Activating Bloggers

Once a list of friendly and like-minded bloggers has been assembled, organize them in an Outlook Contacts folder.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to individual bloggers and friendlies informally in order to build a connection and a conversation. It is important to make sure any formal outreach is carefully considered before moving forward.

When it is time to reach out and message to the list, there are several things to consider before emailing. The most important thing is to make sure you have something important to share or a gift to give. This can be in the form of something simple, but there always has to be a reason for reaching out.

One way to make the connection feel more intimate is to use Outlook’s fine email merge to send out an email. Listservs and mailing lists can be seen as too impersonal, as are formatted newsletters-looking missives. After sending out one of these group activation emails, be sure to respond quickly and personally to each and every personal query and response you may receive.

The primary goal is to build a relationship between other bloggers and your company’s community. The secondary goal is to have the community blog about your company organically on their own; saying whatever it is they want to say.

Ideally, if everything is done above board and transparently, and the prospects are tried and true, then any and all coverage will be either very positive or at the very worst, neutral in tone.

Advice on Starting and Growing an SNS

The main reason why SNS’s are so appealing is not because people are exhibitionists but because people crave connection and community. Too many folks who are jumping onto the Social Network Services bandwagon lost site of what an SNS actually is, including the real motivations for joining them as a registered member.

I am going to brain dump on this based on my experience, research and understanding. Enjoy! It is a bit of a rant. I didn't have much time so I brain dumped as fast as my fingers would allow.

So, creating a space for your members to “show off” or “express themselves” is less important than giving members to interact. They crave connection and will pursue any perceived connection such as shared interests, hometowns, movies, orientation, or schools. Unlike the “eigene homepage,” which is about creating a website to share personal interests. SNS’s aren’t websites or personal home pages.

They’re not at all about sharing, they’re about connecting. The best of breed SNS’s are primarily concerned with three things: finding your current friends, reconnecting with old friends, and making new friends. In that order. Current friend connections are the most essential, offering the most energy.

The best SNS’s are like an office ski trip. Out of the 30 people who choose to chip in on the trip, maybe four or five of them are pretty good friends. The remaining 25 have only a few things in common with you, including being in the same industry, being at the same company, liking skiing, and being probably within ten years of each other in age and a shared experience of going to college.

When you get to the ski slope, there are plenty of diversions planned to help you relax and feel comfortable among your colleagues. You may rent a very large home together near the slopes, you might stay at a big hotel together. You might all travel up there together in a chartered bus. And when you arrive, there is a cocktail party, and a social, and in the morning there is breakfast, etc. The people who come up who don’t want to ski have board games and the spa.

So, an SNS is about creating artificial and intentional ways of starting a conversation. Office pools and work happy hours. They’re all affectations. There are so many web sites and blogs and so forth out there that successful SNS’s can’t follow that model.

So, when it comes to building a valuable personal profile for an SNS, it is important that the profile isn’t just pretty and isn’t just the equivalent of a questions-based, template-based personal website. For example, modern SNS’s tend to request an exhaustive list of favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, etc. These are props that allow registered members to find each other based on a love of LOST, 24, or the Matrix.

People love to connect based on shared interest and shared memories. People also love to compete. A friendly competition is always a very powerful way to allow people to both connect and create shared memories.

One of the most successful methods of connecting people in a very strong way is through bringing them together through “pools.” Fantasy football is popular; Oscar pools, college basketball pools, etc, are very powerful ways of bringing people together and allowing them to “ski” together, allowing them to interact in a very powerful, visceral, way.

I have friends who have powerful, shared memories, of Oscar and football and basketball pools; even stronger are the shared memories of seasons of fantasy sports, fantasy football in particular. Unlike catching a real game together, fantasy football can happen 100% online.

Virtual online communities are neither virtual nor are they exclusively online. They are real, powerful, communities of real people building real connections that can, and often do, result in marriages, children, businesses, jobs, and emotional support when times are rough.

The beauty of an SNS is that it can easily be built in stages. In fact, building an SNS in stages is preferable, and here’s why:

Users don’t like their user experience dictated to them, they want their user experience and preferences to define the innovation of the SNS.

It makes everything easier, actually. There have been many applications and virtual spaces that have been very expensively designed, like a terrarium or like a theme park, only to be rejected by the members. Usually, at this stage, too much money, time, and investment has been put into the project, so all the energy is spent to try to persuade the members of all the untapped potential and value they’re missing by not doing as they’re told.

Orkut & Friendster are great examples of Social Networks that were too rigid in their design, expecting the users to adopt their tools, their styles, and their values of community.

