Tag Archives: RSS

Write online to be taken out of context

I am in the middle of guiding some new bloggers over at Marketing Conversation on how to blog most effectively. It is pretty exciting and instructive because there are many things I take for granted.

derrida1 Write online to be taken out of contextOne of the biggest trends I see is internal shorthand. What I mean is that my bloggers tend to write based on a lot of assumed context.

They simply assume that people who are reading content from Marketing Conversation or Because the Medium is the Message — or even an article on the corporate website — are in on the joke.  That they grok the context.

Not only is that not true but it is dangerous because I am guilty of it myself. I would say north of 80% of the people I engage with on a daily basis online don’t know that I am president of a digital agency with over fifty staff and dozens of clients.  I assume, too.  I assume that I shouldn’t be so self-referential because “they” surely know who I am by now, I have been branding for years.

Not so.

And I have not even gotten to the most important part: even if people know who you are, what you do, the company you own, and it’s products and services intimately, their brand perception hasn’t evolved with your business.  What I did in 2006 is quite a bit different than what Abraham Harrison does now, as a company.

Even worse, after we spend all of this time, resources, hours, money, and brain trust on creating insightful analysis and share it for free on our blogs and via Twitter and Facebook, we’re living in a Derridian world: “there’s nothing outside the text.”

In a world of excerpting, RSS-reading, sharing, retweeting, and sharing shares, simply all of the breadcrumbs required to bring a reader down the road back to you, your brand, and your sales channel needs to be contained not only in that blog post but also in that tweet, if possible.

Do not use acronyms unless you’re brand is that acronym. Every name of every employee should be linked to their bio on the corporate website at best case or to a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook profile at the very least.  Every product or service should be linked to its exact corresponding sub-page on the corporate website if at all possible.

In blogging, we often do a much better job of linking to other people, companies, and blogs in the form of attribution than we do ourselves.

Even more essential to these constantly conceptualizing linking strategies is that the keywords should be hyperlinked and not some worthless [link] or a pithy here or there or my work or any of that, if at all possible.  Search abhors a pronoun.

Finally, any and all posts should be wrapped in analysis, if at all possible.  Don’t just excerpt a social media news article onto your blog or site, make it your own!  While collecting news and propagating it through your blog with attribution links and excerpts and all that can result in your colleagues and neighbors and even prospects to learn of your existence, you’re not really adding value when you just propagate — it is essential to interpret, analyze, and synthesize, allowing all the marrow of your experience to be extracted in answer to, “well, that’s great content but it is content from your competitor so maybe we should be using them instead of you if they’re so insightful.”

In a perfect world, with a corporate blog, people should be subscribing to and reading posts on Marketing Conversation in order to learn more about the products and services and quality of mind of Abraham Harrison and not just to get an aggregation of the latest social media marketing news.

Sometimes I forget that and it is something I would like to share with you in addition to sharing it with my new bloggers.

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Your corporate website needs to become a trap

rabbit2 300x254 Your corporate website needs to become a trapI just started as Director of Social Media at Unison Agency in Washington’s historic Georgetown. One of my perks is getting to work with Executive Director of Strategy, Andrea Fabbri. He’s a strategist’s strategist. During a meeting on Friday he quipped, “a website is a trap — or should be.” I had never thought about it that succinctly. It’s true! “It’s Wabbit season, and I’m hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!” Continue reading →

My Beard Has More Followers Than You!

Remember when I had a beard?  Man, it was one hell of a bushy beard!

chrisAbrahamSocialMediaBeard My Beard Has More Followers Than You!?

Thanks to the brilliant an eccentric Mr. Phillip J. Rhoades for such an portrayal of devotion.  So, how’s the likeness?

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Ignore the brute power of reddit at your peril

reddit is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room and has been for years. No one talks about the powerful and direct influence that this quirky, impenetrable, and oddly still-underground this social sharing site is.

Ignore the brute power of reddit at your perilWhile people are writing post-after-post about Pinterest, So.cl, Google+, Facebook, Instamatic, and Twitter, reddit’s eating everyone’s lunch – at least when it comes to authentic bottom-up self-organization.

One reason why I don’t ever discuss it when I am discussing social media marketing and PR is because I just can’t get my foot in the door. I have been submitting links since before it had corporate owners and the only up-votes I have ever garnered have been forced, never organic. None of my pieces have ever resulted in a fire storm. If you look at my submissions, you’ll see ones and twos – I have pretty much given up. And this is part of the reason why I believe we in marketing and PR ignore it.

While I wear my promotional hat by day, by night I am a reputation manager – defensive stuff. When it comes to anticipating, identifying, and even responding to a crisis online, reddit cannot be ignored.

In a world where big media is becoming even bigger under mergers and acquisitions – federated, even – it is harder and harder for dissenting voices to find purchase in a mediasphere that is getting better and better at controlling the hitherto uncontrollable chaos called social media, where anyone, anywhere can supposedly, like David, handily take down Goliath with just a little honesty, integrity, and the benefit of some variation of the humble blog. Not so anymore.

