Tag Archives: Abraham Harrison

Fire for effect when you can’t get a bead on your market

I’ve run a social media marketing agencies since Autumn 2006. In that time, we’ve learned quite a lot. One of my biggest learnings is that you can’t always get a direct bead on your demographic target — and that’s OK.

We’ve worked for a broad spectrum in these five years, from health care and pharma to huge radio astronomy projects; from global non-profits to very specific public affairs campaigns. Social media marketing and blogger outreach and activation can be effective for everything, though it isn’t always clear how. B2B seems to be the least confident that social can help them but I believe we have really sorted it out:

If you cannot target your dream customer directly, you can target everyone around him

I call this “fire for effect” which is a term taken from artillery for when you don’t quite know where your target is or your target’s well-guarded or sheltered. So, what you do instead is you fire downrange, doing your best to either step your shells closer and closer to the true target or to just use the shock and awe of incoming high explosive shrapnel shells going off everywhere else, distracting and engaging powerfully but indirectly. (In artillery, you generally try to have someone down range, a forward observer, who can help you drop your mortars closer and closer, called adjusting your indirect fire, which I will discuss further along.)

Let me bring this analogy back to social media marketing

In two instances, I have seen indirect social media marketing work wonders. 80% of what we at Abraham Harrison do is long-tail blogger outreach. Instead of “sniping” at just the top-25 most influential bloggers in any one vertical, we dig deep and often come up with between 2,000-10,000 relevant blogs. Most client projects make it easy for their general appeal; however, in a couple notable cases, firing for effect was the only thing we could really do: targeting health care providers for a client that sells health care devices and targeting astronomers for a global radio telescope project.

What we quickly realized is that not only were the doctors and scientists that my clients most desired generally not blogging, they were also very busy and quite invulnerable to the sort of blogger PR pitches we were wont but they were also unpredictable and often volatile.

Doctors were almost impossible to access directly and scientists tended to be impolite whenever they received a plea via email from someone they didn’t know — typical A-lister behavior.

What we needed to do was to brainstorm and expand our campaigns to include everyone around the doctors. Since the campaign was a public affairs campaign on hospital acquired infection-prevention, we brainstormed on who else is in the space — targeting the “ground” immediately around the docs, expanding as far out as we had budget and time.

Who did we come up with? Well, nurses, orderlies, caregivers, parents of elderly parents, partners of the elderly, people with immunosuppressive diseases, parents of sickly children, pregnant women, nursing students, medical students, public policy bloggers — the list was thousands of blogs and bloggers long. All the earth around the OR, an impenetrable fortress, was razed and we super-saturated the blogosphere, the twittersphere, and the Facebookesphere with discussion, mentions, messaging, excerpting, and commentary about the very real issue of healthcare associated infections in today’s hospitals and clinics: ventilator-associated pneumonia, surgical site infections, cross contamination, etc.

The same thing with the scientists who are associated with the radio telescope campaign. The scientists were there, they were just snippy, so instead of risking too much negative feedback, we instead isolated them and instead reached out to everyone around them: science nerds, space geeks, techies, amateur astronomers, sky watchers, backyard astronomers, and stargazers.

When it comes to blogger outreach and engagement, the goal is never to convert the blogger into a customer, I must remind you, but is always to message through the blogger onto his or her blog as a post, tweet, retweet, or wall post. If the blogger is a gatekeeper, a blockade, to the blog and the blog’s readers (and to the spiders and bots, busily indexing links and content for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!), then you must abandon them and move on to the more accessible publications — generally the hobbyists, the amateurs, and the aspirants of the social media and blogosphere.

Amateur hobbyist bloggers are generally hungrier, more available, more grateful, and don’t have the hundreds of “date offers” that journalists, professionals, or A-listers generally have — they’re interested in making a name and are generally pretty amazed when a brand or an agency is sensitive and generous around to notice a blog that’s not solidly in the A-list and are generally really appreciative and open to building an authentic relationship.

Why do all of this? Why expend all this energy and munitions on indirect fire?

The obvious answer is to smoke them out. Since we’re often able to start a wildfire of blog posts, tweets, likes, retweets, and Facebook shares, there’s really nowhere for these well-fortified A-listers, scientists, professionals, and surgeons to hide.

And since all of the messaging, all the wildfire, is no longer coming from up range, from our battery, then it is no longer associated with us or our clients. Now, the wildfire is owned by the blogosphere instead of the client or my agency.

