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Being an Entrepreneur is only half the battle. Getting the exposure and press is crucial to your success. Learn from the masters on how to take publicity and press into your own hands. Here's the Powerpoint presentation Chris Abraham -- I -- would have presented but I am happy to share this one with the world!
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Do It Yourself (Online) Public Relations(Questions via hash tag #diypr)
Chris AbrahamPresident and COO
[email protected]@chrisabraham
US +1 202 657 4769UK +44 20 81 44 56 71DE +49 30 70 12 59 80
Site www.abrahamharrison.comBlog www.marketingconversation.com
Before We Start: Don't Be Seduced by the Lure of Astroturfing“You may be attracted to covert online marketing: special ops, black ops, spycraft – “fifth column marketing,” if you will. Don’t be. The blowback that can result from using a false name, a false email (a Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail address created for the campaign and the false name), and a false bio, isn’t worth it. Even though your reputation online is more defined by your contributions to the conversations rather than who you are, the culture of the Internet doesn’t suffer being fooled, duped, or suckered.”
If you are ever found out, you are screwed.
Online PR and Marketing
“Markets are Conversations”• “Through the Internet, the people in your
markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They're talking about your business. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices.”
• “These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999, by Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
http://www.cluetrain.com/book/
Social Media Strategy Set GoalsListenFind CommunitiesFind InfluencersContent StrategyPick ToolsDeliver ContentEngageFacilitateMeasure
Platform Agnosticism• Public Relations needs to become as
platform-agnostic as possible
• Traditional PR has suffered tragically from an inability to be platform-independent
• Radio, television, newspapers, co-op, telephone, newsletter, email, social networks, blogs, message boards, forums, email lists, etc...
• Where are your potential customers? Go – and be – there!
Cross Pollination is Key• Messaging is a continuum
• Prospecting and engaging is key
• Create outposts “everywhere”
• Meet people where they're comfortable, not where you want them to be
• Help them find their way – and you – there! (Via web sites, email lists, blog posts, direct mailings, etc)
• Make it – and keep it – super-simple
Widgets, Badges, Links• There are lots of ways to encourage
participation
• Twitter, Facebook, and others offer embed codes and scripts to allow you to cross-post and cross-pollinate between your social network profiles and your web pages and corporate sites – requiring little or no coding!
• Work hard on getting your boss or your designer to build in links to your profiles directly on your site. Even Fresh Air Fund ended up taking the leap!
Never Build Up a Ghost Town• Once you initiate creation of a social network
profile, page, blog, or group, mailing list or message board, commit!
• There is nothing worse than leaving a ghost town or elephant grave yard
• Most blogs and pages are abandoned
• To the persistent and consistent go the spoils
• Update at least once-a-week forever!
YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Etc.• We're so obsessed with Facebook we often
forget the power of Virtual Online Communities such as YouTube (yes, it is a community first), MySpace (it ain't dead yet), and Flickr (yes, also a community first, then a gallery space)
• Remember the niche social networks as well! Where do you need to be? Golfers? Photographers? Boomers? There are hundreds of niche SNS's with passionate community members (remember Ning?)
• Are you using the correct platform?
Brand Grab on Niche Sites• There are hundreds of social networks you
have never heard of.
• Grabbing your brand on each site is worthwhile, even if you squat
• Join every new service you hear of (Google Wave! Aardvard!) because you never know which one will get big! Huge!
• KnowEm http://knowem.com can help you register all of them for a quick $69
• Update them using Ping.fm http://ping.fm
Engagement Gap
The difference between the influence of the Internet in consumer decision making and the amount of spending and effort on the part of corporations, organizations and government agencies in trying to interact with and shape the thinking behind those decisions.Source: CMO Council January 2009
The Engagement Gap
What we are seeing is much stronger sensitivity to engage directly with customers and learn more about what shapes, influences and impacts purchasing decisions and intentions to do business.
The move to quantify "customer affinity" and increase "customer advocacy" has become a new measure of marketing effectiveness.
Source: CMO Council January 2009
Monitoring Conversations
Only 16% of US companies are monitoring the online conversations for mentions of their brand.
Source: AdAge
What Is Influencing Your Audience Today?
Search EnginesNews EnginesOther Websites BlogsMicro bloggingPeer ReviewsCommentsFeedsPodcastsVideoSocial NetworksSocial News SitesTagging
New Media Relations Strategy
• Direct to the public
• Bloggers• New online
media properties• Online
Journalists• Traditional
Journalists • News Sites• Social News
Sites
Social Networks Engagement
• Does the separation of work and home life exist? Should it?
• People are attracted to the flaws in other people.
• Being human is a selling point.