It truly takes an SEO ninja to handily do anything online these days; unless, of course, you’re able to plug yourself into a disruptively-powerful amplifier, reddit.

Unfortunately, the old adage, “if you can’t beat it, join it” is impossible for most agencies and businesses who do not invest the time, resources, and risk to infiltrate reddit in a big way over time; or who are afraid of the risk associated with trying to “turn” a reddit high priest or priestess in an environment where outing that offer publicly (on reddit) is better than actually signing that industrial non-disclosure agreement and getting that big retainer – or it is in the reddit economy, anyway.

This is the same thing going on on Wikipedia and on message boards as well; however, unlike message boards, reddit ends up being mentioned in my RSS and mainstream news feeds almost every day these days.

OK, I will tell you how one could probably get a lot of moxie and mojo and even some clout-with-a-C from reddit – but only if you promise to use what I tell you for good and not for evil. Because reddit does not enforce real names – and in fact doesn’t reward using your real identity, actually – your authenticity and transparency needs to be on the honor system. That said, reddit’s rather paranoid and has the immune system of a retired janitor – they’re not afraid to Fisk you for what you are, based on your public history, which is readily-viewable. If you start ascending into high-Karma territory on reddit, there will be scads of people with Turing-class pattern-recognition skills who are going to put your nefarious dark-hearted plans together right before outing your true name, your associations, your agency, and al your clients before they summarily execute your reputation in a public square after putting you in stocks and tar-and-feathering you to within an inch of your life. And not just on reddit but also downstream in the Times and on CNN, ABC News, AdAge, and even PRNews. Consider yourself warned. Oh, and PS: in my work as reputation and crisis manager, I am the guy who is often sent to discover who you are and why you’re attacking my client’s client – and there are always enough clues for me to break your anonymity – and I’m not even that smart!

What I have yet to do (and really need to if I intend to ever influence at any level on reddit) is to give more than I take and listen more than I speak. What that means is what one really needs to do is vote and comment on 100 other reddit submissions before you ever submit your own. You need to hunker down and consume all of your news, your buzz, your rumors, your conspiracy, your conjecture, and your paranoia exclusively through either the reddit web site or the various reddit readers and reddit apps available for any and all of your mobile devices.

Learning to become influential on reddit is a good way to learn to be influential online and even in real life, interpersonally. There are some people who are naturally gifted story-tellers who can just walk into a room and immediately draw everyone in. Some call it charisma and fancy it a natural gift – and they’re only partially right. The other part is that I have yet to meet a naturally-gifted story-teller who doesn’t either spend a hell of a lot of time preparing and rehearsing or, or more often, telling lots and lots of stories to many different audiences in order to accrue the 10,000 hours of mastery. But yes, it generally does begin with a little bit of natural talent and positive feedback: laughing’s a much more positive feedback than and groans – believe me, I am groan-inducing in my pun-iness.

What’s more, I said listening. While I have not done any quantitative research, this is how I would have set up reddit if I wanted to make sure the biggest rewards went to those who contributed the most, I would have implemented attention economic indicators on each member. Each member would be rated, of course, on explicit things such as number of reddits, positive or negative, on other people’s submissions; number of reddits on other people’s comments; number of comments made associated with other’s submissions; comments associated with other’s comments; an also how many reddits, positive (good) or negative (bad) associated with your comments – that all seems pretty obvious and in the realm of explicit data: intentional votes.

Implicit data is less considered, which is why I said before that you should listen to what’s going on in reddit way more than you speak, and engaging is speaking even if it’s in the form of a comment response and not just in the form of being the OP: original poster (forum-speak). If I were reddit, I would not only judge your level of engagement, I would also rate your level of participation even of these is no intentional act associated with the action. We in the industry all acknowledge that 90%-99% of all your readers are lurkers. This means that only 1%-10% of all of your members (and guests – those readers who have either never registered or are reading while logged out or veiled in their own private privacy bubble) ever reddit up, down, comment, or submit anything!

So, what I think that reddit does – or should do – is follow Google’s model: give credit to someone for any and all unintentional interaction with the reddit site, whether or not that person is in the mood to engage or participate. So, if a member is logged in, he or she should get partial credit for just spending time on reddit in lurk or browse or stumble-mode. They hearty 1% who rigorously engage, reddit, comment, or submit should get partial karma for click throughs and page views and time on page and time on comment – anything associated with any action, no matter how incidental – that results in additional page views (and ad dollars, if that’s what floats your boat – call it profit-sharing or karma-sharing).

And, you know, reddit (and Google, et al) don’t even have to share this “credit score” with you. This implicit attention equity garnered from attention data in the attention economy can be simple internal bookkeeping – and also a way of monitoring for fraud as well. (Just based on the impatience of clients and campaigns and the cost of infiltrating, moles tend to do the least amount of work that result in the biggest reputation benefit. They also tend to participate in during working hours and via PC instead of mobile – there are so many tells! Their IP, their lack of IP, their association with an anonymizer service, their popping between different logins – all are suspicious; unfortunately, the top legitimate participants, especially those associated with the Anonymous movement, behave highly suspiciously but this is because of something much cooler than political operators and marketing infiltrator trying to reddit up or down a leaked or place story, this has to with global disruption and universal (forced) transparency, which is what the kids these days love, love love!)

