If you want to succeed in running a kitchen for the homeless in Washington, DC, or have wildly successful social media marketing campaigns, it all comes down to one thing: do you respect and appreciate your guests? Do you cut-corners and just serve slop or do you prepare organic, healthy, and delicious meals with an obsession for presentation and taste?

I volunteer as sous chef at a Washington, DC, homeless kitchen. They serve fresh, organic dinners to folks who really need a healthy meal. Miriam's Kitchen treats everyone who dines there as respected and honored guests. I have learned a lot about how to be a much better social media marketer as a direct result of working both in the kitchen as a sous chef and also as dining room captain. Can someone who isn't in love with the taste of food be a top chef? You know what they say, "never trust a skinny chef."

Well, it seems to me that there are quite a few PR and marketing companies that aren't in love with social media. Even worse, they have downright contempt for the honest denizens of social media. Can you truly be effecting in social media marketing, digital PR, and SEO if you're not completely in love with it? Can one ever trust a skinny social media maven?

And even if you're not in love with social media, can you be truly effective if you don't taste what you make? If you're too "busy" or too "above" rolling up your sleeves and getting into the kitchen, can you actually create social media campaigns that are fashionable, timely, au courant? Are you serving campaigns that nobody's ordering -- and would you even know?

Too often, for too many traditional agencies, social is just another channel, another product to sell in order to be integrated and full-service -- there's very little passion -- or respect -- for online community. Much of this is not intentional, it's just that "full-service" agencies, and their practitioners, are oftentimes spread too thin over too many media and too broad mission.

It reminds me of a recent experience I had at Miriam's: I prepared enough sauce to feed one-hundred-and-fifty homeless men and women and forgot to even taste it. Seriously. I was so busy chopping onions, peeling and crushing tomatoes; browning the onion and garlic; and adding oregano, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper in the too short amount of time I had that I never dipped in a plastic tasting spoon to see if it all worked together.

I looked at my watch: I was on time! However, I looked over at John Murphy, head dinner chef at Miriam's Kitchen, and my boss.

"How does it taste?" he asked. I looked at him dumbfounded.

"We can't feed our guests with food that doesn't taste good," John continued while dipping a clean plastic tasting spoon into the sauce and tasting it, "that you wouldn't eat and enjoy yourself -- you need to always monitor the food you're cooking by both taste and presentation."

"I know we're in a rush but you must put yourself out there in the dining room and you must make sure what you serve isn't just nutritious, organic and fresh but also appealing to the eye and palate."

In my mad rush to deliver, I completely forgot that the food I was preparing didn't just have to get done but also needed to be delicious, compelling, appealing, and well-seasoned. And, so I tasted. It was bland.

I doctored it up and the results were delicious -- and so was the presentation, with fresh basil and rosemary adding green to a sea of red when it was finally served to the kitchen's guests. So, what happens if you're not willing to be an active participant in the flavor of the meals you serve.

Corporate folks used to call it "eating your own dog food," right?

What I see in the social media marketing and PR space, however, are lots of folks who are cooking and cooking and cooking without ever taking an interest in tasting. What I mean in this case is that there are too many social media marketers who have zero interest in social media, social networks, technology, or online community.

And, even if you do taste-as-you-go, how's your palette? Maybe you're serving fast food but you have a foodie palate -- are you able to connect with your guests cook to their unique taste in food? Are you able to produce meals that appeal to your guests or do you feel contempt for their lack of sophistication, always trying to force tastes and textures that might, in fact, disgust them and drive them away, never to return.

How well do you know the palette of your market online? How much of a died-in-the-wool social media consumer are you yourself? How engaged are you on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, or Google+ yourself? -- to say nothing of message boards, forums, or reddit.

You make think your know how to market to online denizens but just because you may understand how to market or promote using traditional tools to traditional markets doesn't mean that you'll be able to map those strategies directly to this new, vibrant, global online market -- or, to map those recipes directly to your new restaurant.