• “Wearing your baseball cap to the office”
• “Attend the party in your bowler hat”
• Controlled openness
The Bowler Hat Versus the Baseball Cap
• Like Social Networks, dinner parties are fun
• Candor and insight are valued at dinner parties
• Dinner parties are civilized events
• “Don't discuss religion or politics in polite company”
• Don't be scared, but realize, always, your vicar and boss are “in the room”
• That said, there's a lot to be had at a PG rating!
Dinner Party with the Boss and the Vicar
Twitter Engagement
• Twitter doesn't care if you believe in Twitter
• Twitter allows anyone to do anything with twitter and use it any way you like – except hurt others
• I guess Twitter is a Libertarian!
• You can use Twitter however you want: news feed, “what I'm doing,” for business, pleasure, engagement or voyeurism
Twitter Behaves Like a Digital Dial Tone
• There are many “best practices” that people are writing about Twitter
• Reject Twitterati dogma!
• Only rule: “do no harm”
• Create ten account or one! @chrisabraham @robochris @abrahamharrison @marcon
• Try one for your business and one for yourself
• Have some fun!
Don't Take too Much Advice on Twitter
@FreshAirFund as Exemplar
Following People on Twitter
Following-Back and Unfollowing Non-Followers
Follow the Influencers and the People They Follow
Follow the Influencers and the People They Follow
FAF Twitter Message Modeling
Crossposting Retweets via Ping.fm
Seesmic Desktop is our new fave tool to help manage, update, and respond to multiple campaigns from one desktop too.
TweedDeck now offers multi-account tools and a web services that allows you to maintain state across multiple platforms and machines (Apple and PC)
Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts
Automating Tedious Twitter Tasks
Resist the Auto-Welcome DM Temptation
Twitter is Now: When You Should Tweet
While they may call Twitter a microblogging platform, please don't confuse tweeting with blogging.
Twitter has more in common with IM, ham radio, and commercial radio than it has with blogging
Growth of @FreshAirFund Over Time
Since we have implemented the strategies we have outlined, we have been able to blow the carbon out of the @FreshAirFund Twitter campaign.
Cross-promoting the @FreshAirFund Twitter account via email, Facebook Groups and Pages has helped accelerate the profile of their Twitter account.
Twitter Isn't a Broadcast Medium
Twitter Isn't a Broadcast Medium
#followfriday is a weekly opportunity for tweeple, tweeps, and Twitterers to share the people who they're currently following who they recommend for others to follow. What a gift of support!
Search and Engage with Your Tweeps
Search and Engage with Your Tweeps
• Search Twitter for mentions persistently:– Search for company: “Abraham Harrison”– Search for services: “digital PR” or “social media
marketing,” “blogger relations”– Search for products: “blogger outreach”– Search for staff: “chris abraham”– Search for locale: “Berlin,” “Washington”– Search for yourself: “abrahamharrison”– Search for questions you can answer
• Follow them, answer questions, reach out, say hello!
Search and Engage with Your Tweeps
No Twitter Community-Building Panacea
• All community-building takes time• There are many promises but few
panaceas• If you're a big celebrity or brand
already, you're golden!
From Your Blog to Twitter's Sphere
From Your Blog to Twitter's Sphere
Facebook Engagement
• Facebook is awesome & everyone uses it
• FB is a walled-garden
• I have over 4k friends
• You can only reach people who are your friends – remember that
• Profiles are for people only; other uses break Terms-of-Services
• Choose Pages for corporate work
Facebook Profiles Versus “Fan” Pages
• What you do is who you are, or part
• facebook.com/chrisabraham
• Feel free to share with your friends
• I accept all friend requests and have over 4,000
• My FB friends are as valuable as a lobbyist's fabled “Rolodex”
• Both many friends and a broad base of friends
• People don't read everything but they get to know you as a person
Facebook Personal Profiles
• Pages are more like Personal Profiles than ever and becoming more like Twitter too
• Personal URL with > 100 fans
• faceook.com/abrahamharrison
• All updates run through the same status updates personal updates to, now.
• Pages can be open to the Internet
• Very hard to prospect for new fans short of promoting for money through Facebook
Facebook Pages
• On Facebook and Twitter – and on your blog – your followers and friends will tell you where the line is
• Update your status too often and your friends will ask you to cut it out, in the best case, and will unfollow you in droves; in the worst case, they'll block you and report you as spam!
• Aggregate too many RSS feeds in or Retweet badly or cross promote wily-nilly, and the same thing, or worse
• Please don't be afraid, experiment, just listen!
• PS: I have made all the mistakes and I am still OK.
Your Followers Will Tell You When Not To
Blogging is Not Dead!
Blogging Still Rules!
• The demise of blogging has been greatly exaggerated!