So, just assume that you’re constantly being observed, under the omnipresent eyes of reddit’s panopticon and just play nice. If you’re transparent enough, you’re welcome to vote up (or down, but be careful) stuff that flatters your interests, you’re welcome to engage on the often-heated threads, sub-threads and all levels of nested conversations, and you’re even welcome to submit news, but just realize that once your behavior triggers the defensive measure that reddit employs (in the form of the “you have submitted too many links, please come back in an hour;” the natural immune-defenses of reddit activist community members, and in the form of the equity you have formed (or depleted) from both your explicit and implicit interactions with the reddit platform.)

If you can follow that advice, then hard work will take you the rest of the way–but reddit has its quirks also. Next week, I’ll give you a few more tips on the good and the bad with reddit. Stay tuned.

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Don’t trifle with reddit

8bit 1 Dont trifle with redditMy recommendation for you individuals who are interested in just growing your experience, mastery, equity, and inclusion as deeply as you can in as many relevant and germane communities as possible, you will never be rewarded unless and until you really commit to reddit. I have been with reddit way over 5 years and I have yet to get any traction there. Like I said last week in Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the room, commit to reddit completely. Eschew Facebook and Twitter for a little while and replace Flipboard on your iPad with reddit. Commit making reddit your morning news and the novel you read before you go to sleep. This week, I want to add a few more specific tips.

Of course register, but register as yourself and not as your brand, your company, or you business, though naming yourself after your hobbies or passions or best feature, your sport, your team, your OS, or your geolocation seem to be popular ones. Many people use the same handle on reddit as they do on YouTube, message boards, and on Twitter, which is smart if you want to be transparent and let people on reddit who casually Fisk you know that you have nothing to hide and have an online historical context (but stupid if you want to elude detection or don’t want me – or someone like me – to find you, actually).

Just in case this isn’t obvious to you, part of listening includes reading threads and not just clicking through to the links. You need to read through all the comments, all the nested comments, all the internal dialogues and the OT (off topic) conversation. Most of the best intel that I have collected in the crisis work I neither confirm nor deny is deep in the conversation after a reddit submission has fermented for a while.

Once a comment thread really build some steam and folks pile in, people lose themselves and you can see people doing research, Fisking, checking facts, and lowering their guards. People really reveal themselves deep in the comments and you can really get to know, especially after the submission is stale enough to turn into a de facto place to chat, to compare notes and to do a little fencing for status, dueling for geek cred. It is here where you can learn more about community pecking order, status, intelligence, competence, context, what people do behind their anonymity, how old they are, where they’re from. This is where the community coalesces and builds, in the secondary and tertiary conversations – the chats you’ve ignored because they’re no longer really about the new Microsoft Surface – except they are. It is in these deep contests where young bucks can – and do – challenge the alphas for dominance. It is also where folks can work on their post count – places they can just chew the fat while positively effecting their reddit karma and reputation.

Let me explain in a way you’ll understand: you know how much you talk about frequent flier miles with your friends and how much of a pissing content you’re in with you workmates over what level you are with your respective airlines and hotels? Well, consider reddit Karma and message board post counts to be analogous to flier or hotel miles. And even though you spend most of your time drooling on yourself, looking like an idiot in your inflatable neck pillow, you fancy yourself a road warrior just because every mile you travel in the air at 600-miles-an-hour gets you closer to the hallowed “million mile club.” (Man, yuppies are lame!) Same thing with reddit (and most of the other contribution-based communities and platforms, including many of the top file-sharing sites).

Don’t worry, gaming post count is a open secret and people are pretty up-front about it. It is essential because when you play silly post count games such as “word association” you really really get to know how game folks are, how willing to be silly they can be, how tolerant people really are, and how well they play with others.

Here’s a new flash: company happy hours, lunches, dinners, and team-building exercises are not optional, they’re analogous to games meant to jack your post count. they’re stress-tests that your employers and those sneaky HR managers use to see if you belong – if you’ll ever make it to VP or partner, and if they actually like you. You can’t just blow them off because you really should be back with your toddlers and your loving wife and ailing mother. Those yearly trips to Vegas are as important as your yearly performance review – and your success and popularity – and discretion – at these (mostly) harmless events very much color your yearly reviews by either enhancing or diminishing them and what management is willing to turn a blind eye to or really obsess about. Remember that when you decide to take a winter holiday instead of attending your company’s Christmas party!

Well, the same is true for reddit and communities like it, both online, virtual, communities as well as in real life. When you’re wading in to the shallow end of the reddit pool, people are going to be judging you based on your swimwear, your fitness, your abs and how cute your butt is, like it or not. they’re going to haze you if you get a little deeper; and they’re going to be suspicious of you as you swim deeper, and they’ll jealous of you if you become more popular or prove yourself more useful or interesting.

