How to Build Your Influencers in Social Media with Chris Abraham

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and a former IBM distinguished engineer. Today, you'll be hearing from Chris Abraham. Who will present How to Build Your Influencers in Social Media. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GagaLamp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GagaLamp for free today. Geris Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. MENG, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey Chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job. We're about staying current to grow in our careers. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Chris. While we're waiting for our last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Chris Abraham is one of our authors at Biznology.

Hi, folks.

He's a digital strategist and technologist and a leading expert in search engine optimization, online relationship management, internet privacy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and internet Chris is founder and principal consultant of Geris Digital, an agency devoted to online brand promotion and protection through influencer outreach and engagement. So if you've ever struggled with connecting with influencers in social media, this is the webinar for you. Chris, take it away.

Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate your time and your introduction. There's a lot of information I'm going to be going through. I'm going to be going through it pretty quickly. All of this information will be up on my slideshare.net/chrisabraham and a little bit later on youtube.com/chrisabraham. If you go to the Biznology blog, the SlideShare is already up with a blog post from this morning that kind of goes over what I'm talking about today. So you want to build influencers. I'm going to give you the quick and dirty but long hard slog way of doing it. Because unless you're already Kim Kardashian, worth billions of dollars, have a sex tape, have a reality show, are already a politician, or are routinely on television, well, excuse me, who the heck are you? So what the goal of today's thing is not how to wrestle influencers into doing your bidding. It's about—

How to get them to listen.

kind of populating a space for people online to discover you, when you reach out to them saying, hey, I would like you to cover this. Hey, I would like your help in this. And on those kinds of things, they will do a cursory exploration, a little bit of a Google search of who you are. And if you don't have any rep at all, if you are not an influencer yourself, if you are not, if you will, a little bit of a colleague or a—

Superstar.

