Remember, if your campaign doesn’t check all the boxes of being a publicity, PR, or buzz campaign, it won’t work as an earned media campaign.

When I pitch my influencer marketing services these days on behalf of my digital agency Gerris, I find that I am not competing against humans at other agencies, I am fighting it out with Google AdWords,Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads and even PinterestAds.

What’s more, because there have been so many bad actors in the influencer marketing space, it’s quickly becoming perceived as a cash-only, pay-per-post, payola game. I guarantee you that if you reach out asking me to write about your product, service, client, or event and you’re unable to give me a plausible, compelling, or attractive why, then I’ll do one of three things:

1. Ignore or delete your email (some report as spam)
2. Ask for too much money (to make ’em go away, though they often pay)
3. Out your terrible, insulting, pitch onto my sites and the Bad Pitch Blog

When you do outreach you never hear back from 1 so, if you’re tone deaf, you’ll just assume that everyone you reach out to with your insufficient outreach comes back with their rate sheet in one hand and their right hand out for the cash. Payola, baby!

Almost three years ago I wrote Blogger outreach is more PR than social media. I think it’s worthwhile going back this this article if you haven’t read it before.  In it, I go through my process and talk about the value of earned media versus paid post.

Much along those lines, earned media is still the best policy. Here’s what we do these days:

1. Prepare every campaign as if it’s a traditional PR campaign (it’s not selling, it’s sharing)
2. Make sharing, posting, and blogging your pitch is as easy as possible (premasticate!)
3. Make sure your “gift” (be it review products or exclusive news) is perceived as valuable by the influencers
4. Be responsive to any and all questions, queries, or concerns by hand immediately (be kind!)
5. Reach out several times (see “ignore or delete your email”) because people are busy and they don’t know you. Let ’em know you mean business. That you’re serious and intent on communicating with — reaching — them
6. Do what you say you’re going  to do when you say you’re going to do it — these are not sales conversion, they’re real people and you’re investing in community not links, not SEO, not Google Juice or social signals.

Remember, if your campaign doesn’t check all the boxes of being a publicity, PR, or buzz campaign, it won’t work as an earned media campaign. And, if you can’t convince the blogger or social media influencer that what you bring to the table today, via email or DM, is a win-win-win, then you’ll end up with goose eggs.

“Gifts” can be anything: exclusive embargoed news, access to an early private beta, access to your client for interviews or meet-and-greets, copies of your book in whatever format the influencer prefers (including Kindle-native, a PDF won’t do), full-size test products. You can go for sending testers but beware of being perceived as cheap — influencers love to be spoiled (actually, most insist on being spoiled).

No matter what your ultimate agenda, no matter what your final goal, being perceived at all, ever, of being a user “just for juice” and you’ll be lucky if you just get a request for money. If that’s what you’ve been doing, pull the plug and go back to the drawing board — it’s worth the time. If you do your job, you’ll not only be securing mentions and reviews — and links — on blogs and across social networks but you’ll be initiating what could be a persistent, long-term, professional relationship.

When you make an acquaintance online it’s up to you to convert that casual engagement into a full-blown relationship. The best brands have teams of ambassadors who are very happy to not only tweet or blog once on your behalf but become a happy part of your volunteer ambassador squad or even, if they’re luck, a sponsored team.

For example, last Friday I ran the first of five weekly 5ksin the Crystal City 5k Fridays series and there were Oiselle brand ambassadors and even team members everywhere.

Did I know about Oiselle Running and Athletic Apparel for Women before last Friday? No. But I sure as hell do now! I have been indelibly branded by Oiselle because they have both done an amazing job of engaging their community and also providing products that women like (you need to do both, right? You need to start with an amazing product even before you start an influencermarketing campaign).  And, now that I have seen Oiselle in real life during the 5k, I see Oiselle ambassadors everywhere, especially on Instagram —  over 18,648 #oiselle tags!

So, it’s not about selling, it’s not about marketing, and it’s not about advertising. It’s about relating, it’s about engaging. If you can find people who ache to become part of Team You and you treat them special and give them an amazing experience and a generous gift, you can earn the (free) attention of hundreds if not thousands of people. And, unlike ads, these reviews, links, and mentions persist forever and don’t just fade away the moment you stop paying your ad networks.

Now it’s your turn. Remember that there are a million real people in two million real bunny slippers out there who could potentially join Team You in 2016. Stop treating them like numbers and appreciate them all for the beautiful Children of God that they are.

(Originally posted by Chris Abraham on Biznology on Apr 5, 2016)

Where it's happening is as important to the increasingly location-aware internet as that it happened at all.

Back in the beginning of March I wrote Build a Page and Profile for Absolutely Everything. It was about how I wouldn't take no for an answer when it came to wanting my local 9Round gym to have its very own Facebook Page, Google+ Page, and Twitter Profile instead of sharing one profile on each social network across 4 or 5 separate gyms.

That just can't work if your brand has separate locations that are open to the public.  The public is funny. They don't care passionately about Starbucks or McDonalds or Chick-fil-A or Target so much as they care deeply about their Starbucks, McDonalds, Chick-fil-A.  My girlfriend has her Target. It's the one off Route 1, the one Michelle Obama goes to.

It's hers.

Facebook is location-aware. Google is location-aware. Twitter is location-aware. FourSquare's Swarm is hyper-local-location-aware.  When I check-in to a gym, every day, and share my struggles I want people to know that it's happening underneath the Giant and the Penrose Square Apartments.

Where it's happening is as important to the increasingly location-aware internet as that it happened at all.

For me, I want the people in my online community to know that squeezed between the Hair Cuttery and Penrose Cleaners is my home away from home where I make an arse out of myself as many days as I can, for around 30-40-minutes-a-day, as often as I can.   While I am sure that the Courthouse 9Round and the one on North Quincy Street and the one in Springfield are swell, but they're not mine.

I feel the same way about my Taqueria el Poblano, too. There are two other locations, one in Del Ray and one on Lee Highway but they're not mine. I have never been to either of the others.

And I am not the only one who feels this way.  People are loyal to their favorites. They're loyal to the locations of the brands they frequent even more than they are to the brands themselves.

Ask folks about Starbucks, especially in someplace dense with Starbucks like downtown DC or NYC: people have their favorites. My girlfriend works in Crystal City, Arlington, VA, and there are three or four Starbucks right on Crystal Drive. You bet she has a list of her preferred Starbucks cafes in order or preference. And, she can tell you exactly why she does and doesn't like each one, even though they really should be cookie-cutter versions of each other, held to the same standard of training and expectation.

When it comes to attracting and holding on to the fanbois and true believers and the people who do all the unpaid work from passion, love, dedication, or even personal interest, they're not a guarantee. They'll give and give and give -- until they don't.

When you find people who are willing and able to become volunteer workers, a street team enabled to paper all the cars in the neighborhood, you should do whatever it takes to cultivate and facilitate that relationship.

Via Biznology

Come on, don’t you think the thankless job of blogging passionately about a topic for free, persistently, over months and years deserves at least some face time and maybe a coffee, a burger, a bourbon?

If you have enough budget to do PPC campaigns, spend money on inbound links, or are willing to pay bloggers for their reviews, then you have enough budget to take the bloggers and social media influencers that you dream of sharing your content, announcing your news, talking about your brand and reviewing your products, then you really should put some time and money aside to make sure you reach out to the bloggers and influencers of your dreams individually when you find yourself in their town and take them out!

Breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks, dinner, nightcap — you decide what’s appropriate.

They may well say no, but they may say yes. And, it’s so very rare that anyone who pitches bloggers and expects them (us) to do stuff for free ever asks bloggers (us) out to do stuff IRL (in real life). Yes, of course you should start with your hometown or city. And it could be coffee or lunch or even dinner. But pick up the tab. And tweet it. And get an selfie together (an ussie).

Don’t have the budget?  Well, put time aside to do the same exact thing virtually.  Comment on their blogs in meaningful ways.  Share their posts on your personal social media profiles. But don’t stop there. Like their Pages, follow their Board, subscribe to their YouTube. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Follow them on Twitter. The whole 9 yards. Build it into your calendar because you should be doing this for ten, twenty, fifty, one-hundred influencers. And not just on wedding, anniversaries, and birthdays.  But you also must remember that most bloggers have very rich lives outside of their blogging life.  You should add each one of them to your Salesforce, to your personal contact. Bring them closer than a single row in an Excel Spreadsheet.

Clotilde Dusoulier’s Got a Posse

My girlfriend is a huge foodie and consumer of food blogs. Last week, while on business in France, she hired Clotilde Dusoulier to guide her and a friend through Paris gastronomie. Mademoiselle Dusoulier is cookbook author and sole proprietor of the very famous foodie blog, Chocolate & Zucchini. They spent the day together and my girlfriend and her friend were not only personally led through the best cafes, restaurants, and bakeries, but Clotilde gave classes in what made baguettes baguettes francaises and and what made chocolate croissants croissants de chocolate.

Both bloggers and online influencers have real relationships with their readers and fans. Bloggers and their readers know each other. When you reach out to a blogger and tell her “I love your blog,” even if you have the benefit of seeing her historical posts from influencer management tools like GroupHigh, InkyBee, and Audienti, your earned media PR pitch could very well land on deaf ears because she doesn’t know you. When I was a boy in Catholic school on the slopes of Kalaepohaku at Saint Louis School, I was told that when you die and reach the pearly gates the and ask for entry, only those who are known by the Lord are admitted. Same thing with influencer marketing.

Do You Have a Posse of Online Influencers?

If you want someone to do you a favor, do something for free, or do you a solid, you need to be in a trusting relationship with them already.  That relationship could be in the form of already being their legitimate fan — and not a double secret fan but a supportive, commenting, resharing, retweeting, Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM friend who repins stuff on Pinterest.

The relationship could be in the form of being an online influencer yourself, being a fellow blogger, or having the sort of Google juice, influence, number of followers and friends, that would turn you from being just a shill asking for favors for free into being a fellow blogger, fellow influencer, and maybe someone that influencer has already heard of, in passing, before. That’s who I am.  And, even though it’s really totally unfair, that relationship could be based on the fact that you happen to do blogger outreach for something seriously cool.

Dan Krueger’s Got a Posse

My buddy and colleague Dan Krueger is that guy. He’s both a totally jacked Greek god of CrossFit trainer and athlete and he’s also Spartan Race’s influencer marketing guy.  He’s also a blogger and is very active onFacebook and social media. He’s the trifecta of influencer outreach and engagement.  What’s more, he’s engaged in it long-term on behalf of Spartan and has as many tickets to free races as he can hand out to his thousands of devoted influencers.

That’s the ideal.

You Should Be Passionate About What You Pitch

And if you’re doing blogger outreach to athletes and you’re an unfit shut-in, you may be the wrong person; and, if you’re doing influencer outreach for Ducati but think motorcycles are donor-cycles and you drive a Volvo for safety, you may well be the wrong person for the gig; and, if you’re not passionate enough on your own to actually be an influencer in your sphere of influence yourself, you may very well be the wrong person for the gig.

It Won’t Happen Right Away

Most people who start a blogger outreach or influencer marketing campaign give up right away. They puss out because they’re generally not expecting the sort of hazing associated with reaching to someone you’ve never met before and getting either dissed, harangued, or handed a pay-per-post price card.  Influence outreach is sort of like converting to Judaism: rabbis would discourage potential Jews-by-choice, turning them away three times to test how serious they were.

Show your bloggers and online influencers how serious you are!  It won’t happen right away but even I, when doing my outreach into communities that are not my native land, need to reach out three times total in order to get each influencer’s attention enough that they actually consider my pitch. It takes time and it might be embarrassing. People who have done sales are really good at this; do, too, are poets and novelists because anyone who has become used to heartbreaking rejection is just the kind of person who is made for the job of influencer marketing.

I do blogger outreach for companies, brands, startups, and nonprofits so I am not always reaching out to bloggers and online influencers who know me at all. And, to add to that, most of my campaigns are to thousands of bloggers and online influencers at a time. It can be awkward. But it can be done.

For me, it comes down to how I treat people (with respect) how I talk to people (I don’t BS them or pretend I am something I am not), the gift I give (it had really better be generous), the clients I choose to work with (crappy brands with crappy products and dodgy services have burnt me before — who would blog about something not awesome for free?), and I rely heavily on the fact that I am a fellow blogger, that I have been blogging since 1999, that I have a Klout of 79, 50.8k followers on Twitter, and all that stuff (and if you search me for a second, you’ll see that it’s all true).

Good luck and go git ’em, Tiger!

(Originally posted on the Biznology Blog)

This is an interesting book because it's written by enterprise-level Search Engine Marketing (SEM) geniuses. They eat big data for breakfast every day.

What James Mathewson and Mike Moran learned in their decades of fortune 500 and enterprise-level experience with search marketing and content strategy is that too many companies are spending all of their time and treasure following UI and UX trends and redesigning their sites based on the whims of creative directors and not nearly enough resources on using big data to sort out what's working on your site and doing more of that.

In Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing, Mathewson and Moran have figured out how to make search marketing (SEM), content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO),and inbound marketing actually work for you by taking the guesswork and opinion out of the mix and relying, instead, on A/B tests, data-tracking, and strong analysis of the data you're already collecting to win at search, to win at content, and to win at business.

Too many agencies are recommending throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The book is thin, essential, and maybe should even be proprietary. There's no BS but don't second guess them or assume that you, too, can't leverage the sort of tools and strategies that Mike and James do.

They're giving away $100,000 of consulting for $25.

Original reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.

What it took me to become a 72-hour reddit celebrity, from Saturday night through Sunday afternoon, is not a secret at all

I've unlocked the code to becoming an Internet sensation on reddit because I've become an Internet sensation on reddit!

Back in 2012 I wrote both Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the Room and You Must Commit to Reddit to Succeed. Back then, I was terrified of reddit.

Don't get me wrong, I am still terrified to market on reddit but now I know what it feels like -- and it feels as good as you imagine.

What it took me to become a 72-hour reddit celebrity, from Saturday night through Sunday afternoon, is not a secret at all:

1. Commit to becoming a part of one or more reddit communities
2. Choose communities you vibe with and are passionate about
3. Put the time in to mostly read and comment to other people's posts
4. Take your lumps gladly* when you break each subreddit's unique and arbitrary rules and terms
5. Take your lumps gladly* when you step in it and lose the support of your other members
6. Take your lumps gladly* when you float something and nobody cares
7. Take your lumps gladly* when you get piled on by other redditors who don't agree with you or your way of thinking
8. Finally spend a couple hours to read both the sub's FAQ and sidebar Rules (where you'll discover that those rules aren't arbitrary at all)
9. Realize that reddit isn't federated and that each subreddit is its own universe and that what you learn in IAmA is unique and has nothing to do with what the Moderators over at /r/running/, /r/C25K/, or /r/Fitness/
10. Get over it!
11. Give it a go -- say something or share something
12. If it doesn't work, GOTO 4-7 (take your lumps gladly)

And if it works, you're golden, but it probably won't. And the more you take your lumps sadly, the less you will be accepted or respected on reddit. What's more, if you have contempt for reddit and all the people who make up this most vibrant of online communities, then you're sunk. Have you ever:

• Physcially rolled your eyes whenever anyone mentions something they read on reddit?
• Accused reddit of being a horrible den of bullies
• Generally consider reddit denizens to be morons or children
• Think everything about reddit is stupid doo doo head
• Preferred primary source news over secondary conversations
• Actually still subscribe to the WSJ, the Post, the Times
• Have a hateful place for Millennials and Generation Z
• Don't have the skin to survive from a mild hazing to a severe beating

Maybe you should find someone else in your community, company, or in the want ads (does anyone use want ads anymore).

Mind you, I'm cheating: once I started working out again, I quickly joined up with /r/Fitness, /r/Spinning, /r/C25K, /r/kettlebell, /r/bodyweightfitness, /r/trx, and /r/9round -- so, I spend at least an hour every day looking through other people's posts. Sometimes I just upvote, other times I comment, mostly I follow the links or read the race reports.

So, you can do it to. You can. But you need to do what you need to do in any community, virtual or online: you need to listen more than you talk, you need to read more than you write, and you need to speak from the heart way more than you need to bullshit.

Folks on reddit have been hurt before. It's a place where a whole heap of hazing makes sense because one needs to be tested for one's resilience in order to make the cut.  Every club tests its prospects' characters, be it actual testing or hazing or simply tests of persistence and even likability.  Jerks need not apply.

But I also cheated because the blog post I submitted to both the C25K and Running subreddit was heartfelt, personal, vulnerable, and an actual race report. The blog wasn't monetized at all and it's currently totally about my personal struggle to get back in shape.

I did take one chance: many reddit subreddits look down their nose on posting links to your own blogs, articles, or sites.  I'm really lucky that the post I shared hit a nerve.

That the struggle I had actually getting off my couch and not only getting onto the road but also into a race -- and being dead last for both my age and my gender.

I almost forget: my server crashed once, so be sure to monitor your assets while you're being reddited/slashdottet by your newfound stardom.

Also, if you'll notice, once I posted the link to my blog, I spent the next 72-hours commenting on any and all questions, comments, or kudos. In fact, that might well be the most important part. I made friends with several people and even Peter Shankman discovered me via my post on reddit. There were over a hundred combined comments on both of my shares, and I made sure I was on top of all of them.  I wonder if my reddit share would have had remotely the same effect if I were not an integral and timely part of the entire share and experience.

Now it's your turn! Go for it! You can do it, just be smart, careful, but also be bold and brave. Reddit's looking to cull the sick and the weak.

(Originally posted on Biznology by Chris Abraham on April 12, 2016)

Stever was able to give me a couple powerful just-for-me tools in our 25-minute personal coaching session.