Come on, if you’re over 30 you already know all of this stuff. Why don’t you think it maps exactly and perfectly the same way online. We in word-of-mouth constantly de-humanize the natural humanness of online communities, assuming that simple tricks of seduction and incentive – what’s in it for them – can trick thousands of people who are in a very real, albeit virtual, family. I made the same mistake when I dismissed the entirety of Second Life with a turn of my quill without thinking that maybe the heart of Second Life has nothing to do with their exceedingly heavy and mobile unfriendly-app and more to do with the beautiful universe of furries for whom Second Life is their real home. My bad. Never again.

Once you’ve checked your ego at the door – who you were in high school, what college you attended, how much you make, how hot your spouse is, and how good you look in skinny jeans – dive in. Just remember that nobody knows you in this, your new school. They don’t know how hot or successful, they’ll just know you don’t know the difference between they’re, there, and their, and they’ll crucify you for it.

I do recommend you don’t do three things:

  1. Don’t comment right away as this community has a lot of history and people all sort of know each other and until you get a little context, reserve your judgement to an up or down arrow for now).
  2. Avoid being sarcastic, snarky, or a troll until you have enough history and reputation – acceptance – that folks know you’re not a dick but just dry-witted or dickish-but-with-a-heart-of-gold
  3. Don’t start a fight you know you can’t win, meaning, no matter how good a case you have and no matter how correct you think you are, reddit is not rule of law it is mob rule – reddit is not (yet) your home so the locals are under no obligation to support you just because you have the evidence when their allegiance and loyalty is to their friends and family.

Oh, and final rule: prepare your armor and take nothing too seriously because any community that does not enforce real names, like Facebook does, tends to be pretty brutal since everyone has a veil of anonymity. You might very well be bullied mercilessly by the very 98-pound weakling you terrorized in high school. Just desserts is what I call it, but be forewarned and don’t forget to gird your loins before participating.

That said, what I recommend to everyone is spending more money on brand representatives and social media community managers than you do on technological solutions. Learn from the CIA, the FBI, the NRO, the DIA, and the NSA: no matter how awesome your spy tech, you live or die on how many and how good are your analysts. The top online analysts are worth their weight in gold – don’t I know – and even the top big-data-munching-and-interpreting “carnivore” platforms need online analysts online to check for false-negatives, false-positive, and blindspots.

And, unlike monitoring and responding platforms, the longer you have worked with an online analyst, the better he or she is – be it in experience, corporate knowledge, or just because the best employees should be inexorably linked to your brand and surgically removing them can be the gut wound that never heals or it can result in a dangerous shift if (when) your (former) employee takes up with your competition, lending all of his or her equity – that was portable, after all – directly to your competitor. Whatever you believe, company-who-thinks-their-social-media-community-managers-are-fungible-assets, when you let a social media asset leave, get poached, or go, that person is leaving with 80% of the equity they developed while working with you. Are you ready to be 80% poorer as a result?

As an aside, deep infiltration is still going on, I am sure. In full disclosure, I participated in deep infiltration on behalf of many very high-profile clients from until I started my own company back in 2006. While there are many disclosure laws on the books and “everyone” has reformed, I can’t imagine that any of it had gone away. I am sure it has either submarined, distanced itself from the operators, or just expatriated itself to nations where this isn’t a thing.

The only reason why my past company, Abraham Harrison, or my new company, Social Ally, don’t do this sort of black ops thing is because we don’t need to because you really don’t need to be sneaky on social media – you don’t need to master NLP or have a nom de guerre or even wear a trench coat and disguise your voice with a synthesizer – you can just waltz right in, say hello to the owner or high priests, and tell them what you want and what’s in it for them.

But no, folks are still spending too much time listening to Bernays and Freud, assuming that American consumers are ever vigilant and informed and in order to sell them anything you need to come in nap of the earth, under radar, by the inky cover of the night in order to drop your paratrooper and payload. Advertising and PR has earned its reputation by constantly buying into better and better anti-radar and radio-jamming technology and not enough on proper diplomacy and diplomatic channels, that’s for sure. More money on our special forces than on our diplomatic corps.

Reddit’s a little bit like a unicorn: you’ll only see a unicorn – and make it to the front page of reddit — if you’re pure of heart. You can start by faking it ‘til you make it, but at the end of the day, most of the folks on reddit are smarter than you so being yourself is really the only way that this is ever going to work out for you if you ever want to become an influencer on reddit, so give it a go and let me know what happens.

Good luck, soldier!

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reddit is the 800-pound gorillaphant in the room

reddit is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room and has been for years. No one talks about the powerful and direct influence that this quirky, impenetrable, and oddly still-underground this social sharing site is.

reddit is the 800 pound gorillaphant in the roomWhile people are writing post-after-post about Pinterest, So.cl, Google+, Facebook, Instamatic, and Twitter, reddit’s eating everyone’s lunch – at least when it comes to authentic bottom-up self-organization.

