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.

Related articles

• Being Pretty Isn’t Enough for Social Media Success (socialmedia.biz)
• Being Pretty Isn’t Enough for Social Media Marketing (biznology.com)
• Advice To Help You Succeed In Social Media Marketing (ronmedlin.com)
• Ten social media stats that SMEs should know about (marketing.yell.com)
• Eight ways to measure how effective your social media efforts are (marketing.yell.com)
• Is It Possible For A Business To Survive Without Using Social Media? (superdoodadsblog.wordpress.com)
• How to get more Facebook likes for your fan page (marketing.yell.com)
• How to make the most of the new YouTube redesign (marketing.yell.com)
• Daily Dose Social Media Tip of the Day – Don’t get caught up in numbers (jcsocialmarketing.com)
• One Size Fits All Social Media – Is There Such a Thing? (socialmediaexplorer.com)

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?
The Daily is absolutely free for 2 weeks. Then it’s just 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. If you’re interested in the math, that’s around 14 cents or 11 cents a day, respectively — far less than any traditional newspaper that we’ve seen. And every day’s issue has the amount of content you might expect from a monthly magazine, many of which cost $2.99-$5.99 for a single issue. The Daily is currently available exclusively on the App Store. If you already have an iTunes account you don’t even need to pull out your credit card.

How do I download the latest issue every day?
Just open The Daily app on your iPad when it’s connected to the Internet via WiFi or 3G. The latest issue will start downloading automatically. You can begin reading almost immediately. No need to wait for the whole issue to download; it will continue in the background as you read.

Do I need to be connected to the Internet to read The Daily ?
Once you’ve downloaded the day’s issue, there is no need to be connected. All the articles, text and photos will be there; you only need a live connection to stream videos that you’ll find throughout the issue, to pull in the live feeds attached to some articles, and to comment and share. The long and short of it is, there’s plenty to read and do in The Daily when you’re on the subway or otherwise out of range. Being connected makes it better.

Why the iPad?
The Daily was created to take advantage of everything tablet computing can do. Without the legacy of print or even a destination web site, we can focus exclusively on a great tablet computing experience. The iPad offers an incredible reading experience, and being the first of its kind also means there is an existing reader base that can take advantage of The Daily. In the coming months we’ll announce The Daily’s availability on Android tablets, and we’ll also be considering other platforms as people adopt them.

What about sharing with friends that don’t have iPads?
While The Daily lives on the iPad, web-friendly versions of most of its articles can be easily shared via Facebook, Twitter and email. Hit the ‘share’ button at the top right of the app to try it. While the full tablet experience is unavoidably lost in translation, the text, photos and video aren’t — and quite often that’s enough to share articles conversationally with friends and colleagues.
You can also find some of our content on our blog, http://blog.thedaily.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo for updates and more.

You can also follow The Daily on all the normal social media sites:

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: