Monthly Archives: June 2012

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June 28, 2012

Integrity is inherent in earned media but not paid

http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Sk%C3%A6rmbillede-2011-11-23-kl.-5.02.52-PM.pngChris AbrahamYesterday I wrote a post called Blogger outreach is earned media not paid, right? wherein I asked if earned media was a think of the past and whether payola, pay-per-post, pay-per-link, sponsored posts, and site sponsorship were the new de facto in digital PR. This morning, Gail Gardner wrote a post in response, accusing us digital PR professional of stealing from bloggers since we agencies do get paid for doing blogger outreach only to “talk bloggers into working for free” on our behalf:

These companies want to argue they deserve “earned” media coverage when what they are really doing is BUYING that awareness by paying PR agencies to go out and sell it for them. They aren’t earning it by some good deed or being awesome – they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf.

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June 28, 2012

Your social media plan needs to shut up and start listening

http://chrisabraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/20120531-crmbpiya7x7bam93ci7un1p72s.jpgChris AbrahamI know you. You’re spending all of your social media marketing budget on promoting your brand, products, and services; that’s fine except you’ve either forgotten — or never knew — that social media is a two-way street. It is.

And, something you also didn’t know: social media is two-thirds defense and monitoring — listening — and only one-third promotion and publicity — speaking. Most marketing folks not only don’t get PR but they revile it; sadly, this is what social media is, no matter what you call it: public relations, all aspects of it: publicity, of course, but also crisis management! Continue reading →

June 27, 2012

Blogger outreach is earned media not paid, right?

Chris AbrahamMy definition of blogger outreach has always been about acquiring earned media coverage from bloggers and online influencers.

My definition–and my assumption–has always been that blogger outreach is public relations and not paid media. I may well be mistaken.

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June 25, 2012

Have you embraced Pinterest for your brand?


Guess jeans turned users’ Pinterest boards into campaign ads.

 

The booming social network reminds us that text can no longer stand on its own

Chris AbrahamIf you use images or photos on any of your sites, you’re probably already on Pinterest, whether you’ve registered on Pinterest or not. So, what are you going to do about it?

If you’re not on Pinterest, you’re already losing control of your visual brand by virtue of not participating. Pinterest is going to push you to better brand your content and intellectual property in such a way that people know where that content is from without imposing grotesque watermarks, oversize copyright notices, or garish splashes of brand that takes away attention from the message in the image.

So, when someone steals your image, your graphic, or your photo, will they associate it with you even if it is disassociated with your sites, blogs, or social media? I know, when you post your own pins on Pinterest, you can add a source link-back URL. I know when people pin your content from your own blog’s “pin this” button that the link-back is attached to the image; however, most pins don’t happen in ways you even remotely control. That’s why National Geographic blocks Pinterest: losing control of IP scares the bejezus out of copyright-dependent organizations like Tony Stone, National Geographic, Getty, and Corbis! Continue reading →

June 20, 2012

Are you sold on frictionless sharing?

Target audience: Marketers, social media influencers, businesses, brands.

Chris AbrahamIhave been exploring frictionless sharing for years in the form of auto-tweets, retweets, automatic cross-posting, and attention data. What is it, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia, frictionless sharing refers to “the transparent sharing of resources using social media services.” What this means is that all you need to do is look at a particular piece of content such as a news item, story, video, or content, and that piece of content is linked to on your Facebook Timeline, in Google Plus and in other social media.

We all have been frictionless sharing with advertisers, social media companies, big data minters, and search engines for a decade in the form of implicit attention data, part of an attention economy. While people are freaking out about how privacy-invading frictionless sharing is, we have all been frictionless sharing everything and anything — sometimes even including our credit card information, Social Security numbers and secret questions’ answers — with everywhere and everything, including Friendster, MySpace, eHarmony, match.com, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the No. 1 data-vacuum, Google.

On Facebook, the most common frictionless sharing experiences come from their social sharing apps, with the Washington Post’s app being the most famous and infamous – though TechCrunch and ESPN and quite a few other media platforms have invested. Trouble is, none of these social sharing apps perform very well in new Facebook because their new stream of news Timeline algorithm prioritizes friends and family above the social shared content. Continue reading →

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