See the photo above?  The woman with the pony tail on the MacBook?  Well, that’s Jenna Levy, our new intern at Abraham Harrison, the other AHPR.  We got to meet in person for a little while but she put school and class and a test ahead of having coffee with me. To be honest, that’s just the kind of Intern we like: business before pleasure!

Anyway, I love any and all opportunities to speak at colleges and universities — just saying.

Finally, thanks to Kelli Matthews and the denizens of Allen Hall for their generosity, patience, attention, and passion.

Go Ducks!

Abraham Harrison LLC’s client, The Daily, just launched it’s cool new iPad application today!

The Daily is a first-of-its-kind daily national news publication built exclusively as an application for tablet computing. It provides readers the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the immediacy of the web and the need-to-know content of a newspaper, all while elevating user experience beyond the printed word. The Daily is a subscription-based news product, published 365 days a year, at the cost of $0.99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. For more information on The Daily go to: www.thedaily.com.

The FAQ covers a lot of the details that you might be wondering about:

What is The Daily?
The first digital news publication with original content created every day exclusively for the iPad®. Built from scratch by a team of top journalists and designers, The Daily covers the world: breaking news, sports, pop culture, entertainment, apps, games, technology, opinion, celebrity gossip and more.
The Daily has the depth and quality of a magazine but is delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time like the web. Great stories, photos, video, audio and graphics come alive the more you touch, swipe, tap and explore. The customized sports section allows you to follow your favorite teams’ scores, pictures and headlines — even players’ tweets.

How often does it publish?
There is a new edition of The Daily early every morning — 365 days a year. The Daily can update with breaking news stories throughout the day, and many articles pull in data from the web at large, so that stories have elements that live in real time.

How much does it cost?
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Via Marketing Conversation

I never really fell in love with the Hair song, Let the Sunshine In until I had an experience in Berlin very similar to this one (yes, Berlin is totally awesome no matter what you think):

Orchestre Miniature in the Park AKA OMP only plays music that mentions either the sun or summer. My friend Elisabeth King gigs with them.  They only play children’s and toy instruments. One day a couple-few years ago with Phoebe Kreutz (she loves Berlin too) popped in an joined OMP in singing Let the Sunshine In, from Hair, in Berlin, and it was so awesome I was done. Mind you, the video I linked to is not the right one, it is from an ad hoc outdoor gig at Ostkreutz in Berlin, but you get the idea — I know I have it recorded somewhere on YouTube myself, but I am still looking for that.

Sigh.

Before that, I already knew Ms. Kreutz because OMP loves to play her song All Summer Long (but be sure to also check out Phoebe Kreutz’s version of All Summer Long as well)

And here’s All Summer Long by Phoebe Kreutz

And here’s a really gorgeous version of Let the Sunshine In that I think takes place in Washington Square Park:

And here’s OMP playing All Summer Long:

And here’s the version of Let the Sunshine In from the movie Hair:

While the Economist is calling what I do “my spiel,”

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Let me explain: my agency is not banking on a shift of power from mainstream media to bloggers and social media.  I have little or no interest in any particular blogger’s or tweeter’s personal influence, though my strategies are not typical. I am interested in all of their voices equally.  There is power in numbers.  I am egalitarian and am not interested in becoming a King-maker online.

In fact, we embrace the chaos!  Nobody in my agency feels like we’re the boss of anybody online. We also understand how scared mainstream media like The Economist are — they don’t really like the shift of control, can’t handle the fact that you really should not — cannot — herd cats.  We have just mastered the art of making a can-opener sound loud and compelling enough to attract kitties from all over the neighborhood!

Abraham Harrison is banking on the disruption of the mainstream online, though not only online. Both worlds bleed together through the mediasphere.  We’re banking on the dilution of the power once held by a handful of journalists, reporters, and anchormen.  At least I see that there is a new and fecund seedbed that is so very fertile and so powerful that even mainstream media tends to follow the lead.

Mainstream media is picking stars from YouTube and they’re picking more and more stories right out of the trending topics on Twitter.  We’re not banking that the social-mediasphere or the blogosphere will usurp the New York Times or the Economist, we’re banking — and experiencing — the WikiLeaks effect.

What is the WikiLeaks effect?  Well, we’re watching the irrational exuberance of newspaper publishers in one giant feeding frenzy over Julian Assange‘s leaked content on his terms.  Influencing hundreds or thousands or millions of bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers en masse to school around a message, an issue, product, an event, or a passion can spur political and news decisions.

Actually, it can change the direction of the conversation. It can change the world. Seriously, this is not hyperbole.

I know this is yesterday’s news but it still hasn’t changed: each one of you — of us — has more access to tools that can expedite, influence, effect, and harness change than ever before. Justin Beiber and Charice Pempengco are the highest-profile example of going from nowhere to King and Queen of pop, but there are an infinity of examples. Perez Hilton, for example.  And no, that land grab is not over.  New titles are awarded every day. Blogging is not dead, it is hard. People giving up because something is too hard is not the same as something dying.  All those tweeters and bloggers who have ceased blogging and tweeting are not reading blogs and tweets.  They’re committed lurkers.  They’re readership.  Yes, even you PR and Ad men, you too.