• I encourage students to blog their way into jobs
• I encourage companies to blog their way into:– Their own online conversation– Respected authority– Internet celebrity (#114 on Power150)– Organic search domination
Why Blog?• Zero barrier-to-entry – free services like
Wordpress.com and Blogger are as good and as prestigious as fancy blogs – and sometimes better!
• Blogs are highly-textual – blogs have more pages, more text, and more links than your corporate web site, quadruply so if your site is Flash
• Blogs are application – they offer comments, RSS news feeds, permalinks, user-readable URLs, social tools, and so much more!
• Blogs are like cat-nip to Google!
Using Your Blog to Flirt
• Search for all the blogs and bloggers in your industry and space, even competitors
• Subscribe in Google Reader, etc.
• Read their posts once-a-day (both for news and to foster ideas for your blog)
• Visit their blog and make yourself known by commenting
• Even better, blog a response and link back
Using Your Blog as Cred
• The reason why I am so successful in digital PR is because I am a blogger
• The Law of “Who the Hell are You?”
• Bloggers use Google and will Fisk!
• Blogger engagement by bloggers is key
• The who concept of “By us, for us.”
• Otherwise, you're a shill or a user...
Blogger Engagement
Blogger Harvesting and Prospecting
1. Who do you need to reach?– Activists, animal lovers, educators, parents, moms,
dads, politicos, the faithful, shoppers, travelers, sports fans, marketers, democrats, environmentalists, foodies, greens, Los Angelinos, New Yorkers, college grads, Pennsylvanians, etc…
2. Where do they spend time and doing what?– Are they bloggers, on Facebook, Twittering, on
YouTube, etc…
Blogger Harvesting and Prospecting3. Develop lists of blogs and their bloggers
• Search Google for exactly what you want “Top mommy blogs,” “best green blogs”
• Leverage blogrolls like you would endnotes
• Bloglines’ Most Popular Feeds,http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs
• Technorati Top 100 Blogs, http://technorati.com/pop/blogs
• Technorati Blog Directory http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/
• AllTop http://alltop.com/
Topic Universe Example
• We have tried many different styles and this is where we are:
– Short, terse, minimal, highly textual, with a clear message and a clear request
– Any verbiage that sounds like it is selling or marketing must be removed
– All assets, graphics, movies, or videos are collected into a “microsite” or “SMNR”
– Do not include conversion GIFs, hyperlinks, hot emails, images, or attachments
Example of an Outgoing Message
Example of an Outgoing Message
The SMNR (Steal this Content)
• As you might have noticed, our pitches are very spare
• We offload all content, message, keywords, images, links, and videos onto what is essentially a microsite
• It is convenient for our clients and handy for our outreaches
• We can get metrics and not have to change our clients’ websites
Respond Quickly & With Love• At Abraham Harrison, we don’t use autoresponders or let emails wait
until morning. When we send out an email outreach, we staff the INBOX almost constantly over the next hours and days
• If a blogger gets pissed off by a pitch, we have only minutes to respond
• A personal, immediate, and human response can make the difference between earning a blog post or being forwarded to Bad Pitch Blog
• When you respond, never lock horns or rise to the bait – people have busy, complex, lives:
• "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" -- Philo of Alexandria
• Always respond with either support or desperate Mea Maxima Culpa!
Respond Quickly & With Love
Tracking Responses & Mentions• Be sure to always track who
replies.
• Also, be sure to remove anyone who asks immediately.
• Don’t hesitate to ask your bloggers to pop you the link to their post when they say that they will
• Also, don’t hesitate to hold a blogger accountable for posting if he offers
Follow-Up Boldly and Proudly
Proof is in the Pudding
Earned Media Mentions
Earned Media Mentions
Metrics & Reporting
Metrics & Reporting• These charts represent volume of social
media mentions over time• The green dots represent our blogger PR
outreach• Spikes in conversation map perfectly with
our digital PR engagement
Metrics & ReportingThis chart compares the same time frame in two different years
Metrics & ReportingThis chart breaks online mentions into social media platform
Reputation Management
Online Reputation Management Defined• Online reputation management, or
ORM, is the practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across all types of online media. It is also sometimes referred to as online reputation monitoring, maintaining the same acronym.
• AKA Search Engine Image Protection (SEIP) Also known as Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)
Online Reputation Management Defined
• ORM partly formed from a need to manage consumer generated media (CGM)
• The Cluetrain Manifesto speaks to the ease with which one may initiate and amplify conversation online …
• You need to participate, engage, communicate!