Are you invested in social media? Are you a fanboy or fangirl of social networks? Do you spend too much time developing online relationships in online communities? Are you the first person rushing around to try to get an invite to Pinterest, for example? If not, do you really have the sort of passion and commitment to knowing your audience well enough to be able to cook for them?Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

A mobile marketplace for getting stuff done from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Start-up offers location-aware marketplace for getting stuff done

One of my favorite new iPhone apps and online services is TaskRabbit, a platform that allows people to hire other people to complete tasks in their own towns or neighborhoods.

The concept is drop-dead simple but difficult to pull off. Founder Leah Busque says TaskRabbit lets folks "outsource small jobs and tasks to other people in their neighborhood" — say, if you need dry cleaning or groceries picked up, house cleaning or yard work done, Ikea furniture assembled or a wifi system set up in your home.

"We've seen some really funny ones," Leah said, "like, 'Help me write a love letter to my ex-girlfriend to help win her back.' Or, 'Help me prank my office mate by wrapping all of his desk items in cellophane.'"

Here's my 8-minute interview with founder Leah Busque on Vimeo.

A simple way to connect customers with a local workforce

TaskRabbit works like this:

• Sign up on the site for free.

• Post a task — what do you need done and at what price? Use the app to voice-record a description and upload photos.

• The task goes out to participants ("TaskRabbits") based on their location. They bid on your job, you confirm the best match, he or she goes to work, and TaskRabbit gets a small cut of the price.

Well over 2,000 people have signed up to perform tasks in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, San Antonio and Austin, with Atlanta, Dallas and Houston on the way. The company's vetting process includes online applications, video interviews and a background check, which greatly weeds out the flakes (my term, not hers). Trust, safety and security are at the heart of the marketplace, Leah says.

Unlike online services like Angie's List, TaskRabbit is not marketing the services of licensed electricians, plumbers and carpenters but instead is targeting regular folks — individuals in a community who can offer their free time, special skills and services.

TaskRabbit has 35 full-time staffers at its San Francisco headquarters with "city managers" across the United States, and it has $24.7 million in financial backing, TechCrunch reports.

In a phrase, TaskRabbit is about service networking rather than social networking. Check 'em out.

Related

• Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking and crowdsourcing?

• Book: 'A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing'

JD Lasica is founder of Socialmedia.biz. We work with large companies and nonprofits on social media strategies and campaigns. See JD's business profile, contact him or leave a comment.

Image by BigStock Photo

Ready or not, the mobile revolution is upon us!

There is a lot of hype out there about how many people own mobile devices and how much time people spend on them.

Over the past two years, I've been charting and chronicling the rise of the mobile Web and the changes that it is unleashing on American society.

Let's look at some overall numbers:

• Today there are 5.3 billion mobile device subscribers in the world.
• There will be nearly as many mobile devices as there are people in the world by 2015.
• There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home.
• Estimates are that we sent more than 8 trillion text messages last year.

So everyone has or will have a mobile device. Everybody needs a phone, right? What’s the big deal? What does this matter to our website optimization or online marketing efforts?

The following numbers reveal the impact more clearly:

• By 2012, almost all mobile devices produced will be able to access the Internet.
• There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015.
• By 2014, mobile Internet browsing will surpass desktop browsing.
• Mobile ad revenue will skyrocket to $20.6 billion by 2015.
• Shopping on the mobile Web will reach $119 billion in 2015.

Now the issue is not that everyone has a mobile device, but that they all have Internet access via that device. Many of them access the Web only through their mobile device. More importantly, they are taking advantage of that access by searching, purchasing and clicking through on mobile ads at unprecedented rates.

This is great news for those of us who market on the Internet. But it can be equally bad news for those who are not prepared for this mobile opportunity.

Imagine that someone visits your website from their mobile device and your site loads so slowly the user just moves on to the next site in their search results. Or, perhaps your site eventually loads but with no images and with a gaping hole where that spiffy piece of Flash you paid so much for is supposed to play. Or worse, the user receives a message from her browser informing her that your site cannot be viewed on her mobile device. These are very possible scenarios for a website that is not mobile-ready.

There are many things you can do to get your existing website ready for the mobile web, as well as other tactics you can use to market within the mobile web. Stay tuned as we explore these tactics in more detail throughout 2012!