Actually, Friendster is a perfect example. The creators of Friendster made it quite closed and structured, and the designers felt a certain amount of stewardship over its users’ experience. Friendster wanted to define what a community was and should be... People you know and who are either your personal friend or a friend of a friend.

Children do not like having the toy’s box taken from them just because they’re playing with the box and not the toy. It all comes down to play. People who want to build deep, important, and intimate relationships should be allowed; people to who want to compete should have lots of ways to do so, and people who want to date, meet single, and flirt should be able to do that, too.

Of course, one of the natural competitions that emerge when there isn't a competitive activity such as is offered in the form of a pool on Facebook or a sport competition such as is offered in Protrade, the competition happens anyway, oftentimes in a competition for being cool. How many friends do you have?

Are you in Chris' top 8 friends on MySpace? On MySpace, collecting friends is huge sport. Also, getting a certain type of friend is important. The most important competition surrounds getting into a popular band, celebrity, or cool kid’s profile’s “top 8 friends,” the number of faces that are shown on the MySpace member’s main profile page.

The MySpace users, be he a band or a person, gets to choose the “top 8” from amongst the hundreds or thousands that are often collected into friends. If you’re not in the top 8, you’re noone; and, if you were on the top 8 and get bumped, that is a severe insult and can start thunderous gossip.

Seriously. I was watching diggnation, the wildly popular video blog sponsored by digg.com, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, co-hosts, spent a large chunk of their podcast talking about the very important politics surrounding who is and isn’t on their respective top-8. If you start dating a girl, she might insist that you put her into your top-8.

If you dump her and start dating someone else, your new girlfriend may insist that you dump your ex off of your 8 and then put her on the top of the list of 8. It is all very serious stuff. I am not joking. Some of the biggest wars on MySpace have to do with not merely becoming someone’s friend (as friendship is pretty promiscuous since everyone is trying to collect the most friends) but becoming someone’s inner-circle, posse, and best friend.

After the first 8, there is of course a proximity prestige – how close to the top-8 are you? Are you on the first page of the friends page? This is a BIG thing, who would have known?

So, after all your friends have 9000 friends, there are 8 spaces for friends that show up on your profile and they are your 8 -- and people hunger to be put into the 8. They talk about it on Podcasts and so there are lots of emergent games, and the emergent games should be encouraged, co-opted, and developed for.

No, adding more than 8 isn't the answer, but it should be an option, right? All of these things should be choices

Facebook is closed but the developers are super responsive. So, it seems like it is open. Because after you have tapped out a particular gimmick, such as "pokes" and "gifts" and "tagging," then they add something else, another gimmick.

Yes, educational toys and instructional picture books may be great for the development of children, but kids want BB guns and Barbies and comic books.

Google uses this technique. We have not discussed all the failures that Google has pursued. One may say that Google Video is a failure and so is Orkut, their “failed” social network service.

YOUR should not be afraid to fail, it should be afraid to fail big. Breaking down any goals of evolving Your into an SNS and a Prediction Market needs to happen incrementally and should be creative and innovative while still allowing whimsy.

There is a high probability that a majority of the tools, apps, toys, and tools you release will not get the sort of purchase you want them to; moreover, a few of them will fail; luckily, quite of a few of them will be “misinterpreted” and used for things very different than you anticipated, and that is okay, too. It is sort of like drugs being used “off prescription.”

Viagra was a drug, sildenafil, being developed to aid heart and lung circulation until it was discovered to be what is today.

Google heavily invests in its Google Labs, a playground in which Google developers are encourage to explore their creativity. YOUR may try out a digg-like “voting” function or a social bookmarking function. Trying out these tools and services, doing a little bit of marketing, and then seeing how it goes before really investing in the tool is the best way to develop into the web2.0 environment.

Digg does this all the time. They have, over time, identified an “advisory board” – a focus group of the top-performing users, digg leaders, and biggest fans. They’re constantly being asked questions, given polls, and participating in focus groups, many of which are in-person.

Digg and Facebook and MySpace all have attached faces and people to the brand; Vox, too. How can Your make the brand more personal?

Mercedes and DaimlerChrystler have tried to allow Dieter Zetsche, Dr. Z, to become the face of the company. With digg it is Kevin Rose, with VOX it is Mena Trott, with Facebook it is Mark Zuckerberg, and with MySpace it is the ubiquitous “Tom.” Tom is a default friend that everyone in MySpace gets as a friend as a default… Tom has 162,363,695 friends – yes, 162 Mio!

One of the techniques that especially works for MySpace is an open system that encourages a vast majority of innovation and development be shouldered by third party developers… a lot of YouTube’s success happened via embedding on MySpace and many of the top “inline” flash-based MP3 players were developed primarily to be added to MySpace.