superior when it comes to influence, then people are just going to reject you outright. So how to become an influencer first. It doesn't require many. It requires the right. For example, I just spent— I'm up here in New York City and I spent the night at my buddy David's apartment with his lovely wife, Allie, and baby Franny. And he is a reporter for the New York Times. So having his ear is a lot of influence. I mean, he doesn't listen to me, but if I had his ear, that would be the kind of influencer that I'd want to connect to. So if you are trying to become an influencer, finding a few close friends who are highly influential is a good use of your time and energy. Initially, it requires that you're compelling enough to be taken seriously on one or more core topics. I'm going to teach you how to get your voice into the blogosphere, into the world as an expert in your field. This is pretty postmodern because the fact that I'm doing a free webinar for you and the fact that I blog for Biznology is a signification that I'm eating the same dog food that I'm suggesting for you here. And even if someone doesn't know you by name, they will Google you. So you need to leave a very obvious trail of breadcrumbs. So first, I always tell people, buy domain names. Or you don't want to go ahead and spend all of your energy writing on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and Tumblr without being able to draw people to something that you own and you call all your own, like your own website. At the end of the day, Twitter and Facebook and all those things are great, but they are ephemeral. They are eventually going to go away. So you need a landing page. You need a funnel. to channel people into. And the best way to start with that is to register some domain names. I registered ChrisAbraham.com. My company is Garrus. I can't afford the $5,400 or don't want to afford the $5,400 for Garrus.com, so I chose an Icelandic domain name, GERR.is, Garrus Corp. I have Garrus Digital, Garrus Co. And then what I do, I'm lucky enough to own BloggerOutreach.com. If you are using a site like Squarespace where I use currently, my site is hosted, it is easy to go ahead and park all those domains onto one site. And as you become more confident and competent, you can start developing multiple small little teaser sites for people to find when they are looking for you. Like MikeMoran.com and Business Knowledge Mike Moran in many ways, you can start doing the same thing. But get the domain names now because you never know how how available they will be in the future. Start a personal site. I start with a personal site. I don't tell you to go to a blog right away. You need to create a funnel. LinkedIn is not enough. A lot of people spend a lot of time and energy pimping out their LinkedIn page, their profile. It's not good enough. Squarespace, Tumblr even, Typepad, Drupal, WordPress, WordPress.com are great platforms that you can build a website. I'm currently using Squarespace because I'm a sucker for advertisement and they are all over all of my podcasts. So whatever. LinkedIn is not enough. Second thing, you can make it look really good. It's just drag and drop. Make sure that you describe everything you can do in painful clarity. If you'll notice right there on top, influencer outreach, social media marketing, search engine optimization. I try my best to keep on deepening and optimizing my website as I go. It's not perfect. There's a lot of dead ends on my website, but I made sure that it's up and there's a lot of opportunities to make things work there. Back here you need to have all of your contact info. Don't be coy by creating your email address in a graphic file or making people jump through a lot of hoops. You need to create that personal site so people can find you. Stop being so coy. Then start a blog. It's a lot of work. People will make fun of you. You're going to want to bail after a little while. You can ask Mike Moran. Man, he has to herd a cat. He has to deal with herding a herd of cats on Biznology. You'll resent it. You'll resent all the blogging. You'll resent your bloggers. You'll end up resenting Mike Moran. People will laugh at you because you're not a proper journalist, but it will turn out to be the best thing you've ever done. Be smart for free. Right now, like I said, in a postmodernistic way, I'm being smart for free. I'm not getting paid for this except for the beautiful and loving attention of my moderator, my friends, family, and all of you who are listening. Be willing to be smart for free for any platform that will accept you as a topic expert. If your job isn't writer, don't demand pay. Think of it as a very expansive, extensive business card. Writing is marketing when you're in marketing. Books are even better. If you have a book in you, as you saw from Mike's introduction, he has 2. I'm sure he's got more in the hopper. And start with LinkedIn. LinkedIn now has a blogging platform that I cross-post to, and I get a lot of attention on it. So if you are leery about starting blogging, do it on LinkedIn now. Search for LinkedIn posts or whatever. And then as you become more confident, start copying things onto your blog. And ask Mike Moran or ask— Social Media Today even allows you to submit posts. Gravity assist, slingshot effect. I don't know how many of you are space nerds, but you can use the gravity and power of brands you're associated with all the way back to when you were, you know, wee 21 or intern. Places you worked are powerful attractors. Clients you've had, brands you've served, you can use them to connect with people who are a couple casts above you in terms of influencers. When I worked at Edelman... hey, Greenpeace was my client... See these shoes? Mizuno. What a great campaign. And if you look in all of my blog posts, I beat it to death. I beat the horse to death. Mizuno giving up its ghost in benefit of my Gravardius's slingshot effect. Convert from morning papers to morning feed. Your future influencer core is already publishing and sharing online. Read them, share them, comment on them, favorite them. Install and use Feedly and Flipboard to track your industry and influencers. Also, Flipboard is an amazing way of tracking interesting conversations that are happening on your Facebook, your Twitter, etc. Install Buffer app to share across all of your platforms. It's so much easier. You can go ahead and spend your morning reading all these interesting stories and then have them trickle out over the day, the week, the month. It's very useful. Do a social media land grab. Your goal is building influencers. Your goal isn't becoming top influencer. Your goal isn't becoming a writer or blogger. You need to be in more places than Twitter. You need to be everywhere. If you go to YouTube or Pinterest or Facebook or Google+, you can find me everywhere. But if you don't have time to do that, you can hire a company called KnowEm. They can actually set you up for like 300 to 500 social media profiles that you can at least land grab your Chris Abraham or your Garris. Then from there you can— and they will even populate it with bios and photos and logos and everything else. Then as those sites become more popular, like I guess right now, ello.co is hot. You want to jump on those too so you can register your brand across those things. And people are looking for you where they are. They're not going to go all the way to your Facebook page. They're going to go to the business page that you have on Google+ when they use Google+. Find your contacts on social. Go ahead and add personal contacts to all of your social. Go through Skype and Facebook and LinkedIn. Of course you're sacrificing your entire address book, to the backend of all these sites. But you've got to pay to play anyway, right? And if you don't engage, your address books are static dying things. It's better to take those address books and those lists and find out where else they play. Attentively allows you to upload your mailing list and find where all those people are in social media. Listen to that, Eileen. That's a great suggestion. And FullContact is a way of personally synchronizing all of your across all of your platforms that you can use them in a unified address book. Very cool. Make your competitors your colleagues. Man, at first I resented Jeff Livingston and Brian Solis. I resented Scott Monty. I totally resented Mike Moran for being Rockstar. And now they are my biggest proponents. I am very happy. And don't burn bridges. I learned that in DC your Past bosses are your future employees. Your past employees are your future bosses. Connect and befriend your competitors. They'll become your partners, your colleagues, supporters. And when they move on or retire to a place in Barbados, you can get all of their clients because they love you. They end up as being your benefactors. And just say no to snark. Even if you see one of your frenemies vulnerable, love them. Love on them. And don't snark them out of business. But then again, rob your competitors blind. I used a tool called ManageFlitter, and I stole all of Mike Moran's followers and the people he follows. And now I follow them on my Twitter. There are lots of services that make following the followers and followed easy on Twitter. You can check out SocialOomph and ManageFlitter for those kinds of things. Very useful, very cool. Buy your way into business. When you start a Twitter account, or if you just start a channel on YouTube or whatever, you're not going to— it's going to be like crickets. Chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp. So what I do when I start a Twitter for somebody, I pay $300, get them 10,000 followers, get them 1,000 followers, 2,500, whatever, $59.99, or I spend a little bit more and get targeted US only. And I know that's completely uncool, but it gives me a little bit of wiggle room so that I can follow interesting influencers more aggressively on their behalf without getting banned. I highly recommend it. Once you get the forward momentum going, all those spammy kind of fake guys will move into the background and you'll actually have authentic followers. But if you want to spend $999 for 100,000 followers, honestly, most of my clients don't even do any due diligence. So maybe it's worth it for you. Be shamelessly generous and inclusive. Link shamelessly. Mention shamelessly. Comment shamelessly. Share. Dude, I use Feedly and I use Flipboard every morning as a way of giving back. I read other people's stuff and I love them and thumbs up them and like them and share them and retweet them. And it really goes a long way.