One reason why I don’t ever discuss it when I am discussing social media marketing and PR is because I just can’t get my foot in the door. I have been submitting links since before it had corporate owners and the only up-votes I have ever garnered have been forced, never organic. None of my pieces have ever resulted in a fire storm. If you look at my submissions, you’ll see ones and twos – I have pretty much given up. And this is part of the reason why I believe we in marketing and PR ignore it.

While I wear my promotional hat by day, by night I am a reputation manager – defensive stuff. When it comes to anticipating, identifying, and even responding to a crisis online, reddit cannot be ignored.

In a world where big media is becoming even bigger under mergers and acquisitions – federated, even – it is harder and harder for dissenting voices to find purchase in a mediasphere that is getting better and better at controlling the hitherto uncontrollable chaos called social media, where anyone, anywhere can supposedly, like David, handily take down Goliath with just a little honesty, integrity, and the benefit of some variation of the humble blog. Not so anymore.

It truly takes an SEO ninja to handily do anything online these days; unless, of course, you’re able to plug yourself into a disruptively-powerful amplifier, reddit.

Unfortunately, the old adage, “if you can’t beat it, join it” is impossible for most agencies and businesses who do not invest the time, resources, and risk to infiltrate reddit in a big way over time; or who are afraid of the risk associated with trying to “turn” a reddit high priest or priestess in an environment where outing that offer publicly (on reddit) is better than actually signing that industrial non-disclosure agreement and getting that big retainer – or it is in the reddit economy, anyway.

This is the same thing going on on Wikipedia and on message boards as well; however, unlike message boards, reddit ends up being mentioned in my RSS and mainstream news feeds almost every day these days.

OK, I will tell you how one could probably get a lot of moxie and mojo and even some clout-with-a-C from reddit – but only if you promise to use what I tell you for good and not for evil. Because reddit does not enforce real names – and in fact doesn’t reward using your real identity, actually – your authenticity and transparency needs to be on the honor system. That said, reddit’s rather paranoid and has the immune system of a retired janitor – they’re not afraid to Fisk you for what you are, based on your public history, which is readily-viewable. If you start ascending into high-Karma territory on reddit, there will be scads of people with Turing-class pattern-recognition skills who are going to put your nefarious dark-hearted plans together right before outing your true name, your associations, your agency, and al your clients before they summarily execute your reputation in a public square after putting you in stocks and tar-and-feathering you to within an inch of your life. And not just on reddit but also downstream in the Times and on CNN, ABC News, AdAge, and even PRNews. Consider yourself warned. Oh, and PS: in my work as reputation and crisis manager, I am the guy who is often sent to discover who you are and why you’re attacking my client’s client – and there are always enough clues for me to break your anonymity – and I’m not even that smart!

What I have yet to do (and really need to if I intend to ever influence at any level on reddit) is to give more than I take and listen more than I speak. What that means is what one really needs to do is vote and comment on 100 other reddit submissions before you ever submit your own. You need to hunker down and consume all of your news, your buzz, your rumors, your conspiracy, your conjecture, and your paranoia exclusively through either the reddit web site or the various reddit readers and reddit apps available for any and all of your mobile devices.

Learning to become influential on reddit is a good way to learn to be influential online and even in real life, interpersonally. There are some people who are naturally gifted story-tellers who can just walk into a room and immediately draw everyone in. Some call it charisma and fancy it a natural gift – and they’re only partially right. The other part is that I have yet to meet a naturally-gifted story-teller who doesn’t either spend a hell of a lot of time preparing and rehearsing or, or more often, telling lots and lots of stories to many different audiences in order to accrue the 10,000 hours of mastery. But yes, it generally does begin with a little bit of natural talent and positive feedback: laughing’s a much more positive feedback than and groans – believe me, I am groan-inducing in my pun-iness.

What’s more, I said listening. While I have not done any quantitative research, this is how I would have set up reddit if I wanted to make sure the biggest rewards went to those who contributed the most, I would have implemented attention economic indicators on each member. Each member would be rated, of course, on explicit things such as number of reddits, positive or negative, on other people’s submissions; number of reddits on other people’s comments; number of comments made associated with other’s submissions; comments associated with other’s comments; an also how many reddits, positive (good) or negative (bad) associated with your comments – that all seems pretty obvious and in the realm of explicit data: intentional votes.

Implicit data is less considered, which is why I said before that you should listen to what’s going on in reddit way more than you speak, and engaging is speaking even if it’s in the form of a comment response and not just in the form of being the OP: original poster (forum-speak). If I were reddit, I would not only judge your level of engagement, I would also rate your level of participation even of these is no intentional act associated with the action. We in the industry all acknowledge that 90%-99% of all your readers are lurkers. This means that only 1%-10% of all of your members (and guests – those readers who have either never registered or are reading while logged out or veiled in their own private privacy bubble) ever reddit up, down, comment, or submit anything!

So, what I think that reddit does – or should do – is follow Google’s model: give credit to someone for any and all unintentional interaction with the reddit site, whether or not that person is in the mood to engage or participate. So, if a member is logged in, he or she should get partial credit for just spending time on reddit in lurk or browse or stumble-mode. They hearty 1% who rigorously engage, reddit, comment, or submit should get partial karma for click throughs and page views and time on page and time on comment – anything associated with any action, no matter how incidental – that results in additional page views (and ad dollars, if that’s what floats your boat – call it profit-sharing or karma-sharing).