Creating a closed playground, a sterile sandbox, means that the only advancement and evolution of user experience happens at the pace of an official development team. While the open API and the open systems and the generally foolish access that MySpace offers user to their CSS and template has resulted in some amazing user-customization and feelings of ownership it has also resulted in lots of abuse, too.

People can steal passwords and steer users away from MySpace and so forth. That said, when all of your users and third party developers are actually leading the development of your application, you can spend your money and your resources on plugging the leaks and the abuses early and often.

Allowing the community to define itself, more like London than Paris or DC, is the way to grow. SNS’s are not like aquariums: if you get a bigger tank the fish won’t necessarily grow to the size. This is the Internet where one can always add more servers and more capacity. The real advice to give would be to allow the SNS to feel as intimate as possible while still being as expansive as needed.

Start out as a boutique and then grow in response to the “neighborhood” and the market. A toy store in a retirement community might sound like a bad idea because a toy store should be marketed to parents; actually, grandparents so a lot of the spoiling so allowing grandparents to easily and effortlessly shop for and buy toys for their grand children is a really great idea.

You community, as it grows, is not really your choice. A lot of the decision as to who and what your community becomes depends on the initial members. Your first 10 members will define your 100 will define your 1,000 will define your 1,000,000. The only choice you have as a business and as a host is who you invite to be your first 10-100 members. After that, you sort of have to get out of the way and then meet the needs of this new thing you have created.

I had an online community about memetics, memes.org, which I wanted to be a place in which to discuss memes, memetics, popular culture, and other social- and pseudo-scientific stuff. Well, after a couple years, the community evolved itself into a community that was really fetishing the existence of alien life, of a global conspiracy, of the reptilian aliens, and of the Bilderberg’s control of all commerce and all choices, the New World Order.

If I hadn’t let the community find itself and kept on steering the community back to my vision, I would have pruned memes.org too dearly, I would have starved off the members and their interests, and I would have alienated the real core of my users, the 1/1000 who spent a lot of their time making the community ultimately a success.

Most SNS’s, such as Friendster and Orkut, end up “losing control” of their communities and then spend their entire life trying to being the mission back into line. Orkut evolved into a Brazilian SNS and Friendster is not an Asian SNS. Instead of selling the sites to Brazilian and Asian investors, they instead try desperately to steer them back into line.

A community is indeed a family. In order to really have a successful family, you have to let its members to be themselves and trust you. Family members have to feel that their patriarch and matriarch are disappointed in them.

Do all of your scheming before you launch. After you first hundred members get started, you pretty much should get the hell out of the way and let the community self-organize. You can be a gardener but don’t practice bonsai.

Don’t alienate your SNS, don’t alienate your community. Let them grow and have fun and play. Give them the gifts they want not the gifts you want to give; offer them, your members, the toys with which they want to play, even if it is the cardboard box in which the toy was packaged. And, at the end of the day, don’t judge your community.

Play with them. Enjoy them. Love them.

Always Bring Something to the Party

Why should the online conversation change because of you? Why should online communities care about what you have to offer? Much the same way that before you attend a party, you should purchase a bottle of wine to present as a gift to the host, especially if you heard about the party from your friend and the host doesn’t know you. In that case, maybe a nice bottle of scotch might be more appropriate. All online communities are real families, real parties, and real communities. People know each other. If you’re going to be showing up uninvited, you had better be charming, friendly, cool – and bearing gifts.

Blog Community Outreach

A powerful technique for building ommunity on blogs is to find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services, then search for blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati.

It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.
To spread the word online, tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself.

Blog Messaging and Counter-Messaging

Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse only care about the last word. If you can reply to a negative, hurtful brand hit, then you can dominate the conversation and win the debate in most cases.

Google cares about everything, but the latest word isn’t always indexed yet. In the world of Google, the better indexed site always wins. Maximize your knowledge about SEO and Google Sitemaps if you want to compete here.

You can’t control online conversation unless you participate. To quote Sernovitz, “you’ll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don’t even try. You’ll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don’t even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.” The only way to get indexed by Google or to show up on Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse is to be an online opinion leader who has a site that has made it out of Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google’s sandbox, and has a SEO and a Blog Search Engine strategy.

You have to initiate membership, become part of the conversation, build street cred, have an SEO and blog strategy, and become a respected online opinion leader before something goes awry. It is important that you begin establishing yourself as soon as you begin building your company. Visibility and influence online takes time, so it’s best to start building early, so that when your product or service is ready for launch, you won’t have to wait another six months to become visible.

Blogger Outreach

While exploring the blog search engines for relevant company-related content, take note of particularly friendly blogs and bloggers. Also take note of any blog and bloggers who are actively embedding Your Company code into their blogs.

