I had two meetings, both which were very informative. The first was at lunch at the “Hells Kitchen” restaurant on West 39th Street, with Aaron Newman, who started Techrigy and the SM2 platform, and just sold his company to Alterian (see my earlier post on SM2/Techrigy is now part of Alterian).

Newman, who was in New York for a Board Meeting of another company he started, was excited over the Techrigy acquisition, that makes him an Alterian employee and gives his company the freedom to really expand, hire programmers and improve the SM2 Platform by adding capabilities that were desired, but didn’t have the wherewithal to develop.

At lunch, I told Aaron what I thought the future held for Social Media Monitoring tools like SM2 and Radian6. On one had, SM2 does have an unlimited time line you monitor on, while Radian6 shows, at least for me, only the last 30 days of data; full historical data is a very nice caveat. SM2/Techrigy has increased their clients sixfold from what it was last year and the average client pays ~500.00 per month.

We discussed Radian6′s new developments along with suggestions on where SM2 could forge ahead [ see Radian6 New Enhancements plus Social CRM, WebTrends and SalesForce Intergration and New Features I like about Radian6 and what you can do with them to drive traffic to your site ] along with the consolidation of Social Monitoring Tools that may have just begun.

I see myself, at times like this, in the center of the cyclone that is moving across the business landscape – I can share my ideas – and see, maybe 6 months or a year later – some of the ideas I put forward, become reality.

I can’t prove I’m an influencer in the Radian6 WebTrends and Salesforce.com deals, though, I believe, I was one of the first to ask for them, last year. I would very much like to see what SM2 Techrigy/Alterian additional features are, in, say, 6 months – if SM2 develops new Social CRM capabilities (see Social CRM – Bantam @ NYC CRM Meetup), as that is what I’m pushing for. I’m hoping to see Aaron again, later next month when he’s next in New York.

Later, tonight, I met Chris Abraham, for the first time (see E.Factor Presents – DO IT YOURSELF PR w/ Chris Abraham) – I’ve known of Chris Abraham through his internet writings and the work he’s done with the Fresh Air Fund and, would you know it, SM2/Techrigy.

Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison
Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms. He specializes in web2.0 technologies, including content syndication, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.

Prior to starting Abraham Harrison, Chris was a member of the Interactive Team at Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC, consulting clients such as Wal-Mart, Shell, and GE on blogger and social media strategy. Before Edelman, Chris was Technology Strategist for New Media Strategies, a pioneer in online brand promotion and protection with clients including Sci-Fi Channel, Buena Vista, TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA, RCA, and NBC.

The presentation was soposed to be about do it yourself PR – we ended up having a one hour presentation, mostly in the dark, disco club like atmosphere, about the secrets to Blogger PR.

A Social Media campaign, as Chris Abraham’s company evolved to do it – comprises mainly of Blogger Outreach and here’s the basic steps, as I understand them from what he explained tonight:

1. In order to run a Social Media Campaign, you must first build a list of Bloggers to outreach to - this list should be in the several thousand. His list now has 40,000 blogs and is growing, exists in several languages and localities.

Note: Chris Abraham suggests using Google to find the bloggers and using search queries such as “best Cuban restaurant blogs” or “best photo blogs” and manually reviewing the results using hired offshore workers – digging deep into the search results, building up a contact list.

Chris offshored this work to India and Russia, saying that automated platforms like Radian6 or SM2/Techrigy, or an in-house developed tool, are more expensive and less useful than human labor.

2. During a campaign, develop an idea and send it out to 2,000 – 4,000 bloggers on the list (he has several lists, developed based on subject/topic/locality) and observe results – at this point, if bloggers reject the message – the messaging is immediately changed and tried again – till it works.

Chris goes backwards to make sure the bloggers are happy and always offers the bloggers an incentive for blogging about his campaign.

In most cases, the outreach to bloggers is accompanied by an offer - like a discount on a product and a widget to place on the blog that allows a discount to be passed on to the blog readership.

My guess, is the discounts and widget usage are measured and recorded as metrics to be delivered in a dashboard of some sort to the client – Chris didn’t talk about that part – but it seems logical to extend his idea out – if he’s going to go though that much trouble to offer incentives – he’s got to be tracking the results of the usage of those incentives. If he’s not, it’s clearly a missed opportunity.

I expected to hear that Chris Abraham and Company, use an automated database contact manager – of some sort, turns out it’s mostly done manually – and if a blogger on the list doesn’t respond back – he contacts them the next week, and the next, till they respond – and if they respond negatively, he engages them, transparently.

I’m sure it makes sense to have this kind of work done manually – I’m not an expert in PR like he is – but I think we should automate this task in the future – the sooner, the better.

3. The metrics, from a public relations point of view, would be “Media Mentions” along a time-line.

I’m sure Chris has a lot of other metrics he uses, but the main one, for this kind of outreach – is how many times bloggers have written about the campaign he’s pitching. Using a time-line of roughly, 90 days, from campaign start to finish – he shows the client, in a dashboard, just how many times, and when, blog posts and articles resulting from the campaign, occurred.

In any case, short emails are sent out, with brief pitch and a link to a Social Media Press Release where all the details are contained – but little else, so they can pass by spam filters on one hand, and, make come on easy, to begin with, on the other hand.

Chris feels that when people ask for too much, provide too much detail in the first meeting, it turns them off. Better let the conversation evolve gradually, than to use it all up in the first email. I agree here – and it was refreshing that Chris found a way to email bloggers in a non-invasive way.

Chris Abraham was clear to point out that his firm works with all levels of bloggers – he believes that focusing on A List Bloggers on sites like TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb (my examples) would be ignoring the much larger number of legitimate bloggers who can add value and media mentions – and who are less jaded than, what he believes, the A-List bloggers may be.

My take is that if you run a Social Media Campaign, and focused only on A-List Bloggers – you’d have an very hard time showing a client that many results- you could either get the A-List bloggers, or not – and if you failed, he’d have nothing to show at all. In a way, this reminds me of Search Engine Optimization by companies that promise results.

In SEO, it’s known that you can get results on a longer phrase, very easily. For example, if a client’s business was debt consolidation – getting a first page listing on “debt consolidation” would be next to impossible – there’s so much competition.

But …. you could get the client a first page search result on “debt consolidation counseling services”. True, hardly anyone is using the phrase “debt consolidation counseling services”, so the traffic benefit of having a top listing, is almost meaningless – but the SEO firm delivered (something that was easy for them to deliver).

I think the same argument could be made here – you go after low hanging fruit of bloggers that just want content to write about – and don’t worry about their readership much – then you can deliver 4,000 bloggers, many of them who’ll write about your client or pitch.

At the end of the evening, and meeting many new people, I thought about how much SM2/Techrigy and Radian6 should, even now, be able to provide the Blogger list – and how Chris would rather hire people to use Google, which I question.

Social Profile of an “Influencer”

That’s enough for one post – one of my longer “rants” but hopefully, with insights valuable to the community of my readers.