And, you know, reddit (and Google, et al) don’t even have to share this “credit score” with you. This implicit attention equity garnered from attention data in the attention economy can be simple internal bookkeeping – and also a way of monitoring for fraud as well. (Just based on the impatience of clients and campaigns and the cost of infiltrating, moles tend to do the least amount of work that result in the biggest reputation benefit. They also tend to participate in during working hours and via PC instead of mobile – there are so many tells! Their IP, their lack of IP, their association with an anonymizer service, their popping between different logins – all are suspicious; unfortunately, the top legitimate participants, especially those associated with the Anonymous movement, behave highly suspiciously but this is because of something much cooler than political operators and marketing infiltrator trying to reddit up or down a leaked or place story, this has to with global disruption and universal (forced) transparency, which is what the kids these days love, love love!)

So, just assume that you’re constantly being observed, under the omnipresent eyes of reddit’s panopticon and just play nice. If you’re transparent enough, you’re welcome to vote up (or down, but be careful) stuff that flatters your interests, you’re welcome to engage on the often-heated threads, sub-threads and all levels of nested conversations, and you’re even welcome to submit news, but just realize that once your behavior triggers the defensive measure that reddit employs (in the form of the “you have submitted too many links, please come back in an hour;” the natural immune-defenses of reddit activist community members, and in the form of the equity you have formed (or depleted) from both your explicit and implicit interactions with the reddit platform.)

If you can follow that advice, then hard work will take you the rest of the way–but reddit has its quirks also. Next week, I’ll give you a few more tips on the good and the bad with reddit. Stay tuned.

Continue reading →

Don't mess with reddit (or Texas)

8bit 1 Don't mess with reddit (or Texas)My recommendation for you individuals who are interested in just growing your experience, mastery, equity, and inclusion as deeply as you can in as many relevant and germane communities as possible, you will never be rewarded unless and until you really commit to reddit. I have been with reddit way over 5 years and I have yet to get any traction there. Like I said last week in Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the room, commit to reddit completely. Eschew Facebook and Twitter for a little while and replace Flipboard on your iPad with reddit. Commit making reddit your morning news and the novel you read before you go to sleep. This week, I want to add a few more specific tips.

Of course register, but register as yourself and not as your brand, your company, or you business, though naming yourself after your hobbies or passions or best feature, your sport, your team, your OS, or your geolocation seem to be popular ones. Many people use the same handle on reddit as they do on YouTube, message boards, and on Twitter, which is smart if you want to be transparent and let people on reddit who casually Fisk you know that you have nothing to hide and have an online historical context (but stupid if you want to elude detection or don’t want me – or someone like me – to find you, actually).

Just in case this isn’t obvious to you, part of listening includes reading threads and not just clicking through to the links. You need to read through all the comments, all the nested comments, all the internal dialogues and the OT (off topic) conversation. Most of the best intel that I have collected in the crisis work I neither confirm nor deny is deep in the conversation after a reddit submission has fermented for a while.

Once a comment thread really build some steam and folks pile in, people lose themselves and you can see people doing research, Fisking, checking facts, and lowering their guards. People really reveal themselves deep in the comments and you can really get to know, especially after the submission is stale enough to turn into a de facto place to chat, to compare notes and to do a little fencing for status, dueling for geek cred. It is here where you can learn more about community pecking order, status, intelligence, competence, context, what people do behind their anonymity, how old they are, where they’re from. This is where the community coalesces and builds, in the secondary and tertiary conversations – the chats you’ve ignored because they’re no longer really about the new Microsoft Surface – except they are. It is in these deep contests where young bucks can – and do – challenge the alphas for dominance. It is also where folks can work on their post count – places they can just chew the fat while positively effecting their reddit karma and reputation.

Let me explain in a way you’ll understand: you know how much you talk about frequent flier miles with your friends and how much of a pissing content you’re in with you workmates over what level you are with your respective airlines and hotels? Well, consider reddit Karma and message board post counts to be analogous to flier or hotel miles. And even though you spend most of your time drooling on yourself, looking like an idiot in your inflatable neck pillow, you fancy yourself a road warrior just because every mile you travel in the air at 600-miles-an-hour gets you closer to the hallowed “million mile club.” (Man, yuppies are lame!) Same thing with reddit (and most of the other contribution-based communities and platforms, including many of the top file-sharing sites).

Don’t worry, gaming post count is a open secret and people are pretty up-front about it. It is essential because when you play silly post count games such as “word association” you really really get to know how game folks are, how willing to be silly they can be, how tolerant people really are, and how well they play with others.