People notice.

Everyone notices everything. They notice being linked to. They notice being included. If you read the article I wrote today for Biznology, lots of references to all of my frenemies and colleagues, etc. So give it up until it hurts, way past until it hurts. I volunteer at a place called Miriam's Kitchen. And you just got to give because you love the dudes on the other side, not because you are trying to get people to think you're awesome because you volunteered at a soup kitchen. So you need to learn to love to share. It really is worth it. And at some point it really comes back 7 times 7. Ask for favors. I forget the journalist or the politician who said it, but if you go up to someone you just met and say, hey, can I borrow a pen? Do you have a piece of paper I can use? People, in terms of neurolinguistic programming and in general, they want When they give you their card, they want to be engaged. Don't collect influencers without running them. You buy a bunch of cars, fill your garage with it. If you don't drive those cars, they go to seed. Ask for help from people. Grant assistance and offer to help other people even when it's not for a client or to curry favor. It's a little bit like building credit. Do it when it doesn't matter. Because when you want people to retweet you, and you don't have, if you will, the good credit, they are not going to give you the loan that you need. And people love to help, but have been hurt before. So don't be a dick about it. Like, don't make it bad for the rest of us down the road. Love generously, and do not burn bridges. Be perceived as giving more than you get. Win-win-win. Activating influencers for business purposes. I put this at the tail end because you need to get your mojo up before you do anything. You can use Google Docs spreadsheet. You can identify using just Google. You can use super cool tools like GroupHigh to identify influencers or Inkybee, which is a little bit less expensive. You can use the really interesting tool called Little Bird. No matter what you use to engage your posse, it won't work unless you're already best mates, or you're a known entity, already a star to somebody. You don't need to be a star to everybody. You don't need to be Kimye. You're a recognized brand. Hey, did you know I'm David Armando and I work for Edelman? Well, actually, he's already a star. You have a stellar gift like an A8 Audi or whatever. Or you're willing to pay to play. There's a lot of that going on. I'm proud Firstly, earned media. Final words on influencers and influence. You are not a wizard activating hordes of zombies. I am not a wizard activating hordes of zombies. I have so many people who think that because I'm an influence marketer that I have this huge activation list that when I say activate zombie horde, robot zombie hordes, they all go out and do exactly what I say. No, I have to win them every single time. I have to have a good product, a good selling pitch.

It's earned media.

I need to You have to frickin' earn it every time. It's not easy. It's called quid pro quo. If you're not lawyers or if you're not like a hip urban cat, it means an exchange of goods or services where one transfer is contingent upon the other. It doesn't have to be right now, but down the road. You help them back. You give them solid. You give them an exclusive offer. It's really up to you. But people just don't do stuff just for whatever reason. Everybody's got a personal impetus. And next final thing you have to say before we go to questions. Treat social media like a for real job. Everybody is real people. All of those followers have souls. Hard work plus time equals social media success. There are very few overnight successes, and even those people are generally already famous. Like they've been hustling for 10 years to become overnight success. And to quote Philo of Alexandria, be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. And when you're in the lurch of it and someone's being a dick online and they have a platform. And even if they don't, they have Yelp. So hugs, not horns. And they have Glassdoor. So I guess that's it. Is that it?