This post was paraphrased from Deltina Hay's latest book, The Boostrapper's Guide to the Mobile Web. The book will be released in May 2012, but you can request a review copy today. This post originally appeared on MobileWebSlinger.com.

Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper's Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at Social Media Power and at Mobile Web Slinger. Deltina offers consulting for search, social, semantic, and mobile optimization at PLUMB Web Solutions, and teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube. Contact her or leave a comment below.

The Social Enterprise Conference will be held Feb. 25-26 at Harvard.

Guide to events & conferences for the coming month

Who would have guessed that February has become one of the busiest months of the year for social media, technology and marketing conferences? Look at the list of conferences below, which run the gamut from Women 2.0 Pitch to Vator Splash to Lift, Strata, TED, SMX West, Wisdom 2.0, the first SOBCon Europe and the year's first Social Media Strategies Summit. And don't forget Social Media Week, the multi-city global conference running Feb. 13-17.

For the full year, see our full Calendar of 2012 social media, tech and marketing conferences. And Socialbrite has our calendar of nonprofit and social change events for February.

Hope to see you at some of these! If you know of other must-attend events, please share by posting the information in the comments at the bottom.

Conference	Date	Place
February
Business Video Expo	Feb. 1-3	Miami
Video is emerging as a new type of corporate data that – when deployed in the right way – can make online meetings and corporate publishing more vital, vibrant and engaging than ever before. Business Video Expo will help you understand how to use evolving software and hardware solutions to transform your organization's approach to corporate communications – from the executive conference room to the employee desktop.
Innovative e-Marketing	Feb. 1-2	Barcelona, Spain
Reinforce your online presence and boost your brand and marketing activities through social media communities and effective email campaigns to reach your target audience, guarantee customer satisfaction and maximum ROI for an increased bottom line. Leading experts will address many of the issues facing the industry as well as look to the future to discuss the most important trends and developments.
SF MusicTech Summit X	Feb. 13	San Francisco
The summit brings together visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.
Women 2.0 PITCH Conference	Feb. 14	Mountain View, Calif.
Learn from the leaders of successful high-growth startups and tech companies as they share best practices, growth strategies and disruptive product development stories.
RootsTech	Feb. 2-4	Salt Lake City, Utah
RootsTech is a leading-edge conference designed to bring technologists together with genealogists so they can learn from each other and find solutions to the challenges they face in family history research. Genealogists and family historians will discover emerging technologies to improve their family history research experience.
Vator Splash	Feb. 2	San Francisco
Splash is a single-track evening event and startup competition that gathers leading entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists and angel investors across technology to inspire and energize the audience about entrepreneurship and innovation. Splash brings together high-caliber speakers who talk about how to build and scale great successful companies, how their industries are changing and the opportunities those changes are creating.
SoCon 12	Feb. 3-4	Atlanta
It's hard to ignore the enormous impact social media has had on the world. SoCon12 will explore these changes. Get connected with hundreds of professionals with diverse backgrounds as they attend the Southeast's premier social media networking event, now in its sixth year!
Social Fresh East	Feb. 6-7	Tampa, Fla.
Social Fresh East 2012 will be the first of a new focus for Social Fresh conferences. Join this conference for two days of advanced social media training from companies like Ford, RadioShack, Nordstrom and more.
Online Marketing Summit	Feb. 6-10	San Diego
Join more than 1,500 of your marketing peers as they share ideas, hear from expert practitioners and learn best practices in the areas of social media, demand generation, search, email, analytics, mobile, integrated marketing and more.
An Event Apart	Feb. 6-8	Atlanta
An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based Web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you've been waiting for. Also coming to Seattle on April 2-4, Boston on June 18-20, Austin on July 9-11, Washington, DC, on Aug. 6-8, Chicago on Aug. 27-29 and San Francisco on Nov. 12-14.
SOBCon Europe	Feb. 7	Amsterdam
SOBCon is coming to Europe. SOBCon is the think tank of the social web where some of the best minds in the Internet space gather to present models, discuss insights, and determine best practices. SOBCon Europe is the European version focusing on business models for social responsibility and profit.
Enterprise 2.0 Summit	Feb. 7-8	London
