Tag Archives: personality

Erika Mauer Was My Neighbor in Berlin

Berlin is surely the coolest city on earth. Erika La Tour Eiffel (AKA Erika Mauer) was my next-door neighbor for a while in Berlin.  She is an Objectum Sexual and here is her story! (You can watch all of the episodes here):


Don’t let the unique nature of her sexual orientation to turn you off to her.  She’s a badass and have accomplished amazing things in her 37+ years. She is coo, she is creative, and she is unique, for sure! I like her, she’s cool and doing cool things and definitely living her life her way.
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Social Media Promotes Your Business

1824234195 e6b913c563 m Social Media Promotes Your Business
Image by luc legay via Flickr

You are not too late to enjoy the benefits of social media — you will never be too late — because the spoils in social media marketing go to the company that can maintain its social media participation over the long haul over the long term. Start now, start later, and I guarantee that if you’re a lion-hearted social media marathoner, you’ll probably best your competition.  Anyway, Joseph Ratliff did a brilliant job getting you motivated in How The Social Media Promotes Your Business:

The great thing about social media marketing is it offers a place to talk about your business in a new setting that is a lot less threatening than many other types of advertising. Social media is not about the hard sell. Instead, it focuses on creating relationships with people. Social media allows business people to share some of their personal lives with others. This helps to overcome any fear or reservations connected to buying from people online.

If you’ve started a blog for your business, you already have your foot in the water. The next logical step is to begin commenting on other blogs related to your business. Spend some time searching for a few blogs that you enjoy and subscribe to them via an RSS feeder to manage your time. This will allow you to follow several blogs without having to go to each one every day. When you find a post you can contribute a useful comment to, go to the site and offer your thoughts. Leave a link, if you can, so the audience can link to your own blog. Make this a part of routine at least three times a week.

Next, choose one or two social media communities to join. There are dozens and dozens out there, so do not try to become visible everywhere. Two of the most popular social media communities for business networking are Twitter and Facebook. Both of these are effective sites to increase your relationship building skills with prospects. Combine some personal tidbits with some business information until you discover the perfect mix of both. Do not just focus on building big numbers of friends or followers. It isn’t all about the numbers. Instead, build a little slower and spend your time interacting with the people you meet.

Social Media Promotes Your Business

SEO Strategies Aren’t Either Or But Both

Nick from Search Engine Optimization Journal says it short, sweet, and right on, Is Organic SEO Really Your Best Option?

For years SEO practitioners have been proclaiming the virtues of organic SEO. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not PPC. Etc. By the same token, PPC experts have been signing the praises of PPC – it’s fast, it’s dynamic, it’s targeted traffic, and it’s not organic SEO. Does it really matter?

Personally, I think that your Internet marketing efforts should all work together. It’s not a matter of SEO vs. PPC. It’s more a matter of whether or not you are targeting your traffic through the tools that are available to you, and organic SEO is one tool at your disposal. And it’s a valuable tool.

Organic SEO is about targeting the keywords that are important to your business and achieving business results for your targeting efforts. There’s more to it than simply picking keywords out of a vacuum and throwing them against the wall. The idea is to target the keywords that searchers looking for a service or product like yours would use to find it. If you can identify the keywords that the market thrives on then you can drive traffic to your website. You can do this through organic SEO and PPC as well as through other avenues.

The only thing I might add is the power of digital PR, blogger outreach, and online engagement to help out your war of search placement; otherwise, this is the best I have read in quite a while.

This is not a game of panaceas, it is a game of content-creation, site architecture, organic SEO strategies, PPC, and all the rest, over time.  SEO is about consistance, predictability, and is much more of a war than it is a battle.

Mind you, try not too lose to many battles along the way.

An Interview with Martin Oetting of Germany's trnd

Cross-posted on SocialMedia.biz — As  part of my exploration of branding and communication around the world, I am starting a series of interviews with as many European and world-wide movers-and-shakers as are willing to submit themselves to my barrage of probing questions.

I was inspired to start this series of interviews while at lunch with today’s interviewee, Martin Oetting, partner and director research at trnd. We met at a bistro in Prenzlauer Berg, a trendy neighborhood in Berlin, where Martin lives. We ate and talked and realized we had both a lot of thing and a lot of people in common. After we both pedaled away on our bikes, it occurred to me that it would be super cool to be able to share all of this great stuff with you – and it would be great to be able to ask a bunch of questions to as many people in the branding, new media, and communications as possible.

With no further ado, here’s my interview with Martin Oetting:

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Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world?