Here’s a new flash: company happy hours, lunches, dinners, and team-building exercises are not optional, they’re analogous to games meant to jack your post count. they’re stress-tests that your employers and those sneaky HR managers use to see if you belong – if you’ll ever make it to VP or partner, and if they actually like you. You can’t just blow them off because you really should be back with your toddlers and your loving wife and ailing mother. Those yearly trips to Vegas are as important as your yearly performance review – and your success and popularity – and discretion – at these (mostly) harmless events very much color your yearly reviews by either enhancing or diminishing them and what management is willing to turn a blind eye to or really obsess about. Remember that when you decide to take a winter holiday instead of attending your company’s Christmas party!

Well, the same is true for reddit and communities like it, both online, virtual, communities as well as in real life. When you’re wading in to the shallow end of the reddit pool, people are going to be judging you based on your swimwear, your fitness, your abs and how cute your butt is, like it or not. they’re going to haze you if you get a little deeper; and they’re going to be suspicious of you as you swim deeper, and they’ll jealous of you if you become more popular or prove yourself more useful or interesting.

Come on, if you’re over 30 you already know all of this stuff. Why don’t you think it maps exactly and perfectly the same way online. We in word-of-mouth constantly de-humanize the natural humanness of online communities, assuming that simple tricks of seduction and incentive – what’s in it for them – can trick thousands of people who are in a very real, albeit virtual, family. I made the same mistake when I dismissed the entirety of Second Life with a turn of my quill without thinking that maybe the heart of Second Life has nothing to do with their exceedingly heavy and mobile unfriendly-app and more to do with the beautiful universe of furries for whom Second Life is their real home. My bad. Never again.

Once you’ve checked your ego at the door – who you were in high school, what college you attended, how much you make, how hot your spouse is, and how good you look in skinny jeans – dive in. Just remember that nobody knows you in this, your new school. They don’t know how hot or successful, they’ll just know you don’t know the difference between they’re, there, and their, and they’ll crucify you for it.

I do recommend you don’t do three things:

  1. Don’t comment right away as this community has a lot of history and people all sort of know each other and until you get a little context, reserve your judgement to an up or down arrow for now).
  2. Avoid being sarcastic, snarky, or a troll until you have enough history and reputation – acceptance – that folks know you’re not a dick but just dry-witted or dickish-but-with-a-heart-of-gold
  3. Don’t start a fight you know you can’t win, meaning, no matter how good a case you have and no matter how correct you think you are, reddit is not rule of law it is mob rule – reddit is not (yet) your home so the locals are under no obligation to support you just because you have the evidence when their allegiance and loyalty is to their friends and family.

Oh, and final rule: prepare your armor and take nothing too seriously because any community that does not enforce real names, like Facebook does, tends to be pretty brutal since everyone has a veil of anonymity. You might very well be bullied mercilessly by the very 98-pound weakling you terrorized in high school. Just desserts is what I call it, but be forewarned and don’t forget to gird your loins before participating.

That said, what I recommend to everyone is spending more money on brand representatives and social media community managers than you do on technological solutions. Learn from the CIA, the FBI, the NRO, the DIA, and the NSA: no matter how awesome your spy tech, you live or die on how many and how good are your analysts. The top online analysts are worth their weight in gold – don’t I know – and even the top big-data-munching-and-interpreting “carnivore” platforms need online analysts online to check for false-negatives, false-positive, and blindspots.

And, unlike monitoring and responding platforms, the longer you have worked with an online analyst, the better he or she is – be it in experience, corporate knowledge, or just because the best employees should be inexorably linked to your brand and surgically removing them can be the gut wound that never heals or it can result in a dangerous shift if (when) your (former) employee takes up with your competition, lending all of his or her equity – that was portable, after all – directly to your competitor. Whatever you believe, company-who-thinks-their-social-media-community-managers-are-fungible-assets, when you let a social media asset leave, get poached, or go, that person is leaving with 80% of the equity they developed while working with you. Are you ready to be 80% poorer as a result?

As an aside, deep infiltration is still going on, I am sure. In full disclosure, I participated in deep infiltration on behalf of many very high-profile clients from until I started my own company back in 2006. While there are many disclosure laws on the books and “everyone” has reformed, I can’t imagine that any of it had gone away. I am sure it has either submarined, distanced itself from the operators, or just expatriated itself to nations where this isn’t a thing.

The only reason why my past company, Abraham Harrison, or my new company, Social Ally, don’t do this sort of black ops thing is because we don’t need to because you really don’t need to be sneaky on social media – you don’t need to master NLP or have a nom de guerre or even wear a trench coat and disguise your voice with a synthesizer – you can just waltz right in, say hello to the owner or high priests, and tell them what you want and what’s in it for them.

But no, folks are still spending too much time listening to Bernays and Freud, assuming that American consumers are ever vigilant and informed and in order to sell them anything you need to come in nap of the earth, under radar, by the inky cover of the night in order to drop your paratrooper and payload. Advertising and PR has earned its reputation by constantly buying into better and better anti-radar and radio-jamming technology and not enough on proper diplomacy and diplomatic channels, that’s for sure. More money on our special forces than on our diplomatic corps.

Reddit’s a little bit like a unicorn: you’ll only see a unicorn – and make it to the front page of reddit — if you’re pure of heart. You can start by faking it ‘til you make it, but at the end of the day, most of the folks on reddit are smarter than you so being yourself is really the only way that this is ever going to work out for you if you ever want to become an influencer on reddit, so give it a go and let me know what happens.