The summit is an event organized by Kongress Media yearly since 2008. It is set up as a highly interactive gathering of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business experts and practioneers in Europe. Its uniqueness is its intensive exchange of experiences and the practical insights and implications presented.
Social Media Strategies Summit	Feb. 7-9	Las Vegas
Social Media Strategies Summit has been designed to apply to a variety of industries. Six tracks are designed to focus on a particular industry. While tracks are organized by industry, attendees are encourage to move freely between tracks based on their individual learning objectives. Other SMSS events include SMSS Chicago , April 18-19; SMSS Miami , June 12-14, and SMSS London , Nov. 6-8.
Murmuration	Feb. 8	Franklin, Tenn.
Join Gigya, Radian6, ExactTarget, Moontoast and ISM at the Historic Franklin Theatre to share insights, technologies and strategies that are changing the social marketing landscape. Learn how these leading technologies are making social monitoring, commerce and campaign integration a manageable and profitable reality.
SES Conference & Expo	Feb. 9	San Diego
SES Conference & Expo is the leading global event series that educates delegates in search and social marketing, putting a special focus on tactics and best practices. SES Events provides instruction from the industry's top experts, including representatives from the search engines themselves. Other SES events include: SES London , Feb. 20-24, and SES New York , March 19-23.
Media That Matters	Feb. 10-11	Washington, DC
This year's theme, "Change for Good," features conversations about how independent social change filmmakers can execute integrated campaigns that are strategic, action-oriented and have enduring impact.
ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work	Feb. 11-15	Seattle
CSCW presents research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations and communities. CSCW encompasses both the technical and social challenges encountered when supporting collaboration. The development and application of new technologies continues to enable new ways of working together and coordinating activities.
O'Reilly Tools of Change	Feb. 13-15	New York
O'Reilly's TOC Conference is where the publishing and tech industries converge, as practitioners and executives from both camps share what they've learned from their successes and failures, explore ideas and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation. TOC 2012 delivers a deft mix of the practical and the visionary to give attendees the tools and guidance they need to succeed — and the inspiration to lead change.
Cloud Connect	Feb. 13-16	Santa Clara, Calif.
Learn about the latest cloud technologies and platforms from thought leaders in Cloud Connect's comprehensive conference and see leading companies showcasing the latest cloud platforms, technologies and services.
Social Media For Government Communications	Feb. 13-16	Washington, DC
Hear the latest practical advice on using new media and traditional communication tools to engage your community, along with helpful tools, tips and techniques to get started.
Social Media Week	Feb. 13-17	Various
Social Media Week is a multi-city global conference connecting people, content and conversations around emerging trends in social and mobile media. Events take place in New York, Paris, Toronto, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Singapore, Tokyo, Miami, London, Hong Kong and elsewhere through a series of creative events that connect brands, marketers, media and public venues.
Pubcon Paradise	Feb. 14-15	Honolulu, Hawaii
Pubcon Paradise 2012 will offer a multiple-day look at the future of technology presented by many of the world's top speakers. This event will be an ambitious gathering of search and social media innovators and leading technology and online marketing visionaries charged with offering attendees valuable new ideas and solutions for their businesses.
The Startup Conference	Feb. 16	Seattle
The Startup Conference is a one-day conference for everyone considering launching a startup. It covers everything from raising angel money, finding co-founders, getting press from TechCrunch, how to launch and more. Join the startup competition and be selected to pitch on-stage in front of a panel of VCs.
OnMedia NYC	Feb. 21-22	New York
OnMedia is where cutting edge of Madison Avenue meets the best of Global Silicon Valley. This two-day executive event features New York's power players and top digital media CEOs, who engage in high-level debates on how the Internet is disrupting the world of media, marketing, advertising and branding. OnMedia also showcases the emerging entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way media is being created, distributed, consumed and analyzed.
Cloud Computing for DoD & Government	Feb. 21-23	Washington, DC
IDGA's third annual event is your opportunity to claim your place in the virtual world of DoD and federal government data storage. This time-critical event will emphasize how cloud computing can cost-effectively revolutionize the way your enterprise works.
Gravity Summit	Feb. 22	Washington, DC
The summit will bring together a lineup of sports and entertainment leaders and insiders to address social media marketing trends, innovations, tools and strategies now and in the future.