I just completed 25-minutes with Stever Robbins on a Skype coaching call that we scheduled. Before we jumped on the line, Stever sent me along three questions. 

• What is the #1 challenge you'd like to address in our call?
• Why is this important?
• What have you tried so far that hasn't worked?

The topic of our meeting was "Living an Extraordinary Life" and in only twenty-five minutes Stever was able to work through some issued that have plagued me for my entire professional career. My take-away was two powerful real-world, real-life, actionable solutions that I can start using today.

Stever's solutions are equal parts business and human. Because life is both business and human. He brings business skills from a 15-year coaching career, several years' experience in management, and a gig helping to design part of the Harvard Business School MBA curriculum. He brings personal skills from extensive training in different forms of cognitive psychology, NLP, and interpersonal communication.

In our work together, his questioning helped find that place where the two came together. He helped find where my personal behavior was sabotaging my ability to take certain important actions in my business. Once the connection was found, he led me through an intervention to defuse the conflict.

He also helps businesspeople change their thinking. He writes:

As your business grows, you must expand your thinking across functions, and be able to link the larger company strategy to your organization’s goals and actions. I help you understand what drives your business strategy and how you can craft an organization to implement that strategy. (And if you don’t have one, I can help you create one!) We cover both breadth and depth of your business.

If you want to work with a coach who can help you build powerful results in your life and business, contact Stever.

When I have a client that needs something launched in a big way I go at it with guns-blazing.

When I work, I do a lot of things concurrently, front-loading as best I can, pimping their social networks using ManageFlitter, buying followership if their Twitter following is pathetic using FastFollowerz, sort out a following strategy based on keywords and hashtags using SocialOomph, then jump headlong into influencer and blogger research using GroupHigh, Audienti, and InkyBee.

Then I jump in, feet first, and reach out to all the most salient and germane influencers by hook or by crook: I follow everyone who is in my demographic, be it via keyword or hashtag, I engage with them all, no matter what their mozRank, Total Reach, Alexa Rank, Kred, PeerIndex, Kred, Page Authority, or PageRank, or Domain Authority.

Creating real buzz, at least on Twitter, and in the Blogosphere, doesn't rely as much about all those things, such as Followers, like SEO-focused social media marketing does.

Timing's of the essence so go go go go go go go!

When it comes to campaigns like this, I get the explicit OK for me to leverage my own personal social networks -- that's why I work so hard on developing my 79 Klout -- because the only online influencer I can 100% rely on is me.

So, the more force and impact I have o sole mio the more I can really make a splash on behalf of my client and their product, brand, event, offer, or service.

• Twitter: @chrisabraham: 51.5k followers
• Facebook: /chrisabraham 5k followers
• Instagram: /chrisabraham 7.5k followers
• Vine: @chrisabraham 1k followers
• YouTube: /chrisabraham 3.5k followers
• Periscope: /chrisabraham 605 followers
• Tumblr: chris-abraham.com 451 followers

My GaggleAMP's Got a Posse

GaggleAMP is my secret weapon. It allows me to harness the social media profiles of over 663 members who have not only opted in to my public GaggleAMP gaggle but also have availed their accounts to the content that I provide. The value is that I can deliver content to them through a broad variety of platforms and delivery tools, including:

• Share on Linkedin
• Share on Twitter
• Share Photo on Twitter
• Share Video on Twitter
• Retweet Twitter
• Like on Twitter
• Share Photo on Linkedin
• Share on Google plus
• Share on Facebook
• Share and comment on blog post
• Like Facebook Page
• Review Facebook Page
• Like Facebook Post
• Follow Linkedin Company Page
• Follow LinkedIn Influencer
• Linkedin follow influencer
• Join Linkedin Group
• Follow Pinterest Board
• Answer Quora Question
• Repin on Pinterest
• Comment on Slideshare deck
• Like Slideshare deck
• Follow Twitter Profile
• Follow Twitter List
• Comment on Youtube Video
• Like Youtube Video
• . . . and several more...

This is a very powerful tool and I happily avail it to worthy campaigns.

Buy 10,000 Followers!

So many worthwhile organization and companies have very many followers. I always recommend that an account have at least 10,000 followers before I put my my mad skills to work on them because my mad skills have a lot more room to work when there are more followers. So I recommend buying followers, at least at first (and not for the followers, but because Twitter has limitations on how many profiles an account can follow based on how many are already following).

I personally use Fastfollowerz and spend a little extra money -- OK, three-times the money -- to buy accounts that are more germane to the owner of the account (such as US only, etc). Some clients really don't like doing this because they often don't consider things like buying followers to be "authentic" -- and it's not -- but it's not me, it's Twitter's fault for putting lame limitations in there. For example, for $299 you can buy 10,000 targeted followers targeted by location and keyword and with a guarantee that the followers have active accounts.

Audienti & SocialOomph & ManageFlitter

I have had some amazing luck using automation tools that allow me to automagically follow everyone who has the correct keywords, bio, or hashtags. Once you have someone's attention, you can then see if they'll follow you back. Once they follow you back there's a better chance that you'll be able to influence them. While SocialOomph and ManageFlitter are following and follow-back tools, Audienti is a local MD business that has done an amazing job of doing automated influencer marketing.

The Keys to the Kingdom

While I am always more than happy to personally use @chrisabraham, etc, as the campaign account, it would benefit the campaign if my clients were to allow me to have admin access to their Twitter and Facebook Page.

#Hashtagging and Copying/Stealing

While most clients have already chosen their home hashtag, it's really important to do some serious research as a discovery to see which hashtags, followers, and keywords all your brother, sister, and competitor organizations, brands, and companies.

I know, I know "hijacking" is such an ugly word, but it's the most efficient way of finding your most salient and topical birds of a feather Twitter profiles and campaigns.

Luckily, once you discover all of these hashtags, it also allows you to find the profiles and users who use them so that you can not only follow them but also follow everyone they're following as well as the people who follow them, too. One can easily go down the rabbit hole on this, which is why everyone needs to have at least 10,000 followers!

Influencer Outreach (Earned Media)

It's essential that we only engage people who already have and feel the synergy with your campaign. While influencer outreaches are generally used to reach the readers of the blogs and the platforms, influencer outreach using emails and reaching out to people who have their own social media platforms, allows for de facto direct messaging, which means we can reach out directly to your ideal vertical to let them know about your campaign (for their followers, wink wink, but also for them as well, wink).

Usually, I break up each outreach to A-List and everyone else. I reach out to the A-listers by hand via GroupHigh's excellent blogger/influencer-dedicated social CRM -- it allows me to track the outreach and, if I can't find their email, I can still fill out their contact form or reach out to them via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or even DailyMile, if that's what I have to do.

For the longer tail, I only reach out to people who have emails. And then I send out a blast.

For both of them, I need to come up with a client-approved message model for the email and other communications. Sometimes if a client doesn't have all the messaging in one place, I collect everything into a landing page, something I call a Social Media New Release (SMNR).

Prep takes as little as a couple days or as long as two weeks, depending on how addicted you are to the hours of 9-5 versus the kind of workaholicism I am still way too addicted to at 46.

That's how I do it, in a nutshell. I go into a lot more detail in my other blog posts. You should look around and check them out!

Good luck and go get 'em, Tiger!

Originally posted on Biznology by Chris Abraham.

While it’s important to have followers, it’s equally important to have room to breathe and room to follow.

I’ve said it many times before: if you want your Twitter profile to be strong and if you want to develop both influence and clout, you’ll need to prune your Twitter following as rigorously as you would a prize Bonsai.  While it’s important to have followers, it’s equally important to have room to breathe and room to follow.

I used to support following everyone back equally, resulting in following the same 10,000 that follow you but I don’t feel that way anymore.

While I don’t feel like one needs to have the same ratio as I do, I do think it’s important to have as much room as possible so that we can aggressively follow the people we want to follow us with the goal of following us back.

While I love to organically earn people’s following, I personally use my own Twitter account,@chrisabraham, to help get me into the attentionsphere of the people I want to influence.  And I can’t really just wait until those people discover me solely through my own hashtags, language, keywords, and links.

So, I use an assortment of tools, apps, and services to winnow down all the folks who I do follow but who no longer — or never did — follow me back or in the first place.

ManageFlitter

While possibly the most expensive, ManageFlitter is also the most valuable. Unlike Crowdfire and SocialOomph, ManageFlitter has found the best Twitter TOS loophole: Remote Action Management.

RAM is awesome because you get to outsource all of that manual unfollowing, all that click-click-clicking, to a human person who does it for you but you never have to meet ever or interact with.

But it’ll cost you: order a business class account for $49/month and you’ll get spotted 10,000 “RAM actions.”

They do roll-over, month-after-month, but if you want or need more, you’ll need to pay $10 for another 10,000 or, if you’re managing a Twitter profile with hundreds of thousands of followers needing tens of thousands of actions, you can get 22,222 actions for $100 or 285,714 actions for $1,000.