If a blogger consistently uses Your Company, comments on blog posts, or has ever given a positive or neutral review of Your Company, consider asking the blogger to be part of a select list of folks who will receive news, updates, upgrades announcements, and other company news with the understanding that when the news is received by the blogger, the blogger can do whatever they want with it.

This is why it is important to make sure the blogger (or message board owner) is committed to liking Your Company. If you have an agency to conduct blogger prospecting and the online advocacy, be sure they know the form and content of the messages you would like to be conveyed. The prospect may or may not blog about the news.

The hope is that the prospect will decide to blog about the news, either positively or neutrally. Once the email goes out, however, you have no control of what is done. If you have any second thoughts about the prospect being a friendly, don’t do it.

Blogger Relations

The internet is neither a place nor a One cannot broadcast to the internet and there is very little correlation between throwingdestination. money at advertising and building brand equity.

To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations,” and marketing to the internet not only requires engagement in the conversation that is already happening online, but it also requires engaging with the people having these online conversations.
Obviously, there is no way there can be a one-to-one conversation with everyone on the internet.

The ultimate goal of online marketing and online brand promotion is to accurately target your marketing message directly to the people who want and need what you have to sell, and the most efficient way to reach these consumers is to identify and influence the influencers – the men and women of every online community who are popularly understood to be the most credible and reliable members.

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 receptive to the marketing but to be impressed enough to tell all their friends about what you have to offer as well.

Brand Ambassadorship Requires Authenticity

An essential part of marketing conversation is being who you are. Moreover, best practices indicate that you should be open and honest about your identity. Resist the temptation to base your online identity what you want to be or some ideal form. Being accessible, approachable, and human is the best bet.

Honestly, folks are paying pretty close attention to your voice, tone, and message and so it is just safer to use your own voice and tone, uniquely tailored to your target community.

Whether you decide to wear your affiliations and intent on your sleeve or not, one thing is essential: authenticity. Outreach is more effective when you are being conversational, casual, and allowing your passion and excitement to flow.

Campaigns Must Evolve with the Internet

Marketing to the entire Internet is impossible. This is why it is important to define your target audience and determine ways to find that audience while being open to the many and evolving ways of accessing online communities.

For example, do not limit your concept of the Internet to the “blogosphere” and to allow 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).

Corporate Blogging and the Corporate Blog

Blogging about your company is an important way to engage in the conversation surrounding your brand. You should seriously consider produce a separate corporate blog that would focus on exposing the cast and crew behind who, what, when, and where to go regarding your company.

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including gaining access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog readers.

Blogs offer useful built-in, tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with the blogosphere.

The corporate blog offers the unique opportunity to share yourself as owners, staff, and crew. You can easily address the curious and the unconvinced.

Not only will the corporate blog allow you to publish shameless testimonials from real fans, it allows you to publish all positive or neutral mentions about the blog or your company website.

Corporate blogs are still a rarity and just producing one will garner favor with the blogging and marketing world. A corporate blog will aid in your brand reputation. Because Google gives priority to web sites and pages that are constantly updated, a corporate blog ensures that Google pays attention to your site.

Domain Name Registration Strategy

Thinking of a great domain name, registering it or if unavailable, buying it from its owner, and possibly initiating trademark proceedings are the first steps to implementing a domain name strategy. The next step is to make sure your online brand is locked down with a mind to controlling brand reputation, both in terms of promotion and protection.

Register Domains for Multiple Years

Domain names are quickly becoming one of the most important parts of search engine optimization (SEO). In a wilderness littered with spam content, search engines are looking for ways to discern the legitimacy and intent of a web property. In a world of “splogs” and illegitimate sites, Google and other search engines are starting to rely on the length of registration as an indicator of intent. Most illegitimate sites only register domains for a year or less.

Registering a domain name for multiple years indicates to the search engines that you have committed to the property. In most cases, registering your primary domain name for ten years is a relatively inexpensive way to curry favor. In effect, you are telling Google that you aren’t going anywhere.

In a patent application from back in 2004, Google told SEO firms that a domain’s age and the length of time for which it was registered were important factors. Google has since become a domain name registrar itself, which grants them direct access to WHOIS data. WHOIS data is the specific contact and domain name server (DNS) information associated with each domain name that is registered in a top-level-domain (TLD) registry database. This information is provided free of charge to the public.

As a registrar, Google can see the age of a domain, to whom it is registered, and where it is hosted. The older your domain or the longer the commitment, the more invested you seem, and the more legitimate and credible Google sees the registration. Consequently, Google is more likely to rank it favorably.

Private Registration of Domain Names

A private registration allows you to shield your personal information from the public WHOIS database when registering a domain, while still retaining the full benefits of ownership.