Intelligent Content	Feb. 22-24	Palm Springs, Calif.
Intelligent Content 2012 is an intimate, three-day intensive learning experience designed to help attendees understand what is required to create intelligent content: content designed to be structurally rich and semantically categorized, automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable to any future functionality.
Lift	Feb. 22-24	Geneva, Switzerland
Lift conferences are a series of events built around a community of pioneers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social implications of new technologies. Each event is a chance to turn innovation into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead and to meet the people who drive them.
BlissDom	Feb. 23-25	Nashville, Tenn.
This conference is for women who find and express their bliss by publishing online. Speakers and panels will feature the best blogging, public relations and social media pros who'll be on hand to mentor new and old friends.
Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference	Feb. 23-26	St. Louis
In this annual conference devoted to computer-assisted reporting, come and learn about tools you need to dig deeper into stories and give readers and viewers the information they want. The CAR conference offers something for everyone, from beginners to those on the cutting edge of digital reporting. Sessions include the basics on using spreadsheets, databases and online mapping as well as the latest technological advances.
Wisdom 2.0	Feb. 23-26	Redwood City, Calif.
Join the founders of Facebook, PayPal, Zynga and other technology leaders along with wisdom teachers in this conference where the focus is on exploring how one can live mindfully and wisely and engage the great technologies of this age in ways that benefit us, our society and our world.
SuperConf	Feb. 24-25	Miami
SuperConf 2012 is where Web development & entrepreneurship converges. On Day 1, Startup Blast Off is where eight new companies launch their products to the public. On Day 2, the conference dives deeply into understanding user interface design, bleeding edge technology, marketing, business and building lasting relationships.
SearchFest	Feb. 24	Portland, Ore.
Industry experts and thought leaders from around the country will deliver in-depth presentations on topics including advanced search engine optimization, social media marketing, universal search, analytics, paid search marketing and much more.
Social Enterprise Conference	Feb. 25-26	Boston
This year's conference will feature two days of rich content at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. The Saturday schedule is designed for a smaller and more practitioner-focused audience, while the Sunday schedule will feature about 100 speakers with a more general focus with a Pitch for Change Competition and Career Fair.
Mobile World Congress	Feb 27-Mar 1	Barcelona, Spain
Mobile is enhancing and expanding education and thus, transforming the world. Mobile World Congress 2012 will celebrate the current state of mobile and offer a glimpse into where mobile has the potential to go next.
TED	Feb 27-Mar 2	Long Beach, Calif.
From dazzling technology and leading-edge science to the richest veins of human creativity and interconnection, TED 2012 will display remarkable speakers, new uses of music, extravagant use of underused senses, intricate choreography between speaker and screen, new ways of involving the audience, breakthroughs in animation, intense, campfire-style storytelling and some "spectacular surprises."
TEDActive	Feb 27-Mar 2	Palm Springs, Calif.
TEDActive is an opportunity to let your mind travel the world of ideas while watching the live-hosted TED 2012 program on screen in a comfortable, customizable space. When the talks are over, your conversations with other passionate people begin -- a chance to engage in inspiring discussions and projects.
Inbound Marketing Summit	Feb. 28-29	New York
The must-attend conference for digital, social and mobile marketing will have a mix of inspirational speakers like Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, Tim Hayden and Barry Libert, cutting edge content and real-world case studies. IMS is where innovative marketing and media professionals meet face to face, participate in sessions and network with their peers. IMS will also take place June 12-13 in San Francisco and Oct. 24-24 in Boston.
Search Marketing Expo – SMX West	Feb 28-Mar 1	San Jose, Calif.
Attend SMX West for the exceptional content, invaluable connections and essential conveniences. Dramatically increase the number of people who come to your site with ROI-enhancing paid search advertising and search engine optimization techniques and best practices.
Strata Conference	Feb 28-Mar 1	Santa Clara, Calif.
Strata Conference is the leading event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. The home of data science, Strata brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss big data, Hadoop, analytics, visualization and data markets.
Digiday Agency	Feb. 29	Los Angeles
This conference from Digiday Agency  will address the biggest issues and challenges digital agencies and marketers face today across the buying spectrum. This year's theme is "Retooling for the Future."

