• How ready is your organization for social media?
• Do your employees know the rules of the road and how to comply with them?
• How do you turn the vast amount of data from social media into insights?
• How do you get the social expertise on board?
• How do you constantly measure and evaluate your efforts?

Last week I asked my management team if what we do at Abraham Harrison is inbound marketing. Sara Wilson, my COO, told me yes, that our digital PR strategy of identifying thousands of topical blogs and then pitching them on behalf of our clients with the goal of securing hundreds of earned media mentions is surely the definition of inbound marketing–and maybe even the way that God intended. Or at least the deities who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, where markets are conversations.

Earned media is hard. How do you get loads and loads of unpaid citizen journalists to make a gift of their valuable time and platform? It must be just short of impossible. Far from it, and we have been doing it again and again, week after week, since the Fall of 2006, about a half-decade ago.

This commonly-held belief, that earned inbound marketing is well-nigh impossible, has caused “fickle and unreliable” bloggers and influencers to be avoided in place of predictable but artificial inbound marketing. This new version uses technology and SEO, fake review sites, fake blog sites, fake news sites, affiliate marketing, monetary incentives, text-link-ads, link trading. and entire “informational” sites similar to Wikipedia, distributed globally, on many different servers and under many different domains and sub-domains to emulate its “impossible” counterpart.

That natural flow of emergent citizen-sharing was supposed to be the original source of everything online: real reviews, real stories, real communities, real comments, and real content at the end of every real search. But until recently, when Google did a big check and adjustment to its algorithm, fake inbound marketing was outdoing the real thing.

What inbound marketing has become, in many instances, is a very elaborate and convincing hoax, a simulacrum, that aims to create an artificial world of viable content, at its cheapest and most shameless, to very useful content, at its best, but which has the single-minded goal of acting as a sales and conversion channel of commercial or political products or services.

Yes, earned media outreach and engagement also has an agenda. Yes, when I engage online, I am not reaching out in order to just meet new friends, I am also interested in convincing citizen journalists and online content providers to report on what’s going on with my client on their own personal or collaborative blog to their precious readers.

The most important difference between the simulacrum of entire virtual online content cities being formed intentionally by networks and affiliations to emulate as perfectly as possible the emergent and organic reviews, reporting, discussion, recommendation, and experience and true earned media is that only earned media is authentic.

Authentic, you ask, are you serious? Yes. Let me explain. My friend Pamela has known me for years. She was under the illusion that Abraham Harrison and I had the blogosphere hypnotized. To her, under my hypnosis, these zombies would be at my very command, writing and blogging anything and everything I decided to feed them, no matter how salesy or shilled. She believes that hundreds and thousands of bloggers were at my bidding, awaiting my call.

This is not how it works at all.

Controlling only the front end of the messaging

What really happens is that we take what our client has–their assets, graphics, copy, products and services, agenda, and message–and we deconstruct it into component parts and then reconstruct it into as simple and clear a message as we can and no simpler. We construct a very terse and very clear message model that evolves into a a pitch email, and then we come out the other side of the tunnel with a social media news release (SMNR)–rife with copy and videos with embed codes and photos and images that are easy to copy and paste, sometimes going so far as to include image embed codes–and three outgoing pitch emails.

We do the best we can with this because this is really all we control at this end–the front end–of the messaging. The only other thing we can control over the course of the campaign is how we react to initial blogger response, be it in the form of an email reply to our pitch or a blog post, a tweet, a video response, or a wall posting.

I won’t go into the art of dealing with blogger email and blog responses in this post; however, it does require the patience of Job and a constant reminder of the sage words of Philo of Alexandria, “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Sometimes this isn’t so easy to remember but I have a professional team that does an amazing job of always being decent, respectful, responsive, and generous. Also, my COO and CEO like to remind me that it is very rare that a blogger ever bites us. Things can generally always be handled and addressed well before anything embarrassing or untoward evolved. These days, after really sorting out a series of best practices, there is rarely if ever a crisis.

Using clearness, kindness, and responsiveness, we are routinely able to garner hundreds of earned media blog mentions in addition to the hundreds of tweets and wall posts. Do we care about the relative popularity and readership of these hundreds of bloggers and tweeters? No, not at all. We don’t care about their compete.com score, their Google PageRank number, or their Alexa ranking. We don’t care where they show up on Technorati or on Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop. We really don’t care where they rank in Klout or Empire Avenue.

We just care that they have their very own platform, be it a blog, a Tumblr, a Posterous, a Facebook Page, or a Twitter profile. Full stop. That and a high probability of topical relevance, which is to say we take great pains to make sure we only reach out to people for whom our message, our email pitch, is at least minimally topically relevant and neither surreal nor out of left field.

