May 6, 2013

Blogger outreach is more PR than social media

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Discover and engage your allies with long-tail blogger outreach

The current catch-all these days for what I do is ‘social media’. Unfortunately, when what you do is described as such, people tend to think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and maybe Google+. My expertise, however, is online community outreach and engagement. Back in 2006, I developed a strategy of blogger outreach that allowed me to reach out to more than just 25 top-tier bloggers by hand but to 2,500-5,000 bloggers.

I have always called this long-tail blogger outreach — though I would love your help with choosing a new name for it — because it focuses on the B-Z-list bloggers, the online influencers who are often overlooked by most social media teams at digital agencies.

While I agree that the top-25-50 bloggers do deserve deep, long-term, and personal engagement, spending that sort of time, over time, on “everyone else” would take all the time in the universe. So, what my team and I developed is the equivalent of blogger-brand speed dating. Continue reading →

February 20, 2013

Marketers still need to learn some basic HTML

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Image courtesy of Brian J. Bruemmer via Creative Commons

Improve your readers’ experience with some basic HTML knowledge

I have recently been blogging for the Huffington Post and they use Six Apart‘s Movable Type blogging platform. Movable Type was my second blogging platform after converting from Noah Grey’s Greymatter that I started using back in 2000. Even in 2013, the Huffington Post’s blogger interface doesn’t offer a Rich Text Editor so writing in familiar WYSIWYG isn’t possible there.

So what I do is compose over here on WordPress, on its Visual Editor, and then click the Text tab and copy and paste over to Movable Type. Then the work begins. I upload all of my media, photos, graphics, and whatnot to my server at ChrisAbraham.com and then align them correctly before I copy the raw HTML over — which should work perfectly, right? No! Continue reading →

February 11, 2013

SocialOomph offers essential Twitter tools

Go beyond bulk uploading with SocialOomph’s suite of tools

There are some Web apps that have withstood the test of time — tools that I still use and sometimes abuse. Let’s look at what SocialOomph offers through its Pro account.

Though there are quite a few features that SocialOomph offers, I use it for a couple of things that it does very well: prospecting folks to follow on Twitter based on the keywords as well as the hashtags they use in their profiles and tweets, and also queuing up loads and loads of evergreen bulk tweets that can seed my personal (as well as my clients’) Twitter feeds over time while my team and I are busy being much more responsive and timely with the tweets that we add by hand when we’re online and active. SocialOomph makes this easy and a little more flexible than the other tools I’ve used. Continue reading →

December 5, 2012

9 social media predictions & business recommendations for 2013

Scrollmotion’s enterprise sales tool for tablets.

Mobile, social, geolocation, big data, marketing — Socialmedia.biz’s strategists eye the future

The social media landscape has undergone enormous changes since the current Socialmedia.biz team of strategists partnered up in 2009. With the end of the year fast approaching, we thought this would be a good time to offer our forecasts into what the next year may hold in store for social media, mobile, social businesses and more. Here are nine fearless predictions — including a look at the current state, predicted future state and our recommendations.

When in doubt, think mobile — and especially tablets

Current state

1While mobile usage has been rising for years and a majority of Americans’ cell phones became smartphones during 2012, tablet usage is now eclipsing the smartphone numbers by threefold in the case of the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends). Now, 55 percent of adults access the Internet from their mobile phone, double the rate of what they did only three years ago (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project). Along with bandwidth improvements, visitors increasingly access your organization’s page from a mobile device, with 13 percent of global traffic coming from mobile (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends).

Future state

The computing environment – along with our lifestyles – is moving away from the desktop and even the laptop, with users relying more heavily on their smartphones and tablet devices to do business, stay connected and share. Increasingly, even the road warrior is ditching a laptop for a tablet, Bluetooth keyboard and a set of apps to get through the work day or while attending a conference. User expectations are exceedingly high in terms of navigating a site for informational purposes, to complete a task, to make a purchase or a donation. They expect a browsing experience akin to the simple, intuitive navigation found in buying a book on Amazon or the crisp visual experience of inhaling your Facebook stream via the Flipboard app. Continue reading →

October 1, 2012

Why you should treat your client like your BFF

How to win friends and influence people — updated

Just because we’re digital and work in the cloud doesn’t mean everyone does. If I learned one thing from running my own digital, in the cloud, virtual agency, with upward of 40 active staffers, for five years, it is this: The moment I didn’t treat my client like my No. 1 Valentine is the moment I got dumped. I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but your clients don’t choose you exclusively because of your mad skills. They choose you because they like you, trust you, and want to spend time with you during their work hours. Clients choose you for three reasons: 1) to do the job 2) what hiring you says about them 3) to have a cool new work-time best friend. Continue reading →

September 26, 2012

Why you need to buy all your domain names now

If you’re interested in protecting and controlling your own online reputation, one of the easiest things in the world you can do is register as many domain names as are available and try to back-order all the rest.

Expensive? Don’t tell me how expensive that’ll be, because it’ll surely end up being a lot cheaper than options B, C, etc. — where option B is the thousands of dollars you’ll need to spend if someone else gets your domains first and is willing to sell them back to you and option C is when, instead of selling your domain name back to you, they create an attack site where mis-info is the special of the day.

Continue reading →