Daily Archives: 09/02/2011

Online Outreach and Online Engagement

As word of mouth marketing has proven to travel further, faster and more effectively than traditional marketing, the development of a comprehensive online advocacy program is vital to promoting any idea, product or person.

It is popularly understood that highly-influencing opinion leaders are capable of influencing between 100 and 1000 consumers; obviously, influencing the influencers is a more effective strategy in terms of time, money, and staffing.

One must break the Internet down into communities and conversations, breaking them down further into influencers and opinion leaders, and then delivering a marketing message in such a way that is relevant and appealing enough to not only be received by these taste-makers but to be impressive enough for them to tell all their friends about what you have to offer as well.

Online advocacy requires a series of key steps, which are derived from two basic strategies: top-down and bottom-up.

Despite the simplicity of the terminology, the strategy itself isn’t this simple, it largely reflects two very separate approaches to targeting and reaching a given audience. In essence, these terms relate naturally to the picture that they paint – top-down buzz marketing being the strategy in which taste-makers or community leaders are defined, targeted and appropriately messaged to (online outreach); bottom-up buzz marketing, on the other hand, targets the everyday consumer via online engagement.

While Online Outreach (OO) is a structured approach to marketing to a given demographic, Online Engagement (OE) is much more organic and relies upon the natural echo chamber of the Internet – or the ability for messages to virally spread from community to community naturally. Additionally, online outreach requires the development of a topical and category-based Affinity Site Index (ASI) which be defined as a collection of Birds of a Feather (BoF) blogs, forums, and websites.

Affinity Site Index Development
Marketing to the entire Internet is impossible as it is a constantly growing and changing entity – one cannot broadcast to the Internet given its scope of millions of sites creating billions of pages.

For this reason, it is important not only to define an audience that can reasonably be reached, but also to be mindful of the constant evolution of the Internet.

Do not limit your concept of the Internet to the “blogosphere;” Instead, adopt a more Web 2.0 approach to marketing by allowing the community to include message boards, Wikis, social networks, social bookmarking sites, email lists, podcasts, vlogs, forums, IRC, SMS, IM, MMORPGs, Webcasts, Skypecasts, groups, online video games, 3-D virtual worlds (such as Second Life).

To kick off any Online Advocacy Program, our team spends considerable amounts of time researching and developing your BoF Affinity Site Index. This research is devoted not only to finding out where your current audience lives online, but also to finding like-minded communities that may be interested in your message. This includes thorough investigation within blogosphere; collecting hundreds to thousands of message boards, usenets and forums; scouring social bookmarking, social media and photo and video sharing communities.

Online Outreach
Following campaign and client research and Affinity Group Index development, online outreach officially begins by collecting contact information for community taste-makers.

Deciphering individuals from taste-makers is a key task within this processes. The Affinity Group Index is also vetted for appropriateness and for communities that tend to be receptive to the marketing message as well.

It is also important to note that while online engagement is very heavily focused towards reaching out to consumers within message boards, forums, usenets and other communities where the nature of online dialogue is participatory, online outreach is geared toward reaching out blogs, sites and online media outlets in which the tone is online dialogue takes a more editorial tone.

The primarily goal of any Online Advocacy Program – to build relationships between the you and the community leaders.

Via Abraham Harrison

Facebook Gives Away Your Data

Facebook is known not only for its services and features but also for its security and privacy breaches. These issues are not new to them or to the users. Recently however another alarming circumstance surfaced from underneath Facebook’s privacy issues. Facebook now grants third party applications and applications from Facebook to get a hold of greater information from users such as mobile numbers and home addresses.

All Facebook reports on this matter is:

It’s true. Facebook’s new permissions gives those developers with bad intentions access to a greater amount of personal information. The flip side is that this isn’t exactly credit card information. However, as developers gain access to more information, the question arises: Is the company doing enough to protect our personal data? The answer is most definitely not clear cut.

This can affect most of the common users that don’t pay attention to details and technicalities. A common user that wants to use a certain application that wants to connect to Facebook would “allow” right away permissions to that application without even reading what information that application is going to get.