In mainstream media’s desire to keep up and keep relevant, they have become indiscriminate and frenzied.  There is a lot of opportunity there.  Now is the most empowering time to actively participate in the conversation that is happening now online, happening every day on message boards, forums, Twitter, Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Second Life, irc, Ecommerce sites, blogs, email lists, and whatnot.

My agency and I are not depending on the voice of one blogger or tweeter, we’re depending on their choir of voices in concert.  That’s what The Economist missed.  The new media and social media war is not the war of the flanking Redcoats (MSM), it is the Revolutionary war: the mainstream media Redcoats against the social media Rebels.  Not conventional war.

Mind you, Abraham Harrison offers earned media services, meaning that our messaging and outreaches aim to inspire folks online to seriously consider what we’re proposing with the goal of writing, tweeting, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, sharing and/or Facebooking it.

Not one front directly opposed to another across trenches.

The mainstream media, including The Economist, is physically unable to see what is before them.  They’re unable to even recognize what is going on even now.  They’re not even completely clear that they have been reporting on news, content, events, and political action that has been influenced, steered, instigated, catalyzed, and propagated by communications shops the world over, from crisis shops to public affairs, from promotional agencies to social media marketing teams; from PACs to lobbyists — every day.

Personally, I’ve been herding cats by opening cans of cat food and planting catnip online professionally since 2003. Sorry, Economist, too little too late.

Rise of the image men PR Man has conquered the world. He still isn’t satisfied

AS THEY prepared to face their second big strike in four years, America’s coal-mining bosses knew they had to do something about the newspapers. It was 1906—a time of rising resentment against robber-baron capitalism and the heyday of muckraking “yellow journalism”. During the previous strike the trade unions had fostered good relations with newspapermen and won themselves a sympathetic press. To help put their side of the story, the mining bosses turned to a former journalist, Ivy Lee.

It was already fairly common for big companies and public figures to employ publicists and press agents to represent them and rebut criticism. But these men did not conduct extended campaigns to influence public opinion. And many prominent folk engaged with the mass media as little as possible. As Stuart Ewen notes in “PR! A Social History of Spin”, the standard businessman’s attitude towards the public was one of “hardened arrogance”. Lee was to pioneer new methods—and, in the process, create a new industry.

Lee observed that the rise of national newspaper chains and syndicated journalism in America since the 1880s, combined with the extension of the franchise, had profoundly changed society. Now, for the first time, there was something that could accurately be called “public opinion”, a shared consciousness and conversation across the country—and it was to be feared. Lee noted how the emerging mass media were acting as the conduit for the anti-capitalist message of Progressivism, the liberalising reform movement that peaked in America in the early 20th century. He realised not only that it was essential for businesses to counter this message, but that the same conduit could be used to spread pro-business sentiment.

His idea, blindingly obvious now but a novelty then, was to send newsdesks a stream of statements putting the mining bosses’ case and rebutting allegations against them. These, as well as the statements he put out the same year on behalf of a railway following a train crash, are now sometimes described (with a bit of spin) as the first press releases. The immediate result was perhaps the earliest recorded whinges from journalists about being bombarded with tendentious bumf.

Lee’s response to such complaints was a bombastic “Declaration of Principles”. He snorted that “This is not an advertising agency…our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.” No doubt the hacks scoffed at his pomposity. Lee’s tactics nonetheless worked: the mining bosses’ side of the story was given a fairer hearing henceforth. The public-relations consultant had been born.

Of course, spin and image-making have been around for as long as history has been recorded. The earliest historians were often the PR men for the winners of battles and dynastic squabbles. In 18th-century London, the political spin-doctor was already at work, in the form of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who conducted a ruthless publicity campaign on behalf of the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, in between posing for Gainsborough and Reynolds.

But only since the early 20th century, and Lee’s campaigns for the coal and rail bosses, has there been a recognisable PR industry dedicated to shaping the representation of clients in the media. That industry has since grown to enormous (indeed, perhaps excessive) size and global reach. Ever since Lee’s first spats with cynical hacks, public-relations officers have been locked in an antagonistic, symbiotic relationship with journalists, with mutual contempt tempered by mutual dependency. They have also fought for influence within big corporations against their great rivals in the marketing and advertising departments. Yet, after a century of spinning, PR Man remains uncertain of his proper role. Is he a master manipulator? Is he the devil’s advocate (as long as Satan pays his fees)? Or is he a benign bridge-builder between the corporate world and the public?

The dark arts
Despite representing big businesses, Lee at first bought in to two of Progressivism’s main ideas: that the excesses of capitalism must be curbed; and that ordinary people were rational and responded best to facts and figures. He presented an “honest broker” vision of public relations that, to this day, is the one that most of the industry’s leaders reflexively proffer. As Lee put it, PR is a “two-way street”. He put forward sincere, factually based explanations on behalf of his clients, listened attentively to the public’s response, then conveyed it back to his masters, helping them to understand better how to meet people’s expectations.

This principled version of PR did not long withstand pressure from clients to take a more forceful stance. In 1914 perhaps the most unpopular capitalist barons of all, the Rockefellers, were facing a storm of popular anger over a massacre of striking miners and their families by the paid thugs of a Rockefeller mining company in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee was hired on the strength of his performance in the previous decade’s mining strike. But instead of delivering honest truths, as he had promised in his “declaration”, he spread egregious lies about the strikers and the cause of their deaths. One of his press releases accused Mother Jones, an elderly union organiser, of being a prostitute and brothel-keeper.