Good luck, soldier!

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Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the room

reddit 150x150 Reddit is the 800 pound Gorilla in the roomreddit is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room and has been for years. No one talks about the powerful and direct influence that this quirky, impenetrable, and oddly still-underground this social sharing site is. While people are writing post-after-post about Pinterest, So.cl, Google+, Facebook, Instamatic, and Twitter, reddit’s eating everyone’s lunch – at least when it comes to authentic bottom-up self-organization. Continue reading →

Notes No More: Facebook Retracts the Blog Link Option

In an article posted this month on Inside Facebook , it was announced that the famous social media company, as of November 22nd, would no longer contain the RSS automatic import feature in the Notes application. This feature consists of an automation of the blogging agenda, where links from a recent blog post to the Facebook Notes page are automatically updated once posted. For bloggers, this controversial decision spells a difficult turn within the blogging community, though not that difficult for those of you, who were unaware of such an application available in the first place.

The reasoning behind such a decision stems from the results of its use over the years. According to Facebook stats, a majority of this ‘auto-posting’ actually results in significantly lower feedback and interest in blogs, a total of 70% of ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ users, actually. Similarly, this article speculates that the removal of this feature is an effort to get users of the ‘auto-post’ to, instead, customize the link to their blog with images and different types of text in order to further implement and market their posts. With respect, the auto-post does fail to add that personal effect and creates a rather robotic feel.

dsc 0149 1024x719 Notes No More: Facebook Retracts the Blog Link OptionHowever, one can also argue that forcing the author of said blog posts to physically manipulate the links, such as cutting them from the actually blog page and pasting them to the Facebook page, will result in less usage and interest as well, especially from companies implementing this feature in their social media departments. Administrators of these blog accounts now will have to take the time to further manipulate the blog posts to coincide with the Facebook page. It’s not exactly an efficient way to connect the dots, and as they say in any business, “time is money”, especially in these harsh economic times.

Luckily, other connecting applications, such as Tweetdeck, NetworkedBlogs, and Hootsuite, will remain available. These ‘third-party syndication app providers,’ as they are described in the article, utilize the continuous RSS feed and therefore still allow bloggers or simply users of these specific social launch sites to automatically sync their content onto Facebook. However, since the amount of blogging sites, which contain a continuous RSS feed, is limited, the sudden loss of this Notes feature will instigate significant change in the Facebook blog-posting community. The results of Facebook’s decision remain to be seen, leaving only speculation, yet it all comes down to the priorities of the user. If the users post for an economic benefit, such as a large-scale company or even small-time business, the loss of efficiency will simultaneously remove their desire to post such content on Facebook through a non-RSS feed site; however, adding that personal tweak to your blog-post link on the FB page, could be the last necessary push to increase the amount of viewers to both sites. It looks optimistic; Facebook providers are anything but pessimistic, considering the sheer mass of users (FB accounts reached 800 million this year worldwide). Thus they can afford to take such minimal risks. The question is: Can you afford efficiency or the personal touch?

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Notes No More: Facebook Retracts the Blog Link Option

Blogging Design Mistakes to Avoid

webicons 300x56 Blogging Design Mistakes to AvoidSome may seem more apparent than others, but bloggers continue to make a plethora of blunders as blogs become essential for both personal and professional use. Alana Brooks of Likeable recently wrote an article about basic blogging mistakes to avoid. She notes that “In addition to having truly stellar blog content, bloggers need to consider the look and feel of their blog.” This is exceptionally important because many bloggers rely solely on intelligent subject matter disregarding marketing techniques to draw in more viewers and followers.

Adding a soundtrack, overly colorful backgrounds and unreadable fonts are all to be avoided. A soundtrack is inappropriate especially if a site is being accessed in an office or professional environment. Additionally Brooks points out that viewers are most likely already listening to their own music, and yours will only interrupt them.

Backgrounds that are overly bright or dark can be daunting. Your subject matter should speak for itself and be supported by a flattering background. Keep your font scheme in mind, you should not have to wear sunglasses to read a blog post. Ensure that your font choice is easily identifying from at least a foot back. If your readers have to squint to understand your content, they most likely won’t want to download your RSS feed or regularly check back.

Brooks targets centered paragraphs as inferior to other text structures. I agree that they’re not as professional, but they’re not a code red mistake. Justified text is easier to read and more optimal for photo placement, but depending on your content, centered paragraphs may be justified by your brand.

Brooks and I are on the same page though when it comes to clutter. It’s the first way to check a blog off as immature or unprofessional. Sparkles, flash ads and an overload of buttons are a huge turn-off to visitors. A simple solution is to create a drop down menu or even move them to a separate page.

These are design aspects that it’s important to properly research. They don’t hide technical flaws or a lower quality of writing. They take blogs to the next level and make them easier to market but remember that content is the most important aspect of a blog, no matter what its mission.

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Blogging Design Mistakes to Avoid