One action represents a single follow or unfollow. Simple.

I upped my game to the next level that offers 5 Twitter profile accounts, the $119/month account that comes with 24,000 RAM actions-a-month, including rollover.

One of the greatest things about ManageFlitter plus automagic RAM actions is that you can create elaborate, persistent, and automatic follow, unfollow, and block rules that you can set and forget — something that SocialOomph does gorgeously as well — though if you have enough RAM actions purchased in advance, only ManageFlitter allows you to set it and forget it.

If you fire and forget SocialOomph, it’ll queue up hundreds and hundreds of potential follow, unfollow, and block actions that you’ll eventually have to personally attend to at some point.

SocialOomph

I use SocialOomph personally as a way to pepper evergreen tweets on behalf of @chrisabraham and my clients. In addition to that, SocialOomph also offers Google+ cross-posting and search-based, keyword-based, and profile-based following tools.

Unfortunately, Twitter’s TOS disallows both automatic follow-back as well as automatic follow based on keywords. Instead, SocialOomph collects a queue of hundreds and hundreds of prospective people to follow, including the Twitter Lists you could add them to.

It’s a full-featured tool but lacks the auto feature.

But, after using SocialOomph for a hundred years, I found an intentional hack that the SocialOomph team has double-secretly added to the queue to make it much easier for me to gently get away with Twitter Murder.

SocialOomph’s follow queue initially uses radio buttons to make it impossible to “check all” and just power through them all. But double secretly, if you triple secretly skip past a few pages, you’ll see that thataccept radio button secretly turns into a check box, allowing the sneaky and persistent SocialOomph user to get his speed on, throwing Twitter TOS caution to the wind!

If you download this awesome Check All tool and install it onto your Chrome Browser, you’ll then be able to quadruply-secret check them all up and follow them all in a sort-of giant batch to your heart’s content! It’s not nearly as awesome or efficient as ManageFlitter’s RAM actions, but it’s cheaper and sneakier!

Sneaky is sexy.

Shhhhh, don’t tell either SocialOomph or Twitter that I told you this secret — don’t tell Twitter especially!

Crowdfire

Crowdfire is fun. There’s an awesome app for both iOS and Android and it’s super fun to click all of those red buttons! Click, click, click! So much fun (shown below but turned on its side for amusement purposes only)

I personally spend $19.99/month for the Earth Plan, but this is recent as I have recently added a couple-few more Twitter accounts to my Crowdfire account.

Until recently, I only paid $9.99 Pluto plan, which offers everything but for only one Twitter account.  Aside from the fact that Crowdfire isn’t persistent, it’s very powerful and allows one to search for people based on things that have written in their bios, their tweets, and even location.  And if and when you use location, use quite a few different ways of locating: Arlington Virginia, Arlington VA, 22202, 22204, etc.

Of course I also use HootSuite, Buffer, and GaggleAMP as well, but when it comes to controlling, containing, and taming my bushy bush bush of a bushy bush of a Twitter profile, @chrisabraham, I use ManageFlitter, SocialOomph, and Crowdfire for all my manscaping.

Now it’s your turn, you bushy bush bush of a bushy bush!  Go git ’em, Tiger!

Via Biznology

You employees and staff are the flesh and blood and memory of your company. Interview them as the source of your content marketing strategy. Allow them to become part of the company's narrative. It'll help both your online reputation and your natural organic search success.

If there’s anyone in your world who can pass the duck test, it’s your employees. There’s nobody else anywhere who looks more like a duck, swims more like a duck, and quacks more like a duck, then your staff. So, don’t duck your staff when your aim is to win at search.

However you may lie to yourself, you’re doing all your content-creation andcontent marketing for Google, aren’t you? Admit it. That’s smart. But it doesn’t need to be hard.

I recommend a strategy of begging, borrowing, and stealing from a vault full of riches that you have possessed the entire time: who your people are, what they do at their jobs, when they came on board,where they got their start, why they’re on the team, and how they got there.

But Chris, I’ve tried collaborative corporate blogging, and there was zero buy-in, you say. Well, did New York Times reporter David Gelles ask Secretary of LaborThomas E. Perez to write Thomas Perez, a Labor Watchdog Who’s Not All Bitelast Sunday? No! He interviewed him, he did some good old fashioned reporting, he wrote, rewrote, and then needed to pass it through his editor and the fact-checker.

You should do exactly the same thing with everyone in your company, too — and you don’t have to attend J-School at Berkeley to make it happen. All you need is a GoPro or a Smartphone and some time. Actually, forget the tech and the gear, what you need is curiosity, time, attention, interest, and the trust of your staff that you’ll put them in their best possible light across all channels and media.

Here are some things to consider before you get started:

Become Your Employees’ Ghost Writer

The reason why collaborative corporate blogs almost never work is fourfold: 1) most people hate public writing as much as they hate public speaking 2) non-writers tend to write what they believe their employers want to read rather than what they’re thinking 3) employees who are not in communications or storytelling tend to not be able to actually see how compelling and interesting when they do on a daily basis might be, both for readers and for Google’s spiders and bots and 4) at some point the bean-counters and bosses will resent the time their staff is spending not doing core business.

As a result, you need to embrace your inner Dick Cavett (okay, okay, I’m showing my age. How about James Lipton? Jimmy Fallon?) and schedule some one-on-one video interviews with a deep cut of your staff. Stay away from the C-Suite because each of them already have their management team, board of directors, executive team, about us page content already. What we’re looking for is deep knowledge, is deep language.

Since you’re probably doing this 80/20 for search, you need to extract as much deep content as possible and allow it to be conveyed verbatim and not go through your thesaurus, your buzzbox.  Why? You already can write you and your buzzwords and all the stuff you’ve learned from your expensive and extensive keyword research, so don’t. What you need to do is to extend your long tail to include the words, phrases, and context that your experts use amongst themselves. Sadly, communications and C-suite executives generally have entirely different buzzword bingo cards than their experts.  No matter how populist you may well feel, officers and enlisted have almost nothing in common when it comes to language.

So, what a ghost writer is supposed to do exceptionally well is find a way to do the writer’s version of theStanislavski Method and take what you’ve learned in the Five Ws and an H interviews and fashion them together in the voice of whomever you’ve interviewed, using your own compulsion to be writerly to bring coherence, context, and readability into the work.

And, of course, to make sure that each staffer who trusts you enough to buy into this content-creation project can be proud of the final outcome — something they would very well consider sharing to their own social channels, including a braggy email to mom (who might finally understand what her dear son or daughter does for a living).

Fight the Urge to Do Too Much at Once

You’re going to be tempted to want to really front load all of this work. You’ll want to do a ton of prospecting and scads of interviews. Soon, you’ll be under a pile of raw, unedited, content, and you’ll quickly become overwhelmed enough to rue the day you decided to do this at all.  Don’t do it.  It’s better to identify one or two people you’d really like to learn more about, maybe someone who’s been there forever or those impenetrable, unknowable coders who build the backbone of your company. Start with them. See what you can do. See how deep you can get.

That’s the first reason. The second reason has more to do with the evolution resulting from experience.

Listen to anyone’s early podcasts or watch anyone’s first vlog on their YouTube Channel and you’ll see how crap, raw, confused, unformed, immature, unprofessional and scattered their first attempts were.  If you do all of your interviews before you even know what the heck you’re really doing (or, what has and hasn’t worked based on actual live, wild, analytics and experience) then you will want to throw a lot of your work away and start over after you realize that there were loads of things you should have asked and didn’t.

So, take it easy. Allow yourself plenty of time to learn.

Plus, the less you disrupt the Force of your company and the less you interrupt people’s work day and the less energy you suck out of your company’s productivity the better.  Do not treat this project like bloody school picture day!

Additionally, if you break it down into smaller pieces or even single perfect bites, you can make the whole endeavor seem more exclusive, much more special, and you’ll also be able to retain a lot more of the information and context of each interview you do because you’ll be doing this entire project in series instead of in parallel. It’ll allow you to authentically connect with each staff member if your head’s not swimming with the other dozen interviews you’ve done over the last couple weeks.

Produce the Recording for Future Use

Measure twice, cut once. That’s not perfect but you’ll really want to over-sample the time you put into this project as much as you can in order to create a digital master, just like they do in recording studios. However, in this case, you’re less concerned with audio density as we’re not really going for the audiophile marker.

You’re concerned with being as compatible as possible with the future.  You don’t want to record all your interviews on an old Pearlcorder then slap yourself in the forehead over not getting any of it in video (according to Chad Abbott of Abbson Live, video, especially livestreaming, is defining 2016). Worse yet, you didn’t get it in 4K, 5K, or 8K video! What were you thinking? 720p? Yikes!