Testifying to a congressional inquiry afterwards, Lee was startlingly honest about his dishonesty. “What is a fact?” he asked. “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to give you my interpretation of the facts.” In other words, it was perfectly OK to bamboozle the public with plausible-sounding factoids. Verisimilitude mattered more than veracity. His testimony earned Ivy Lee the nickname “Poison Ivy”. He had committed what is still seen as a grave error for a PR man: becoming the story.

Freudian analysis
Even when Lee was claiming to be an honest broker there were some who doubted that the public responded best to rational argument. The rise of radicalism in the years preceding the Russian revolution worried elites everywhere. And there was growing interest in what the emerging field of psychology had to say about the irrationality of the human mind, and in particular that of the masses. Among the curious was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the other main contender for the title of PR’s founding father. He turned others’ theoretical musings on ordinary people’s openness to images and emotional appeals into a series of handbooks explaining how to manipulate the public mind in pursuit of corporate or political goals.

Like Lee, Bernays had started out as a journalist, editing medical magazines. But he discovered the power of persuasion when, in 1913, he promoted a play about the spread of syphilis in a family, breaking a taboo against mentioning sexual diseases. The success of his efforts persuaded him to become a publicist, representing some of the great performers of the day, from Vaslav Nijinsky to Enrico Caruso.

Bernays’s greatest opportunity came with the outbreak of the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson realised the government needed to bring on board the many doubters who saw it as a capitalists’ war that their country should shun. Bernays and other leading PR men were recruited to a new Committee on Public Information (CPI), a vast propaganda operation. They were to put into practice one of Bernays’s main findings from the studies of mass psychology by Uncle Sigmund and others: that the public’s first impulse is usually to follow a trusted leader rather than consider the facts for itself.

In small towns across the country the CPI recruited bank managers and other local authority-figures as “four-minute men”. They gave brief, supposedly impromptu, speeches in cinemas and other public places. Many made the bogus claims that antiwar sentiment was being fomented by German agents, and that America risked being overrun by Prussians.

So successful was the CPI in shaping public opinion that it encouraged the early PR men, Bernays especially, to puff themselves up to new heights of grandeur. No longer would they be mere lackeys of the robber barons; they were now the Great Manipulators, shapers of public opinion for the public’s own good. Bernays went so far as to proclaim that, since the public was so irrational, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” The alternative to manipulation, he argued, was chaos. Illustrating the extent of his, and the PR business’s, exuberance at this time, one of Bernays’s manuals boasted: “When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’ he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s work.”

Edward Bernays maintained that the alternative to manipulation was chaos
Unlike Napoleon the PR industry has never known retreat. It has spent the past century advancing, from its origins in America and Britain, across the globe and into all areas of corporate and public life. In “A Century of Spin”, another history of the industry, David Miller and William Dinan note how PR conquered China in the 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. In 1984 the first state firm set up an internal PR department, followed a year later by the country’s first PR agency, a joint venture between Burson-Marsteller (a big American firm) and the Xinhua news agency. These days PR enjoys as heady a growth rate as any other industry in China.

All sorts of outfits have discovered the power of persuasion. Charities, trade unions, protest groups and other anti-corporate organisations create stunts and “facts” as powerful, and sometimes as dubious, as those staged by Bernays’s minions. A masterful recent example is a Greenpeace video in which an office worker opens a KitKat and finds an orangutan’s finger inside—the intention being to press Nestlé, the chocolate bar’s maker, to stop buying palm oil from places where the ape’s native forests are being cut down. Such anti-corporate PR often goes curiously unnoticed by historians of the industry, but it is at least as manipulative as what companies get up to.

Indeed, a revolving door has opened between the PR operations of companies and their critics. In 1997 Greenpeace, seeking a new communications chief, turned to Jonathan Wootliff, formerly of two of America’s biggest providers of corporate PR advice, Hill & Knowlton and Fleishman-Hillard. And where is Mr Wootliff nowadays? Back on the corporate side. He works for Reputation Partners, advising big firms (from BP to an Indonesian pulp firm) how to build “productive relationships” with NGOs and activists. The public-relations men recognise that PR is PR, whichever side it is conducted for.

Washes whiter than white
Since the 1960s, when both sides in the brutal secessionist war in Nigeria’s Biafra region hired foreign PR men to try to get the world on their side, the agencies have found a growing sideline in what their critics call “reputation laundering”. Hardly any regime has been too nasty to be represented, from Argentina’s bloody military regime to Suharto’s brutal kleptocracy in Indonesia. Justifying their image-making on behalf of such unappealing clients, PR men have developed another version of what their industry is for—an alternative to the well-established “honest broker” and “great manipulator” models—in which they portray themselves as defence lawyers in the court of public opinion. By analogy with the criminal courts, where even murderers are entitled to a defence, they argue that they are simply serving justice.