In PR and with blogger outreach, as with everything, be a gentleman and everything else will follow. No tricks. No sleight-of-hand. Just honest reaching out with relevant material. Just the way God intended.

Last week, I talked about using the long tail of blogger outreach — the idea that you can’t pin your hopes for most public relations efforts on only the A-list bloggers.

For each outreach, there are hundreds and often thousands of bloggers that are not well-known but have influence on the very people that your PR campaign is trying to reach.

I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work on an ongoing basis, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible.

You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like.

We need to be clear in our email that we want a post and the pitch to be shared with the readers of the blog. In our social media news releases, we need to make sure that everything can be copied and pasted as-is, that images are the correct size, that the links are already embedded, that copy and text is simple to copy and block-quote and that any and all banner ads or videos have a handy and easy to find embed code right there.

One cannot assume any technical proficiency, one cannot assume any PR or communications experience, one cannot assume that any blogger knows any PR-speak or knows how to deal with an embargo. One cannot assume that anyone knows what a press release is, or a social media release or what PRWeb is or, heaven forbid, how to keep an embargoed message holy. Long story short, if the message in any way seems more complicated or time-consuming than each blogger fancies it’s worth, then you’ve lost them.

Authenticity vs. robot armies rife with affiliate links

I get why folks have spent many millions of dollars creating a robot army of sites and links and posts that emulate a passionate blogosphere. A robot army rife with affiliate links is really much more manageable to control freaks who need to make sure they can predict ROI based on investment. This is probably the direct result of VC-funding. Those guys love seeing money in and money out. But it isn’t authentic and it isn’t real and these castles of cards are also vulnerable as we have been recently seeing as Google goes through revisions of its search algorithm, oftentimes removing or de-prioritizing entire portions of the Internet that have been produced at great expense to emulate the vigorous and organic, self-organizing, engaged citizenry.

I won’t lie to you, having hundreds of earned media mentions as the result of a very real digital PR long-tail blogger outreach to thousands of bloggers can be SEO gold. Some clients retain us yearly and we can turn those hundreds of posts to thousands of posts per year. The powerful secondary effect of the earnest PR earned-media campaign is SEO link juice, something we didn’t sort out until we were doing this for a couple of years.

Having hundreds of thousands of prepared keyword strings and copy and images and videos pointing back to our clients results in a white-hat link-farm effect, if you will, with one caveat: It is real. We don’t pay these bloggers to write. None of these bloggers are on the same server or the same node or the same cloud or in the same network. The vigilant army of real live Google site investigators can scrutinize these hundreds of posts with a fine tooth comb and there’s no harm and no foul.

When it comes to the empowered and powerful A-listers, they’ve been pitched a million times by the world’s top brands. In fact, companies and their agencies are falling all over themselves to appeal to these powerful few. Not much further along the tail, there are loads of blogs and bloggers who have never been kissed at all, never been pitched by a noted brand, never been engaged by a social media team or PR agent, have never received an offer to pass on to their readers or received a book to review, have never received super-super concierge service and follow up.

In so many cases, we’re their first. We’re their very first PR kiss and, as you know, nobody forgets their first

I received this missive today from Barnes & Noble‘s CEO William Lynch:

Dear Borders Customer,

My name is William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble, and I’m writing to you today on
behalf of the entire B&N team to make you aware of important information regarding your Borders account.

First of all let me say Barnes & Noble uniquely appreciates the importance bookstores play within local communities, and we’re very sorry your Borders store closed.

As part of Borders ceasing operations, we acquired some of its assets including Borders brand trademarks and their customer list. The subject matter of your DVD and other video purchases will be part of the transferred information. The federal bankruptcy court approved this sale on September 26, 2011.

Our intent in buying the Borders customer list is simply to try and earn your business. The majority of our stores are within close proximity to former Borders store locations, and for those that aren’t, we offer our award- winning NOOK™ digital reading devices that provide a bookstore in your pocket. We are readers like you, and hope that through our stores, NOOK devices, and our bn.com online bookstore we can win your trust and provide you with a place to read and shop.

It’s important for you to understand however you have the absolute right to opt-out of having your customer data transferred to Barnes & Noble. If you would like to opt-out, we will ensure all your data we receive from Borders is disposed of in a secure and confidential manner. Please visit www.bn.com/borders before October 15, 2011 to do so.

Should you choose not to opt-out by October 15, 2011, be assured your information will be covered under the Barnes & Noble privacy policy, which can be accessed at www.bn.com/privacy. B&N will maintain any of your data according to this policy and our strict privacy standards.