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment.  We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

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Lee Hopkins on Email Marketing in Digital PR

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment.  We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

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Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive

We do brand reputation and online reputation management and the number one thing we tell our clients is that if you don’t amplify your brand online — add some signal to the noise, if you will — then someone else will.  And, you can do this before you’re attacked or you can do it afterwards as an ORM campaign, which, like going to a plumber when your pipes burst, is generally much more expensive.  Better to maintain than to repair.  Here’s a great article from over on Online Publicity Journal that you should check out, Be Proactive – Don’t Wait Until Negative Press Finds You!:

The internet has allowed people who have normally been quiet to now have a voice, and sometimes a loud one. That voice can easily cripple your business model and stop or slow down revenues coming like a wrench thrown into the gears. One online complaint can send ripples very quickly through your business model.

Whistle blowing websites are everywhere and frustrated clients and customers are waiting for a reason to shout and make noise if things go sour with their experience. If you haven’t’ done any proactive online marketing and your reputation has not been tarnished yet than that is great. But all it takes one angry customer to ruin that good luck streak and you just never know when it could occur.

Many times it will be from an angry customer you have never even heard from who just didn’t even bother contacting you first to try to fix the problem. If you take a proactive approach right from the beginning you can allow yourself to build up a barrier and wall against new, fresh new negative publicity coming in. It is much easier to build a barrier for you business of positive information before negative press finds it way to your search results.

With consumer confidence down and online customers becoming more and more savvy each day more and more online shoppers want to see a squeaky clean online image. If they see any angry clients or customers it could easily trigger them to purchase or do business with a competitor. Online publicity is a very quick and easy way to start building a clean online reputation.

As others pick up your releases you will effectively add more content to your search results. As these links sit and age they become anchored into the search results making it much more difficult for any Rip Off Report and Pissed Consumer listings to make their way to your search results generated by someone search for your personal or business name.

What You Can Learn from Twitter's Success

Rohit Bhargava from the Influential Marketing Blog just posted a very insightful article about how we entrepreneurs can learn from Twitter, 7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter’s Success — basically, make things easier, better, more open (as in API), and more insidious (all of Twitter’s competitors feel compelled to integrate with Twitter — how insidious is that — open API wins again):

By any measure, the growth and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has hit mainstream isn’t really the right metric to use. It’s more powerful to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not having email. It has become just that necessary. How did the site get to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the real secrets behind Twitter’s success:

  1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It’s useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
  2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work – even if you’re not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user’s audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
  3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that “less is more” – Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.
  4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.
  5. Integrate with the most popular competition. The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact that many entrepreneurs already know – by integrating with your competition where your “customers” currently are, you make it easier for them to migrate over to your site.
  6. Launch where your influencers are. A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
  7. Offer a public ranking or authority. The final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is located right beneath your username on the site and it’s high visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using the site. And you can’t help but want that number to go higher. 

Via Chris Abraham

How to Make Constructive Criticism Online

Chris Garrett has a super-smart, “stop, think, breathe, write, review, share, rewrite, and then maybe don’t hit post,” list of things to consider before criticizing anyone or anything online, 10 Tips for Criticism Without Harming Your Reputation:

  1. Calm down – Take a breath, walk away, posting emotionally could cause more trouble than cure.
  2. Know what you want – Why are you doing this? What is it you want changed or to achieve?
  3. Does it need to be public? – First the best approach is to contact the company or person in question directly. I often go buy the rule of thumb “Praise in public, complain in private“. We all slip occasionally, but worth to keep in mind.
  4. Stick to the facts – If you only present the facts as you see them then you are normally safe as far as legal grounds are concerned (though I am not a lawyer), and only use relevant information.
  5. Get a second opinion – Before making something public, ensure you have expressed the issue clearly – this is not a time to be misunderstood!
  6. Keep to the issues – Personal attacks, name-calling, embellishments, posturing and exaggerations will just make you look nasty and foolish. The issues should speak for you.
  7. Swearing – Some people swear because they think it is funny or just part of their brand, which is fair enough if this is what your audience expects. I find though more people are put off than engaged by swearing, particularly where the quantity seems excessive even for swear fans. While you might like swearing, and might even think it is warranted, you will lose the support of your audience who want to see your points articulated well without resorting to it. If you must swear, give fair warning in your introduction, particularly if you are using audio or video.
  8. Balance? – Can you balance it out with any positive, empathy or second perspectives? Is it possible you just got the wrong idea? Show that you are a human being with an issue, not going after someone for links and traffic.
  9. Don’t sell – Make your point and leave it. Do not use the opportunity to sell or pump up your own stuff otherwise your audience will question your motives and you will lose their trust and credibility.
  10. Use a mirror - Is your own house in order before you go attacking someone else? And spare a thought for how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of your article.