When you register a domain name in the normal manner, an historical title is created for that Internet address. Like the title of a house or car, the entire history of the domain name is documented, including owners, entities, contact information, server information, and transactional history.

ICANN, the governing body of all Internet addresses (domain names), requires every domain name registrar to maintain a publicly-accessible WHOIS contact information directory for all registered domains. This directory includes a complete history of changes. This means your personal information is available to anyone who wants to see it 24-hours-a-day.

While this information is important to domain marketers, researchers, and brokers, this information is also interesting to your competitors. One may access sites such as DomainTools, www.WHOIS.sc, in order to explore the domain history, including who has bought the domain, domain, history of ownership, and who is associated with the domain name. DomainTools, the industry best, keeps historical WHOIS records tracking the history of millions of domains since 2002.

A common way to work around the problem is to provide false contact information, particularly a false e-mail address, but this is dangerous. There are many examples of users losing domains because their registrars could not contact them through their contact information. Private registration allows you to use alternate contact information rather than your personal information for the WHOIS database when registering a domain name.

While converting your current, normally-registered domain names to private registration is a good idea, full privacy is maintained only when you use a private proxy server during your initial registration of domain names.

Register Many Variations of the Domain

yourcompany.com, yourcompany.net and yourcompany.org are great buys. We all know how difficult it is to even secure a unique, pithy domain name these days. There is an industry that registers Misspelled Domains, Variations Domains, Similars Domains, and Transposed Letter Domains as a way of stealing traffic. For large sites, this can mean hundreds of thousands of page visits lost to you. In order to lock down the brand, it is important to make sure you have all of your bases covered by registering the following iterations of your domain name:

Misspellings Domains: yourecompany.com, yurcompany.com, yourcompanie.com, for example.
Variation Domains: xyzprogramme.com for the British, for example, rather than xyzprogram.com.

Similar Domains: Domain investors and marketers often steal traffic and harm brand by creating similarly-branded and named properties that succeed parasitically off of common user error and intentional misdirection. One example is bedbathbeyond.com, rather than bedbathandbeyond.com for the home wares superstore.

Transposed Letter Domains: youcrompany.com, yourcompayn.com, etc.

Other domains to register include:

Search String Domains: Make a list of keyword search terms and phrases that one might use to find yourcompany.com and register as many of them as possible. For example:

ineedinformationaboutyourcompany.com
whatisyourcompany.com

Slogan Domains: Register domains that spell out your site slogans and trademarked catch phrases. For example, for a travel services site:

wheninromedoastheromansdo.com
when-in-rome-do-as-the-romans-do.com
wheninromdoastheromando.com
wheninromedoastheromans.com
inromedoastheromans.com

Site Content Domains: Register domains that describe Categories and sub-Categories of your business.

yourcompanyrecentvideos.com forwards to yourcompany.com/video/recent
yourcompanypopularvideos.com forwards to yourcompany.com/video/popular
uploadingvideostoyourcompany .com, yourcompanyuploads.com, uploadyourvideotoyourcompany.com and yourcompanyvideouploads.com forwards to yourcompany.com/upload
Your companyTags.com forwards to yourcompany.com/tag/list

Unfriendly Domains: It is important to make sure that any derisive domain names are registered. Competitors are not above hosting slanderous web sites and web properties. Even though yourcompanysucks.com may never be used or even registered, the price of registering even dozens of domain names at $9/year is cheaper than any crisis response or legal actions.
Email Domains: Consider registering a domain to be used exclusively for your company’s corporate email. www.washingtonpost.com uses washpost.com for their corporate email address and www.nationalgeographic.com uses ngs.org for their corporate email address. This is especially important if the main corporate address is long and easy to misspell.
Top Level Domains (TLDs): Consider yourcompany.info, yourcompany.us, yourcompany.tv, yourcompany.ws, yourcompany.jp, yourcompany.ca, yourcompany.co.nz, yourcompany.net.nz, yourcompany.org.nz, yourcompany.de, yourcompany.co.uk, yourcompany.org.uk, or yourcompany.eu in addition to the regular domain name purchases. In many cases, you cannot register foreign domain names unless the purchase is via a local proxy, even in the case of .ca and .eu.

Domain Forwarding and Masking

Many registrars offer the ability to forward your domain name to another URL or Internet address. Redirecting one domain to another domain isn’t viewed well by Google and doesn’t offer much benefit outside of making sure your Misspelling Domains, Variation Domains, and Top Level Domains direct to the correct site. Be sure to park Misspelling Domains, Variation Domains, and Top Level Domains as aliases on your server instead of just forwards from your registrar.

When it comes to maximizing Search String Domains, Site Content Domains and Slogan Domains, it is important to follow some simple SEO best practices because search engines favor web sites that have consistent content across the Page Title, Meta Tag Description, Meta Tag Keywords, and full-text content.