It will be practical now to lie about your personal information on Facebook or decline all the requests for permission to your Facebook account rather than be honest and give yourself away to people. People with ill intentions are increasing nowadays, and this Facebook feature is giving them a hand to make their crimes possible.

I do not think somebody will sue you for not including your home address on Facebook. You cannot be jailed if you won’t give Facebook your mobile number. These very personal pieces of information that should be taken care of by the person himself and should only be distributed by him.

It is a good news that users can relax a little bit longer since Facebook updated its blog saying that gathering these critical information from the users is temporarily disabled.

On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.

Well this is after they received “some useful feedback”.

Turning Haters into Social Media Lemonade

In participating to social media, it is to be expected that not all people would be pleased with your existence. As stated on a previous post, it is only normal because you are exposing yourself, your contents or your brand to people — all kinds of people. The larger the audience is, the higher the probability that you’ll start attracting ‘Haters’.

These are the folks who would take time to talk about you behind your back, slander you online, and not give you any credit or the benefit of te doubt. They aspire to bring dirt to your name. They lurk around your comment boxes or wherever they can put their negative two-cents in.

Truth is, we can always turn the bad into good good, but how? Here are some ideas to try to reverse the intended effect of these negative comments or words :

Don’t look for the negative. We have the tendency to be sensitive in various things, we don’t want anybody throwing dirt to our face, we are becoming too conscious about matters like that which leads us to really looking for negativity in every situation. Try to understand what the words are telling you first before concluding that it really is a negative input — as Howard Rheingold recommends: “assume good intent.” We tend to go negative when the problem is more probably a mis-communication
Do not take it personally. If you looked at the comment, for instance, with very objective sight and still you categorized it as a negative one, do not take it personally, it might be directed to what you posted, what you wrote, what you said, what you did, but not you, yourself. It will really mean so much more if you take it as a personal jab at you. Be professional as much as possible. As we say at Abraham Harrison: always give them hugs and not the horns. Or, to quote Philo of Alexandria, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” — we live by these words.
Understand the inner sentiment. Be a psychologist for a moment, and try to feel what the commenter is feeling when he said what he said to you. Try to answer the question “why,” why did he say that? For example, someone will say “You already posted this elsewhere, this is nothing new — it’s redundant!”, you may think that the inner sentiment of the statement goes like this “I have read your works, I am following your every post because I am expecting something new”. Basically try to be in the person’s shoes and act as you would.
Disassemble the words and extract the message. After answering the question why, answer the question “what does this person want me to do?” Surely, the person wants something out of you by delivering those words for you. He may say “This post has so many points, it is so vague.” it might not be directly said but he wants you to organize the idea of the post thoroughly. He might wants you to focus on something instead. You can actually learn from the criticism — turn the hater’s message into constructive criticism. Also, since there are a thousand lurkers for every hater, his frustration and hating might be representative of a much larger issue. Try to dig to the meat of the message.
Have a unique, witty and immediate response. This is one way to prevent people stress out the same points again. You don’t want negative comments to be posted again and again, so stop it with a great counter immediately but make it a positive one. However, that said, stay a hundred miles way from being snide, ironic, snarky, sarcastic, or dismissive. Remember, hugs not horns!
Finally, Learn something. You should learn something from the encounter, a criticism wont appear if there were no mistake, even a single one. The mistake may be yours or the commenter, either way you should learn from that mistake and be smart enough to study how to avoid it next time. Again, you can actually learn from the criticism — turn the hater’s message into constructive criticism. Also, since there are a thousand lurkers for every hater, his frustration and hating might be representative of a much larger issue. Try to dig to the meat of the message.

If done correctly, this list of tips may turn bad comments into a good input for you.

Peggy Orenstein and Lori Gottlieb explore girlie-girl princess culture

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

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

From the description about Lori Gottlieb:

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

Peggy Orenstein and Lori Gottlieb explore girlie girl princess culture

Chris Abraham

Because the Medium is the Message

Daily Archives: 09/02/2011

Peggy Orenstein and Lori Gottlieb explore girlie-girl princess culture