JD Lasica is founder of Socialmedia.biz. We work with large companies and nonprofits on social media strategies and campaigns. See JD's business profile, contact him or leave a comment.

Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

While neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data  to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science.

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves.  While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia. And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don't venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn't everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don't even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn't matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar's too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you've made exclusively for one use may well be adopted "off prescription" for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn't want it that way because that's not the right way and it shouldn't be done this way. Social media's just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it's willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don't look like the sort of people they're used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that's to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they're global, they curious, they're ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you're an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you're still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You're unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all--or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you'll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don't know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It's essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git 'em Tiger!

Via BiznologyChris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

A presentation at the 2011 Strata conference.

The leading big data conference, Strata 2012, the leading big data conference, is coming up fast! And you can save 20% with the Socialmedia.biz discount code below.

Strata debuted to a sold-out crowd last year and has become the top event in the field for the people and technology driving the data revolution.

What: Strata delivers the nuts and bolts of building a data-driven business — the latest on the skills, tools and technologies you need to make data work.

When: Feb. 28 to March 1, 2012

Where: Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif.

Discount: Register now and save 20% with discount code SOCIALBIZ

From the conference organizers:

Get control of the new data opportunity at Strata — immerse yourself in three full days of hands-on training, information-rich sessions and an Expo Hall filled with the key players and products. Strata’s topics and programs include Data Science, Business & Industry, Visualization & Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data. Plus, new for 2012 are two all-day Intensive Programs: Jumpstart - the missing MBA for Big Data; and Deep Data - a no-holds-barred program with advanced technical content.

The Strata experience is made up of intensely practical sessions for both business users and hardcore technologists; success stories (and cautionary tales) from startups making data their business and established companies that are saving millions and creating new revenue streams; great networking opportunities; and keynotes that snap the big picture into focus. We hope you will join us at Strata to explore emerging data tools and technologies that are shaping the future.

JD Lasica is founder of Socialmedia.biz. We work with large companies and nonprofits on social media strategies and campaigns. See JD's business profile, contact him or leave a comment.

I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada. Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity.  If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online.  Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success.  Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet.  This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage.  Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign.  You need both quantity and quality of Likes.  I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing. Via Biznology.Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

The Long Tail

Last week, I wrote about how to succeed with B-list bloggers, but maybe some of you aren't convinced. So, this week, I want to draw an analogy to successful Google AdWords approaches so that you can see how to apply that same technique to blogger outreach. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers online, there's a lot you can learn from Google AdWords. Long-tail blogger outreach is like long-tail Google AdWords advertising. Instead of putting all your money on the top 10 most expensive and popular keywords that everyone bids on, smart advertisers segment their markets and hyper-target their highest-performing keywords with their most compelling ads and content while always pruning away their worst performers.

The same should be done with blogger outreach. There will always be blogs that are out of your league and your target audience. Instead of hitting your head against the wall by trying to make it onto TechCrunch and Mashable, learn to segment your blogger list, target more precisely while expanding your pool of bloggers past the top most blogs that tend also to be the most exclusive and difficult to break into — out of your league — to blogs and bloggers who are just starting out, who blog more from passion than ad revenue, and who are naturally more receptive to your content and your message based on a natural affinity.

Affiliate marketers have learned that they can reliably make money by spending money on Google AdWords by finding keyword phrases with such low bids that they can make money from the relatively small commissions or bounty they get from converting the click throughs to sales. Millions in yearly profits cent by cent, dollar by dollar. A cascade of small sales made by people who were so well targeted to that they were almost powerless to resist.

The same thing can be done with blogger outreach. If you're able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you'll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions. In concert, hundreds of earned media mentions both drown out a single post on TechCrunch and also do a better job or finding what you really want: sales.