Interview Once for All Applications

While you make not care about it now, produce your recordings as well as you can with the best equipment you can afford (to rent) if only to have a viable sample when and if you should decide to extend your corporate storytelling to Vine, Insta, Periscope, Facebook Live, or even video uploads to YouTube, Facebook, and Google+.  And spend as much time going over everything you could ever want to know:

• Where are you from?
• How did you end up here?
• How long have you been here?
• What do you do here?
• What do you like to do on your free time?
• How did you get into the industry?
• Read/watch/see any good books/movies/etc lately?
• Where do you see the state of the art going?
• Are there any interesting trends in your space?
• Any interesting stories from your youth?
• Where will you spend your holiday?
• Do you have any siblings?
• Who do you admire in your space?

There are a million questions you can ask. You can be as personal and prodding as you like but be mindful if you sense you’re veering outside of what they’re comfortable with. It’s common sense and really depends on how much your interviewee trusts you and the process and will surely be aided if the people you interview have the opportunity to see a final edit before anything goes live — nobody likes to look foolish.

Also, don’t forget that you need to do some transcribing and writing. Don’t get lazy and just allow this to live only in video or audio.  If you don’t turn all of this work into readable, compelling, and interesting narrative, then you’ve failed. Don’t write just for spiders and bots. Google isn’t OK with that any more. Everything you write online needs to be optimized for human consumption these days.

Break Big Meals into Small Snacks

When all is said and done, you’ll probably have between 30-90-minutes of raw footage. After you chunk it down, you really shouldn’t have much more than 10-15-minutes of produced video. Your next step is to chunk everything down into vignettes and tweets.

There are two reasons for this, one practical and one tactical.

Practical: Few humans have the attention span to watch a soup-t0-nuts interview with anyone short of Donald Trump or Taylor Swift; so chop the interview into personal, professional, industry, and corporate.

Tactical: While the new Google loves long-form, they also prefer content that is single-topic and vertical in focus.

If you chop up the longer corpus into verticals, you’ll do much better in search. And, since metrics like length of engagement, bounce-rates, and social sharing are important signals for Google these days, it’s better to make sure that each bit of content is inexorably linked to a clear relevant title and description as well, both on your corporate blog and on YouTube.

Empower Your Staff to Veto

At the end of the day, you need to empower your staff to be able to say no.  You also need to be willing to negotiate your side of matter as well. No, not my threatening but by making the people you interview feel empowered, proud, safe, and ultimately trust you.  Once you get them to sign off, don’t turn around and change it all around again — that’s dirty pool.  Remember, even though you once dreamt of becoming a gotcha journalist, this is corporate communications so it’s all puff pieces here, buster.

And it’s sort of like shooting crows on a power line: you may get the first one but you’ll scare away the rest.  And there are deeper ramifications of betraying staff trust not including lawsuits or anything else. If you’re too bombastic and break their trust, you’ll become toxic in your company and will probably cease being able to perform your job. Oh well. Hey, don’t worry!  But be sure to respect second thoughts, too, even after they okayed everything before. This is about consent. Consent isn’t a blanket statement.

Now it’s your turn!  I really think you should give this a go. Feel free to play favorites at first. Start with someone you already trust, know, and like. Maybe a colleague.  Even so, you still might both feel a little stressed. While I won’t recommend a stiff drink before you start, be sure to keep them off camera.

While I have been recommending employee- and staff-provided content, both via collaborative blogging and through 3rd-person narrative story-telling, I really need to thank Sandy Adam, Manager of Social Media Marketing at ANSYS for her discussion on the subject at last week’s AMPlify conference, sponsored by GaggleAMP, titled Empower Social Selling Through Content Delivery & Consistent Training. Thanks a lot for the motivation, Sandy!

Good luck and go git ’em, Tiger!

Originally posted on the Biznology Blog: Your team is the best content source for search by Chris Abraham on May 17, 2016

Before we start, I want to let you in on a little secret: every successful person you truly admire take naps.

On May 15, Laura Vanderkam wrote a story for the New York Times, The Busy Person’s Lies, calling bullshit on all of us busy professionals who end our days in tears believing our lives ravished by our 60, 70, 80-hour work weeks.

Her tagline says it all, with four kids and a full-time job, time is precious. But it’s also plentiful. In it, she tracked every hour of her every day for an entire year. After she did the math, she had time to take runs, to go to the spa, to read books, and even sleep an average of seven or eight hours-a-night.

Her conclusion is that we spend way more time dreading, worrying, and freaking out than we do actually doing office work or domestic chores. You may be at the office for 80-hours but you’re really only working for 35 of those hours. And no, your commute doesn’t count, only the work, not the seat-warming.

Some of the most universally-admired gods of industry, stage, and screen play as hard as they work. They put on their own oxygen mask first. They pay themselves first. They take calls on lounges or on treadmills. They stay at hotels instead of commuting for two hours if they need the time. They’ll take a half day. They’ll make like a doc and take Wednesdays off. Or, they’ll actually love their jobs enough to make every day feel a little like a play date.

They’ll do all that and then lie to your face about how early they start, how late they sleep, and how they have no life. Why do they do such a thing? Because if they ever told you what their real life was like, you’d resent the hell out of them. They work smart–not nearly as hard as you’d think–or at least not in the kind of steady-state way that grinds all the rest of us into nubs. What “they” do is something more akin to Tabata, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), or Jeff Galloway‘s run, walk, run marathon training. Ever watch an ultramarathon onYouTube? There’s a lot of walking, even amongst the leaders.

Nobody can keep up even a slow jog for 50-weeks-a-year, not even your hero.

I was infected when I was 16 by US Senator from Hawaii Daniel Inouye. I was in DC, my current home, with a bunch of other high-performing teens from Hawaii, my home state. He invited us into his office and amazed and impressed us in so many ways.

What I took away from the visit is that Senator Inouye professed that he only got 5-hours of sleep a night.  From then on, I fancied five hours of sleep to be the x-factor associated with getting everything done. I’ll admit that I am not the most efficient human in the world.

I could blame being a Pisces or my debilitating ADHD, but the truth is more along the lines of needing to steal time, interspersing the time I committed to work with bits of play. With little sips of recovery, because I deserved it.

It worked when I was warming the seat as a salaryman in an office job but it just doesn’t cut it at all when you’re your own boss (I am judge jury and executioner at Gerris).

Mindfulness is not mumbo jumbo.

Mindfulness is Norton Antivirus and System Tools for you.  Unless you’re a sociopath, an Ascended Master, or a Virgo, you’re spinning your wheels to some degree or another. You’re either really lost at sea or you’ve developed an elaborate suit of armor against the little happy place you’ve begged, borrowed, and stolen to protect.

Either way, a little bit mindfulness and some accountability are all you’ll need to unlock the gate to your very own magic garden. And by magic garden, I mean all that time and happiness you magically have when you’re on holiday for two weeks every summer, up until that dread of returning to work starts creeping back on day ten.

I am not an expert in Mindfulness. I am not even a practitioner. While some of my best friends are mindful (David Gelles wrote the book on Mindful Work), I am starting with getting enough rest and enough sleep. More of a gap between my work and my play.

What I do know about what mindfulness is and should be is this: you never stop experiencing your life and everything in it, but you’ll become better at disconnecting from all the crazy associated with the crazy. You’ll be able to compassionately detach (not insouciance–professional distance–but simply recognize the difference between what you think is going on and what is actually happening).

The tenets of mindfulness, as I grok them, are similar to the tenets of theSerenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Mindfulness is the wisdom to know the difference.

The extent of my mindfulness training includes running, rowing, lifting, cardio, naps, sleep, and as much time spent with the Headspace guided meditation app that I can (it’s really wonderful, at least when I’m not unintentionally sleeping through the guided meditations).

I don’t know about Apple products, but my PC and my Android need to be periodically rebooted and recharged. I also need to defrag hard drives, delete cache, kill rogue processes, uninstall unused apps, keep up with application updates and system upgrades, and even downright delete and reinstall.  If I don’t do this kind of maintenance on both my machines, resources become so clogged that you no longer have access to them. They’re there, but you just can’t use them.

You’re the same.

You’re not working nearly as much as you think you are. You’ve become an inefficient engine, dumping way more of all the energy you generate to heat than light. It’s because you’re going mental. It’s because you’re stressed, worried, insecure, unsure, and wasting your brain power keeping an inventory of how you come up short, what you haven’t done with your life, the money you haven’t saved and don’t make, and you’re just in a big frothy tizzy and it just might kill you.

It doesn’t have to be that way, just as long as you can promise me that there’s nothing in your crazy that you’re addicted to.

So, if you’re already fully aware that you have an embarrassment of leisure time you just don’t want to share any of that time with your friends, neighbors, spouse, or family, then that’s your business, go ahead and be too busy.

For the rest of us, the truth is, we’re kind of freaking out. We’ve lost control of the train.

Some of you have been humping that pack since you were a tween and your ruck was made by JanSport.

You might not even know what it’s like to have all the time in the world. To sit with a book in a sunny spot all afternoon. To put aside time every weekend for your long marathon training run, or even the hour every day you’d like to spend at the gym — and, according to the accountability work done by superwoman Laura Vanderkam, you won’t need to “just sacrifice your sleep and get your ass up at 5am, soldier!”