This means that the public affairs messaging, the content from our social media news releases, and the emailing back and forth between my crack team of online analysts and the hundreds of bloggers who take up the flag of our outreach, become detached from the final end-product: the rash of intense conversation, posting, tweeting, and retweeting that has all of a sudden lit up the social mediasphere like day actually comes from an impressive number of bloggers and readers from the space and not, at the end of the day, directly from us — so, it is much more likely that these unassailable influencers will end up, at the end of the day, be influenced anyway, without ever being pitched directly by us.

We have seen this happen time and time again, so much so that we have cliches for these things: priming the pump, setting the stage, tenderizing the steak, fertilizing the field — and, of course, carpet bombing (I like that last one the best, but my management team wants me to stop using military analogies, so please forgive me for all the above).

At the end of the day, the results outlive the campaign on organic search

When hundreds of blogs and tweets are published online — public, archived, and indexed — most of which link to your client’s social media news release, web site, issue page, or landing page — hundreds of posts from a diversity of blogs and sources, almost always focused on a very impassioned three-week span. While I don’t condone link-farming or any black hat or even grey hat tactics, earned media mentions — where “earned media” means that you make the offer — the pitch — to the blogger and the blogger decides if and when he or she will post and how he or she will post.

Some bloggers post the our pitch email directly to their blog and that’s cool. A majority mention that they received a pitch from us and our client as well as excerpting and blockquoting a sizable amount of our very own copy from our social media news release. A minority actually spend the time to go in and write up a brand new piece, researched and contextualized, and we love those, too. We’re realistic: we’re reaching out to someone, asking for their help, not paying them anything at all except attention, and then expect them to do us a solid and actually post about our clients for free? Well, we’re always darned grateful for just about any mention — even, believe it or not, the spiny ones. It’s all good.

And, at the end of the day, as they say, any publicity is good publicity as long as they link our client’s name, product, services, and keywords as close to right as possible.

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Unison named me head of their social media practice

I am happy to announce that I have been named Director, Social Media, of Unison, a branding and digital agency here in historic Georgetown. Here’s some coverage from Everything PR via Phil Butler:

One of the web’s most influential social media practitioners and evangelists, Chris Abraham has been named Director of Unison’s social media practice .

The Unison Agency just announced having appointed Chris Abraham as their head of social media. Abraham, former President of Abraham Harrison, LLC, will be responsible for the direction and leadership of Unison’s social media practice, overseeing the integration of social media across all Unison’s products and services. Unison’s Co-Founder and President, Robert Fardi, had this to say about Abraham’s naming:

“Chris Abraham is a rarity in digital experts, someone who can boast a 20-year track record in online communities and a combination of skills in PR, marketing and technology. We look forward to tapping those skills and bringing them to our global client base.”

A rarity indeed. Since about the time there was a form of digital engagement, Chris Abraham has helped in practice, evangelism, and developmentally to refine the dynamics of online community development, social media, social networking, and online collaboration. Our own founders interacted since when with Chris via just about every social network ever named. As far back as 1999, Abraham was already honing skills and community via blogging and connecting.

Abraham is not only a fixture on the social networks, but his expertise can be gleaned via any number of key online publications such as; The Huffington Post, ChrisAbraham.com, Biznology.com, and Socialmedia.biz, among the many others.

Abraham has been named a “Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer by Forbes”, among his many other professional accolades. As for Unison, the company is a leading global digital agency headquartered in Washington, D.C., and with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, that leverages technology to help promote brands via digital channels. The company was founded back in 2003 by now President Robert Fardi and Creative Director R. Julius Talvik.

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A synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO

I am very grateful to Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz for doing the work that explains a little better how social media, online social networks, and the real-time web heavily influence the results that Google proffers when we search in the form of Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings.

I have been doing this since 2003 for various agencies sort of by feel. But here’s a compilation of the results of Mr. Shepard’s experiments:Firstly, the real-time search you had been seeing from Google was highly-reliant on a direct firehose from Twitter, which has been mysteriously cut:

The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed. The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared – all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.

The direct result is that launching Google+, whether it was ready or not, was mandatory. Real time search of the real time web is essential in order to be competitive with Facebook and especially Twitter — the epitome of the real-time web — and so Google Plus is not an option, it is a requirement:

For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to

calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.

With realtime results on, a highly-influential tweet, widely retweeted, could end up as the #2 result on Google within a couple hours. For reals. Not the old answer of, “I think we can get you onto the front page of Google within six months, no guarantee,” the natural SEO shop response of the past.