All the most successful AdWords gurus, such as Adam Viener of imwave, realize that you can only make money in affiliate marketing with Google AdWords if you can make more money from your converted sales than you spend. You can't do this unless you find the magic sweet spot where there aren't many competing bidders who are bidding up the price of your keyword phrases so that you can both keep your spending low and also increase the likelihood that those who do stumble upon your ad will not only click through, costing you money, but also make a trackable major purchase, resulting in a commission--in commissions--that cover the costs of the ads and then some. This is not easy and the field fluctuates.

It takes expertise and vigilance, Adam tells me, and a mistake can be costly. One possibly apocryphal story reported that there was a very profitable keyword phrase that suddenly also became popular and the bids shot up without someone noticing, resulting in the equivalent of a Range Rover being lost in one day. Because of such high risks tantamount to the stock market, these folks are very good at discovering and milking the long tail, realizing that making a little bit here and there spread concurrently over hundreds and thousands of ads and keywords is more profitable, long term, than making a single big score.

If you're loaded with cash and don't really care about extracting value from your campaign, you can spend all your money on trying to get your ad copy at the top of every Google Search just to see it there but being constantly outbid by others, ultimately clearing out your budget or maxing your credit card; the same can be said with regards to blogger outreach: you can spend all your budgeted time and money pursuing the top bloggers while constantly being blocked by content from bigger, sexier, richer, more impressive national and global brands that have exclusive content and truckloads of valuable review products, better assets, and a promise of more and better traffic resulting in higher advertising revenue.

The most obvious thing you can learn is how easily it is to get outbid. Another thing you'll learn is that AdWords can rapidly burn all your cash with nothing to show for it. Finally, you'll learn that Google doesn't wage a fair fight — they both play favorites as well as giving preference to quality of ad over quantity of bid.

What this means in Google AdWords ads is that you're rewarded for the following: 1) Having lots of cash: a fool and his money are soon parted 2) Finding new markets: Being willing to hunt out holes in the market — keyword combinations that are not so obvious but are hyper-targeted to appeal to a new segment of visitors, bringing new opportunities for Google to make money 3) Creating an irresistible ad: no matter how much money you're willing to spend, Google doesn't make money unless visitors are compelled to click through 4) Becoming a long-term client: there are many cases where no amount or money and wit will claim you the top ad position on Google search, inline with organic search, because that spot almost always goes to the client who has made Google the most money, historically, over time.

These lessons map perfectly to blogger outreach.

The blogosphere rewards specialization and laser-targeting

The most desired, desirable, and "easy" keywords are like the top bloggers with the highest Alltop rankings and Klout scores are constantly being pursued. How realistic are you that you can even compete with all the others vying for their time and copy? If you're Dell or Sony, you probably have the sort of brand recognition and respect to be able to get a blogger to schedule time to review your new gizmo pretty thoroughly. You'll probably also have the sort of marketing budget that would allow you to offer a review product to everyone you engage.

You'll probably have a graphic design department and a staff of copywriters who can develop an amusing and compelling pitch which could include press junkets and personal meet and greets. Finally, a company like Dell is able to commit the long-term time, staff, and expense account towards making sure their communications team developed and professional as well as personal relationship with as many online influencers and online journalists over time — to use Google AdWords parlance, they have learned how to appeal to Google on all levels.

How many levels are you able to compete on? If you're unable to compete on any of these levels, you'll go bankrupt trying. It's not that A-List tech bloggers are corrupt, it's just that they're under pressure as well. They have only 24-hours/day and they're heavily rewarded with traffic when they're able to get exclusive content from a national player such as Dell. In the same way that Google AdWords rewards its clients for trying harder and digging deeper into the "long tail" in order to find new, under-served, markets, the blogosphere also rewards specialization and laser-targeting.

In a perfect world, one should only spend one's AdWords budget on keywords phrases that display ads only to people who will convert into clients and customers. The better one knows one's market and customer and the more time one spends finding out who and where they are and engaging them there, the more value you can extract from your sweat and cash.