Google Alerts & Tweet Beep• Google Alerts are your friend
• Use it liberally
• Learn Google search arguments– “chris abraham”– [chris abraham]– chris+abraham– chris OR abraham– Chris-abraham
• www.google.com/alerts
Mandatory Alerts and Monitoring
• Negative conversation can still start on message boards
• Twitter can be like wild fire• Blogs are still powerful• Keep your eyes on the Web!
If You Can't Remove It, Hide It
Countermeasure: Decoys, Chaff, Flares
• A countermeasure is a system (usually for a military application) designed to prevent sensor-based weapons from acquiring and/or destroying a target.
• Preemptive action of countermeasures is directed to generally prevent lock-on of a threat sensor to a certain target. It is based on altering the signature of the target by either concealing the platform signature or enhancing the signature of the background, thus minimizing the contrast between the two.
• Reactive action of countermeasures is directed toward break-lock of a threat already homing in on a certain target. It is based on the tactics of signature imitation, augmentation, or reduction.
• One or more of the following actions may be taken to provide softkill:
- Reduction of signature– Going stealth or going offline
- Augmentation of signature– Duck decoys, squid ink, anti surface-to-air
missile flares and chaff
Countermeasure: Decoys, Chaff, Flares
Preemptive Countermeasures: Inoculation• Chris Abraham Blog• Marketing Conversation• Abraham Harrison LLC• Twitter Page• Facebook Profile• LinkedIn Profile• YouTube Director• Flickr Profile• Friendster Profile• Jaiku Page• Pownce Page (RIP)• Tumblr Page• Utterli Profile• Friendfeed Profile• QIK Profile
Dominate Your Search Results
Cleaning Up a Crime Scene• Most clients want a clean up• Generally, clean ups are done after the
reputation “crime” occurs• Sometimes, we're retained during the
crime, to minimize exposure• Crisis management ORM campaigns
are like repairing homes during a rocket attack
Case Study: The Poor Maligned Pig
Each Search Engine is Very Different
Each Search Engine is Very Different
Chum Thyself into Social Networks• autoki.com
• autoki.de
• bebo.com
• blip.tv
• blogger.com
• blorkut.com
• bluedot.com
• broadcaster.com
• buzznet.com
• classmates.com
• crackle.com
• cyloop.com
• dandelife.com
• del.icio.us
• digg.com
• en.netlog.com
• en.sevenload.com
• facebook.com
• flickr.com
• flixster.com
• flugpo.com
• friendster.com
• gather.com
• gawkk.com
• hi5.com
• hollywood.com
• imdb.com
• imeem.com
• indenti.ca
• jaiku.com
• jappy.de
• kewego.com
• librarything.com
• librarything.de
• linkedin.com
• livejournal.com
• livevideo.com
• login.live.com
• lusitaniansonline.com
• megavideo.com
• metacafe.com
• migente.com
• multiply.com
• my.opera.com
• mychurch.com
• mychurch.org
• mycorners.com
• mygrito.com
• myspace.com
• ning.com
• photobucket.com
• ping.fm
• plazes.com
• plurk.com
• quepasa.com
• rateitall.com
• searchles.com
• shelfari.com
• skyrock.com
• sonico.com
• soundpedia.com
• spaces.live.com
• spanglish.ie
• spock.com
• stumbleupon.com
• tabulas.com
• tagged.com
• takingitglobal.org
• travbuddy.com
• tumblr.com
• twango.com
• twitter.com
• upcoming.yahoo.com
• utterli.com
• viddler.com
• video.msn.com
• video.yahoo.com
• videos.google.com
• vidoosh.tv
• vimeo.com
• vostu.com
• vox.com
• wamba.com
• wordpress.com
• xanga.com
• xing.com
• xuqa.com
• yahoo.com
• yasni.de
• yelp.com
• youtube.com
Domain Name Strategy
• Google indexes domain names the way it indexes page text.
• Domain names are the cheapest part of the entire online reputation game
– $6-$25/year, depending• Registrar?• Private registration?
– Too many folks get frugal here
Every URL is Sacred
Defensive SEO• We'll often populate a number of domains with a number of
blogs using a number of platforms – by hand over time...
• Our job is to promote deep links that are positive and neutral and ignore negative listings
• We'll create between 5-25+ of these “aggregator” and “boing boing” sites in order to bring attention to deep, old links
Defensive SEO• The goal is not to promote the sites we build
• Our goal is to promote everybody else's sites• At least all the POS and NEUT stuff!
• We only use real content.
• We promote all listings that are positive and neutral, even “off-brand”
– Deep search results are pretty spacey– “Chris Wilson of 235 North Abraham
Lane”
Thank You for Attending Today!
To get slide show decks and videos, check here:
•http://www.slideshare.net/chrisabraham
•http://youtube.com/chrisabraham
Chris AbrahamPresident and COO
[email protected]@chrisabraham