For example, in August, when the Guardian wrote about his company’s image-making for the government of Sri Lanka and others with poor human-rights records, Tim Bell, one of British PR’s leading figures (and a former image-maker to Margaret Thatcher) responded: “I am not an international ethics body. We do communications work. If people want to communicate their argument we take the view that they are allowed to do so.” Lord Bell nonetheless says he would not force his staff to work for a client they found unpalatable. Some were recently excused from working on a brief to represent the Norwegian government in calling for a resumption of whaling, for example.

Although it has been debating the issue for decades, the PR industry is no closer to agreeing where the limits of such advocacy should lie, says Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Its professional bodies have codes of practice that ban outright lying on clients’ behalf. But there are so many agencies fighting for business that such rules are often honoured in the breach. The industry “goes round and round” the same ethical issues “like wheels spinning in the mud”, she laments.

What people in the industry are certain about, and have been since the days of Lee and Bernays, is their burning desire to be more than just press-release peddlers and excuse-makers. PR folk want to be at the strategic heart of organisations, helping to make big decisions. Some cite firms such as IBM and Diageo (a drinks giant) where PR men have won seats at the executive top table. Such optimists—the industry is full of them, of course—now spy a rare opportunity to steal a march on the Mad Men of advertising and the flipchart-wielders of marketing. In the chaotic online world of social networking, they argue, their talents are much more relevant than their rivals’.

Here’s their spiel: the mainstream media—the traditional gatekeepers of news and the bane of the PR man’s life—are becoming less important. So is the worth of the advertising slots they sell, and therefore so are the sort of paid-for, hard-sell campaigns that the ad men and marketers deal in. Meanwhile social networking, with its cacophony of bloggers, Facebookers and tweeters, is becoming more influential. It is also confusing and hard to control. The public is becoming deafened and confused by a barrage of contradictory messages. Bernays’s maxim about the public needing trusted “influencers” to tell them what to buy and think is therefore becoming truer than ever.

Anyone with a laptop can quickly become a company’s most trenchant critic
It is true that anyone with a laptop or smartphone can go online and quickly become a company’s most trenchant and visible critic. Look at the attention (and the near-200,000 followers) grabbed by BPGlobalPR, a Twitter feed set up to attack BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In this world, PR firms expect that their clients will need more help in mopping up publicity slicks and, ideally, in preventing image blowouts before they occur. Ray Kotcher, the boss of Ketchum, one of America’s biggest agencies, predicts there will be “more demand for reputation-defending than ever”. As a result, PR is bound to become more vital, he reckons.

It is not difficult to stick pins in the PR men’s inflated hopes of being the lords of online chaos. For a start, ad men can also distribute their hard-sell branding campaigns on social networks. Nike shows its television ads—the same ones it pays to have broadcast—on its Facebook page, to which over 3m people have signed up as “likers”. Ms Gregory has seen few cases where PR firms have created true social-media-only campaigns: all that is happening is that social-media elements are being added to traditional marketing plans.

As for reaching those new social media “influencers”, most of these still get their basic information from old-fashioned news providers, as do most powerful and influential people. Lord Bell is sceptical, too, pointing out that PR men have talked of rising to the top of big firms for years.

But even if the PR men are in danger of believing their own spin about the opportunities the online world will bring, at least they are showing signs of adapting to it and finding ways to use technological change to further their business. They may not achieve the power and glory they have ached for since the industry’s early days. But it is clear that another century of spin, perhaps greater than the one gone by, is in prospect.

While we wrote a proper case study on our 2007 CAFE Standards public affairs campaign years ago, this is the first time I really sat down and explored one of my favorite blogger outreach and digital PR campaigns — one we did in support of MSHC Partners, RIP, and the National Environmental Trust three years ago.  Thanks to the gang at Agencyside for publishing Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover today:

Case Study: Blogger Approach for Air Cover

In 2007, Abraham Harrison (AH) worked on a public affairs campaign with MSHC Partners in Washington, D.C. to collaborate with the National Environmental Trust to pass the Energy Bill veto free.

To this end, MSHC Partners and AH needed to run an integrated campaign. MSHC bought targeted advertising and placed full page issue ads into the local papers of key politicians while AH was taking these ads and turning them into online content and copy. This included copying-and-pasting into blog posts, identifying bloggers and influencers in these markets, messaging thousands of them, letting them know about the ad, about the message, and about the issue.

I call this sort of thing ‘air cover.’ The political operatives are in the local market doing very powerful issue-oriented work, but all of this hard work can be very ephemeral. What we were able to do was to turn newspaper, magazine, television, radio ads, spots, and interviews into a series of web-accessible Social Media News Releases (SMNRs). This allowed bloggers to easily know, through targeting email messaging, what was happening at that moment in their communities. Bloggers are not paid to keep on top of everything that’s going on in their community. It would be impossible for MSHC to have been able to both produce the content, get it into the papers and on the air, and also discover, identify, classify, and then message thousands of relevant bloggers.

In many cases, AH had the content, the challenge, the copy, and the full-page ad in Colorado bloggers hands the day before the full page ad showed up in Mark Udall’s local Colorado newspaper in the morning. How? We were able to get the art, convert it from an Illustrator or Photoshop file and into something that bloggers could use. A full text copy of the ad’s message and an easy-to-copy hosted scan of the full page ad itself in several widths including 200px, 400px, 800px, were standard. Also, print-ready files so that any journalist who learned about our leaked content from the SMNR could run the story too.