None of that.

Of course, the idea that nothing can help you of your busyness is part of an elaborate pissing contest (I’m the first into the office the morning and the last home at night)? Is your busyness a ruse? Do you resent your spouse, friends, and family, and either hide out at work as much as you can to avoid them (do you commute to DC from West Virginia, do you commute to NYC from Connecticut)? Are you keeping a lover on the side? Another family?

But if you’re really and truly losing your proverbial shit, there are ways you can cope–and you already know this–coping is not the answer.  Coping skills are awesome, but they’re much more akin to snooze alarms then truly enough sleep, rest, recovery, and resources.

The only human with more going on than Laura Vanderkam is Arianna Huffington who is currently obsessed with both mindfulness and rest. The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time is Arianna’s way of getting off of her habitrail the only way she personally knows how: by writing an entire book, doing a book tour, jumping on every interview imaginable, and working more than ever.

While the road to mindfulness is a long one, my prescription for you is to take a nap. Lots of naps, actually. As many as you can steel. Step one: become OK with taking naps.

I drove to NY and back from DC yesterday and by 8PM on the Jersey Turnpike on my way home my eyes were tired. I was driving my old Bimmer somewhere between 80-90 in a light shower. My eyes were burning even after popping a caffeine pill and downing a red eye.

I was smart.

I took the exit to the Walt Whitman Service Area, drove to a dark corner away from traffic, stopped the engine, reclined the seat, locked the doors, and lost time.

By the time I woke at 8:40pm my eyes felt so much better, I was aware that part of my tiredness was dehydration (I needed to drink a lot more water), and my mind was clear and I was Autobahn-ready again. I never feel this way on my motorcycle because I am always overstimulated and engaged, but my car is warm, smooth, comfortable, easy, effortlessly fast, and there are infinite podcasts, audiobooks, and 80s New Wave.

I don’t know if taking a break would have been enough.

If I were to just park, stretch my legs, take a walk, use the bathroom, and grab a cuppa, I don’t think it would have had the same effect as those 35-minutes of shut eye did, assuming some meth head didn’t slit my throat while I was sawing logs, which thankfully didn’t happen.

Now it’s your turn.

Originally posted as Mindfulness is close to Godliness on Biznology by Chris Abraham

Former Intel President Renée James joins Board of Advisors; David Meadvin joins as Managing Director

Laurel Strategies, Inc., the global business advisory and strategic communications firm, announced two strategic additions to their team: former Intel President Renée James is joining Laurel’s Board of Advisors, and communications specialist David Meadvin is joining as Managing Director.

“David is a great addition to the team at Laurel Strategies as we advance our suite of services for CEOs and their c-suite”

Renée James, former President of Intel, has been a leader in the technology industry for more than 25 years with experience in software, hardware and complex multinational operations. Renée is a member of several public boards and an Operating Executive of the Carlyle Group. At Intel, Renée built her career through product R&D leadership positions and as chairman of Intel's software subsidiaries. She is also a member of the C200, and was among both Fortune’s and Forbes’ Most Powerful Women List.

“In the world of corporate consulting firms, Laurel Strategies stands apart as unique. It was founded to be the capable and trustworthy partner to CEOs and senior leaders," said James. "From their sophistication around crisis management, reputation positioning, and navigating the global geopolitical terrain to executing strategic communications and positioning initiatives; from communicating persuasively with investors and stakeholders to advising on merchant banking and philanthropy and other complex financial transactions, Laurel has designed and developed the essential levers needed for today's global leader."

“We are thrilled to have Renée join our Board. Her proven leadership, insights and deep understanding of technology trends and growth opportunities will be a critical addition to our Board of Advisors,” said Alan H. Fleischmann, Founder, President & CEO of Laurel Strategies.

David Meadvin has broad experience in both the public and private sectors as a corporate adviser, executive communications strategist, and speechwriter. In the private sector, David led executive communications functions for Facebook, Bloomberg L.P. and the financial services firm Citadel, and was also president of Inkwell Strategies. In the public sector, as chief speechwriter for the U.S. Senate Majority Leader, David was instrumental in developing a national communications strategy and was the lead author for the Senate's weekly radio address. During his stint as director of speechwriting for the U.S. Attorney General, he wrote speeches to advance law enforcement policies for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

"The world of executive communications and business strategy is changing unbelievably fast," said Meadvin. "New technologies and platforms are creating opportunities for the world's great companies and leaders to reach, inspire and move their audiences to action. What excites me most about joining Laurel Strategies is that this firm is not just keeping up with the future of leadership communications and strategy, but helping to define it."

“David is a great addition to the team at Laurel Strategies as we advance our suite of services for CEOs and their c-suite,” said Fleischmann. “He comes to us with an exceptional reputation as a top communications specialist. We are delighted to welcome him.”

About Laurel Strategies, Inc.

Laurel Strategies is a global business advisory and strategic communications firm for leaders, CEOs, and their C-suite. Laurel Strategies helps leaders build relationships, communicate persuasively, seize opportunities, succeed during transitions, and deliver results. Laurel improves strategy development and execution, leverages media relationships, designs and delivers strategic communications plans, advises on geopolitical dynamics, mitigates risk, manages crises, protects reputations, serves as executive CEO coaches, supports investment deals, and increases the impact of philanthropy. Laurel Strategies also specializes in merchant banking services. The firm's work spans multiple sectors and across the globe. For more information on Laurel Strategies, please visit: http://laurelstrategies.com.

Surefire Social is about to offer an all-in-one social media, search, reputation, review, analytics tool in the form of SurePulse, now in beta.

Surefire Social Offices

I get to play with a lot of cool tools in my work doing social media and SEO audits and reporting. My reports are mostly a hodge podge of data culled fromGoogle Analytics, Moz, Google Webmaster Tools, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and then there’s reviews across so many sites, and business updates over so many sites, and even social media posting, updates and engagement tasks over so many sites.

From the demo I received late last week, SurePulse is a gorgeously-integrated dashboard for everything you’ll need to both monitor and engage with your prospects, clients, and fans, all-in-one easy-to-use interface.

Seriously: easy-to-use. Seriously: all-in-one.  Even easier than Google Search Console, easier than Google Analytics, even easier than HootSuite, Buffer, or any of the other cobble-together, hooptie.

Blog, tweet, schedule, update all your review sites, engage, retweet, check in on your AdWords campaign, see how your pages are performing across all channels and platforms, organically and otherwise, all from the comfort of SurePulse. And, it’s open and extensible, allowing the SurePulse app to grow in usefulness based on 1) what you, their customers, need added and 2) the data sources that are open, accessible, and have a delicious firehose API (I’m looking at you for sucking, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg!).

What’s even better is that it seems like CEO Chris Marentis gets the fact that advertising, marketing, sales, and digital PR is a game of perception where you always need to make sure that everyone up the corporate ladder from you needs to constantly buy into the alchemical black arts known as search and social ROI.

It seems like SurePulse is surely set up to do it.  And I’ll let you know how it all works when I get it running with my very own sites and client sites. I am officially queued up for a three month demo so I will let you know! 

I know I’ll get some time in the cockpit because Shashi Bellamkonda himself invited me and a bunch of local DC-area marketing, PR, and social Gods andGoddesses, and invited me and a giant conference room full of DC digital, marketing, and PR A-list to a networking breakfast and get-together at the Tysons offices of Surefire Social last Friday I got to catch up with Shashi, of course, but also Lisa Zawacki and Vanessa French and my former colleague, Jonathan Trenn.

Also on board were Marjorie Lane, Chris Antonopoulos,Lynn Miller, S. Lynn Cooper, Ananth Rao, Monica Sethi,Linda Hagopian, Mayra Ruiz-McPherson, Susan Kuhn,Chris Petracco, Akia Garnett, Jessica Bates, and Adele Gambardella-Cehrs. It was quite a crew. 

And I promise to report when SurePulse by Surefire Social becomes a reality to me. If you want to get your own personal demo, click here, OK? Then you can let me know what you think about it.

Originally posted by Chris Abraham on the Biznology blog.

I thought I would talk a little bit about the tools of the trade — what we use to stoke excitement about our clients when we do blogger outreach and influencer engagement campaigns.

We’re off to the races! Dan Krueger and I just launched a new influencer marketing campaign on behalf of the best pure, extra virgin, raw cold pressed, and alkaline coconut oil, Skinny Coconut Oil. So, since blogger outreach is at the top of mind, I thought I would talk a little bit about the tools of the trade — what we use to stoke excitement about our clients! Step one: make sure you have an awesome client with a special, unique, delicious, and superior product, anamazing origin story, industry-leading values, and is willing to be super-generous with not only the A-list but with the long tail, too.† Check, check, check, check, and check!

OK, now on to tools.