At Barnes & Noble we share your love of books — whatever shape they take. We also take our responsibility to service communities by providing a local bookstore very seriously. In the coming weeks, assuming you don’t opt-out, you’ll be hearing from us with some offers to encourage you to shop our stores and try our NOOK products. We hope you’ll give us a chance to be your bookstore.

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–a lot more clearly than my recent Search is three-dimensional chess rant.

Abraham Harrison has this synergy in its DNA but 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 real-time results, 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.

My analysis is that “Google Abhors a Vacuum” and so in the absence of a reliable real-time 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–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 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 mills–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 Topsies 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.

Popularity 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 news 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.

Via Marketing Conversation via SocialMedia.biz via theBiznology blog

As you may well know, I have been hiding out in Portland, Oregon. If you have seen Portlandia, you know that you cannot go anywhere in the PDX if you’re not festooned with birds on things. I commissioned Dave Stoops the crack bag-making team over at Black Star Bags to make me a large courier bag with a bird on it in reflective 3M tape.

Yes, I feel your envy boring into me. Well, you can get a Black Star messenger bag — or any sort of black star bag or back star anything — with a bird on it, just like I have done.

I have been remiss. I had intended to write about Free Hollow Books because they made one of the best selection of hollowed-out books for the private, sneaky, secretive, connoisseur in all of us.

After taking to the trails and taking up biking as part of my health kick, and putting on 72.2 mi this month so far, I thought I would actively adore the Surly Steamroller single speed bike that I have been putting my mileage on:

Abraham Harrison sales star, Nina Martin, just gave my circa 2008 bio a makeover — what do you think?

Chris Abraham, President and Co-Founder of Abraham Harrison, LLC, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms. Chris has been recognized as a Top 100 Social Media Expert and his blog for Abraham Harrison is ranked by Technorati in the Top 100 small business blogs.

Prior to starting Abraham Harrison, Chris was a member of the interactive team at Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC, consulting clients such as Wal-Mart, Shell, Nissan, and GE on blogger and social media strategy. Before Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media Strategies, a pioneer in online brand promotion and protection with clients including Sci-Fi Channel, Buena Vista, TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA, RCA, and NBC.

Chris has had a web presence since 1993 and started blogging in 1999, focusing on community, connection, innovation, and brand extension. As a technologist, Chris has consulted T. Rowe Price, the US Department of Treasury CIO, Friendster, Deutsche Telekom, and others.

Chris has taught blogging courses for the Writer’s Center of Bethesda, has been a guest lecturer on social media and blogging at Columbia University, University of North Carolina, Georgetown University, American University, George Washington University, University of Oregon, University of Maryland and others. He has spoken at social media conferences all over the world including conferences in the United States, Sweden, Slovakia, and Canada. Chris has also led Webinars on subjects such as online PR, Twitter, reputation defense, personal branding, advocacy and policy, and marketing.

Tonight, 8 February, 2011, 7:30 PM at the MGM Building, 10250 Constellation Blvd. From the description about Peggy Orenstein::

“Peggy Orenstein writes about what women and girls, and mothers and daughters, should think about. Her beat includes really anything that matters to women: issues of weight, sex, career, motherhood, investments, relationships, social networks and more—and not in that order. You’ve read her pieces in The New York Times Magazine, and if you haven’t, start reading. Her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Girlie-Girl Culture, examines the alarming new “princessmania” of our culture that drives little girls, young girls and adolescents, and its effect on their sexuality, identity , independence and development. This enormous shift from feminism to girlie-girl takes its toll in eating disorders and depression as well as other social and health problems, Orenstein writes. There’s hope, to be sure: Peggy arms us with advice about setting limits, establishing and sticking to our values, and more. She is also the author of several other books, including: Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap; Waiting for Daisy, and Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Lids and Lifein a Half-Changed World.”

From the description about Lori Gottlieb:

“Lori Gottlieb writes about women and relationships, and ignites brushfires with many of her pieces. Take her piece in The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago, where she wrote that passion and romance are really wonderful, especially with Mr. Right. But as we get older, perhaps our ideals need to mellow out just a bit. Therefore, we need to be open to those who might not be Mr. Perfect, but might instead be Mr. Good Enough. Lori Gottlieb’s widely discussed and controversial Atlantic article turned into a terrific and hugely discussed book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. It set off what The Today Show called “a firestorm” when she proposed that single women would be happier if they were more realistic in their search for a mate and that “good enough” is actually pretty great — and far better than ending up with nobody.”