Let's say you're preparing to launch your new book online and you want to use bloggers as an essential distribution channel, both great ideas. However, let's think this through. Are you internationally famous crime fiction writer James Ellroy or are you an unknown first-time, self-published, crime fiction-writer? Do you have a huge war chest to fuel your promotional campaign or are you running on sweat equity? Do you have thousands of friends online who are already committed to buying your book because you have been developing your popularity online by sharing chapters and answering questions and giving free advice or have you been busily scribbling your work on yellow pads and consider your work protected by strict copyright and not something to dilute by giving it away?

Novice Google AdWords users waste a lot of money with limited results when they start out because they don't understand how the competition works in contextual ad-buying: It's an auction. A complicated auction.

In short, the way it works is that every keyword combination, such as "social media marketing," competes with four things: the general popularity of the search, the quality of the keyword ad, the long-term success of the campaign, and how much money others are willing to bid for their ad based on their keyword choice, also dependent on their prior successes, ad spends, and long-term commitment. In shorter, while how much you're willing to bid for a keyword phrase is important, it isn't that simple.

With blogger outreach, you face the same odds as for paid search. If you are targeting only the top blogs, you'll face immense competition and can easily be outgunned by bigger foes. If you target the long tail of bloggers, you can more easily land your targets and will build up success one blog at a time, rather than in one fell swoop.Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.

It’s always a tough question: would you rather be the smallest fish in a big pond or the biggest fish in a small pond? Would you prefer to be the ugliest pretty person or the prettiest ugly person? Would you prefer to have the lowest IQ at MIT or the highest IQ at State?

This is all according to your preference, but when it comes to a blogger outreach campaign, the decision is never so zero-sum, not nearly so either/or. You can always do both, right? You can always secure hundreds of long-tail earned media mentions while you’re desperately working on securing coverage on Mashable and TechCrunch. You can lock in hundreds of posts short term while you’re wining and dining Pete Cashmore in Manhattan to make sure you become BFFs, so that you’ll have that inside track on getting column inches for your future newsworthy announcements.

However, in the meanwhile, getting those hundreds of posts on B-list-through-Z-list blogs ensures that you start building your reputation as a player. Consider this your bush league experience. Like doing your time in the small clubs. Paying your dues. In fact, most journalists and A-list bloggers glean their story ideas from the blogs they reach, from their influencers, blogs and bloggers who may well be less popular but are still highly influential.

Do you have the sort of news, offerings, and quality of content that can compete with the big players? Do you have the kind of prior relationships with the top bloggers and journalists or do they not know you from Adam?

This is not only about blogger ego and their desire to be treated like demigods by multinational agencies and their billion dollar consumer electronics clients–though that doesn’t hurt–it also has to do with the prestige of the blog’s content as well as the aspiration of what the blog and the blogger wants to become.

Where do you fit on that? You need to be realistic. You need to judge fairly where you are in the competition. Do you have the time, the resources, the reputation, the newsworthiness, the novelty, or the prior relationship to make it into TechCrunch? If not, that’s OK. There is no reason to fight over the top 25 blogs of your industry or the top 100 blogs in general, because there may be over one billion blogs worldwide, which equates to one out of every six people in the world.

Realistically, unless you’re the quarterback of your high school football team, you’re being unrealistic if you limit your options for prom to just the captain of the cheerleaders. There are so many appealing dates for prom everywhere in school. If you’re only applying to Harvard and Yale, you had better also be not only at the top of your class but also a legacy, score a perfect score on your SAT, letter on a sport, and have a well-developed set of extracurricular activities.

Work toward Prom King and an incoming freshman spot at Harvard College, but plan also on going to prom with someone and to college at all. Aim high but have a plan B and C. Remember, also, that being the best lover with the best prom date you get can always results in better dates in the future and being the best student in the college you are accepted to can always result in getting to Harvard as a transfer or in graduate school later.

Focus on being a big fish in a small pond. As you are working to succeed at that, you’ll naturally graduate to the A-list if you have the goods. But if you shoot for the A-list pond exclusively, and you don’t make the cut, you won’t have done anything to win with the B-list.

Start small and grow to make blogger outreach work for you. Via BiznologyChris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz and co-founder and principal of Abraham Harrison LLC, an international consulting group with specialties in online word-of-mouth/conversation marketing and online business & technology strategy advising. See his profile, contact Chris via email, Twitter, or leave a comment below.