You're the expert on that, Chris. Thank you. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to build up their social media influence, but you didn't answer every question. I've got a few good questions teed up from our audience, and it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box on your social media— your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for corporations who want to apply what they learn directly to their own business and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Chris and I teach the digital public relations course and will be there to guide you and help persuade that executive executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all of our offerings. We're about to start firing questions at Chris, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Barnraiser is a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. MENG, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey Chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job. We're about staying current to grow in our careers. Now on to your questions. Our first question is, what is off-limits in social media? In other words, How much is too much?

How much is too much? Well, it depends on what your company is requiring you to do. There is no such thing as too much time. That is why I recommend replacing your morning paper reading with social media reading. You need to go ahead and give up certain things. But you can quickly outsource it. it to other people. I've gone over a bunch of what's called social media automation tools in my search on the Biznology blog. But I think that you get out what you put in. But you need to treat it like a job. Don't forget, just hanging out on Facebook is not doing that job. I have committed myself to writing a blog post every Tuesday morning for the rest of my life, because a week goes by and I forgot to do it and I do it 5 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday and I get it done. You need to go ahead and give yourself mini goals, easy to— and then don't jump all in at once because you'll be so burnt out within 6 months that you'll give it up forever.

Thanks, Chris. The next question is, my only network is LinkedIn. I know you said it's not enough, but what do I do with it if it's all I have to start with?

Blog on it and make it active, not just a passive space. You do not build social media influence by hanging out in LinkedIn groups. You can build business influence, but the only real way to create business influence is to start blogging for your LinkedIn network or creating SlideShare decks. SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn now, so every deck that you upload to SlideShare can be linked into your LinkedIn network. There are a lot of people on LinkedIn. I would get a professional account and start using InMails as a way of engaging with people who you can't get to otherwise.

Next question, how important is Google+? Everyone says I should do it, but I don't know anyone who is on it.

Yeah, there are There are a lot of very vulnerable influencers on there. There are a lot of very empowered Silicon Valley and New York City people who are on there. And they are very accessible and they are very desperate for you to join Google+. I would join Google+ just because of the benefit. It's kind of like a sacrificial lamb to Google search. And so I think it's worthwhile if for no other reason, create a Google+ page.

Great. Next question, should we share our blogs on all of our social media platforms to gain traffic to our personal sites?

I would definitely do that. That is very important. At first, if you haven't gotten to the point where you are going downhill at 1,000 miles per hour, I would do it by hand and not automate it. I would make sure that you custom each each post in a way that is very appealing to your clients, sorry, to your potential clients. And then be very aware because that is only the first step. The second step is to keep track of people who are sharing and commenting on your content.

Great. Next question, how do you set mini goals? How do you know what you are doing is working when there is no immediate realizable goal at hand?

Pretend like you are doing it in a room, in a cabin on your own for the first 6 months. Don't expect really any powerful changes for the first 6 months. After 6 months if you don't start seeing some traction, you have to be aggressive and you have to ask people for help. People do each other to retweet, each other's content. But you need to give it a good 6 months. Consider it to be sort of a mini business school task. Write for a million people, but only expect that your grandmother is actually looking at your posts for now. But just assume that what you are doing is you are building a very powerful platform for your expertise and your historical work. So you are not wasting your time.

Thanks. Let's see, what can I get from influencers? My boss is always talking about sales. He isn't even sold on social media, much less influence.

Influence is its own reward I guess. The thing you get from influence is when you realize that your boss is a dinosaur, you can get a better job.

Last question. We've only got time for one more. This one I really like. I'm not unique. I have things to say, but other people have said them too, probably. Is that okay?

Everybody has said everything before. If that weren't the case, then novel writing should have stopped 500 years ago. So you can just say it differently, and you always have your own way of interpreting it. So go forth. Be derivative. Just expand. It's about expanding the conversation, not reinventing it.

That's great advice, Chris. So hey, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, Chris, for all these great ideas.

And thank you especially to our— My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Hey, thank you. And thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemorangroup.com. And she'll be sure to give them to Chris for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, The 7 Challenges of Social Media Listening, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on November 11th. We hope to see you all back here then. Bye everybody.

Bye.