What my analysis is is that Google Abhors a Vacuum and so in the absence of a reliable realtime feed, Google will turn its algorithmic knobs and change the weighting to prioritize other sources such as the humble blog and other sources such as possibly Tumblr and Posterous — the closest thing to Twitter without being too bloggy, as well as location-based services that could possibly prioritize swarming behavior, location-aware live video, live photography, and lifestreaming.

Anyway, back to the facts from Mr. Shepard who has made a point of answering a lot of the questions I posited above with the following evidence:

After Google announced that they no longer used direct Twitter data, Rand created a previously unindexed webpage and tweeted it to his followers. Within 10 minutes, Google picked up a tweet scraper, but not the original post. After an hour we realized a mistake. We had inadvertently included a meta NOINDEX tag in the head of the webpage. Doh! After quick removal of the tag, it took Bing a full 6 hours to index the original URL, but still no Google. Not until 8 hours after the original tweet did Google index our URL. Eventually it ranked #1 for its targeted keyword phrase.

Google is indexing for effect, it seems, requiring triangulation from secondary references and auto-cross-posts from Twitter to sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo — and even Topsy — and the other secondary outlets, which can make a real mess of permalinks, an especially maddening thing when you’re developing a social media strategy that is must result in a directly-traceable set of metrics.

The SEO traceroute needs always be as direct and and quick as possible and cannot and should not be bounced all over the bloody earth. The good news, according to Shepard is:

Even without the Twitter firehose, it seems the Twitter effect still finds ways of maneuvering into Google’s search results.

But, much less directly but only because Twitter is the source, it is the spring, the font, from which many other indexing platforms, such as Topsy and Tweetmeme, get the grist for their mill — in other words, Google is working ever harder to pan as close to the gold vein as possible but really cannot get there any more but pans just downstream.

The secret here is now each and every tweet needs to break through a barrier into the “recommended tweets” and “top tweets” — effectively needing to make it as close to being a trending topic as possible, so that the secondary consumers — the Topies of the world — take notice of your work. In other words, we’ll need retweets now more than ever before:

The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above. With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.

A caveat, however, is that all of this is some more 3D chess: even if you start getting loads of retweets — for example, setting it up so that everyone in your multinational, global, company retweets everything you post to Twitter — that’s only the first part.

The next, more important, part is that you’ll also need to add Klout, Twitter Ranking, Social Mention, Twitter Counter, TweetStats, etc.In other words, you need to be both popular and important.

Popular without importance suggests fraud and gaming unless there is a secondary and tertiary rash of retweets, suggesting that maybe this low-caste, low-importance tweet contains new that is highly important, timely, rare, and powerful in much the same way that the influence and importance — where in the A-list you are listed — is conferred to you.

Well, search is a continuity of tactics and strategies. All of the tools that worked a decade ago are still being considered as part of the algorithm. Information architecture and proper SEO strategy is essential still, no matter how influential social media, online social networks, and personal and brand prestige have become, it is still only a portion of what really put you, solidly, reliably, on page one of Google.

While social can get you there for a couple hours, a proper organic search engine optimization strategy will help nail you to the first page. Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz says it best in his last line of his article:

Tweets or Google shares alone don’t yet equate to long term ranking nirvana. Employing a synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO savvy provides the best recipe for success.

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How NOT to pitch a blogger

I talked about how blogger outreach is scary, and I talked about why this fear exists for most people before they start talking to bloggers. In great measure, these fears exist because of the horror stories that have resulted from wrong-headed approaches.

In the five years that we’ve been reaching out to bloggers, we’ve learned just as much about how NOT to pitch as we’ve learned about the right ways. The main thing to keep in mind is how you feel when you are on the receiving end of a misguided PR pitch. If you just stick with that mindset, you’ll avoid the lion’s share of pitching mistakes.

Now, I have been getting pitches for my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, since 2004 or so. Now, Marketing Conversation gets loads of pitches as well. Some of the insulting things that abuse me to no end include sending your pitch to “Dear Blogger,” or to “Abraham” when my name is Chris Abraham.

I can generally tell when a compliment is hollow: they’re either too general or way too recent and specific. It is very easy for even the least sophisticated of my fellow bloggers to sense sucking up or kissing up, especially if you haven’t done any homework or any research at all.

Also, if you don’t have your formatting sorted and it looks like you obviously copied and pasted back and forth and I can make out weird spacing and a strange mixture of fonts and sizes, I can tell you’re probably cutting corners and doing things carelessly and without concern for how I will perceive it–as though half-assed is all I am worth since I am not a Mashable or TechCrunch. People don’t like it when they can obviously tell that you’re going through the motions until something else better comes along. Bloggers will always call you out if they sense you’re just calling it in.