BaseCamp 2 — I started with BaseCamp back in 2007, had a BaseCamp mutiny, have tried Asana and Trello and many I have forgotten. I always come back to BaseCamp. My clients know it. My colleagues, contractors, and staff know it. And the haters can always engage 100% via email if they like. There’s apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, and there’s even a BaseCamp app for Kindle Android tablets.  I just love it — and I stick with it. I have integrated it into my processes and don’t cede ground when and if clients or colleagues refuse. BaseCamp is my rock.  I invite everyone, I just make sure I am very careful to make sure that I segregate my client-included and client-focused conversation from the team-only discussions.  A mistake can be embarrassing.

Harvest or Toggl — I had been using Toggle forever but someone asked me to use Harvest for a gig and it offers excellent invoicing tools that I really love.  I am only including this because I work hard and I often put too many hours in to project that aren’t compensating me enough to work so hard, so I think it’s important to track hours whether or not I’m billing. And I’d like to convince my team as well (though it’s hard when we’re doing project work).  This is totally normal agency behavior: how much are you earningand how much are you wasting?  I just started using Harvest — I really love the team over at Toggle. I personally love the invoicing and invoice tracking tool built in and one of my best partners uses Harvest and he makes me a lot of money (follow the money).

OpenSRS — GoDaddy can be a dirty dirty dog. If you’re an aggressive email marketer, GoDaddy can really zing you if they, for whatever reason, are displeased by your behavior. And it only takes a single complaint. They’ll charge you hundreds of dollars to allow you to keep your domain and then put you on double-secret probation anyway.  OpenSRS don’t care. They’re Canadian and don’t care about our petty stuff down here. The fees are fair, the control over the domain is brilliant, and the only limitation might be that this service may well be for pros only.  It has everything I need but it’s not nearly as easy to use as is GoDaddy.  Easy to set up redirects, DKIM and SPF records for email deliverability, and all that fun stuff. Love it!

TotalChoice Hosting — When it comes to what I need in a landing page, a Social Media News Release, TotalChoice is the devil I know. They’re cheap but good and whenever I have any problem, they’ve been able to restore my site with a click of a button, via chat, at all hours. Since my SMNRs are single-page, static sites, I don’t need much horsepower in the back end, so $3.95/month, $44.00/year is just fine for me, though I also have my database-backed, health, sport, and fitness WordPress blog on TotalChoice and they’re awesome on that, too, and were able to survive an amazing reddit flood. Six of one.

Google Apps — I have my Google Apps for Work install for Gerr.is but use it everywhere. Love it. It’s surprisingly easy to use. I can add as many users as I want, as many domains as I want. I can split up my account to separate users from being associated with Gerris Corp into separate organizations.  I can use the Admin console to set up DKIM for all the OpenSRS domains I map to Google.  Setting up the SPF records is for Google is as easy as popping text: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all into the correct OpenSRS domain TXT record in the DNS tools. OK, I am super techie — probably more than you even knew — but I am sure you can sort it all out with the help of trouble tickets, chats, and phone calls. All the tools I use are really good about it.

Yet Another Mail Merge — YAMM is an Add In for Google Sheets. It enables very powerful mail merge tools and makes it simple and wonderful when you need to send out some emails to some targeted influencers. It’s also cheap and easy-to-use and Romain Vialard, the maker, is always available to his users and customers. Yet Another Mail Merge is free to email up to 50 recipients every day (100 recipients/day during your first month) but costs only $24/year for each user or $200-$500/year to allow everyone in your domain to be able to send up to 1,500 emails/24-hours. It’s really brilliant and super-easy to set up and it generally only takes minutes between ordering the Personal, Enterprise, or Enterprise+ version via PayPal and having it work — it might help a lot of you make sure you already have a PayPal balance before you click Purchase. Plus, YAMM can allow you to track openings and all that, too. And a lot of fancier stuff I don’t need, but of course you can do all the regular mailmerge things such as Dear <<First Name>> I love <<Blog Name>> (don’t do that).

Traackr — I have been lusting after this app for years and finally have access to its tools. I wouldn’t say that Traackr is ideal for long-tail blogger outreach but it’s perfect for the sort of cross-platform and cross-channel influencer outreach I am interested in doing, including unboxing reviews on YouTube, Periscope, and Facebook Live, and other Very High Caste engagement where many touches and very close oversight is essential.  While influencer marketing is PR, you need to treat it like sales. You really need to keep pitching the top people until they say no. An explicit no.  With the long tail, you can leave the non-respondents alone; however, when it comes to the real superstars, I am going to either need them to either ask me for money (no thank you) or actually say en oh.

GroupHigh — I have been very happy with GroupHigh but I am glad that I can use Traackr.  The agreement I have with GroupHigh puts some very important limitations on my account and I feel like I’m going to need to spread the love around.  What GroupHigh does amazingly is that it integrates directly into my Google Mail account so any emails I send out from within GroupHigh’s Social CRM interface lives in both my personal Google inbox and also in the history of each blogger as well.  If I were unrestricted, GroupHigh would help me out a lot with my longer-tail outreach, but even with small A-list campaigns, GroupHigh is a very powerful and effective tool.

InkyBee — Such a powerful research tool. I have never successfully sorted out how to use their campaign tools but when it comes to hunting down a lot of topical bloggers that I could either upload toTraackr or GroupHigh or or hand over to my human research team.

Human Research Team — I have tried to choose robots but when it comes to getting an awesome, clean, updated, database of germane and salient blogs, bloggers, first names, and email addresses. The team we have been working with for a decade is still the team that we keep on trying to fire but can’t quit.  While the bots, spiders, and scrapers that GroupHigh and Traackr use are pretty good, they’re not as good as smart, trained, people who are good researchers. US-only, pro-military only, and all that sort of thing?  We can really get precise enough that our team can’t find anyone, to say nothing of the 1,000-10,000 blogs with first names and emails that we ordered — and we need to know that, too. Then we need to loosen the net a little bit.

Google Docs — I heart Google Docs. We can share work on huge SOWs and proposals and message models en masse and it’s all good. And, it works perfectly with YAMM!  Awesome revision control and rollback, too.

Google Sheets — So awesome.  And it works with YAMM! Plus, I share it with a million people concurrently and also all pile in and work on the spreadsheets concurrently, too. Rockstar revision rollback and tracking if you need to undo some serious Intern mistakes.

Microsoft Excel — Sometimes you just need to do some Excel jujitsu!

Ablebits Dedupe — Since we use a lot of spreadsheets to track our lists, this tool allows me to remove duplicates across different Excel docs or tabs.  It’s a super-awesome secret weapon (I use Windows, I don’t know what folks on Apples do).

Google Analytics — There’s a lot of awesome things that our SMNR landing page and personal domains (used both for the landing page and for the outgoing emails) can teach us, and Google Analytics is one part of our reporting.

Google Search Console (née Google Webmaster Tools) — While our landing page, our Social Media News Release (SMNR) isn’t explicitly designed to become the most brand-optimized resource on the Internet, it often becomes that, at least for weak brands. So, we try to optimize our landing pages for Search, and GSC/GWT really helps us with that, especially since we don’t have the built in benefit of RSS, ATOM, or Sitemaps.

SDL SM2 — I have always loved SM2 by SDL. They offer a gorgeous tool for tracking Boolean keywords across Social Media. It’s not really a dashboard the way I use it, it’s an historical analysis tool, allowing us to show our clients the impact that our outreaches have on the volume and quality of brand conversation.

That’s it, for now. I hope it’s a useful list. I am always looking for addition super-tools, even though I know for a fact that I’ll probably never be able to fire my crack and experienced human-based life form blogger research team.

Let me know what you think in the comments! Thanks for reading this far!

† Honestly, this is the most important part.

Originally posted by Chris Abraham on Biznology

Everything the blogger does on your behalf -- for free -- is a gift, a blessing, a mitzvah!

The clearest is Skinny

As I mentioned last month in Influencer Marketing Tools of the Trade, Dan Krueger and I are in the midst of an earned-media blogger outreach campaign on behalf of Skinny & Co. 

We just finished our first week and we've already delivered products to 47 bloggers and have another 60 queued up for delivery this week -- and we've only reached out once so far.

We will be reaching out to everyone who hasn't responded by tomorrow with a follow-up email, which usually results in double the positive responses based on our past experience.

Yes, we have received many requests for sponsorship and advertising money but we were able to graciously decline because we received more than double the positive responses than we conservatively anticipated by this point in the campaign.

We've boiled this exceptional response down to four special things, two of which have nothing to do with anything we're doing at Gerris Corp:

Coconut oil is really hot right now amongst a broad spectrum of influentials

Skinny and Company coconut oil is the best product in the market, bar none.

The Skinny & Co. team is exceptionally generous with their product when it comes to influentials.

The social media news release (SMNR) we made for Skinny really captured what Skinny is all about, from their amazing 100% raw, alkaline, small batch, extra virgin, cold pressed coconut oil to their founders and their origin story from the jungles of Vietnam all the way back to their offices in Indianapolis, Indiana, everything's in the SMNR. Including videos, photos, and logos.