We did this all around the country, capturing interviews and getting them onto YouTube and around the Internet. We collected audio from interviews and made that available and we stalked online commentary and coverage and made that available too.

When Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys, went to Washington to support Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards for fleet vehicles, we took their letter to congress and made the text available and photos of the letter available. When activists delivered candy to the House and Senate over Halloween with messages of how spooky the world will be if the Energy Bill didn’t pass, we covered that and made the photos and the handouts available to bloggers. And when Prius drivers in Philadelphia took to the streets to conduct a drive in to protest the Toyota Tundra and Toyota Sequoia, we were there, collecting photos and news from the event, collecting fliers and news reports, and the collecting all of those media and assets into an easy-to-use release. We were air support.

Of course, we didn’t just post web sites, releases, and microsites on the Internet hoping for bloggers to find these resources. We instead were able to identify, locate, and secure the names, email addresses, and blog names of thousands of interested bloggers and message them based on their passion.

We were able to rally an extraordinarily broad and diverse base of supporters ranging from left wing environmentalists, through the moderate Democrats and Republicans, all the way over to the national security oriented America First supporters. Each had their own reason to want to pass the Energy Bill and CAFE standards: from save the planet to energy independence. We were not afraid to prospect conservative bloggers just because it was a “green issue” … because it wasn’t.

We were able to collect bloggers not just in terms of their politics or their topical interest in cars, efficiency, politics, or whatnot but instead we identified them based on their demographics as well as their location. We basically collected every Philly blogger and let them know about the Prius event. We then identified every Colorado blogger to let them know about how the National Environmental Trust coalition, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, was challenging Mark Udall for his vote and support. We did this all over the country, primarily to bloggers but also to online message boards, forums, Usenet, Listservs, and social media outlets.

In the end, AH reached an estimated 250,000 online influencers and mobilized countless formerly passive activists all across the political spectrum. Support for the higher CAFE standards rose online and offline, and the political pressure mounted tremendously. The White House backed away from their veto threat, and the Democrats recognized the higher CAFE standards as essential. On December 19th, 2007, the Energy Bill passed, complete with the higher CAFE standards.

Chris Abraham, a blogger since 1999 and online since 1983, lives between Washington, DC, and Berlin, Germany, and is president of digital PR and online communications company Abraham Harrison. Abraham Harrison LLC, founded in late 2006, is a global digital PR and online communications firm spread over 4 Continents, 7 Countries, and 14 Time Zones, with clients that include Kimberly-Clark, US Olympic Committee, Sharp, Habitat for Humanity, and others.

Chris Abraham is President of Abraham Harrison LLC. Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and reputation management. You can connect with Chris on Twitter by following @chrisabraham.

When I logged into Google AdSense to check on my current balance and my daily estimated earnings from Google AdWords contextual advertising on my sites as well as the advertising revenue I receive from my almost 800 videos on Google’s YouTube and I was happy to see a new, easier-to-navigate, AdSense interface dashboard. (I am a little afraid to share a screen capture as I really don’t want to anger Google or break any Terms of Service (ToS).

Hello,

We are excited to introduce the new AdSense interface, now available globally in beta. Inspired by direct feedback from you, our publishers, the new interface includes features designed to help you make more money with AdSense by giving you more actionable performance data, offering you more control over the ads that appear on your sites, and helping you manage your account more efficiently.

In addition to a visual redesign, the new interface includes graphical, customizable performance reports, easier to use ad controls, and easy to find help and resources right within your account. It also makes it easy to quickly see your earnings and payment information, find relevant features, and make changes to your account.

You can try the new interface by clicking the “Try the new AdSense interface beta” link in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Clicking this link will bring you directly to the new interface. You can switch between the two versions at anytime.

Whether you’re already using the new interface or this is the first you’ve heard of it, visit www.google.com/ads/newadsense to check out our Getting Started guide and learn more about some of the features in the new interface.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

At digital PR and social media marketing agency, Abraham Harrison, we currently have around 80,000 bloggers in our lists, but those lists are not used like traditional mailing lists, because of the constant new growth and attrition in the blogosphere.

With each new client, and each new outreach, we identify with the client what the demographic is they want to reach, then we ID the bloggers who are leading and influencing that demographic. We call these groups of bloggers that we identify as the group influencers a “universe”.

The universes are built by rechecking the existing lists (adding newcomers and culling deadwood), and by building up brand new lists (since each client has a different set of demographics they want to reach.

We then reach out to these bloggers in a 4-6 week campaign which includes an initial semi-personalized outreach email, followed up by 2-4 follow-up emails. The emails are terse and the majority of the messaging is “outsourced” to a social media news release (SMNR – a one-page simple HTML microsite) that is a “steal me” sheet for the bloggers to make their blogging about our client super easy. Here is an example of an SMNR:  http://freshairholiday.org/

Each one of these outreach cycles generally leads to 100-300 social media mentions in blogs and on twitter (depending on how intriguing the client’s message and offering is), invariably reaching millions and in many of our campaign’s cases, 10MM+ people.