No, I also don’t blame the agents too much. They’re often understaffed, juggling too many balls, have insufficient experience, or lack technological skills and are just doing their best. The agencies are why these agents are oftentimes coming up short. And, at the end of the day, many agencies have given up on earned media because earned media can be risky and it can oftentimes be an all or nothing venture. Outreach failure is easily possible when there is very little cultural awareness and understanding of how best to appeal to these thousands and thousands of very real people who wield very real power and influence over popular consensus and perception.

Perhaps the only thing you’ve come away from this article is that you need to hire me in order to get some of that white-hat link-farming SEO love. So, let me warn you: it doesn’t work unless you spend a lot of time, money, energy, and creativity to actually put together a plausible and meaningful PR campaign.

Bloggers did not fall of a turnip truck. If they don’t see the value in the pitch, they won’t post; if they fancy that you’re just asking them to post because you want to vampire bat on their Google juice, then you’re likely to be in a whole lot of #fail and possibly a whole lot of pain. The white-hat link-farm organic SEO pwn effect is only secondary if you are, the entire way along, a total Mensch and have amazing assets, viral-quality video, a great pitch, an accurate target, and a gentle, kind, and generous follow-through.

It is sort of like dating. You need to remain present during the entire date and not even get angry or resentful–or hostile–if you are not invited upstairs for a night cap. If you’re caught just calling it in and going through the motions, just being on the date because you’re hoping to get lucky at the end of the night, you’re likely to end up either hurting someone else’s feelings or destroying your reputation. Enjoy the company, enjoy the date, enjoy the diversion, enjoy the desert, enjoy the wine, enjoy the walk in the park, enjoy the play, enjoy the coffee, and then be surprised and appreciative when and if you’re invited upstairs for a night cap.

If you are truly present in blogger outreach, and what you do is driven by what’s good for the blogger as well as what’s good for you, you might be pleased with the results.

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Target Twitter audiences of every size with a theory of everyone

Photo credit: Fora do Eixo

Well, as you all know who read this blog, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I believe that anyone who spends their time and talent online are online influencers and potential important brand ambassadors. Marketers balk with visions of lost dollar signs, especially when the in-house social media communications professional generally balances email newsletter, traditional PR and site copy. Marketers forget that influencers aren’t necessary partial to the brand, with the loyalty of a salary or paycheck. They may, shocker, actually be genuinely interested in the topic.

Leveraging the brand’s equity to build one’s own brand is common, a fame narcotic if you will. While I encourage each one of my colleagues to build their own brand equity I need them to maintain egalitarian and democratic values when engaging online on behalf of clients. I don’t want them to lose their tone and voice, I just want them to filter it depending on the audience.

Don’t know where to start? Well, I know for a fact that there’s a guy in Brazil who will hook you up with thousands of Brazilian tweeters almost immediately for a fee. That’s somewhere to start. Once you’ve bought your online friends, you have to deliver the je ne sais quois to keep them. If you suck, are salesy, don’t tweet or post very often, are selfish, don’t play games or bait conversation, don’t give til it hurts, even all of these thousands of purchased followers will start unfollowing you almost immediately.

It is sort of like being an opening act to U2: you might have 30,000 folks who didn’t come to see you who are there to see Bono but there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever buy your album. There’s every reason they should but you really could make a mess of it — if they don’t, it is your fault as they were your customers to lose. Same thing with buying followers and likes. If the targeting is completely off, if you suck as a host, or if you’re boring or rude, they’re gone — at least the real ones are.

Stated simply, the state of the art in social media is still bespoke, based on old models of public relations where each particular PR agent has a Rolodex and that card represents years and years of personal relationships . Very precious and personal connections, formed and tempered over time, built on trust.

And, this very same framework has been mapped directly into social media where many agencies and companies spend all of their time taking their current 25 mainstream media contacts and 25 social media contacts to dinners at Mortons. There’s not enough budget or time to prospect much further or deeper than that.

Which is a sincere pity.

How can one take an old PR model that only concerns itself with an easy-to-manage elite core of gate-keeping journalists, publishers, and broadcasters and map that onto a new media model? A model that could potentially include anyone and everyone who should decide to commit to starting blogging. Producing content for online consumption, resulting in becoming an online influencer. It’s like the circle of success.

In this theory of everyone, in this theory of long tail digital PR outreach and engagement, it is essential to find viable ways of 1) discovering everyone — because there are potentially a lot of people that show up in your net when you’re being inclusive and indiscriminate 2) keeping that list up-to-date as blogs are launched and shuttered every day.

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