To optimize Search String Domains, Site Content Domains and Slogan Domains for maximum SEO impact, use a service such as the Domain Forwarding and Masking tool offered by GoDaddy.com. This service offers the ability to take a Search String Domain or Slogan Domain and forward it to either the main site address, www.yourcompany.com, or to a content-specific page on the site. Unlike traditional domain forwarding, Domain Forwarding and Masking masks the Site Title, Meta Tag Description, and Meta Tag Keywords and replaces them with the Title, Meta Tag Description, and Meta Tag Keywords of your choosing.

This method optimizes a site in which the site administrator or the bureaucratic red tape blocks the deployment of Site Title, Meta Tag Description, and Meta Tag Keywords. If you register several domains each with a unique domain for each menu item and page and set them up with domain forwarding and masking, the “surface area” of a relatively small site can be doubled or tripled. It is important to make sure that each unique URL is customized with each forwarding URL directed to a discrete page and each masked content written exclusively for the target content. Here’s how it’s done.

Domain Forwarding and Masking offers you four masking fields to fill out: Forward To, Masked Title, Masked Description Meta-Tag, and Masked Keyword Meta-Tag. Using uploadingvideostoyourcompany.com as an example, use yourcompany.com/upload as the forward address. Under Masked Title, use “Upload your travel videos to your company.” For Masked Description Meta-Tag, “Your company allows you to easily upload and share your travel videos for free.” Under Masked Keywords Meta-Tag, use “video upload, video hosting, video sharing, free videos, your company, video blog, travel videos, vlogging, vlogs, vlog, etc.”

Avoid the temptation to drop generic content into the masking fields for all of the Search String Domains, Site Content Domains and Slogan Domains. The reward comes from custom-crafting each to its content, making sure that the words for every domain are mirrored in the masked title, the masked description, and the masked keywords.

Don't Be Seduced by the Lure of Astroturfing

Whenever you engage the Internet on behalf if a company or organization, you are acting as a brand ambassador. If someone is curious as to who you are and why you’re so passionate about an event, product, or service, the understanding is that they will pretty easily be able to find out that you’re a marketing professional.

For some, that is enough. Legally-speaking, it is enough. In terms of building a long-term relationship with your current, future, or present customers, hiding your identity as a professional marketer in the folds of your online profile may be considered deceitful.

You may be attracted to covert online marketing: special ops, black ops, spycraft – “fifth column marketing,” if you will. Don’t be.

The blowback that can result from using a false name, a false email (a Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail address created for the campaign and the false name), and a false bio, isn’t worth it.

There is a term for shooting for the short term by being opaque in your intent, no matter how effective it may be: astroturfing, which “describes formal public relations campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior.”

Accusations of astroturfing can compromise the integrity of the organization you are representing, and further put your ability to communicate future messages in danger.

Over the short term, pretending to be just another denizen of an online community or a blog works if you can pull it off. It isn’t tough to sneak in and talk, talk, talk.

Even though your reputation online is more defined by your contributions to the conversations rather than who you are, the culture of the Internet doesn’t suffer being fooled, duped, or suckered.

If you are ever found out, you are screwed.

Gift and Asset Distribution

Why should the online conversation change because of you? Why should online communities care about what you have to offer?

Much the same way that before you attend a party, you should purchase a bottle of wine to present as a gift to the host, especially if you heard about the party from your friend and the host doesn’t know you.

In that case, maybe a nice bottle of scotch might be more appropriate. All online communities are real families, real parties, and real communities. People know each other. If you’re going to be showing up uninvited, you had better be charming, friendly, cool – and bearing gifts.

Some examples of gifts include Big News, a Limited Offer, a Big Event, Cash and Prizes, Cool New Toys, Answers to Questions, Magic Solutions, Righting Wrongs, or a Change in Direction.

Influence the Influencers

There is no way there can be a one-to-one conversation with everyone on the Internet. The ultimate goal of online marketing and online brand promotion is to accurately target your marketing message directly to the people who want and need what you have to sell, and the most efficient way to reach these consumers is to identify and influence the influencers – the men and women of every online community who are popularly understood to be the most credible and reliable members.

Obviously, there is no way there can be a one-to-one conversation with everyone on the Internet. The ultimate goal of online marketing and online brand promotion is to accurately target your marketing message directly to the people who want and need what you have to sell.

The most efficient way to reach these consumers is to identify and influence the influencers – the men and women of every online community who are popularly understood to be the most credible and reliable members.

To reach the influencers one must break the Internet down into communities and conversations, then breaking it down further into influencers and opinion leaders, and then delivering a marketing message that is appealing enough to pursuade these influencers to tell their friends, co-workers, and families.