We integrate twitter campaigns (followership-building, messaging, and community engagement), Facebook, Youtube promotion, and A-list outreach as well. The most basic of our campaigns start at $5000 a month, and the more complex campaigns top $20K per month.

Via Abraham Harrison and Marketing Conversation

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).

People always ask me, “who is this Mark Harrison,” or “do you really need him?”  They even ask, “what does he do for the firm?”  I think there is a belief that any company worth its salt should have been started by a single, strong, founder — a Ford, if you will — and surge forward on the power of his single-minded vision.

Building a company is so much more than just that vision — it is much more than an idea, it is a creation that needs to be fed, maintained, grown, cultivated, and sustained.

When I started Abraham PR, I was a “single parent” but it wasn’t until Mark Harrison came on board around five-months in,  just about now three years ago, that we were able to start growing Abraham Harrison past a little consulting and digital PR practice into a proper company with 35 staff doing client service work in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Russian for global clients like OLX.

Our biggest client, OLX, is a case in point. Just today, Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of OLX, wrote The Power of Two: 2 > 1! in celebration of the entrepreneurial company of partners, which I have generously excerpted below — but it isn’t complete — I cut a lot out, so please, rather, go visit the original blog post yourself. (Via Marketing Conversation)

The Power of Two: 2 > 1! (Heavily Excerpted)

Looking at the most successful Internet and technology companies of the past few decades, it’s shocking to see how many have two or more founders: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Youtube, Skype, Yahoo to name a few all have multiple founders. Even Oracle which is closely associated with Larry Ellison has multiple founders. It’s much harder to come up with super successful Internet companies which only have one founder. Amazon and eBay seem to be the exception and Jeff Bezos is all the more exceptional as he is still CEO. The same applies to up and coming Internet companies which also seemingly all have multiple founders: Gilt, Yelp, Facebook and Twitter.

I would not have expected this result. Running a successful starting requires clear and rapid decision making: you ask everyone’s opinion and make an informed decision and assess its impact. If it’s a product decision, you A/B test the top few decisions and keep refining. There is no time to find the democratic consensus, the field is too dynamic and competitive and from experience the consensus decision is usually worse than an informed rapid decision followed by rigorous A/B testing with continuous refinement. I would have suspected that having multiple founders would slow down the decision making as the co-founders would have to agree on a decision before it gets taken.

Moreover, most marriages end in divorce. Why would it be any different for business relationships especially given the stress that the two partners are under and the financial stakes involved? In fact, I would have expected that companies with multiple founders to be more likely to fail than companies with one founder for that very reason as two disagreeing founders would tear the company apart.

If someone did the analysis, I would bet that companies with multiple founders are more likely to fail than companies with one founder, but when they succeed, they are more likely to succeed in a bigger way.

There are four reasons why having a partner might make a huge difference:

1. If you can’t convince your friends to join you, you probably should not be starting the business.

[...]

2.Being a startup founder is incredibly lonely and it’s great to have someone to pick you up when you are down and keep you grounded in reality when you become exuberant

[...]

3. It’s necessary to have a strategic sounding board

[...]

4. There is so much work to do, it’s good to have someone you completely trust to split it with

[...]

The conclusion is clear: if you are creating a startup get at least one partner!

[...]

Lots of my friends and family ask me what I do and when I tell them they often look at me glassily.  I try to communicate but I don’t even think my mom knows what I do for 12-18 hours/day, seven days-a-week.

That said, I have been trying to brainstorm some of our lesser-know services.  Abraham Harrison is globally known for being able to engage thousands of bloggers in 5 Continents, 12 Countries and 11 Languages.

That said, we also offer Social Network management services and social media solutions and all of that — here’s a list of some of them along with my interpretation of what each of them offers.  Please let me know if I have done a clear job with the copy — I think it still may be too dense.

Online Business Intelligence
Tracking and monitoring the online reputation of your brand, company, product, and services on your behalf, as a way of keeping track of conversation real-time.  Unless reporting is explicitly agreed to, this “open source intelligence” will be monitored for content, friendliness, and threat. Any and all threats are triaged and reported to the appropriate client point of contact.

Online Media and Social Media Metrics
Abraham Harrison maintains a suite of tools, algorithms, and strategies that allow us to provide you and your client with bona fide measurements, including reach, tone, and sentiment.  This suite of tools allow us to create illustrative proof, over time, of the efficacy of the campaign from the launch and over time.

Campaign Metrics and ROI Reporting
Intelligence plus metric plus time equals reports. Client and campaign reporting is something that needs to be defined and agreed to in advance of the campaign because reports are not built into the campaign but are a la carte and you get to define the specificity and granularity of the reporting.  Generally, reports are done bi-weekly or monthly, usually interspersed with weekly updates and “as needed” alerts.

Twitter Community-Building Services
Twitter is not a broadcast medium, it is a community-prospecting platform.  In order for the entire community to take shape and take bloom, one needs to not simply register an account, one needs to design, populate, and then prospect followers before there can be any real growth.  This community-building leverages both our collected contacts and current community relationships as well as several tools that we use to help promote and grow online reputation and growth of your Twitter online reputation.  In other words, like everything online, if you build it they won’t come.  Building it is a start, if course, but unless you’re Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, there is a lot of work and a lot of building, promotion, and prospecting required, and that is what Abraham Harrison LLC can do for you.