Bloggers actually went out of their way to compliment us:

"I am super impressed by your media site - honestly, I think it's one of the best I've ever seen, which will make my job easy!" -- Shelley from My Journey to Fit

"I really like how you make it easy to insert the photos into my site by offering code right under the picture of the product. That will be SUPER helpful." -- Joanne from Apple Crumbles

No matter what the tech savviness is of anyone you reach out to, even the most techie appreciates it when you make things as easy as possible for her.  If you're doing things right, you really should be aiming at doing 80%-90% of all the work for each and every blogger.

The more work you encumber the blogger with, the higher the possibility for resentment that you're making her work for free. And, yes, you are her valet for the entire campaign. It's not fire and forget, you need to make sure you're the one with the memory, you're the one responsible for all reminders, and you're the one responsible for the reviews, for the posts, for the tweets, and for everything else -- not the blogger.

Everything the blogger does on your behalf -- for free -- is a gift, a blessing, a mitzvah!

This relationship needs to be win-win-win, and if, at any point, the experience either becomes stressful or, worse--boring--that balance could be compromised.

The real reason why, however, is that this campaign is a hybrid A-list and long-tail campaign. We reached out to over 1,000 bloggers in the world of food, fitness, health, wellness, running, sport, etc. It was very exciting for our team, and I am sure all of that personal excitement easily translated to the bloggers as well.

As an aside, we always choose to do our outreaches and host our SMNRs on a separate domain, in this case www.SkinnyCoNews.com -- to both allow easier campaign tracking as well as to protect our clients from any blowback that can happen as a result of aggressive email campaigns. Losing SkinnyCoNews.com to a black list is a lot less destructive to a business than not being able to email from their own corporate domain.  

Safety first!

I know I have been a little dark-hearted over the last few years when it came to earned media outreach and how it's been corrupted by ubiquitous bought-and-paid-for reviews, essentially pro-company advertorials.

Well, my passion and excitement for the beauty and magic of earned media blogger outreach and earned media influencer marketing has been restored.

Dan and I are very excited about the rest of the week. And, before I finish here, I thought I would pass on the discount code that we were given to give to our bloggers, since this is, in fact, partially a blog about Skinny coconut oil.

So, here you go: SKINNYCO15 -- if you use it at checkout, you'll get 15% off. Feel free to share.

And the blogger outreach isn't over yet, so if you're a blogger who's interested in doing an honest review of their coconut oil-based line of health and beauty products, let me know quick!

You, too, might be one of our passionate and generous Skinny Bloggers!

Via Biznology

While it’s absolutely essential that your client be exceptionally game, generous, and have desirable products, all the magic happens in the Inbox and the secret sauce of any successful blogger PR campaign is kindness.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" --Ian Maclaren

There are a lot of assholes online, though very few of them are dyed-in-the-wool. They’re simply exceptionally guarded, armored against all the other assholes online. It’s a vicious cycle. We’ve all been hurt before, but it’s a Mexican standoff. Reddit, right? Facebook, right? Twitter? Oy!

“Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.” – C. S. Lewis

A third of my practice at Gerris Corp is devoted to earned media influencer marketing (which I naïvely still call blogger outreach) and guess what I’ve discovered over the past linear decade?

While everyone might lead with being asshole online, the very act of pursuing the life of a blogger, an influencer, a writer, a reviewer, an entertainer, or a storyteller suggests that you’re probably both an optimist (what’re the chances of actually becoming an Internet sensation?) and attention-seeking.

You want to be loved and appreciated. Kindness in the form of love and appreciation are the only keys to your heart, they’re the only things that can truly make you bloom!

While you might lead with money, a price card, a menu of fees, and the link to your “how to engage with me” page, what you really need more than money is a reminder as to why you even started blogging in the fist place!

Kindness opens many doors online, though it’s not always easy. There’s nobody online taken more for granted than bloggers. And, with the advent of (too) easy-to-access and (too) easy-to-use influencer marketing tools offered by Ninja Outreach, Cision, GroupHigh, Little Bird, and Traackr, the potential for abuse is high; even more, blogger outreach started out under the auspices of public relations. PR gets people and understands the value of keeping love alive.

Now, however, they call it influencer marketing, though it’s really become mostly sponsored advertising. Apparently, if you pay for it, you don’t have to be very kind, and that’s made things even worse. But even ad agencies have vision, narrative, and the support of a creative team. It’s gotten worse: paying for links.

Yes, SEO has jumped on the bandwagon and turned an art form into the sullied commodification of money for “DoFollow” keyword text links. That’s it. No review, no editorial. “Just make sure it looks organic to Google,” they plead.

I’ve spoken a lot about the challenges of earned media influencer PR and how you can still, circa 2016, have quite a lot of success with earned media influencer marketing if you’re lucky enough to only take clients who are game, generous, and who have exceptionally desirable services and products, very much like my friends at Skinny & Company coconut oil.

Well, while it’s absolutely essential that your client be exceptionally game, generous, and have desirable products, all the magic happens in the Inbox and the secret sauce of any successful blogger PR campaign is kindness.

And it’s rarely easy. Bloggers have a lot of baggage. They’ve been abused, they’ve been abandoned. They’ve been used for the links, they’ve been using for the advertorial, and they’ve even done things with the promise of working together in the future.

You must be unflappable.

There’s quite a lot of bitterness and a modicum of resentment you’ll have to endure while never skipping a kindness step of losing your kindness stride.

You must remain unflappable!

One thing that has been consistent over the last decade across AbrahamPR, Abraham Harrison, and now Gerris Corp: a quote actually written by Ian Maclaren and not Plato, is our mantra, “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Also, hugs not horns.

Via Biznology

I work harder promoting my online content than I do writing the posts themselves. And so does everyone else, including mainstream media. If you build it, they won’t come unless you get the party started yourself.

Not even revolutions just happen.

Everything requires a vanguard of the proletariat, a catalyst, a shove, a newsie, a royal entrance fanfare, even the King!

So, the moment I post this onto Biznology, I’ll do the following:

1. I’ll run over to Facebook’s Sharing Debugger to make sure all my shares will look right.

2. Pop over to both Google Add URL and Bing Add URL just in case Biznology doesn’t have their act together.

3. Share If You Post it Will They Come? on Buffer to all of my social media properties including @chrisabraham, @gerrisdigital, and my Facebookand my Gerris Page as well as whatever other social media profiles that make sense. I upload the Featured Image directly to Buffer so that the image will surely render properly. If it doesn’t, I’ll crop the image to make sure it’s optimized for social (~1200X630). Then I’ll put them into full buffer.

4. Share If You Post it Will They Come? across HootSuite as well, across very similar sites and properties, but with some edits and changes, then I’ll send them off to AutoSchedule.

5. Then I’ll head over to my Chris Abraham GaggleAMP to make sure I shareIf You Post it Will They Come? across my 541 members, mostly acrossTwitter and LinkedIn but sometimes across Facebook and Google+ as well (though I must admit I sometimes don’t include those last two because I don’t know how often my subscribers share those, though I may well try this week).

6. Next, I’ll cross post the article over to Medium.com using their Import Your Story link (one of the good things that Medium’s import tool offers is a reference link back to the source, which is Biznology, as the source site). Check out my article about this.

7. Then, I’ll do the same thing over at LinkedIn via their Write an Article tool. In this case, I make sure I tip my hat to Biznology and then link directly to the article. Check my post about that here, too.

8. Finally, I copy my Biznology posts onto the blog on my ChrisAbraham.comsite with a link back to Biznology. I really should also copy all my posts to the Insights section of my Gerris digital agency site (which would have been better named “the blog” — I don’t know what I was thinking when I called it Insights, I guess I was being unnecessarily fancy.)

9. Sometimes, I will post the Biznology link by hand directly to my personalTwitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn as well as Gerris’ Twitter,Facebook Page, LinkedIn Company Page, and Google+ Page.

10. If I have time, I will post all those things that I posted above across all the same channels I did with the original Biznology post.

So, that’s what’s going to happen the moment I click Publish. And that doesn’t include anything else. I personally don’t add hashtags to my shares because I share them across so many different platforms that are incompatible with hashtags. In addition to all of the work I do, the gang from Biznology are awesome promoters of all the articles and posts that come through their doors. They’re masters of including @mentions and #hashtags — it’s a beautiful thing.

Anyway, that’s just my own personal promotional dog and pony show. Since I am such a shameless cross-poster, I always try to show all due respect to Biznology and to Google’s recognition of source post versus reposts and cross posts by making certain that Biznology is posted first and every cross post I make links back to the source post.

Google’s getting really good at finding ground zero on it’s own but anything I can do to make it easier I feel is worth it.

While Biznology doesn’t pay me to post every Tuesday, they do spend a lot of money and resources on promoting me and honoring them is the least I can do.

Now it’s your term. Don’t be so goddamn lazy, spend at least as much time sharing as you do writing. It’s a great start. Be your own personal Vanguard!

Originally published at www.biznology.com on July 19, 2016.