Influencer Identification

It’s easy to figure out which blogs, portals, and forums are highly popular and highly influential; it’s harder to figure out which of these communities may be receptive to your marketing efforts. You will also learn which communities and which bloggers consistently blog favorably about your company.

It’s easy to figure out which blogs, portals, and forums are highly popular and highly influential; it’s harder to figure out which of these communities may be receptive to your marketing efforts.

Initial Online Audit

An online audit maps the terrain of conversation in an initial snapshot that records online conversational volume, tone, place, trend, and time. An audit is an essential first step for any buzz marketing campaign. In order to define the success of the campaign, it is important to know what the landscape looked like before the buzz marketing campaign.

Markets are Conversation

Markets are conversations. Conversations are two-way. Since you are what you do and say online and since you will be judge on your reputation and follow-through, it is important.

Being open and authentic is step one of who you are, step two is being available to respond to questions, comments, and criticism.

No matter how sweet, open, earnest, and bespoke your message, if you fire-and-forget while messaging online and don’t follow-up and actually engage in the conversation and follow-up, then you might have an online reputation, but it won’t be good.

Becoming an opinion leader online requires becoming part of a community – being invested and engaged.

Message Creation

It is essential to define the goals of the mission, including scope, desired results, and expectations. Defining your mission ensures your online promotion project is appropriately and powerfully driven.

After defining the campaign mission, the next step is to develop a message model. Online conversation needs to flow. It is responsive and organic. When preparing for a conversation, an interview, or a debate, talking points are more flexible than preparing a script.

The model message you prepare should be flexible and define the outside boundaries of your marketing conversation. Engaging in online conversation as a member of an online community requires your language, delivery, humor, and tone to mirror that of the community.

The model message will act as your point of departure. It should answer most of the questions and issues associated with the marketing campaign. The model message should be flexible enough to allow for interpretation but strict enough to prevent the brand from being misrepresented online.

Simply begin by considering the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” for starts.

Online Advocacy

Doing online advocacy requires commitment, inclusion, attachment, and perseverance. If you participate online, you had better not be a one-night-stand. Be sure to engage in the long term conversation and always be available to answer questions.

Every day, go through your universe to each blog, message board, social network, and social bookmarking site and use either the built-in search form to search for discussions about Your Company, your competitors, or choice keyword phrases, looking for relevant content.

Consider joining the conversation only if there is something worthwhile to contribute. Only enter the conversation if you can answer a question, clear up a misconception, announce news that would be considered interesting to the members, offer a promotion or discount, or contribute to the conversation with expertise or insight that would add true (and not just promotional) value to the conversation.

Online Communities are Not Virtual

Do you think that people who play Second Life, World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, MMOGs, and MMORPGs are freaks? Do you consider message boards, forums, virtual realities, and virtual communities to be a waste of time, populated by losers?

If so, then you need to leave online advocacy, new media marketing, online brand promotion, online word of mouth marketing, online outreach, blogger relations, and brand ambassadorship to someone who has lived, loved, and connected to people in real ways online. And continues to do so. Abraham PR respects online community; Abraham PR respects the online life.

There is a general misunderstanding that online virtual communities are escapist. Many of our clients believe that Second Life (SL), World of Warcraft (WoW), and even Role Playing Games (RPGs) are places wherein geeks, freaks, losers, and loners go to escape their desperate, pathetic, lives. On the contrary!

So-called virtual communities are entirely real and populated with real people with real hopes and real passions. The connections, tribes, relationships, and families that people make online are long-term, real, and intense.

In much the same way that the smart kid may not find people who understand (or even like) him in high school, only to find people just like him -- who really "get him" -- upon arriving at College; the members of virtual online communities often look for and find like-minded people online.

Online, you can find a large population of like-minded birds-of-a-feather no matter how niche your interest, no matter how counter-culture your fetish.

The Internet can be a safe place for people to explore themselves. The Internet can allow access to people who are shy, easily intimidated, overwhelmed, or are just "trying out" different personalities, experiences, relationships, and roles before committing.

The Internet allows its denizens to "try before you buy."

That said, they are real people. Their connections online are real. Their roles -- even fantastic or bizarre -- are true and impenetrable and must be respected.

People are going online to discover people who are exactly like them, called birds of a feather, rather than merely suffering those friends and family who may no longer be a lifestyle choice but a life obligation. People are not escaping, they're exploring, they're mapping, and they're defining. Most of them end up truly blooming in this online world.

Do not engage online if you are unable to respect the full import and depth of culture, experience, and relationship that already exists -- and is forever becoming deeper and more formalized.