Twitter Posts and Posting Services
Twitter has become an essential part of online branding. Companies, celebrities, brands, and even fictional entities have been leveraging the ease-of-use and the simplicity of Twitter to both communication with current and potential customers as well as being able to engage and respond to user question, user requests, and user responses.  However, it isn’t as simple as posting status updates to Twitter regularly.  In our process, we work with the client to come up with 25-100 pre-approved “tweets” that the client can approve, veto, or edit.  Over time, AHLLC is able to message on behalf of you, the client, with messages that are consistent with client vision. After that, the messages are delivered to the Twitter stream with an approved frequency, from once-per-day to a couple posts to multiple-posts-per-day, with the frequency according to the scope of the contract.  During this process, it is also important — essential — to trust the Twitter team to be able to triage all replies and direct messages on behalf of the client — or, there needs to be a rapid process to triage replies and direct messages through the client.  As the campaign moves forward, the evolution of the campaign can change to offer more and more independence to the Twitterer.

Twitter Retweets and Retweeting Services
The secret sauce of Twitter is retweeting (retweet (RT)): a) to copy a tweet and then send it again on Twitter. b) passing along of messages in Twitter) Retweeting is the epitome of what makes Twitter such a powerful tool.

Retweeting allows Twitterers to repeat content from one Twitter stream they’re following onto all of their own followers.  Writing compelling tweets is what organically can result in retweets down the Twitter stream; however, it is also important to use Retweets as a form of reciprocal currency. Retweeting someone else’s tweet can engender attention or connection and build social equity within the “Twitterverse.”

In addition to intentionally retweeting on a client’s behalf, one of the benefits of running your Twitter campaign through Abraham Harrison LLC is that you are able to instantaneously have all of your client tweets retweeted through not only our staff’s Twitter accounts but through all the status-update social network sites our staff is a member of.

This allows our clients to automatically enter the conversation well in advance of their earned reputation online.

Twitter Message Modeling and Copywriting Services
In our process, we work with the client to come up with 25-100 pre-approved “tweets” that the client can approve, veto, or edit.  Over time, AHLLC is able to message on behalf of you, the client, with messages that are consistent with client vision. After that, the messages are delivered to the Twitter stream with an approved-to frequency, from once-per-day to a couple posts to multiple-posts-per-day, with the frequency according to the scope of the contract.

Active and Reactive Tweeting, Real-Time Twitter Customer Serives Services
Twitter is more than messaging and updating the Twitter status, Twitter offers the opportunity to use the real-time web to discover conversation around your products, services, and brands and either collect the intelligence for reporting or action or to engage the conversation, be it through use of @replies, Direct Messages (DMs), Retweets, or even the addition of hash tags.  The Twittersphere is considered real-time so it is essential to keep up-to-the second with a constant flow of twitter mentions.  The best thing about Twitter is that one may also easily engage real people who are mentioning your brand or the brand of your competitor.  You can also mention these people, retweet them, or help them with any sort of problem they may well be having with you, your produces, your services, or your general customer support.

YouTube development
While it is simple to join YouTube, there are quite a few important steps one must take before launching. First of all, there is a lot of customization that one can do to make sure a client’s YouTube channel blends well with the client brand identity, mirroring the parent brand.  In addition, structuring the channel, making sure the channel name is appropriate, and also make sure that if there needs to be content that plays for more than the standard 5-minute limit the ways to extend that (even to hours) are implemented. There are ways to make revenue as well, through Google AdSense.

Since Abraham Harrison LLC staff has been using YouTube since it was launched in 2005, we understand it well – most of all that, unlike television channels, YouTube is not simply a broadcast medium but rather primarily a community platform.  Like Twitter and other online communities like MySpace and Facebook, YouTube allows, and is most powerful with, a very deep level of participation.  Many companies, looking for the next viral hit or just a YouTube land-grab tend to forget this.

It is important to not simply create the YouTube channel and make it pretty, it is important to also upload all of the videos required as well, knowing what the most appropriate file type, file size, and file quality it appropriate for each particular application or requirement.  It is also important to customize the set-up based on how the client wants to share the content and with whom.

Online Video Distribution Services
Sometimes the community maintenance required for YouTube channel creation is too much for a particular client requirement or campaign and what is needed, instead, is a complete and comprehensive video upload to all of the current video sharing sites.

This video distribution service offers a quick and comprehensive upload to over 30 video upload and social network sites, including the usual suspects but also including many other less-popular and less well-known social networks; however, in order to best cover all possible opportunities for brand video sharing, it is always a good idea to make sure the client brand experience and client video assets always exist exactly where and when people are looking for them.

In addition, one of the largest ways people choose their video content in today’s market is through word-of-mouth and sharing, which we can help you ignite; however, a more predictable and common way of discovering content online – and the only way of discovering the content if the word of mouth does not include sharing links – is search. Doing a comprehensive video upload and distribution is a way of stacking the deck towards the discovery of the content organically by flooding the search engine indices with client content — which can result in the ownership of the content.  Video distribution is an important strategy towards controlling and promoting brand perception online – the secret sauce of the social web.

Facebook Page Creation
In the past, there were many methods for promoting on Facebook; however, Facebook is clamping down on Terms of Service (TOS) violations.  As a result of – and in response to – people creating profiles that do not reflect authentic people but brands, products, services, or fictional entities, Facebook has replaced business profiles and business groups with Facebook Pages.  Pages are entities not unlike profiles, and are becoming more and more like profiles. Like profiles, Pages have walls, updates, videos, events, and all the rest. Additionally, they interact with peoples’ statuses in much the same way that Facebook Profiles do.

When creating a Facebook Page or Group or Cause, it is important to remember that these Facebook Apps are community-oriented and need to be fed and watered.  The tools support community, conversation, and collaboration and many people develop these Facebook Pages as if they were a published brochure instead of a dynamic, developing, conversational community.  These communities are needy, more like a blog or like Twitter than anything like a page. A MySpace profile can be developed more like a proper web page, but Pages offer the opportunity to share Events, Conversation, Links, Discussion, Photos, Videos, etc. While they don’t have to be completely open and interactive, they do need to be responsive and there needs to be a certain level of maintenance and content creation committed to the Facebook Page.

There is a lot to know about the Pages, however, and there are many 3rd party tools and services that can be used to expand brand, including doing Facebook Ads and the like, to help promote the brand.

In order to best promote “fan” membership of a Facebook Page, one needs to be creative as to the reason why being a fan is worthwhile.  Some easy “gifts” can include exclusive content, Facebook-only offers, “live” interviews, access to celebrities or notables, etc.  When an online brand reputation

One of the things that makes Facebook Pages better than either Facebook Profiles or Facebook Groups is that the content is not hidden behind the Facebook Authentication Membership Wall.  More like MySpace profiles and groups, which are completely visible and partially accessible when not yet a registered member of the site, Facebook Pages are one of the few “rooms” in the mostly “gated community” of Facebook proper.  Facebook Pages can be indexed by search engines like a normal web page and found using simple keywords through Google, Live.com, Ask.com, and Yahoo!

One of the beautiful things about Facebook Pages is that Google loves Facebook more than just about any other web site (Google loves Twitter more) so brands that have a Facebook Page are often surprised by how quickly the Page turns up on the first page of search.

There are other ways of promoting brand on Facebook, which can include cross promotions with other Social Networks (have all of the networks aimed at the Page), organic SEO strategies, Facebook Ads, as well as incorporating a strong blogger outreach campaign aimed at brand promotion.

However, that said, it is hard to start a Facebook Page and we generally recommend starting with a Facebook Group.  It is much easier to prospect new memberships, invite new members, and get everything started from zero, so we often start with a Group, build that up to over 1,000 members, and then have the Group converted into becoming a Facebook Page, which is what we have the connections to do.  We call it the one-two sling-shot punch!

The advantage of a Facebook Page is that you can use it as a proxy web page for marketing and a proxy online community in support of your brand instead of developing or hosting your own; however, aside from being a “fan” of your company, brand, product, or service, there is little incentive, or “gift,” associated with ever returning to your Facebook Page unless you spend some time and resources developing unique content for the Page — Facebook Pages support photos, events, videos, message boards, a wall, etc –  as well as for responding to questions, queries, comments, and the like.

One of the strong advantages of smartly-but-aggressively developing messages, updates, photos, videos, and exclusive content is that the New Facebook Pages have evolved into me a lot more like the Original Facebook Profile, which includes status updates that scroll down each fan’s status update stream in exactly the same way their friends and family’s statuses update.

This is a very powerful method for brand messaging and distribution.  One of the past lacks of Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages is that it was too easy to join and forget, becoming a Group member or a Page fan and then never seeing hide nor hair of it until there was an explicit admin message to all members — a member update.

Even so, with Facebook Groups in the past, one was penalized by success because when a Facebook Group grow above 1,000-1,200 members, the ability to send a message to all members was revoked.

With the new Facebook Pages, it is easy to keep “fans” engaged and updates, through the regular status update stream that all users; unfortunately, as I mentioned above in the section about Facebook Groups, it is easier to prospect and collect new members on a Facebook Group and a Facebook Cause because it is very possible to easily invite personal Facebook “friends” to Groups and Causes.  When creating a brand profile on Facebook, it behooves one to develop all three: Facebook Page, Facebook Group, and Facebook Cause.

I watch my Video Podcasts via my Roku or via iTunes and an Apple TV or iPod. I watch YouTube via my T-Mobile Android G1 and you watch it via your iPhone. I know that Dan Krueger watches movies through his Xbox 360 and I know people browse the web via their Nintendo Wii.  No, according to Inside Facebook and Microsoft, people are checking and updating their Facebooks via Xbox Live via their Xbox 360s over their TVs:

Microsoft put out a press release yesterday touting the success of its Xbox Live console gaming network, and the company included some stats about its new integration with Facebook and other web services. In the week since Facebook became available, more than 2 million of Xbox Live’s 20 million “Active Members” have signed on to it.

Don’t tell Dell or Lenovo but Netbooks aren’t the least of their worries — the Internet and all the content therein is taking to the hills — you had better not get so attached to how your Flash site or your web site looks on a monitor over IE6 — this is all going to be consumed either via mobile (tiny screen) or vial consumer electronics (either massive or convenient screen).