If you do not learn to love, respect, appreciate virtual online communities as real homes to real people, as real as the village square, the parish hall, the Paris Tabac, or the alumni group then you're underestimating the passion, loyalty, and deep personal relationship found there.

This lack of understanding and appreciation will almost always result in a tragic faux pas the likes of which may result in brand suicide, the likes of which can be easily avoided if you had just understood that the operative word of Virtual Online Community is community. And community, in this case, is synonymous with family.

Online Community Outreach

It behooves the careful online brand promotion operative to spend some time reading previous posts, how people talk, who the main cows are, and how people relate to each other.

Pay special attention to how the Gurus and the Gods interact with each other and with Newbies and Spammers. Are the Old-Timers really nice or do they give new members grief?

Do they expect deference or are they very responsive to adoration and friendliness? Figure out what works and emulate it. Mirror the most successful, including capitalization, tone, humor, and vocabulary.

One a list of friendly and like-minded bloggers have been assembled, organize them in an Outlook Contacts folder. Don’t hesitate to reach out to individual bloggers and friendlies informally in order to build a connection and a conversation.

It is important to make sure any formal outreach is carefully considered before moving forward.

When it is time to reach out and message to the list, there are several things to consider before emailing. The most important thing is to make sure you have something important to share or a gift to give. This can be in the form of something simple, but there always has to be a reason for reaching out.

Ideally, if everything is done above board and transparently, and the prospects are tried and true, then any and all coverage will be either very positive or at the very worst, neutral in tone.

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

Online Universe Creation

Marketing to the entire internet is impossible. This is why it is important to define your target audience and determine ways to find that audience while being open to the many and evolving ways of accessing online communities.

For example, do not limit your concept of the internet to the “blogosphere” and to allow 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).

While exploring the blogosphere, take note of the sites that often discuss your company’s business. Keep a spreadsheet to track the blog name, blog URL, and a short description. A universe should ideally include blogs, message boards, social networks, and social bookmarking sites.

After an initial universe is developed, be sure to join any blogs, message boards, social networks, and social bookmarking sites that may require registration and be sure to record the logins and passwords in cells in your universe.

Ping Servers and Pinging

Tell blog search engines and news aggregators every time a post is added to a blog so that they can index the new content. Telling blog search engines you have updated content is called “pinging” them.

According to the definition on Feedster, “A ping server is a bit of software infrastructure, a server program to be specific, which lets a feed tell us ‘I’ve just updated; please index me now.’ What it receives is a small tidbit of information from a blogging or publishing tool which is called a ‘ping’. Hence the name.”

Publicity and Corporate Blogs

Blogging about your company is an important way to engage in the conversation surrounding your brand. You should seriously consider producing a separate corporate blog that would focus on exposing the cast and crew behind who, what, when, and where to go regarding your company.

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including gaining access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog readers. Blogs offer built-in, useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with the blogosphere.

Since potential and future clients are often clueless as to your company, how you have grown your company, why you chose to go into this business, and your vision, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owners, the staff, the crew. You can respond as someone who has their finger on the pulse, and also address the curious and the unconvinced.

Not only will this allow you to shamelessly publish testimonials from real fans, it allows you to publish all positive or neutral mentions about the blog or your company website.

No matter how cool your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the blogosphere is in not only letting your service speak for itself but that people extremely attracted to a good story, a great personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services.

If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into reaching out to the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional. These types of people, ages 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading – and writing – weblogs.

Reciprocal Linking

Blogrolling sites that you want to be connected to can lead to reciprocal linking. The nature of the blogosphere lends itself to linking. The process of exchanging links with other websites is called Reciprocal Linking. Since both participating websites get an inbound link, it helps in building link popularity and PageRank. In your link building campaign some bloggers and webmasters will only link to your site if they receive a link to their site in return. Linking back to a site is reciprocal linking and is a very worthy endeavor. And it generally isn’t too hard.

Search Engine Brand Protection

Search engine brand protection is a strategy focused on “healing” or “cleaning” negative search engine results from, ideally, the top 100 search results. In many cases, removing negative or defaming search engine results from the first ten results is possible. Since it is impossible to remove negative listings from the search engines themselves, there are some strategies that can be used in order to remove the listings in an organic way by leveraging Google’s algorithms and indexing processes.

Social Bookmarking Strategy

Making sure that your sites are “bookmarked” and “dugg” on the top social bookmarking sites can really help with site promotion and publicity. Some sites, such as Del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon.com and reddit.com can bring quite a lot of traffic.

Social Network Profiles are Not Fancy Personal Home Pages

Creating a space for your members to “show off” or “express themselves” is less important than giving members to interact. They crave connection and will pursue any perceived connection such as shared interests, hometowns, movies, orientation, or schools.